My Ladye Nevells Booke

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

My Ladye Nevells Booke is a key Renaissance keyboard music manuscript by the English composer William Byrd, kept in the British Library. It contains 42 pieces for keyboard and is highly regarded alongside the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book as an important collection of Byrd’s work from the late 16th century.

The music was copied by John Baldwin, a singer from Windsor Castle, but Byrd seems to have chosen, organized, and even edited the pieces himself. The book is a heavy oblong folio with 192 leaves, each having four staves of music, and it still shows its original Morocco binding with the Neville family coat of arms on the title page. The initials H.N. appear in the corner of the page. A table of contents is at the end.

Scholars identify Elizabeth Bacon Neville (Elizabeth, the daughter of Sir Nicholas Bacon) as the likely dedicatee. She was married to Sir Henry Neville, and the book was probably a gift to her. The Neville family kept the manuscript for centuries, eventually passing it through several owners before returning to a Neville descendant in 1668. In 2006, the manuscript was accepted by the government in lieu of Inheritance Tax and given to the British Library. It was digitized in 2009 and is available online, with facsimile editions also published.

What’s inside: the pieces are almost all secular dance and keyboard works, not liturgical music. The collection includes ten pavans and their sombre galliards, some variations on folk tunes and on the hexachord (ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la), and many fantasias and voluntaries. There are a few pieces dedicated to patrons, such as the tenth pavane for William Petre and the sixth for Kinborough Good. Two pieces are dedicated to Lady Nevell, and apart from those, most works were not written specifically for the book but come from Byrd’s earlier years.

One notable piece, the naive Battell, is thought to reflect current events and is often described as a rare, lighthearted programmatic work. The collection shows Byrd in a variety of styles, from dance tunes to more elaborate keyboard fantasies.

The manuscript has inspired many recordings. Complete Byrd keyboard sets by Christopher Hogwood, Pieter-Jan Belder, and Elizabeth Farr cover these pieces, and Davitt Moroney’s complete Byrd keyboard works include them all. Some individual pieces, like Sellingers Rounde and Hughe Ashtons Grownde, have been recorded by Glenn Gould on piano.