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Jeremy L. Smith, The dilatory space of While that the sun: Byrd, Tessier and the English sequence, Early Music, Volume 40, Issue 4, November 2012, Pages 671–685, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cas117
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Abstract
On 10 May 1582, Guillaume Tessier of Brittany published his Premier livre d’airs, a volume that stands out for its English connections, including, most unusually, a dedication to Queen Elizabeth. It turns out, as Jeanice Brooks has recently established, that Tessier had actually set off across the English Channel later that year, making contact with many at the highest levels of power, including the great English courtier poet Philip Sidney, who used one of Tessier’s tunes from the Premier livre as the basis for a poem he included in his pioneering sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella.
The present article centres on a related finding: that the second numbered work in Tessier’s set, Tandis que le soleil, is the incontrovertible source for While that the sun, a song the leading English composer William Byrd published in his Songs of sundrie natures in 1589. An investigation of this Tessierian source uncovers links among the verses in Byrd’s Songs and the poems of Sidney and Thomas Watson. Involved with these poets, as they themselves were setting the stage for the main introduction of the sonnet sequence in England, Byrd set about creating a musical version of this new poetic genre. While that the sun, as seen from this perspective, created the ‘dilatory space’ he needed to deepen the contemporary relevance of his narrative through covert allusion and personalization.
