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William Byrd: An Essential English Composer for Four Centuries When William Byrd died on July 4, 1623, the Cheque Book of the Chapel Royal noted the passing of “a Father of Musick.” That’s not an exaggeration: Today, his legacy as a composer flexible in style and firm in belief still resounds across England and the world of choral music. As a composer Byrd was, in essence, a miniaturist, said Peter Phillips, the founder of the early music ensemble the Tallis Scholars — “a kind of jigsaw composer” who wrote “little snippets of music that fitted together mind-bogglingly well.” Phillips compared Byrd to the painter Paul Klee, a thinker for whom “the little things matter very much.” How William Byrd Influences Music, 400 Years After His Death That small-scale thinking could be easily built up into larger textures, such as in “Ad Dominum cum tribularer” or the “Great Service”; boiled down to its essence, in the concise works of his “Gradualia” collections; and applied to a variety of different genres. Outside the church, Byrd wrote florid music for the virginal, and pioneered the consort song, a precursor to the lute song. Yet as a man, Byrd is known as being far less accommodating. Confident and ambitious in his early years, and obstinate and increasingly litigious later on, Byrd “certainly doesn’t emerge as a very benevolent figure from the records we have of his dealings,” said Andrew Johnstone, an assistant professor of music at Trinity College, Dublin. But Byrd’s stubbornness — bordering on irascibility — came in the face of religious and professional opposition.