ABSTRACT

Even the most concise survey of Western musical history will make some reference to the virginalists, that school of English keyboard composers who flourished in the late Elizabethan and Jacobean eras.’ The largest source to preserve their music, the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, is one of the best known of all musical manuscripts. It has been available in a modern edition for more than a century and was the basis for Charles van den Borren’s pioneering study (1912). Hardly less familiar is the earliest substantial manuscript of virginal music, My Ladye Nevells Booke (hereafter Nevell), dated 1591 and devoted to music by William Byrd. Byrd, who excelled not only in keyboard writing but in virtually every genre cultivated by the Elizabethans, will be the focus of special attention in this chapter. He played a vital role in developing the forms and characteristic textures of the virginalists. Nevertheless, his younger contemporaries, among whom John Bull and Orlando Gibbons are prominent, did not simply imitate him. Each brought a distinctive personality to the art of keyboard composition.