by Paul Matheson

Harry Christophers and his world-class choir The Sixteen will once again bring their annual Choral Pilgrimage to Edinburgh on Saturday 14 October 2023. They will be performing in Greyfriars Kirk at 7.30pm. For those who want to learn to sing some pieces from the programme, there will be an earlier Choral Workshop that same day at 1.00pm.

Harry Christophers and The Sixteen launched their Choral Pilgrimage in the year 2000 with the aim of bringing sacred choral music and renaissance polyphony to audiences around the UK, and to perform that music in the settings that it was originally composed for: cathedrals, minsters, abbeys and churches. Since then it has been wildly successful. It has transformed the UK landscape for performance of sacred choral music and has inspired many imitators. Capacity audiences around Britain show that many people return year after year. As Christophers himself commented recently (BBC Radio 3 ‘Music & Faith’ 09 July 2023), while these concerts are not religious services, they are performances of religious music in religious venues, and that is part of the appeal to audiences.

William Byrd

2023 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of one of the greatest composers of the Renaissance. William Byrd (1540-1623). He was widely admired in his own time and his subsequent musical legacy is so great that he has been referred to as ‘the father of British music’. Byrd’s music has often featured in The Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimages, so it was no surprise their 2023 Choral Pilgrimage programme would explore his music and its continental influences.

Byrd was a devout and lifelong Roman Catholic at a time of anti-Catholic persecution by the Protestant English state. As Harry Christophers observes, ‘it was little short of deadly to be a Catholic’. At a time when Catholics (and especially priests) were regularly beheaded, burnt alive, or hanged, Byrd was unable to practise his faith in public. Therefore he was careful to maintain an output of music appropriate for the English Protestant church as well as the Latin Catholic one.

In his earlier career, as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, Byrd enjoyed for a time a certain amount of royal protection from Protestant enforcers. He wrote and had printed a large quantity of music for the Catholic rite, for services which he and other recusant Catholics had to celebrate secretly, in the private houses and chapels of protective noblemen like Sir John Petre, one of Byrd’s patrons. It was to be close to the protection of Sir John at Ingatestone Hall in Essex, that Byrd left London in 1593 when, presumably, the Queen was no longer willing or able to protect him from Protestant enforcers.

Paul Matheson is a music reviewer and diversity officer with the police.