Very seldom are we able to assign precise dates to the music of Renaissance composers, and, due largely to his tendency to rework the same music into several different guises over a period of as many as twenty or thirty years, William Byrd is no exception. Occasionally, however, a given work will revolve around a particular moment in history or an eventful publication, thus enabling us to be somewhat more precise about our chronology. Byrd's consort song Rejoice unto the Lord, known to have been composed in 1586 as celebratory music for Queen Elizabeth, is one such piece.

During the 1580s Byrd invested a great deal of energy into the consort song as a genre (after that decade he revisited the form with increasing infrequency, while not abandoning it altogether), and, while the various examples of the species vary to a considerable degree, certain characteristics common to most or all of them all are clearly evident in Rejoice unto the Lord. Typically, Rejoice unto the Lord opens with a brief imitation on the little motivic cell-marked by an initial leap of a perfect fourth—to which the voice will sing "Rejoice, rejoice" in bar two (as reckoned in modern 4-2 meter). The second section of the piece (bar twenty-six and following) is even more densely canonic, and of far greater rhythmic thrust than the somewhat laconic, half-note oriented opening bit (the brevity of the individual viol gestures throughout the opening is somewhat acharacterstic of Byrd's usual, more continuously-contrapuntal consort song viol style). While the piece is not especially chromatic, the striking and very beautiful juxtaposition of a D major triad with a B flat major one (all within an underlying C major context!) in bar fifty-one should be noted.

A quotation from the first section of the piece gives an indication of both the regal, patriotic quality that Byrd captures with such finesse and the skill with which he adapts a basically religious text to serve in a courtly manner:

Rejoice unto the Lord with mirth, which us from foreign fears Preserved hath a quiet state these eight and twenty years. Amen. The mercies of the Lord our God pour'd down upon this land Doth far surmount in quantity the number of the sand; So that the people Israel did never feel nor see More certain tokens of God's love in delivery Than we of England whom the Lord hath blest these many years Through his handmaid Elizabeth, in peace from foreign fears.



© All Music Guide