September 30 and October 1, 2023 • 2:00 pm
Plant Family Collection at the
Brooklyn Botanical Garden
Featuring a new work by Kamala Sankaram
Performance included with park admission, $18.95
Student and senior tickets available at reduced price

Make Me To Know Thy Ways:
A Recusant Catholic in a Protestant Court

Saturday, November 4 • 7:30 pm
Saint Ignatius of Antioch Episcopal Church
West 87th St. at West End Avenue, NYC

William Byrd (c. 1540–1623) navigated the tricky and precarious divide between his devout Catholic faith and the Anglican reform embraced by the court of Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I. As a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, Byrd produced prodigiously in English for the Anglican rite and privately, in Latin, for the traditional Catholic rite. All the while he produced Songs of Sundrie Natures, a large body of partsongs in English about love and courtship, village and country life, and religious devotion. His three Latin Mass settings were meant to be sung at clandestine Mass celebrations in recusant households. These services were illegal and might well have resulted in the arrest of anyone participating in them. Byrd was lucky, though. A favourite of the music-loving Elizabeth I, he escaped severe punishment, receiving instead an indictment for failing to attend Protestant church services, a crime under the Act of Uniformity.

Tickets