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• Byrd, William: The 3-part Consort Music

Byrd, William: The 3-part Consort Music

for 3 instruments.

These four pieces appear to constitute the total of Byrd´s surviving consort music in three parts. While modest compared with his five- and six-part pieces, they nevertheless reveal the hand of a master in their elegant economy, concentration and complete absence of padding.
In this edition I have retained the original note values, which gives Fantasia III a rather “white” appearance. The pieces may well have been written at various different stages in Byrd´s career, at a time when musicians were shifting from a semibreve to a minim pulse for serious music. The last two pieces seem to require a semibreve beat, while the first two need to be a little slower to commodate their busier texture.
Fantasia I is printed here after London, British Library, Add. MS 34800, a set of partbooks; it survives also - a fourth higher - in London, Royal College of Music Library, MS 2036; the two lower parts are intabulated for lute in British Library Add. MS 29246. Fantasia II is printed after Royal College of Music MS 2036, but transposed down a fourth to the pitch at which the piece appears in the other sources (BL Add. 41156-8 and the lute tablature BL Add. 29246 - again the two lower parts). Fantasia III follows BL add. 41.156-8; it is also found in the lute tablature BL Add. 29246 (a tone lower). Only the first section of the Sermone blando appears in BL Add. 18936-9, where it has the i:itle “Salvator mundi”. Both sections appear in the lute tablature (BL Add. 29246), without the top part, which has been supplied in the second section: in the same section the lute part is pretty corrupt, but is easy to correct because the two moving parts are in canon.
These pieces will work equally well on viols, or on recorders or flutes. The intabulation of the two lower parts in BL Add. 29246 raises an interesting possibility that can be made to work if a suitable instrument is playing the top part (flute or treble viol?).