William Lewis

In 2013, David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label released Who is William Onyeabor?, a compilation of the obscure, but increasingly influential Nigerian musician William Onyeabor. Now (in 2014) follows a 9xCD box set that collects the entirety of Onyeabor’s recorded output.

English composer William Byrd must have figured he'd lived long enough by 1605, as the seventy-something composer decided to throw caution to the winds and published his largest work, the two-volume set Gradualia, that year. This was a collection of Latin service music, consisting of mass propers for the entire church years in addition to a few secular pieces in the second volume; it contains 109 works in all. Although James I had acceded to the English throne in 1603 with the intention of at least attempting to restore some measure of religious freedom to English Catholics, in quick succession the Bye Plot, the Main Plot, and the Gunpowder Plot put to bed any hopes that this would come to pass during his reign.

English composer and violinist William Brade was a significant transitional figure in instrumental music between the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Brade is credited with transplanting English musical practices most readily associated with William Byrd, Peter Philips, and John Dowland to North German and Scandinavian soil, and in aiding the transformation from the Renaissance notion of the English consort to the more continental Baroque idea of a string orchestra.