Although it is suspected that several of the William Byrd's Pavans and Galliards for virginal are actually adaptations of works that he originally wrote for instrumental ensemble, we have only one case of such a relationship actually existing-the five-voice Pavan in C minor (without an accompanying galliard) published in Volume 17 of the modern Byrd Edition. While we cannot assign the work a precise date, it can be confidently asserted that Byrd must have written it well before 1591, since the collection entitled My Ladye Nevells Booke from that year contains a keyboard adaptation of the piece. Sources for the piece are somewhat fragmentary, and the second tenor part has been lost (performances and recordings almost invariably use Kenneth Elliott's reconstruction of the voice, published in the Byrd Edition), but still the Pavan shows the indisputable and very unique musical fingerprints of its composer. The usual three-section format is used, set in the key of C minor (using, of course, the old two-flat key signature instead of the modern three-flat one). Each of the three eight-bar portions is to be repeated, so that in effect we have a not-insubstantial forty-eight bar piece to reckon with. As is typical of the composer's instrumental pieces, both the rhythmic energy and imitative intensity increase as the piece moves from beginning to end, and the pseudo-homophony of the opening stanza is slowly but surely replaced by an active tossing-about of first a pick-up-like quarter-note idea (typically Byrdian in the way its first three notes bounce of an initial rest) and then an eighth-note cell derived from it. During the third stanza the players' efforts to restrain themselves to the tonic key are continually undermined by a series of dominant tonicizations-this tonic-dominant-tonic-dominant swing is made with a bright, sixteenth- note neighbor figure that each of the voices gets its turn at-before Byrd allows C minor to prevail, suitably colored with a Picardy third.

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