Editing William Byrd (section)

===''Cantiones sacrae'' (1575)===
Byrd's contributions to the ''Cantiones'' are in various different styles, although his forceful musical personality is stamped on all of them. The inclusion of ''Laudate pueri'' (a6), believed by Joseph Kerman to have been originally composed as a instrumental fantasia,{{sfn|Kerman|1980|pp=85{{ndash}}87}} is one sign that Byrd had some difficulty in assembling enough material for the collection. However, [[Andrew Carwood]] speculates that Tallis' ''Laudate Dominum Omnes Gentes'' (in the Baldwin Partbooks) served as a model for Byrd's ''Laudate Pueri'',<ref>{{Cite web |title=Laudate Dominum (Tallis) - from SIGCD029 - Hyperion Records - MP3 and Lossless downloads |url=https://www.hyperion-records.co.uk/dw.asp?dc=W15386_GBLLH0402908 |access-date=2025-04-16 |website=www.hyperion-records.co.uk}}</ref> giving ''Laudate Pueri'' a purely choral provenence. ''Diliges Dominum'' (a8), which may also originally have been untexted, is an eight-in-four retrograde [[Canon (music)|canon]] of little musical interest. Also belonging to the more archaic stratum of motets is ''Libera me Domine'' (a5), a ''[[cantus firmus]]'' setting of the ninth responsory at Matins for the [[Office for the Dead]], which takes its point of departure from the setting by Parsons, while ''Miserere mihi'' (a6), a setting of a [[Compline]] antiphon often used by Tudor composers for didactic ''cantus firmus'' exercises, incorporates a four-in-two canon. ''Tribue Domine'' (a6) is a large-scale sectional composition setting from a medieval collection of ''Meditationes'' which was commonly attributed to [[St Augustine]],{{sfn|McCarthy|2004<!-- |p= -->}} composed in a style which owes much to earlier [[Tudor dynasty|Tudor]] settings of [[votive]] antiphons as a mosaic of full and semichoir passages. Byrd sets it in three sections, each beginning with a semichoir passage in archaic style.

Byrd's contribution to the ''Cantiones'' also includes compositions in a more forward-looking manner which point the way to his motets of the 1580s. Some of them show the influence of the motets of Ferrabosco I, a Bolognese musician who worked in the Tudor court at intervals between 1562 and 1578.<ref>{{Harvnb|Kerman|1980|p=35ff.}}</ref> Ferrabosco's motets provided direct models for Byrd's ''Emendemus in melius'' (a5), ''O lux beata Trinitas'' (a6), ''Domine secundum actum meum'' (a6) and ''Siderum rector'' (a5) as well as a more generalised paradigm for what Kerman has called Byrd's 'affective-imitative' style, a method of setting pathetic texts in extended paragraphs based on subjects employing curving lines in fluid rhythm and contrapuntal techniques which Byrd learnt from his study of Ferrabosco.