William Byrd was possessed by the power of song When people are asked to name the most important British composers the answer usually involves Purcell, Elgar, Britten and, if you're lucky, Byrd. It is generally understood that William Byrd deserves high respect both as a musician and as a man of principle in very troubled times; but the difficulty for the general listener is that he didn't write grand music. The others wrote obviously extrovert music, either for the stage or the orchestra. Byrd wrote miniatures. The intimate scale of Byrd's music makes it difficult to programme him in modern concert halls. Tomorrow, the Cardinall's Musick will launch their series of Byrd concerts in an ideal venue: the Wigmore Hall comes closer than most to the kinds of spaces Byrd was writing for. These were rooms or private chapels in palaces and country residences, or the Chapel Royal in St James's Palace, which to this day is cramped for the six men and 10 boys who regularly sing there. But it wasn't just the practicalities of performance which led to Byrd's manner of composition, it was also his way of thinking. He described how in his favoured texts there is such a deep and hidden force that the right notes would occur to him spontaneously. The same could be said about Purcell's and Britten's response to texts, but whereas with them the result was solo singers standing on a stage projecting outwards, Byrd thought of small groups - vocal ensembles or voices with viol accompaniment - turning inwards. He liked to strip meaning to its essence, and then express it through the interraction of several melodic lines in a polyphonic web - a method which compares sharply with the solo, hummable, melodic lines of opera and oratorio so beloved of Purcell and Britten. In fact, the subtle art of writing polyphony did not always have to be realised in miniature. Thomas Tallis, Byrd's friend and mentor, was not a miniaturist, even though he and Byrd used the same musical language. Like Taverner and a host of great English composers before him, Tallis knew how to write big. His training had been in the pre-Reformation Catholic tradition, which knew no doubt. All his music, even the smallest in scale, has a delivery which expresses confidence, demanding attention and sweeping the listener away. This is true of his epic 40-part motet Spem in alium; it is also true of his tiny four-part anthem If Ye Love Me. Byrd not only could never have written a 40-part piece (which is not to say he didn't have the technique for it), he could never have written If Ye Love Me. He didn't have the necessary address, which in essence was a kind of distance. It was as if Tallis put his words on a table in front of him and surrounded them with music, where Byrd swallowed his whole. This has the unexpected result of making Byrd the more rewarding to sing, and Tallis the more rewarding to listen to. Byrd is often portrayed as a trenchant Catholic who deliberately and provocatively shunned the established (Anglican) Church. It is concluded that he must have been deeply unhappy about his situation, possibly in personal danger, and that that feeling informed all his music. No doubt it did - and yet it is easy to exaggerate what was really happening. It is clear, for example, that he himself was in little or no physical danger, even if some of his more outspoken acquaintances were. Many times he and members of his family were listed as having failed to attend their local church, proving to the authorities that they were Catholics (not that they made any secret of it) and in turn leading some of them to be fined or summoned to court. But there is no evidence that anything came of these punishments. One historian (John Harley) has concluded that "in spite of their indictments, Byrd and his family seem to have suffered little more than worry and inconvenience. Fines were imposed, but there is no evidence that any were collected. Indeed the number of Catholics from whom fines were ever collected is remarkably small. Of course Byrd had the advantage of enjoying the Queen's favour - for two reasons. Not only did she know him and his music personally from his attendance at the Chapel Royal, but she knew his older brother who, if anything, had bettered even William's claim on her attention. John Byrd was a shipowner whose vessels had travelled to Brazil, the Caribbean and West Africa. They had also taken part in the defeat of the Spanish Armada and the capture of the Spanish flagship Madre de Dios. Three times in the following years Elizabeth intervened to halt court proceedings against William. So what of those texts which seem to cry out for deliverance from a strange land? "Vide, domine, afflictionem nostram" ("Behold our affliction, O Lord") reads one of them. Although the importance of these words to Byrd himself cannot be doubted, the shock factor in choosing them can also be overstated. Many Protestant writings of the period deploy exactly the same metaphorical references to a lost Jerusalem as Catholic writings. Byrd himself had set psalms for the Anglican Church which, if he had set them in Latin, would be instantly given a Catholic interpretation. It is too easy for us to over-dramatise events of the past we do not fully understand, and make a headline out of them. Very few people were killed for their beliefs in Elizabeth's reign, and those who did die were all arraigned for high treason. William was nowhere near this. He was a musician whose art reflects his deepest emotions, but outside a dictatorship you don't get beheaded for that.