Encounters with Music in Rudolf II's Prague

This article uses three well-known members of Rudolf II's imperial court—the astronomer Johannes Kepler, the composer Philippe de Monte, and the adventurer Kryštof Harant—to delineate some ways music helped Europeans understand identity and difference in the early modern period. For Kepler, the unfamiliar intervals of a Muslim prayer he heard during the visit of an Ottoman delegation offered empirical support for his larger arguments about the harmonious properties of Christian song and its resonances in a divinely ordered universe. For Harant, listening and singing were a means of sounding out commonalities and differences with the Christians and Muslims he encountered on his travels through the Holy Land. Monte sent his music across Europe to the English recusant William Byrd, initiating a compositional exchange that imagined beleaguered Bohemian and English Catholics as Israelites in exile, yearning for Jerusalem. Collectively, these three case studies suggest that musical thinking in Rudolfine Prague did not revolve around or descend from the court or sovereign; rather, Rudolf II's most erudite subjects listened, sang, and composed to understand themselves in relation to others.

The Cantiones of 1575

In 1575, Tallis and his younger colleague William Byrd were given a royal monopoly on the printing of music. That same year they published the Cantiones, an elegantly produced collection of music by both composers. Some of Tallis’s contributions were reworkings of his older pieces, but others were strikingly innovative. His works in the last part of the book are particularly creative and fascinating. This chapter describes the whole collection and examines those last pieces one by one. It is unclear whether the Cantiones were a commercial failure or at least a partial success, but in either case they were a significant landmark in English music printing.

William Byrd and the limits of formal music analysis

Writing in 1962, Joseph Kerman was the first to speculate about potentially subversive political meanings in the Cantiones sacrae of the English Renaissance composer William Byrd, his two collections of motets published in 1589 and 1591, ?voicing prayers, exhortations, and protests on behalf of the English Catholic community?. Subsequent research has corroborated Kerman?s speculations, showing that many of the texts Byrd set indeed feature the same politically charged metaphors that English Jesuit missionaries used to describe the predicament of Catholics living under the Protestant regime of Queen Elizabeth I, as well as that Byrd maintained close ties with many of these missionaries. In our own time, however, those who have analysed these motets, including Kerman, have paid little attention to this, preferring formal(ist) analytical approaches to this body of music. Focusing on Ne irascaris Domine, one of Byrd?s most famous ?political? motets, and the only two major analytical responses to it, this article attempts to demonstrate the limitations of formalist music analysis when applied to Renaissance sacred music.