Philip Brett

This volume might be the most comprehensive, accessible, and informative volume of essays on Renaissance master composer William Byrd ever published. Edited by Richard Turbet of the University of Aberdeen, it was prepared especially for distribution at the 2008 William Byrd Festival in Portland, Oregon under the direction of Dean Applegate. It covers his life and entire work, from Latin and English church music to secular songs, and even unpublished manuscripts. Fully indexed and beautifully produced with a foreword by the editor, the essays include seminal contributions by the world's foremost Byrd scholars: Richard Marlow (Trinity College, Cambridge), Kerry McCarthy (Duke University), Philip Brett (1937-2002; King's College, Cambridge), Joseph Kerman (University of California, Berkeley), William Peter Mahrt (Stanford University), David Trendell (King's College London), Richard Turbet, and Mark Williams (London). 210 Pages

Philip Brett's groundbreaking writing on Benjamin Britten altered the course of music scholarship in the later twentieth century. This volume is the first to gather in one collection Brett's searching and provocative work on the great British composer. Some of the early essays opened the door to gay studies in music, while the discussions that Brett initiated reinvigorated the study of Britten's work and inspired a generation of scholars to imagine 'the new musicology'. Addressing urgent questions of how an artist's sexual, cultural, and personal identity feeds into specific musical texts, Brett examines most of Britten's operas as well as his role in the British cultural establishment of the mid-twentieth century. With some of the essays appearing here for the first time, this volume develops a complex understanding of Britten's musical achievement and highlights the many ways that Brett expanded the borders of his field.

Throughout his distinguished career, Philip Brett wrote about the music of the Tudor period. He carried out pathbreaking work on the life and music of William Byrd (c.1540-1623), both as an editor and a historian. He also studied other composers working during the period, including John Taverner, Thomas Tallis, Orlando Gibbons, and Thomas Weelkes. Collecting these influential essays together for the first time, this volume is a tribute to Brett's agile mind and to his incomparable skill at synthesizing history and musical analysis. Byrd was a prominent court composer, but also a Catholic. Besides important instrumental music and English songs, he wrote a great deal of sacred music, some for his Protestant patrons, and some for his fellow Catholics who celebrated mass in secret. Ranging from the report of Brett's findings on the Paston manuscripts, an unpublished round-table paper that he delivered a few months before his untimely death, to his monograph-length study of Byrd's magnum opus, Gradualia, the essays collected here consider both sacred and secular music, and vocal and instrumental traditions, providing an intimate glimpse into what was unique about Byrd and his music. Elegantly written, with the particular brilliance for which Brett was known, this book opens a fascinating window onto one of the most fruitful periods of English musical history.