Like almost all Renaissance composers, William Byrd's reputation rests rather heavily on his remarkable polyphonic vocal music (a reputation not hurt by the fact that a great deal of this music is in English and thus is more easily accessible to Britons and Americans). And yet enough cannot be said of the vitality and, from a certain point of view, historical importance of his purely instrumental work. More than any other English composer of his time, Byrd helped to catapult the consort into the main forum of contemporary musical life, not merely adapting pre-existing vocal pieces to be played by viols (as was the trend of the day) but actually composing fresh music with distinctly non-vocal stylistic traits—music that shows off the ample expressive and formal powers that lovers of his vocal music hold so dear in a different and equally remarkable light. The sole five-part Fantasia, published in Volume 17 of the modern Byrd edition, with its great length and striking, continuous canonic interplay, provides for us a single, extended piece by which to familiarize ourselves with the fundamentals of Byrd's instrumental style. The Fantasia is cast in the key of C major and is sometimes given the title "Two in One" on account of the label that Byrd has applied to the two highest voices ("two parts in one")-a reference to the continuous, exact canon at the fourth that these two parts outline throughout the piece. [Such exact canon, in this case at the distance of one-and-a-half bars, is a rather "old-fashioned" musical tactic and thus, to some scholars, seems to indicate that Byrd composed it relatively early on in his instrumental career.] The work lasts a full 142 bars, and yet the two-voice canon around which all the other parts are composed never waivers for an instant. We can trace several sections as the Fantasia unfolds, marked not by changes of tempo or necessarily even tonal implication but rather by changing trains of motivic thought: the opening, relatively slow-moving quarters and half-notes give way to some eighth and occasionally sixteenth-note figurations, dotted gestures crop up, and then even some very active triplet passagework (note that throughout this portion there is usually some editorial reconstruction). Byrd's habit of introducing an eighth-note motive that bounces off an eighth-rest near during the final section of his Fantasias is in full force here. A rich V-I cadence, almost immediately preceded by a colorful (and typically Byrdian) B flat, draws a close.

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