William Byrd – Mass for Five Voices (c. 1595)

I feel the same way about this piece as I often do about Palestrina:  sure, it’s beautiful and elegant and perfectly constructed, but that actually works against it, because I get tired of perfection pretty quickly.  (I once read a quote from the Japanese novelist Ryunosuke Akutagawa in which he said that the worst hell would be an unending forest of cherry trees in full bloom.)  There’s some textural variety in the piece — points of imitation, denser polyphonic passages, passages that lean more toward monophony — but it’s all somber, all similar note-values, with very little dissonance outside of the “Agnus Dei,” and most problematically, pretty much all D minor (is 1595 late enough to talk about keys rather than modes?), enlivened only by the occasional visit to F major or Picardy third at a cadence.  I can’t criticize Byrd’s craft, but what he’s doing just doesn’t hold my interest for very long.  Give me a 16th-century weirdo like Gesualdo any day.

Speaking of which, anyone got any recommendations for Cipriano de Rore?  Preferably something in which he experiments with microtonal tuning systems?