Music
Where was Byrd?
Peter Phillips
The guessing game of what famous con- temporaries would have said to each other if they had met is a good one for long dark nights. A combination which seems to me to give intriguing possibilities is Michelan- gelo and Palestrina. They were both employed at the Sistine Chapel in the mid- dle of the 16th century, so why shouldn't they have met? It is only too likely that they discussed the ins and outs of aural as well as visual perspective over a pinto of their favourite beverage, though perhaps the following has more bite: Michelangelo: `You're going to get thrown out of here for being married.' Palestrina: 'Not a problem for you, then.'
Better still is the question of what Byrd might have said to Shakespeare, and vice versa. Alas, it really does seem as though they never met, and certainly never collab- orated. Indeed none of the inhabitants of that unusually talented 'nest of singing birds' which surrounded the monarch in Shakespeare's lifetime ever seems to have set his songs or written his incidental music, surely a missed opportunity on the grandest scale. For whatever reason, possi- bly because he had no ear for it, Shake- speare was content to settle for the standard musical fare which was readily available from the Elizabethan theatre.
If I had been Byrd I would have wanted to ask the bard what sort of music had inspired his most serious references to it. What was in his mind when he made Jessi- ca say (in The Merchant of Venice) 'I am never merry when I hear sweet music.' Or, going one step further at the beginning of Sonnet 8:
Music to hear, why hears't thou music sadly? Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy; Why lovs't thou that which thou receivs't not gladly, Or else receivs't with pleasure thine annoy?
for here the poet admits that he loses something which doesn't please him. One imagines that this ambivalence would have been inexplicable to Byrd or Gibbons who, although they were the last men to want to encourage superficial merriment, never gave the impression of being annoyed by their craft and died in the service of abstract sound.
We have all had the experience of being so moved by music that no single emotion has dominated our reaction and none of them could be described as involving mer- riment. So what was that extraordinary sweetness which Shakespeare had in mind, that had the power to make him so sad? In the realm of art music it surely was not the kind of madrigal with the cliched 'fa la la' refrain. Unless Jessica may be credited with a deep sense of irony the message of these — straightforward bacchanalian riot- ing — was hardly appropriate. Those set- tings of Shakespeare's songs which do survive and may have been used on the stage in his lifetime, like Ariel's 'Where the bee sucks', are attractive, but so artless that one would hesitate to say that they were strong enough to set the scene for lines such as these. At least to a modern audi- ence there would be a sense of shortfall if such a contemporary lute song were to be followed, for example, by Lorenzo's incom- parable 'soft stillness and the night/Become the touches of sweet harmony', Act V of a Shakespeare play not being the place to make room for a Vaughan Williams sere- nade.
There are two other possibilities. Either Shakespeare had an idealised music in mind, like the music of the spheres, which he had never actually heard; or he had been listening to sacred polyphony or secu- My charming companion orderedhomard aux noisettes vinaigrettes, which I considered to be wildly overpriced.' lar writing which strongly resembles it. The former seems the most likely, since the the- ory of idealised sounds had a long history reaching back to Pythagoras (and does not require Shakespeare to have had an opin- ion of the actual music which surrounded him). If it were the latter, I cannot believe he would not have wished to make some sort of contact with the men capable of conceiving such beauty. That he seems not to have done only goes to show either that I have a different estimation of Elizabethan and early Jacobean music than his or that the condition of his life and work meant that it never occurred to him that this par- allel cultural world was worth exploring.
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