ABSTRACT
William Byrd's Masses were the first to be written in England for over thirty years. Not many English musicians now shared his memory of singing Masses in their boyhood. Without compromising the attention given to every word, Byrd's parsimony with notes is conveyed into the Masses from some of his most recent motets. He repeats few words and sets few syllables to more than one note. Like Beethoven's late piano sonatas and string quartets, Byrd's Masses embody many melodic fragments that seem to have risen involuntarily from a common source in the composer's unconscious mind and insinuated themselves into his work in ways of which he may have been unaware. Kerman, on the other hand, says flatly that Byrd's Masses 'display only a few internal thematic relationships', while acknowledging that Andrews takes a somewhat different view.
