Recorded at the Chapel of St. Anthony's Seminary, Santa Barbara, CA 
March, 1996 
December, 1996 
March, 1997

Acknowledgements: 
Santa Barbara City College Department of Music 
721 Cliff Dr. 
Santa Barbara, CA 93109
Josquin edition by Dr. Allejandro Planchart
University of California, Santa Barbara
Department of Music
© 1997 The Santa Barbara Quire of Voyces

E-mail: sbqv@catalina.org
www.sbcc.net/academic/mus/choir/qv.main.htm

Born around 1543 at Lincoln, Byrd studied music in his youth with the great Thomas Tallis, and served Queen Mary (reg. 1553-58) as a chorister in the Chapel Royal. Around the age of twenty he was appointed organist at Lincoln Cathedral, and in 1570 he was instated as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. He shared with Tallis the position of organist there, as well as a national monopoly on music publishing. By all outward signs, he was as successful as any English musician could hope to be.

But the great inner tragedy of Byrd's life, to which we may perhaps ascribe the special passion and power of his music, was the abolition of Roman Catholicism in Britain. Byrd sought to make a careful distinction between his Catholic faith and his English loyalty, but as anti-Catholic and xenophobic voices grew stronger in British society such nuanced positions became untenable. Those "recusants" who refused to attend the new Anglican liturgies were subject to heavy fines; those who were brought to a public accounting of their religious activities endured dreadful tortures, even martyrdom. Despite protection from Queen Elizabeth herself, Byrd finally left London in 1593 for refuge in Essex, under the protection of various powerful Catholic noblemen for whose secret chapels he composed much service music. He died there in 1623, venerable and greatly respected by his countrymen.

Byrd's Mass for Four Voices (1593) is the first of his three Mass cycles for the forbidden Catholic rite. A central tenet of Elizabethan Catholicism was its historical legitimacy, and Byrd makes an explicit homage to that heritage in his Sanctus setting by quoting the great pre-Reformation Tudor composer John Taverner's "Mean" Mass. Elsewhere, he refers in diverse ways to the English tradition of composing music for the Mass: opening each movement with a reduced numbers of parts; beginning each movement with more-or-less the same music (known as a "head motive"); and a certain archaicism in harmony. More personal elements of Byrd's style include the avoidance of musical models or quotations (excepting Taverner's Mass) so that the Mass unfolds in accord with a free, inner logic; he also exhibits a straightforward non-elaborative approach to the text. There is very little repetition of the liturgical words, so when Byrd does repeat a phrase (such as in the Credo at "unam sanctam catholicam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam," "one, holy, catholic, CATHOLIC and apostolic church") it is hard to miss that his point is rhetorical (one might even say political), rather than merely musical.
-Temmo Korirheli

The son of an important family in Avila (Castile), Victoria began his musical career as a choirboy at Avila Cathedral and his classical education at Santo Gil, a Jesuit school attended by the nephews of St. Theresa of Avila. Around 1565 he received a grant from King Philip II of Spain to continue his studies, and used the funds to enroll in the Jesuit Collegio Germanico in Rome as a singer. He surely knew Palestrina, who was maestro di cappella at the neighboring Seminario Romano, and may well have studied with him. From 1569 to 1587 Victoria held various musical posts in several Roman churches. He was ordained priest in 1575 by the last surviving pre-Reformation English bishop, Thomas Goldwell, and joined St. Philip Neri's new Congregazione dei Preti dell' Oratorio, whose interest in musical presentations would later serve as the cradle of the Baroque oratorio.

By the 1580s Victoria was homesick, and was actively seeking an opportunity to return to Spain. In 1587, Philip II obliged by appointing Victoria chaplain to his sister, the Dowager Empress Maria, who in 1581 had retired with her daughter to a wealthy Madrid convent, the Monasterio de las Descalzas de Santa Clara. In addition to his chaplaincy, Victoria served for about twenty years as maestro de capilla at the convent, which supported a flourishing and famous musical establishment; thereafter, from 1604 until his death, the aging composer restricted his activities to playing the organ. His music was widely known and printed throughout Catholic Europe, and it played a formative role in the music life of New Spain cathedrals such as Lima, Bogota, and Mexico City.

Victoria's surviving output is entirely sacred and in general it paints a picture of a committed Catholic composer-priest in the post-conciliar era. There are approximately 60 motets and other liturgical works, and about 20 masses. He seems to have applied different styles to the different categories of compositions: affective, even manneristic writing in the motets, and a more sober approach, textually concise but musically inventive, in the masses. Most of his masses are "imitation" or "parody" compositions; that is, they base their musical fabric on a pre-existing polyphonic model, usually a motet. In a sense. "imitation" masses resemble vast and elaborate sets of variations, here quoting the opening or another moment of a motet practically verbatim, there lifting out a passage for expansion and repetition, or yet again so transforming and elaborating a portion of the model that only a faint echo of the original remains--the whole, of course, woven together with much that is new. "Imitation" or "parody" had been the prevailing compositional technique for a good half-century by Victoria's time, so it is not surprising that his handling of it is subtle and sophisticated.

Victoria based the Missa "O magnum mysterium" (published 1592 in Rome. after he had returned to Spain) on his own motet setting of "O magnum mysterium," the responsory sung after the fourth reading during the Matins service early on Christmas morning. One effect of basing a mass on a motet is that the resulting mass setting has a certain musical "appropriateness" to the feastday to which the motet belongs, so perhaps Victoria intended this music for one of the masses on Christmas Day as well. The opening of the motet. which appeared in his very first publication (Venice, 1572), is echoed as a "head motif' at the opening of the Kyrie and Sanctus movements; the other movements, although not beginning with a direct quote of the motet. do begin with an open-fifth sonority that recalls the motet. Other motifs and textures from the motet are also carried over into the mass, such as the occasional shifts into triple time. Like Palestrina's "Pope Marcellus" Mass (which legendarily "sacred" church polyphony from censure by the Council of Trent), Victoria's mass makes liberal use of homorhythmic texture in the Gloria and Credo, thus ensuring that the complicated text of these two movements is plainly intelligible to the listening congregation--clearly an important consideration for a Counter-Reformation-era composer/priest.