Like the four-voice setting of the same text, William Byrd's six-voice This sweet and merry month of May is one of very few pieces he ever penned that might rightly be called a madrigal. However common it has become to refer to almost all his English-text vocal works as "Elizabethan madrigals", the fact remains that Byrd was very reluctant to allow the Italian madrigal style to influence his own musical language, and it was only to satisfy publisher Thomas Watson's desire to include the work of a native British composer in his Italian madrigalls Englished collection of 1590 that Byrd ever really invested much of his energy in such music. The two works that Byrd composed for Watson are the two settings of This sweet and merry May (the text itself is attributed to Watson); while the two versions bear many striking similarities of form and gesture, many feel that the richer, six-voice setting is the better work.

Ignoring the various different ways that it has been transcribed into modern notation over the years, the madrigal is exactly the same length (forty-five measures of 4-2 meter) as its four-voice brother, and follows a nearly identical text/music narrative. The text is as follows:

This sweet and merry month of May, While nature wantons in her prime, And birds do sing, and beasts do play For pleasure of the joyful time, I choose the first for holiday, And greet Eliza with a rhyme: O beauteous Queen of second Troy, Take well in worth a simple toy.

The piece begins with a brief canonic duet for the two sopranos (note the appropriate upward flourish on the word "merry", very similar to the double neighbor-figure at the corresponding place in the four-voice version), soon echoed in less strict fashion by the alto and first tenor. The two basses arrive with a new descending dotted-rhythm gesture as "nature wantons", while gentle arch-shaped eighth-notes reflect the singing of the birds. Byrd effects the same change to triple meter-sometimes transcribed as triplets instead—for the fourth line of text, and for a while the voices work together as homophonic groups of three, four, and five before duple-meter is regained just three bars later. "Holiday" is likewise strikingly homophonic, while the "Eliza" bit provides us with some very dense imitation on two distinct eighth-note motives. A complete break is made before Byrd salutes the "beauteous Queen of second Troy" (Queen Elizabeth, "second Troy" being, of course, London) in glorious C major. from here we move steadily and surely to the final perfect authentic cadence in F.



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