My Ladye Nevells Booke

My Ladye Nevells Booke consists of 42 pieces for keyboard by William Byrd, widely considered[1] one of the greatest English composers of his time.

A heavy, oblong folio volume, it retains its original elaborately tooled Morocco binding, stamped with the title, on top of a nineteenth century repair.

[3] Elizabeth Bacon was the third wife of Sir Henry Neville of Billingbear House, Berkshire,[4] whose arms on the title page have now been identified.

The book was preserved by the Neville family until the end of the eighteenth century, when it passed through several collectors' hands until it returned to the possession of William Nevill, 1st Marquess of Abergavenny.

With the exception of the two pieces dedicated to Lady Nevell, the compositions were evidently neither created specifically for the book, nor for the dedicatee, but are representative of some of Byrd's work of the ten to fifteen previous years.

Dance music is represented mainly by the ten magnificent but somewhat sombre pavans and their galliards, and there are none of Byrd's more lively corantos and voltas found in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, and only one of the almans.

The variation forms, sometimes harmonic, sometimes contrapuntal, are on folk-song and dance tunes, and on the hexachord (ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la), possibly an invention of Byrd's.