Vide Domine quoniam tribulor (BW 8;18) is a very interesting motet which is not infrequently

heard in performance today. Even Fellowes expressed doubt as to its authenticity on stylistic
ground (W.Byrd...) but he trusted the ascription in the onecontemporary source know to him,
the partbook Tenbury 389. (The motet as a whole is preserved in Add. 23624, na eighteenth
century score made from Tenbury 389-James and the three partbooks which have since been
lost). Fellowes took this to be a specially good Byrd source because Tenbury 389 bears the initials
W.B and T.E (Thomas East?) and because of indicationsthat the lost partbooks contained glosses
due to Byrd himself (see p.45n). On the other hand, the fact that manuscript mutilates the
sectional motet Guichardo and Abradad and the isorhymitc Sponsus amat sponsam (see p.57) –
argues that it was never in the hands of Byrd or anyone close to him.

However this may be, the concise treatment of the text in Vide Domine would be unprecedented
in Byrd’s writing at the period indicated by the manuscript, and the sensuous harmonic idiom of
the music unmatched at any period. Chromaticism is applied not principally in order to illustrate
individual words and concepts, but rather to enrich the Harmony in general way. Byrd was never
much attracted to chromaticism and his few extended essas in this Direction, such as O quam
suavis est (1607/18) and the seemingly parodistic Come woeful Orpheus (1611), were written
late in life and are nowhere as extreme as the presente motet. It is probably by a younger
contemporary of Byrd, experimenting all out in the Italian manner.

An Ave Regina Coelorum is attributed to Byrd in the Paston lutebook ; it also appears in a closely
associated set of five partbooks, Tenbury , in which no composers names are given. Despite the
authority which on is inclined