Written for Andreas Borregaard and Zubin Kanga. Commissioned by Andreas Borregaard and Zubin Kanga as part of Cyborg Soloists, supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship and Royal Holloway, University of London. The commission was made possible with support from KODA Kultur.

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About:

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The direction for this work emerged after finding out that Zubin and Andreas, during their respective developments as keyboard players, had both studied and performed a pairing of William Byrd’s keyboard pieces - the First Pavane and the Galliard to the First Pavane, published in the set of pieces ‘My Ladye Nevells booke of virginal music.’ My piece can in some way be thought of as arrangement or a co-composition in dialogue with Mr. William Byrd. Like the original Byrd keyboard pieces, which provided the starting point for this piece, ‘Byrds of a feather’ is divided into 2 movements - a long ‘Pavane’, followed by a shorter ‘Galliard’.

 

Byrd composed these pieces for virginal (a Renaissance keyboard instrument) as a Catholic recusant under Elizabeth I. He was a known Catholic at a time when, after the English Reformation, Catholic practice was illegal and punishable. Yet he was protected, by royal favour as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. He lived in a permanent double-life: outwardly serving the Protestant crown musically while composing Masses and motets in secret for clandestine Catholic gatherings. This notion that Byrd was forced to ‘cosplay’ and shape-shift in his identity became something I focussed on in my work with the duo.

 

In a sense, historically-informed performance practice, and the fixation on accurately recreating the sounds of the past, whilst simultaneously bringing something new and fresh to the music, is a kind of speculative fiction, a way of ‘cosplaying’ as our musical ancestors and attempting to fill knowledge gaps that can never be reliably closed. This notion fed into my decisions about the different instrumental samples that are used throughout the piece and their respective tunings and diapasons, which range from a 16th century virginal in quarter-comma meantone tuning, where A = 415Hz, all the way up to the modern grand piano in equal temperament, where A = 440Hz. This chronological instrumental and tuning logic then extends beyond the realm of the concert hall into the use of synthesizer patches where the octave is divided into 48 equally spaced steps. Many of the instrumental patches come from Modartt’s ‘Pianoteq’ -physically modelled virtual instruments. Throughout the piece, the co-existence of ‘incompatible’ tuning systems gives the music a tonal wonkiness. There’s a push and pull I’m attracted to here between the familiarity of the tonal language mined from Byrd’s original and the complex sonorities that come from erratically switching between tuning systems and virtual renderings of old instruments.

 

Another influence on the piece was found whilst researching Renaissance music in the royal courts of 16th century England, when I stumbled upon the word ‘Sprezzatura’. Baldassare Castiglione coined this term in his 1528 publication ‘The Book of the Courtier’. It refers to the art of making something difficult look effortless, or maintaining a nonchalant demeanour while performing complex tasks. This text was unquestionably known in Elizabethan England during Byrd’s lifetime under the reign of Elizabeth I, and amongst musicians of the court. An English translation by Thomas Hoby was published in 1561, which had a significant influence on the English conception of how one should act if appointed at a royal court, as was the case for Byrd.

 

I became interested in the idea of creating additional obstacles for the performers in this piece, that would make it even more challenging to carry out the notion of sprezzatura. Playing multiple instruments at once, frequently changing software patches, controlling multiple hardware devices, singing while playing, fracturing Byrd’s counterpoint into fragmentary hocketed material - these are all additional performative challenges, which bring with them their own set of tensions and expressive potentialities. I’ve been curious about the effect these obstacles will have on the duo’s ability to reconstruct Byrd’s music in an effortless fashion.

 

I was struck by another framing of sprezzatura as ”a form of defensive irony: the ability to disguise what one really desires, feels, thinks, and means or intends behind a mask of apparent reticence and nonchalance”. Berger (2002) This informed some of my decisions with re-ordering words and sentiments found in the recorded interviews I conducted with Andreas and Zubin during the collaborative process. Acting as an ‘unreliable narrator’, I had fun creating some alternative narratives and meanings from the patchworked re-composition of the duo’s responses to my questions, which touched on their respective relationships to Byrd’s music.

 

Source: Berger (2002). "Sprezzatura and the Absence of Grace". In Javitch, Daniel (ed.). The Book of the Courtier: The Singleton Translation. New York: W.W. Norton. p. 297.​

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