This is my first look at polyphonic choral music and I’ve listened to William Byrd’s highly emotive sacred motet Tristitia et Anxietas (Sadness and Anxiety), first composed in 1580.

William Byrd (1539-1623) is arguably one of the most well known and well regarded of English composers from the Renaissance. Byrd lived during a period of major political and religious tension in England and drew much inspiration from his life as a devout catholic living under a reformed protestant monarchy. Byrd was responsible for the development and transformation of the musical traditions of Britain, and his output of nearly 500 published works contributed massively to the further growth of these traditions.

Tristitia is a motet, a type of polyphonic choral work, written for five voices (ATTBB) and mosts performances last around 10m30s.

The composition uses a number of recurring motives to bring in different voices and different sections of the text. The first of these motives, a rising and descending semitone in the word Tri-sti-(ti)-a, is one of the first indications of a melancholic and sorrowful tone of the piece. This semitone motif is used very effectively by Byrd in the introduction of voices which imitate each other. For example, the initial cadence suggests a Phrygian tonality in the first three measures, however, the introduction of the upper voices following the semi-tone motif take on a different meaning when the movement in the lower voices changes. From this change we have the appearance of suspensions in the polyphony formed.

The text itself is used to provide emotional peaks for the composition. In contrast to the text of musical rounds and catches, where the interplay between repeating and overlapping lines of text is used for “poetic” effect, the text here takes on a different function. While going into the significance of each line of the text is beyond the scope of this post, there is a very interesting emotional peak in the piece which stood out to me the most:

Væ mihi, quia peccavi

Woe is me, for I have sinned.

When the piece arrives at this text, towards the end of the first part of the piece, the simple motif presented in the alto voices open up to some of the most interesting harmony of the whole piece. The harmony implied in the section modulates on subsequent repetitions and contains clashing accidentals which lead to an ambiguous tonal direction for the listener. Furthermore, all voices are singing in the upper range or their individual registers; the work itself does not grow louder by the intentional action of the singers, but the overall intensity of the piece grows naturally with the singers reaching higher in pitch.

References: 
1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Byrd

Recording:
Stile Antico (2019). "Tristitia et Anxietas" In a Strange Land. Arles: Harmonia Mundi Musique: