Veni Sancte Spiritus: A Pentecost Service by William Byrd - Cappella Nova, Richard Taruskin

Cappella Nova Veni Sancte Spiritus liner notes

Among English musicians, at least, no man ever did. And among Byrd's contemporaries in Reformation England, it must be added, no man ever tried. For Byrd's Latin liturgical music was written for what was by the time of the composer's maturity an illegal rite, to be celebrated behind closeddoors. That in the face of such conditions Byrd went on composing, undeterred either by the prospect of persecu tion or by the lack of an audience save stalwart recusants like himself, is a great testament of faith and courage in religious and artistic adversity. During the 1570s and 1580s Byrd had solved the problem of reconciling his adherence to the Catholic faith and its musical traditions with the inhospitable environment in which he was forced to work by abandoning the liturgy and composing motets to newly composed or compiled texts. These pieces, often carrying penitential or thinly veiled propagandistic messages, have been termed "pious chamber music" by Joseph Kerman in his recent study, The Masses and Motets of William Byrd. They were probably meant for domestic, secular performance. But beginning in the 1590s, Byrd began devoting his career to the composition of underground Catholic music, now frankly liturgical and therefore subject to search and seizure.The work of this last period, which includes his three settings of the Mass Ordinary and his giant collections of motets for the Mass Proper entitled Gradualia, was in every way his crowning achievement.