William Byrd Research Paper

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Meeting of Minds

William Byrd was an English composer of the renaissance. He born in London around 1542 or 1543 but his documented date is 2nd October 1598 Byrd had two brothers Symond and John who became London merchants and he had four sisters Alice, Barbara, Mary and Martha. He was appointed at Lincoln and On 14 September 1568, Byrd married Julian Birley and had at least seven children with her. They had a long and fruitful married life and lived together until her death around 1608/1609.
William Byrd was born in London into a family of gentlemen, the lowest rank of English gentry. His father, Thomas Byrd, was a little-known musician. His mother’s name was Margery Byrd. Although there is a controversy about it. If we go by his will, which …show more content…

He wrote extensively for every medium then available except, it seems, the lute. His virginal and organ music brought the English keyboard style to new heights and pointed the way to the achievements of other English composers, such as John Bull, Giles Farnaby, Orlando Gibbons, and Thomas Tomkins. In music for viol consort he also played an extremely important role, pioneering the development of the freely composed fantasia, which was to become the most important form of Jacobean and later composers. Although he admired Italian madrigals and as a publisher helped introduce them to England, Byrd’s own secular vocal music is distinctly conservative; much of it is conceived for the old-fashioned medium of solo voice accompanied by viol consort, which was later abandoned by the English madrigalists, with Thomas Morley (Byrd’s pupil) at their head. Byrd sometimes added texts to the polyphonic accompaniments of these songs, in effect making them madrigals and he also was king’s singer which his big honor, in an entry that marked his death in the Chapel Royal Check Book he was described as "a Father of Musick". He is also honored with a feast day (21 November) on the liturgical calendar of the US Episcopal

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