Fantasia for William Byrd

This work was commissioned by Michael Alan Anderson and Schola Antiqua of Chicago in honor of the 400th anniversary of William Byrd’s death.

I was asked to reflect on Byrd's legacy. Having grown up at a full-time choir school and having sung Byrd’s works for most of my life, I had much to draw on. However, as I learned more about Byrd’s life as a recusant Catholic, I began to see that this aspect of his life stood out to me the most. In particular, I tried to imagine the difficulty or strangeness in being a favorite composer of Elizabeth I, and thus the state, but also not only being a secret member of a persecuted religion but also having friends and associates violently put to death.

In my piece, then, I loosely represented the public side of Byrd’s life with quotations and modifications of his English-language anthem Sing Joyfully. This public façade gives way, however, to the Latin motet Emendemus in Melius, a penitent and sorrowful, yet hopeful, work. After much tension between the two sides of Byrd’s consciousness, the work ends with the text libera nos (“free us”).

At the premiere, the pieces on the program alternated with readings from Robert Southwell's Epistle of Comfort, connecting my work directly to its context.