ABSTRACT
Embracing undoubtedly one of the most popular repertories of the sixteenth century, My Ladye Nevells booke is the earliest anthology of Elizabethan keyboard music and the sole manuscript exclusively devoted to the works of one composer, William Byrd, the principal exponent of a school of English keyboard composers. In My Ladye Nevells booke, Byrd also adopts folk tunes as the basis for sets of variations, another genre that allowed the composer to strike a balance between the musical expression and the performer's display of virtuosity. In England, William Byrd, in his cultivating of most genres of vocal and instrumental music in vogue at that time, advocates the delicate symbiosis of oratio and harmonia, thereby raising compositional practices to new heights. His initial anthology, the famous Cantiones sacrae, a publication venture jointly undertaken by Byrd and Thomas Tallis, is a profound testimony to the upholding of traditional compositional practices infused with new ideas.
