Ye Sacred Muses
Ye Sacred Muses is William Byrd's Musical elegy on the death of his colleague and mentor, Thomas Tallis, in the form of a secular madrigal. It is scored for 5 vv or a cappella SATTB choir.
The words are:-
The concluding lines are particularly effective and are repeated. The tonality of the piece is slightly ambiguous, as despite its ending on a D major chord, it never really settles in any one key. Byrd uses the Dorian mode whilst his Renaissance contemporaries generally avoided the use of Medieval modes either by sharpening leading tones or lowering the fourth in the Lydian mode. Byrd’s use of the Dorian mode can be seen in the very first phrase of the piece.
