LiederNet logo

CONTENTS

×
  • Home | Introduction
  • Composers (20,103)
  • Text Authors (19,448)
  • Go to a Random Text
  • What’s New
  • A Small Tour
  • FAQ & Links
  • Donors
  • DONATE

UTILITIES

  • Search Everything
  • Search by Surname
  • Search by Title or First Line
  • Search by Year
  • Search by Collection

CREDITS

  • Emily Ezust
  • Contributors (1,114)
  • Contact Information
  • Bibliography

  • Copyright Statement
  • Privacy Policy

Follow us on Facebook

by William Byrd (1542?3? - 1623)

Reasons, briefly set down by the Author
Language: English 
Reasons, briefly set down by the Author, 
to persuade everyone to learn to sing.

1. First, it is a knowledge easily taught, and quickly learned, 
where there is a good master, and an apt scholar.

2. The exercise of singing is delightful to Nature, 
and good to preserve the health of Man.

3. It does strengthen all parts of the breast, and does open the pipes.

4. It is a singularly good remedy for stuttering and stammering in the speech.

5. It is the best means to procure perfect pronunciation, and to make a good Orator.

6. It is the only way to know where Nature has bestowed the benefit of a good voice: 
which gift is so rare, as there is not one among a thousand that has it: 
and, in many, that excellent gift is lost, because they want Art to express Nature.

7. There is not any Music of Instruments whatsoever, comparable to that 
which is made of the voices of Men, where the voices are good, 
and the same well sorted and ordered.

8. The better the voice is, the meeter it is to honour and serve God therewith: 
and the voice of man is chiefly to be employed to that end.

    Omnis spiritus laudet Dominum.

    Since singing is so good a thing,
    I wish all men would learn to sing.

About the headline (FAQ)

Note: used in Matthew King's A Song of Byrds.

Text Authorship:

  • by William Byrd (1542?3? - 1623), no title, appears in Psalms, Sonnets, and Songs of Sadness and Piety, first published 1588 [author's text checked 1 time against a primary source]

Musical settings (art songs, Lieder, mélodies, (etc.), choral pieces, and other vocal works set to this text), listed by composer (not necessarily exhaustive):

    [ None yet in the database ]


Researcher for this text: Emily Ezust [Administrator]

This text was added to the website: 2010-04-10
Line count: 20
Word count: 225

Gentle Reminder

This website began in 1995 as a personal project by Emily Ezust, who has been working on it full-time without a salary since 2008. Our research has never had any government or institutional funding, so if you found the information here useful, please consider making a donation. Your help is greatly appreciated!
–Emily Ezust, Founder

Donate

We use cookies for internal analytics and to earn much-needed advertising revenue. (Did you know you can help support us by turning off ad-blockers?) To learn more, see our Privacy Policy. To learn how to opt out of cookies, please visit this site.

I acknowledge the use of cookies

Contact
Copyright
Privacy

Copyright © 2025 The LiederNet Archive

Site redesign by Shawn Thuris