The English composer William Byrd's (1543-1623) second set of Variations, Browning my dear (also known as The leaves be green) was not following a long-established tradition. The most popular consort genre of the time, after dance music, was the In Nomine. The variation form, while tracing its ancestry back to semi-improvised genres, was an exception rather than the norm.

This work is a set of twenty variations on the popular tune Browning my dear. It is written for unspecified instrumental consort of five instruments, and can be performed on recorders, viols or any other family of renaissance instruments. It was one of Byrd's most popular consort pieces and was being copied into manuscripts by 1580.

This set of variations is not the first on Browning. A set of five exist by Stonings, and of ten by Woodcock, and Byrd must have known of these. However Byrd's work is superior to these earlier works by the nature of the brilliance of the writing and technically masterful counterpoint.



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Browning ('The Leaves Be Green', a5; arr. recorders)

Folk and popular song play an important role in the music of English composer William Byrd, and, beyond making hidden references to such well-known melodies as Greensleeves (as in the first of the two G minor Fantasias a6) and deriving whole sets of melodic gestures from those genres of musical expression, he was one of the earlier composers to concoct sets of instrumental variations on such tunes. Such a piece is the well-known Fantasia a5 in F major based on the Browning melody (a tune otherwise known as The Leaves Be Green). Although a relatively early work composed sometime around or shortly before 1580, the Browning variations give us a good glimpse of Byrd's characteristic approach to instrumental composition: a sectional approach to form based on contrasting motivic and rhythmic content, frequent recourse to dense imitation and (much less frequently) to bursts of homophony, and a range of melodic gestures that would defy even the best efforts of renaissance singers. The bass voice is given the privilege of providing the first statement of the Browning melody (set against a pair of the other four voices), after which Byrd shapes the nineteen further statements into four large sections of music, each of which lasts twenty bars. Each voice gets a chance to play the melody once during each section (save the third, during which the bass is denied its turn to make up for the one it had at the very opening of the piece), though Byrd varies the packing order with each new round. However, Byrd's formal plans are rarely so cut-and-dried, and the boundaries defined by the above- described layout of melody-statements are sharply contradicted by the rhythmic and motivic plan of the piece, whose ever-changing outlines do not line up with the four sections as given above. And so the eighth-note figurations that characterize the beginning of the second set of melody-statements actually begin to take shape long before that section begins, and there are similar sharp shifts of rhythmic focus in the middles of both the third and final sections. Beyond just serving in a cantus firmus manner, the Browning melody (and in particular its noticeable upward fourth leap) provides the substance for a fair portion of the other thematic material as well. As the work unfolds the music undergoes a gradual process of acceleration that is completely typical of the composer's instrumental compositions, culminating in a passage of wild triplets.

© Blair Johnston, All Music Guide