This wonderful little piece is a fascinatingly elaborate canon. It is one of many pieces in the Cantiones Sacrae that, while beautiful in its own right, is clearly an expression and proving of Byrd's prowess, here in the masterful handling of an exceptionally dense texture, and an astonishing ease with canon technique as well as a formally inventive mind. It is for eight voices, but these are essentially four doubled voices. There are four parts, read from four separate books, with two singers per book reading in opposite directions. One sings the music from beginning to end, while the other, standing opposite, sings from end to beginning in retrograde. Thus eight parts are created from four; a miracle of economy. The line of the canon, befitting the formality of the musical procedure, is fairly tame, and flatly proportioned, remaining within the range of a seventh, and is rhythmically quite tame. Its brevity, too, is also oddly appropriate. After all, what else was there to say? In effect, with so many voices it is difficult to hear the canon as such. What strikes us instead is the temporal paradox, the amazing sound of music played in forward and reverse at the same time forming a pretty, geometrical web, an effect only really possible with canons before the invention of recorded sound.

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