One of the high points of William Byrd's massive Gradualia collection (besides the stunning Easter Mass) is the rather sizeable group of four-voice pieces designed as music for the Mass Proper on Christmas. Like all the Gradualia motets, the Christmas Mass music was probably intended to be sung at private Catholic ceremonies (in the house of Sir John Petre near Byrd's home in Stondon Massey), and an intimate texture well-suited to its chamber-music purpose informs much of the work. In addition to the usual four sections of the Mass Proper (introit, gradual, alleluia, offertory, and communion) Byrd provides three seasonal motets, the first of which is the well-known Vespers antiphon Hodie Christus natus est (This day Christ was born). Whereas much of the music contained in the Gradualia is deliberately restrained in tone, Byrd sets the Hodie text with an appropriate exuberance and joyfulness. A two-voice imitative strand, soon echoed in modified form by the other (lower) pair of voices, begins the first line of text. Throughout the piece the word "hodie (today)", which appears at the beginning of four of the five lines, is treated with a buoyant dotted rhythm, here set as a filled-in rising third D-F. The implied meter of the two voices-each in triple time but offset from one another by exactly one breve, resulting in a nice syncopated feel-is carried over into the tenor/bass response, but abandoned when we arrive at the duple-meter second line of text, "hodie Salvator apparuit". Byrd's characteristic love of chromatic cross-relations is apparent in the F sharp/F natural juxtaposition at the end of the third phrase and the beginning of the fourth. The final Gloria in excelsis Deo, set largely as a cantus firmus, concludes with an alleluia that touches on warm homophony.



© All Music Guide