title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: The film opens with McQuade involved in an intense battle with Mexican bandits and a gang of horse thieves from which he emerges unscathed (saving several Texas State Troopers). Shaking off the dust, McQuade returns to El Paso, Texas to attend the retirement ceremony of his fellow Ranger and close friend Dakota (Jones). After the party, his commander attempts to curb his "lone wolf" attitude by insisting he work with local Texas State Trooper Kayo Ramos (Beltran), a tough but clean-cut and polite Latino.


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: Although divorced, McQuade is on very good terms with his ex-wife, and loves his teenage daughter Sally. McQuade also seems to like Sally's boyfriend Bobby, who is enlisted in the US Army and is respectful of McQuade being a retired Marine.


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: While out horseback riding with his daughter, his daughter's horse runs wild and she is saved by Lola Richardson (Carrera). She invites them to a party where Rawley Wilkes (Carradine) displays his prowess in martial arts and some of his thugs get into a fight with Ramos. After settling the fight, Richardson and McQuade leave the party and apparently have a romantic encounter. She shows up at his house and cleans it. Despite McQuade's annoyance that he does not need a woman to take care of him, Richardson seems to start breaking through his rough exterior within the couple of days they are together.


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: Meanwhile, Sally and Bobby witness the hijacking of a U.S. Army convoy. Bobby is shot and killed by the hijackers, who then cause Sally to be hospitalized when they shove her car into a ravine. McQuade more readily works with Kayo to find out who did this to his daughter and her boyfriend. Kayo's computer skills allow him to track the errant convoy. At an illegal garment factory, they pick up a young delinquent named Snow (William Sanderson), who is reluctant to talk until Dakota points a Mac-10 in his general direction and empties the magazine.


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: In retaliation for disrupting his operations, Wilkes asphyxiates Dakota in his house and also has Snow killed. Dakota's murder attracts the attention of FBI Special Agent Jackson (Kennedy) who works with Ramos and McQuade. The trail leads them to Wilkes, revealed as an arms merchant who is hijacking U.S. arms shipments for his illicit weapons deals.


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: The three eventually find the arms trading headquarters in the desert. Agents Burnside and Núñez are killed when they attack the headquarters. McQuade and Ramos had tried to stop them, but ended up in the gunfight as well. McQuade is caught and sadistically beaten by Wilkes, who then orders that McQuade be placed in his truck and buried under a truckload of dirt, ignoring Richardson's pleas for mercy for the three men. After regaining consciousness in his truck (a Dodge Ramcharger, 1983 model), McQuade produces a beer and pours it over his face. Then, using his homemade supercharger system, McQuade charges his truck through the dirt – miraculously breaking himself free – and then rescues Ramos and Jackson. All three men are weakened due to being shot and beaten.


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: McQuade finds that Sally has been taken by Wilkes to Mexico. A rival arms dealer known as Falcon, who has been disguising his illegal business as a pinball machine dealer supplies McQuade with this intelligence, claiming Wilkes has double-crossed him and he would like his competition eliminated. Falcon gives McQuade the exact location in Mexico where Wilkes and his daughter are.


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: Though McQuade is intent and tries to head to the location on his own, both Ramos and Jackson have followed him and the three head into the base for the attack. After an intense battle, with Jackson being shot again, and Sally and Richardson escaping, Sally is shot in the leg and both women are sidelined.


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: Finally McQuade and Wilkes engage a hand-to-hand fight with the fight leaning in Wilkes' favor, until he strikes Sally (who ran to her father's aid), provoking McQuade into a frenzy of hits and kicks that defeats Wilkes. McQuade is reunited with his daughter, only to be fired upon by an injured Wilkes. Richardson steps into the line of fire to save McQuade and is fatally wounded. Her dying words to McQuade are that Wilkes killed her husband, forced her to be his arm candy, and that she loved McQuade.


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: Meanwhile, Wilkes and his remaining thug run into a building. Jackson provides McQuade with a grenade, and McQuade throws it into the building, killing Wilkes and the other man. Falcon then arrives in his helicopter. McQuade, Sally, Ramos, and Jackson take it, leaving Falcon to deal with the Mexican "federales".


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: McQuade's ex-wife and daughter are at a ceremony where McQuade's commander presents him (as well as Ramos and Jackson) with the Texas Award of Valor, and McQuade congratulates his ex-wife for getting an excellent job in New Mexico. The following day, McQuade has rented a U-Haul and is helping Sally and his ex-wife move. As they are getting ready to leave, Ramos shows up telling McQuade he is needed as a gunman has held up a bank. Figuring he has had enough adventure and wanting to spend more time with his family, McQuade politely declines. However, when Ramos also warns that the robber has taken hostages, McQuade is spurred into action. As the squad car speeds off, his ex-wife bellows "J.J. McQuade, you will never change!"


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: BJ Nelson wrote the script and all drafts. It was originally called "Lone Wolf". He wrote all drafts and was not rewritten. Kaye Dyal only assisted with story ideas late in the process anda John Milius suggested a few details. Nelson wanted Clint Eastwood to play the role but after he passed, Carver thought Chuck Norris would be ideal to play the lead so he approached him to do the film.


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: Carver wanted to "mess up" Chuck Norris' image, having him grow a beard and drink beer on screen. Norris was reluctant as he wanted to be a good role model for children.


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: Chuck Norris and David Carradine refused to use stunt doubles for their climactic fight scene, despite strong reservations from the producers. "The thing about the fight with Dave is that not only is it very well done, but it and the other martial-arts scenes are not just fillers," said Norris. "You've got to have more than technique if you're going to capture the emotions of the audience."


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: Carradine said Norris wanted to do a fight that matched the one Norris did with Bruce Lee in the Roman Coliseum in "Way of the Dragon" "and we were actually trying to go beyond that. I think we did. I think photographically we didn’t. But as far as the fight was concerned, the combination of the two styles, you know, because I was very flowing and loose, and he was very solid and hard, I think we accomplished what we set out to do."


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: Carradine said the fight was shot over four days and "we were little old men by the end of it. All our old injuries came back, we got new injuries, and we were


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: Chuck had a feeling when I was working with him, that he wanted to be a better actor. At one point, when we were working on the fight, I got close to him, and I said. This is really right man, puttin' your face in the dirt.’ And he looked at me, you know, and he didn’t expect that from me. And we got to be buddies. For just that period. I don’t hang around with Chuck. Chuck mainly doesn’t like to work with co-stars. His movies are all solo movies.In an interview in 2020, Steve Carver said Chuck Norris was "easy to work with". He added that athletes "think differently than trained theatre actors. If you block a scene with an athlete, if you ask an athlete to move from point A to B, or to pick up something, or do anything, he will do these movements mechanically. Which is not a bad thing, because with every rehearsal the movement becomes more fluid. Whereas a theatre actor will project their movements and their dialogue. It’s a stage to them. That’s the difference. Chuck was a little bit stiff in "An Eye For An Eye". He became looser in "Lone Wolf McQuade". After that he became better with every picture he did."


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: The film was originally rated "R" but Chuck Norris appealed the decision to the MPAA and succeeded in getting the film rated PG.


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: "This is the second time I've appealed," said Norris. "They gave "Good Guys Wear Black" an R, but I persuaded them to make it a PG. My argument was the strong, positive image I project on the screen. The word karate, unfortunately, connotes violence to many people. Actually, it's a means of avoiding violent situations, and a form of defense if you have no choice and you're backed into a corner... My films are very similar to the John Wayne movies of the '40s. He'd go in a bar and Jack Palance would pick a fight with him, and then Wayne would take out half the saloon. It's the same theme: A man is pushed into a situation where he has to resort to violence."


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: Roger Ebert rated the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and compared Norris and his character favorably to the roles Clint Eastwood used to play in spaghetti Westerns. Vincent Canby of "The New York Times" called Norris "good" and further noted: "The plot, set in and around El Paso, is unimportant and nonstop, like an old-fashioned, Saturday afternoon serial, which isn't at all bad. Steve Carver, the director, understands that in such films action is content." Todd McCarthy of "Variety" wrote, "Fans of "Soldier of Fortune" magazine will think they've been ambushed and blown away to heaven by 'Lone Wolf McQuade.' Every conceivable type of portable weapon on the world market today is tried out by the macho warriors on both sides of the law in this modern western, which pits Texas Ranger Chuck Norris and his cohorts against multifarious baddies who like to play rough." Gene Siskel of the "Chicago Tribune" gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "The rhythm here is seven minutes of action, followed by a minute of dialogue, followed by another seven minutes of action. For a while I was laughing at all of the explosions; eventually, though, all of the noise became annoying." Kevin Thomas of the "Los Angeles Times" thought that the film, "like its predecessor, 'Forced Vengeance,' becomes so numbingly violent that it's a turnoff about a third of the way through." Jimmy Summers wrote in "BoxOffice" magazine, "Chuck Norris still doesn't have the screen presence to achieve his often-repeated wish of becoming the next John Wayne, but as long as he keeps his feet and fists flying and stays relatively quiet he's an effective action hero. In the wildly exaggerated world of this movie, he's almost a super-hero."


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: As of December 2019 the film has a score of 57% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes based on 7 reviews.


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: Norris later said the film "broke the kung fu mode" for him and helped turn him into a more mainstream action star.


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: Norris credits this film as a leading inspiration for his hit television series, "Walker, Texas Ranger," which premiered a decade later. Yet the pilot had to be rewritten, and the characters' names changed, since "all things "McQuade"" were copyrighted by Orion Pictures. The original co-producer of the series was The Cannon Group, which like Orion is now absorbed into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (though the Cannon films are distributed on television by another company).


title: Lone Wolf McQuade

text: Steve Carver and his production partner Yoram Ben-Ami sued the producers of "Walker, Texas Rangers" for 500 million dollars. Carver talked about the lawsuit in an interview in 2020: "MGM and CBS had bigger and better and more lawyers than we did, all the way to the Supreme Court. We failed to convince the Supreme Court that there were similarities. Now, you and I and anybody else knows that there are similarities between "Lone Wolf McQuade" and "Walker Texas Ranger"." He added that the lawsuit was the reason Chuck Norris and he parted ways.


title: Elections in France

text: France is a unitary semi-presidential republic with a bicameral legislature. Public officials in the legislative and executive branches are either elected by the citizens (directly or indirectly) or appointed by elected officials. Referendums may also be called to consult the French citizenry directly on a particular question, especially one which concerns amendment to the Constitution.


title: Elections in France

text: In addition, French citizens elect a variety of local governments. There also are public elections for some non-political positions, such as those for the judges of courts administering labour law (), elected by workers and employers, or those for judges administering cases of rural land leases.


title: Elections in France

text: French politics has ordinarily displayed some tendencies characterizing a two-party system in which power alternates between relatively stable coalitions, each being led by a major party: on the left, the Socialist Party, on the right, and its predecessors. This pattern was upset in 2017, when neither of those parties' candidates reached the second round of the presidential election and the newly formed party gained both the presidency and a comfortable majority in the National Assembly.


title: Elections in France

text: Elections are conducted according to rules set down in the Constitution of France, organic laws (), and the electoral code. Voting is not compulsory.


title: Elections in France

text: The campaigns end at midnight the Friday before the election; then, on election Sunday, by law, no polls can be published, and no electoral publications or broadcasts can be made. The voting stations open at 8 am and close at 6 pm in small towns or at 8 pm in cities, depending on prefectoral decisions. By law, publication of results or estimates is prohibited prior to that time; estimates are however often available from the media of e.g. Belgium and Switzerland, or from foreign Internet sites, before that time. The specified times are in the time zone of the district, which is uniform (Paris time) across Metropolitan France, but varies in French overseas territories such as French Guiana, Martinique and Guadeloupe.


title: Elections in France

text: The first official estimate of the results can consequently become available from Sunday, 8pm, Paris time. Due to their different time zones, voters in some overseas territories previously knew the probable results of elections before polling booths in Metropolitan France closed, which was suggested discouraged voting in these places. For this reason, since the 2000s, elections in French overseas territories in the Americas, as well as embassies and consulates there, are held on Saturdays as a special exemption.


title: Elections in France

text: With the exception of senatorial election, for which there is an electoral college, the voters are French citizens over the age of 18 registered on the electoral rolls. People are automatically registered on reaching the age of 18. For municipal and European, but not national elections, citizens aged 18 or older of other European Union countries may vote in France. Registration is not compulsory, but the absence of registration precludes the possibility of voting.


title: Elections in France

text: Citizens may register either in their place of residence or in a place where they have been on the roll of taxpayers for local taxes for at least 5 years, but not in more than one place. Citizens living abroad may register at the consulate responsible for the region in which they live.


title: Elections in France

text: There are exceptions to the above rules. Convicted criminals may be deprived of their civic rights, which include the right to vote, for a certain period of time depending on the crime. In particular, elected officials who have abused public funds may be deprived of the right to run for national public office for as long as 10 years. The application of such rules in the case of certain politicians has been controversial; see for instance the case of Alain Juppé.


title: Elections in France

text: Voting by proxy is possible when the citizen cannot easily attend the polling station (reasons include: health problems, the citizen does not live in the voting constituency, away for work or vacations, jailed but has not yet been sentenced and deprived of civic rights etc.) The citizen designates a proxy, who must be a voter from the same "commune". The designation of the proxy must be made before a legally capable witness: a judge, a judicial clerk, or an officier of judicial police, or, outside France, before an ambassador or consul. In the case of handicapped or severely ill people, an officer of judicial police or delegate thereof can be sent to the home of the citizen to witness the designation. The procedure is meant to avoid pressures on voters.


title: Elections in France

text: In all elections where there is a single official to be elected for a given area, including the two major national elections (the election of the President of the Republic and the election of the members of the National Assembly), two-round runoff voting is used.


title: Elections in France

text: The 577 members of the National Assembly are elected using a two-round system with single-member constituencies.


title: Elections in France

text: To be elected in the first round, a candidate is required to secure an absolute majority of votes cast, and also to secure votes equal to at least 25% of eligible voters in their constituency. Should none of the candidates satisfy these conditions, a second round of voting ensues. Most constituencies proceed to a second round election. Only first-round candidates with the support of at least 12.5% of "eligible" voters are allowed to participate, but if only 1 candidate meets that standard the two candidates with the highest number of votes in the first round may continue to the second round. In the second round, the candidate with a plurality is elected. Of the 577 constituencies, 539 are in metropolitan France, 27 are in overseas departments and territories and 11 are for French citizens living abroad.


title: Elections in France

text: Primary elections, within registered political parties, are used to select presidential candidates for the general election. Primaries also use two-round runoff voting when there are multiple candidates within a party. (see ). Open primaries, where any eligible voter may participate with minimal requirements, also occur.


title: Elections in France

text: Voting is done using paper and manual counting. The voter gets pre-printed ballot papers () from a table at the entrance of the voting office (mail-in voting is not allowed in France). There is one ballot paper for each candidate, pair of candidates (for departmental elections) or list. These ballot papers are also sent by mail to voters before the election. The voter then has their identity and registration checked by an official, after which the voter takes an envelope. If they also act as a proxy for another voter, they take a second envelope. The voter then enters a curtained booth (), where they are hidden from sight, and inserts the ballot paper of their candidate into the envelope. They walk to the ballot box, where the president of the voting office or their deputy formally checks their identity. Only in municipalities under 1,000 inhabitants is an official identity document optional, if the deputy can attest of the identity. After the officials have acknowledged their right to vote, the ballot box is opened and the voter inserts the envelope. One of the officials, traditionally loudly, announces ""A voté!" (Did vote!)". This is purely ceremonial and has a double meaning: the voter's "voix" (voice) will be taken into account and they have accomplished their civic duty. The voter then signs the voters' list and their voter registration card is stamped.


title: Elections in France

text: Electronic voting is used only for French citizens living abroad and for two specific elections: legislative and consular elections.


title: Elections in France

text: As well as presidential and legislative elections, France also has municipal, cantonal, regional, European, and (indirect) Senatorial elections.


title: Elections in France

text: Regional elections have been held since 1986 to elect regional councillors and regional presidents: all elected to serve 6-year terms.


title: Elections in France

text: French senators are renewed by halves every six years through an indirect electoral college composed of elected officials and general, regional, and some local councillors.


title: Elections in France

text: The Constitution of France defines in Article 3 that "National sovereignty shall vest in the people, who shall exercise it through their representatives and by means of referendum." The Constitution describes two ways for holding a referendum:


title: Elections in France

text: The Constitution explicitly states that a referendum can be called only on a Government Bill "which deals with the organization of the public authorities, or with reforms relating to the economic or social policy of the Nation, and to the public services contributing thereto, or which provides for authorization to ratify a treaty which, although not contrary to the Constitution, would affect the functioning of the institutions" (Article 11 of the Constitution).


title: Elections in France

text: The second procedure for holding a referendum was added to the Constitution in 2008, and it still has not come into effect (as of 2013). It will come into effect when appropriate legislation is implemented by the Parliament.


title: Elections in France

text: Ratification of treaties of accession of states to the EU must go through the same procedure as amendment of Constitution of France. All of ratifications went through the super-majority of the Parliament, except the first EU enlargement in 1973.


title: William Byrd

text: William Byrd (; 4 July 1623) was an English composer of late Renaissance music. Considered among the greatest composers of the Renaissance, he had a profound influence on composers both from his native England and those on the continent. He is often coupled with John Dunstaple and Henry Purcell as England's most important early music composers.


title: William Byrd

text: He wrote in many of the forms current in England at the time, including various types of sacred and secular polyphony, keyboard (the so-called Virginalist school), and consort music. Although he produced sacred music for Anglican services, sometime during the 1570s he became a Roman Catholic and wrote Catholic sacred music later in his life.


title: William Byrd

text: Richard Byrd of Ingatestone, Essex was the grandfather of Thomas Byrd, who probably moved to London in the 15th century. Thereafter succeeding generations of the Byrd family are described as gentlemen.


title: William Byrd

text: William Byrd was probably born in London, the third surviving son of Thomas Byrd and his wife, Margery. No record of his birth has survived, and the year of his birth is not known for certain, but a document dated 2 October 1598, and written by William Byrd, states that he is "58 yeares or ther abouts", making the year he was born to be 1539 or 1540. Byrd's will of November 1622 provides a later date for his birth, as in it Byrd states that he was then in the "80th year of mine age". The historian Kerry McCarthy has suggested that discrepancy over these dates may have been due to the will not being kept up to date over a period of several years.


title: William Byrd

text: Byrd was born into a musical and relatively wealthy family. He had older two brothers, Symond and John, who became London merchants and active members of their respective livery companies. One of his four sisters, Barbara was married to a maker of musical instruments who kept a shop; his three other sisters, Martha, Mary and Alice, were likely also married to merchants.


title: William Byrd

text: Details of Byrd's childhood are speculative. There is no documentary evidence concerning Byrd's education or early musical training. His two brothers were choristers at St. Paul's Cathedral, and Byrd may have been a chorister there as well, although it is possible that he was a chorister with the Chapel Royal. According to Anthony Wood, Byrd was "bred up to musick under Tho. Tallis", and a reference in the "Cantiones sacrae", published by Byrd and Thomas Tallis in 1575, tends to confirm that Byrd was a pupil of Tallis in the Chapel Royal. If he was—and conclusive evidence has emerged to verify it—it seems likely that once Byrd's voice broke, the boy stayed on at the Chapel Royal as Tallis's assistant.


title: William Byrd

text: Byrd produced student compositions, including "Sermone Blando" for consort, and a "Miserere". Church music for the Catholic rite reintroduced by Mary would have been composed before her death in 1558, which occurred when Byrd was eighteen. His early compositions suggest he was taught polyphony when a student.


title: William Byrd

text: Byrd's first known professional employment was his appointment in 1563 as organist and master of the choristers at Lincoln Cathedral. Residing at what is now 6 Minster Yard Lincoln, he remained in post until 1572. His period at Lincoln was not entirely trouble-free, for on 19 November 1569 the Dean and Chapter cited him for 'certain matters alleged against him' as the result of which his salary was suspended. Since Puritanism was influential at Lincoln, it is possible that the allegations were connected with over-elaborate choral polyphony or organ playing. A second directive, dated 29 November, issued detailed instructions regarding Byrd's use of the organ in the liturgy. On 14 September 1568, Byrd married Juliana Birley; it was a long-lasting and fruitful union which produced at least seven children.


title: William Byrd

text: Byrd remained in Stondon Massey until his death on 4 July 1623, which was noted in the Chapel Royal Check Book in a unique entry describing him as "a Father of Musick". Despite repeated citations for recusancy and persistent heavy fines, he died a rich man, having rooms at the time of his death at the London home of the Earl of Worcester.


title: William Byrd

text: Byrd obtained the prestigious post of Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1572 following the death of Parsons, a gifted composer who drowned in the Trent near Newark on 25 January of that year. Almost from the outset Byrd is named as 'organist', which however was not a designated post but an occupation for any Chapel Royal member capable of filling it. This career move vastly increased Byrd's opportunities to widen his scope as a composer and also to make contacts at Court. Queen Elizabeth (1558–1603) was a moderate Protestant who eschewed the more extreme forms of Puritanism and retained a fondness for elaborate ritual, besides being a music lover and keyboard player herself. Byrd's output of Anglican church music (defined in the strictest sense as sacred music designed for performance in church) is small, but it stretches the limits of elaboration then regarded as acceptable by some reforming Protestants who regarded highly wrought music as a distraction from the Word of God.


title: William Byrd

text: In 1575 Byrd and Tallis were jointly granted a monopoly for the printing of music and ruled music paper for 21 years, one of a number of patents issued by the Crown for the printing of books, which was the first known issuing of Letters Patent. The two musicians used the services of the French Huguenot printer Thomas Vautrollier, who had settled in England and previously produced an edition of a collection of Lassus chansons in London ("", 1570).


title: William Byrd

text: The "Cantiones" were a financial failure. In 1577 Byrd and Tallis were forced to petition Queen Elizabeth for financial help, pleading that the publication had "fallen oute to oure greate losse" and that Tallis was now "verie aged". They were subsequently granted the leasehold on various lands in East Anglia and the West Country for a period of 21 years.


title: William Byrd

text: From the early 1570s onwards Byrd became increasingly involved with Catholicism, which, as the scholarship of the last half-century has demonstrated, became a major factor in his personal and creative life. As John Harley has shown, it is probable that Byrd's parental family were Protestants, though whether by deeply felt conviction or nominal conformism is not clear. Byrd himself may have held Protestant beliefs in his youth, for a recently discovered fragment of a setting of an English translation of Martin Luther's hymn "", which bears an attribution to "Birde" includes the line "From Turk and Pope defend us Lord". However, from the 1570s onwards he is found associating with known Catholics, including Lord Thomas Paget, to whom he wrote a petitionary letter on behalf of an unnamed friend in about 1573. Byrd's wife Juliana was first cited for recusancy (refusing to attend Anglican services) at Harlington in Middlesex, where the family now lived, in 1577. Byrd himself appears in the recusancy lists from 1584.


title: William Byrd

text: His involvement with Catholicism took on a new dimension in the 1580s. Following Pope Pius V's papal bull "Regnans in Excelsis", in 1570, which absolved Elizabeth's subjects from allegiance to her and effectively made her an outlaw in the eyes of the Catholic Church, Catholicism became increasingly identified with sedition in the eyes of the Tudor authorities. With the influx of missionary priests trained at the English College, Douai (now in France but then part of the Spanish Netherlands), and in Rome from the 1570s onwards, relations between the authorities and the Catholic community took a further turn for the worse. Byrd himself is found in the company of prominent Catholics. In 1583 he got into serious trouble because of his association with Paget, who was suspected of involvement in the Throckmorton Plot, and for sending money to Catholics abroad. As a result of this, Byrd's membership of the Chapel Royal was apparently suspended for a time, restrictions were placed on his movements, and his house was placed on the search list. In 1586 he attended a gathering at a country house in the company of Father Henry Garnett (later executed for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot) and the Catholic poet Robert Southwell.


title: William Byrd

text: In about 1594 Byrd's career entered a new phase. He was now in his early fifties, and seems to have gone into semi-retirement from the Chapel Royal. He moved with his family from Harlington to Stondon Massey, a small village near Chipping Ongar in Essex. His ownership of Stondon Place, where he lived for the rest of his life, was contested by Joanna Shelley, with whom he engaged in a legal dispute lasting about a decade and a half. The main reason for the move was apparently the proximity of Byrd's patron Petre. A wealthy local landowner, Petre was a discreet Catholic who maintained two local manor houses, Ingatestone Hall and Thorndon Hall, the first of which still survives in a much-altered state (the latter has been rebuilt). Petre held clandestine Mass celebrations, with music provided by his servants, which were subject to the unwelcome attention of spies and paid informers working for the Crown.


title: William Byrd

text: Byrd's acquaintance with the Petre family extended back at least to 1581 (as his surviving autograph letter of that year shows) and he spent two weeks at the Petre household over Christmas in 1589. He was ideally equipped to provide elaborate polyphony to adorn the music making at the Catholic country houses of the time. The ongoing adherence of Byrd and his family to Catholicism continued to cause him difficulties, though a surviving reference to a lost petition apparently written by Byrd to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury sometime between 1605 and 1612 suggests that he had been allowed to practise his religion under licence during the reign of Elizabeth. Nevertheless, he regularly appeared in the quarterly local assizes and was reported to the archdeaconry court for non-attendance at the parish church. He was required to pay heavy fines for recusancy.


title: William Byrd

text: Byrd's staunch adherence to Catholicism did not prevent him from contributing memorably to the repertory of Anglican church music. Byrd's small output of church anthems ranges in style from relatively sober early examples ("O Lord, make thy servant Elizabeth our queen" (a6) and "How long shall mine enemies" (a5) ) to other, evidently late works such as "Sing joyfully" (a6) which is close in style to the English motets of Byrd's 1611 set, discussed below. Byrd also played a role in the emergence of the new verse anthem, which seems to have evolved in part from the practice of adding vocal refrains to consort songs. Byrd's four Anglican service settings range in style from the unpretentious Short Service, already discussed, to the magnificent so-called Great Service, a grandiose work which continues a tradition of opulent settings by Richard Farrant, William Mundy and Robert Parsons. Byrd's setting is on a massive scale, requiring five-part "Decani" and "Cantoris" groupings in antiphony, block homophony and five, six and eight-part counterpoint with verse (solo) sections for added variety. This service setting, which includes an organ part, must have been sung by the Chapel Royal Choir on major liturgical occasions in the early seventeenth century, though its limited circulation suggests that many other cathedral choirs must have found it beyond them. Nevertheless, the source material shows that it was sung in York Minster as well as Durham, Worcester and Cambridge, in the early seventeenth century. The Great Service was in existence by 1606 (the last copying date entered in the so-called Baldwin Commonplace Book) and may date back as far as the 1590s. Kerry McCarthy has pointed out that the York Minster manuscript of the Great Service was copied by a vicar-choral named John Todd, apparently between 1597 and 1599, and is described as 'Mr Byrd's new sute of service for means'. This suggests the possibility that the work may have been Byrd's next compositional project after the three Mass settings.


title: William Byrd

text: During his later years Byrd also added to his output of consort songs, a number of which were discovered by Philip Brett and Thurston Dart in Harvard in 1961. They probably reflect Byrd's relationship with the Norfolk landowner and music-lover Sir Edward Paston (1550–1630) who may have written some of the poems. The songs include elegies for public figures such as the Earl of Essex (1601), the Catholic matriarch and viscountess Montague Magdalen Dacre ("With Lilies White", 1608) and Henry Prince of Wales (1612). Others refer to local notabilities or incidents from the Norfolk area.


title: William Byrd

text: During his life time, Byrd published three volumes of "Cantiones Sacrae" (1575, co-written with Tallis; 1589; 1591), two volumes of "Gradualia" (1605; 1607), "Psalmes, Sonets, and Songs of Sadnes and Pietie" (1588), "Songs of Sundrie Natures" (1589), and "Psalmes, Songs, and Sonnets" (1611). He also composed other vocal and instrumental pieces; three Masses, music for the "Fitzwilliam Virginal Book", and motets.


title: William Byrd

text: One of Byrd's earliest compositions was a collaboration with two Chapel Royal singing-men, John Sheppard and William Mundy, on a setting for four male voices of the psalm "In exitu Israel" for the procession to the font in Easter week. It was probably composed near the end of the reign of Queen Mary Tudor (1553–1558), who revived Sarum liturgical practices.


title: William Byrd

text: A few other compositions by Byrd also probably date from his teenage years. These include his setting of the Easter responsory "Christus resurgens" (a4) which was not published until 1605, but which as part of the Sarum liturgy could also have been composed during Mary's reign, as well as "Alleluia confitemini (a3)" which combines two liturgical items for Easter week. Some of the hymns and antiphons for keyboard and for consort may also date from this period, though it is also possible that the consort pieces may have been composed in Lincoln for the musical training of choirboys.


title: William Byrd

text: The 1560s were also important formative years for Byrd the composer. His "Short Service", an unpretentious setting of items for the Anglican Matins, Communion and Evensong services, which seems to have been designed to comply with the Protestant reformers' demand for clear words and simple musical textures, may well have been composed during the Lincoln years. It is at any rate clear that Byrd was composing Anglican church music, for when he left Lincoln the Dean and Chapter continued to pay him at a reduced rate on condition that he would send the cathedral his compositions. Byrd had also taken serious strides with instrumental music. The seven "In Nomine" settings for consort (two a4 and five a5), at least one of the consort fantasias ("Neighbour" F1 a6) and a number of important keyboard works were apparently composed during the Lincoln years. The latter include the "Ground in Gamut" (described as "Mr Byrd's old ground") by his future pupil Thomas Tomkins, the A minor Fantasia, and probably the first of Byrd's great series of keyboard pavanes and galliards, a composition which was transcribed by Byrd from an original for five-part consort. All these show Byrd gradually emerging as a major figure on the Elizabethan musical landscape.


title: William Byrd

text: Some sets of keyboard variations, such as "The Hunt's Up" and the imperfectly preserved set on "Gypsies' Round" also seem to be early works. As we have seen, Byrd had begun setting Latin liturgical texts as a teenager, and he seems to have continued to do so at Lincoln. Two exceptional large-scale psalm motets, "Ad Dominum cum tribularer" (a8) and "Domine quis habitabit" (a9), are Byrd's contribution to a paraliturgical form cultivated by Robert White and Robert Parsons. "De lamentatione", another early work, is a contribution to the Elizabethan practice of setting groups of verses from the "Lamentations of Jeremiah", following the format of the "Tenebrae" lessons sung in the Catholic rite during the last three days of Holy Week. Other contributors in this form include Tallis, White, Parsons and the elder Ferrabosco. It is likely that this practice was an expression of Elizabethan Catholic nostalgia, as a number of the texts suggest.


title: William Byrd

text: The two monopolists took advantage of the patent to produce a grandiose joint publication under the title "Cantiones quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur". It was a collection of 34 Latin motets dedicated to the Queen herself, accompanied by elaborate prefatory matter including poems in Latin elegiacs by the schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster and the young courtier Ferdinand Heybourne (aka Richardson). There are 17 motets each by Tallis and Byrd, one for each year of the Queen's reign.


title: William Byrd

text: Byrd's contributions to the "Cantiones" are in various different styles, although his forceful musical personality is stamped on all of them. The inclusion of "Laudate pueri" (a6) which proves to be an instrumental fantasia with words added after composition, is one sign that Byrd had some difficulty in assembling enough material for the collection. "Diliges Dominum" (a8), which may also originally have been untexted, is an eight-in-four retrograde canon of little musical interest. Also belonging to the more archaic stratum of motets is "Libera me Domine" (a5), a "cantus firmus" setting of the ninth responsory at Matins for the Office for the Dead, which takes its point of departure from the setting by Robert Parsons, while "Miserere mihi" (a6), a setting of a Compline antiphon often used by Tudor composers for didactic "cantus firmus" exercises, incorporates a four-in-two canon. "Tribue Domine" (a6) is a large-scale sectional composition setting from a medieval collection of "Meditationes" which was commonly attributed to St Augustine, composed in a style which owes much to earlier Tudor settings of votive antiphons as a mosaic of full and semichoir passages. Byrd sets it in three sections, each beginning with a semichoir passage in archaic style.


title: William Byrd

text: Byrd's contribution to the "Cantiones" also includes compositions in a more forward-looking manner which point the way to his motets of the 1580s. Some of them show the influence of the motets of Ferrabosco I, a Bolognese musician who worked in the Tudor court at intervals between 1562 and 1578. Ferrabosco's motets provided direct models for Byrd's "Emendemus in melius" (a5), "O lux beata Trinitas" (a6), "Domine secundum actum meum" (a6) and "Siderum rector" (a5) as well as a more generalised paradigm for what Joseph Kerman has called Byrd's 'affective-imitative' style, a method of setting pathetic texts in extended paragraphs based on subjects employing curving lines in fluid rhythm and contrapuntal techniques which Byrd learnt from his study of Ferrabosco.


title: William Byrd

text: Byrd's commitment to the Catholic cause found expression in his motets, of which he composed about 50 between 1575 and 1591. While the texts of the motets included by Byrd and Tallis in the 1575 "Cantiones" have a High Anglican doctrinal tone, scholars such as Joseph Kerman have detected a profound change of direction in the texts which Byrd set in the motets of the 1580s. In particular there is a persistent emphasis on themes such as the persecution of the chosen people ("Domine praestolamur" a5) the Babylonian or Egyptian captivity ("Domine tu iurasti") and the long-awaited coming of deliverance ("Laetentur caeli", "Circumspice Jerusalem"). This has led scholars from Kerman onwards to believe that Byrd was reinterpreting biblical and liturgical texts in a contemporary context and writing laments and petitions on behalf of the persecuted Catholic community, which seems to have adopted Byrd as a kind of 'house' composer. Some texts should probably be interpreted as warnings against spies ("Vigilate, nescitis enim") or lying tongues ("Quis est homo") or celebration of the memory of martyred priests ("O quam gloriosum"). Byrd's setting of the first four verses of Psalm 78 ("Deus venerunt gentes") is widely believed to refer to the brutal execution of Fr Edmund Campion in 1581 an event that caused widespread revulsion on the Continent as well as in England. Finally, and perhaps most remarkably, Byrd's "Quomodo cantabimus" is the result of a motet exchange between Byrd and Philippe de Monte, who was director of music to Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, in Prague. In 1583 De Monte sent Byrd his setting of verses 1–4 of Vulgate Psalm 136 ("Super flumina Babylonis"), including the pointed question "How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?" Byrd replied the following year with a setting of the defiant continuation, set, like de Monte's piece, in eight parts and incorporating a three-part canon by inversion.


title: William Byrd

text: Thirty-seven of Byrd's motets were published in two sets of "Cantiones sacrae", which appeared in 1589 and 1591. Together with two sets of English songs, discussed below, these collections, dedicated to powerful Elizabethan lords (Edward Somerset, 4th Earl of Worcester and John Lumley, 1st Baron Lumley), probably formed part of Byrd's campaign to re-establish himself in Court circles after the reverses of the 1580s. They may also reflect the fact that Byrd's fellow monopolist Tallis and his printer Thomas Vautrollier had died, thus creating a more propitious climate for publishing ventures. Since many of the motet texts of the 1589 and 1591 sets are pathetic in tone, it is not surprising that many of them continue and develop the 'affective-imitative' vein found in some motets from the 1570s, though in a more concise and concentrated form. "Domine praestolamur" (1589) is a good example of this style, laid out in imitative paragraphs based on subjects which characteristically emphasise the expressive minor second and minor sixth, with continuations which subsequently break off and are heard separately (another technique which Byrd had learnt from his study of Ferrabosco). Byrd evolved a special "cell" technique for setting the petitionary clauses such as "miserere mei" or "libera nos Domine" which form the focal point for a number of the texts. Particularly striking examples of these are the final section of "Tribulatio proxima est" (1589) and the multi-sectional "Infelix ego" (1591), a large-scale motet which takes its point of departure from "Tribue Domine" of 1575.


title: William Byrd

text: There are also a number of compositions which do not conform to this stylistic pattern. They include three motets which employ the old-fashioned cantus firmus technique as well as the most famous item in the 1589 collection, "Ne irascaris Domine". the second part of which is closely modelled on Philip van Wilder's popular "Aspice Domine". A few motets, especially in the 1591 set, abandon traditional motet style and resort to vivid word painting which reflects the growing popularity of the madrigal ("Haec dies", 1591). A famous passage from Thomas Morley's "A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke" (1597) supports the view that the madrigal had superseded the motet in the favour of Catholic patrons, a fact which may explain why Byrd composed few non-liturgical motets after 1591.


title: William Byrd

text: In 1588 and 1589 Byrd also published two collections of English songs. The first, "Psalms, Sonnets and Songs of Sadness and Pietie" (1588), contains the first madrigals published in England. It consists mainly of adapted consort songs, which Byrd, probably guided by commercial instincts, had turned into vocal part-songs by adding words to the accompanying instrumental parts and labelling the original solo voice as "the first singing part". The consort song, which was the most popular form of vernacular polyphony in England in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, was a solo song for a high voice (often sung by a boy) accompanied by a consort of four consort instruments (normally viols). As the title of Byrd's collection implies, consort songs varied widely in character. Many were settings of metrical psalms, in which the solo voice sings a melody in the manner of the numerous metrical psalm collections of the day (e.g. "Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter", 1562) with each line prefigured by imitation in the accompanying instruments. Others are dramatic elegies, intended to be performed in the boy-plays which were popular in Tudor London. A popular source for song settings was Richard Edwards' "The paradyse of dainty devices" (1576) of which seven settings in consort song form survive.


title: William Byrd

text: Byrd's 1588 collection, which complicates the form as he inherited it from Robert Parsons, Richard Farrant and others, reflects this tradition. The "psalms" section sets texts drawn from Sternhold's psalter of 1549 in the traditional manner, while the 'sonnets and pastorals' section employs lighter, more rapid motion with crotchet (quarter-note) pulse, and sometimes triple metre ("Though Amaryllis dance in green, If women could be fair"). Poetically, the set (together with other evidence) reflects Byrd's involvement with the literary circle surrounding Sir Philip Sidney, whose influence at Court was at its height in the early 1580s. Byrd set three of the songs from Sidney's sonnet sequence "Astrophel and Stella", as well as poems by other members of the Sidney circle, and also included two elegies on Sidney's death in the Battle of Zutphen in 1586. But the most popular item in the set was the Lullaby ("Lullay lullaby") which blends the tradition of the dramatic lament with the cradle-songs found in some early boy-plays and medieval mystery plays. It long retained its popularity. In 1602, Byrd's patron Edward Somerset, 4th Earl of Worcester, discussing Court fashions in music, predicted that "in winter lullaby, an owld song of Mr Birde, wylbee more in request as I thinke."


title: William Byrd

text: The "Songs of Sundrie Natures" (1589) contain sections in three, four, five and six parts, a format which follows the plan of many Tudor manuscript collections of household music and was probably intended to emulate the madrigal collection Musica transalpina, which had appeared in print the previous year. Byrd's set contains compositions in a wide variety of musical styles, reflecting the variegated character of the texts which he was setting. The three-part section includes settings of metrical versions of the seven penitential psalms, in an archaic style which reflects the influence of the psalm collections. Other items from the three-part and four-part section are in a lighter vein, employing a line-by-line imitative technique and a predominant crotchet pulse ("The nightingale so pleasant (a3), Is love a boy? (a4)"). The five-part section includes vocal part-songs which show the influence of the "adapted consort song" style of the 1588 set but which seem to have been conceived as all-vocal part-songs. Byrd also bowed to tradition by setting two carols in the traditional form with alternating verses and burdens, ("From Virgin's womb this day did spring, An earthly tree, a heavenly fruit, both a6") and even included an "anthem", a setting of the Easter prose "Christ rising again" which also circulated in church choir manuscripts with organ accompaniment.


title: William Byrd

text: The 1580s were also a productive decade for Byrd as a composer of instrumental music. On 11 September 1591 John Baldwin, a tenor lay-clerk at St George's Chapel, Windsor and later a colleague of Byrd in the Chapel Royal, completed the copying of "My Ladye Nevells Booke", a collection of 42 of Byrd's keyboard pieces, which was probably produced under Byrd's supervision and includes corrections which are thought to be in the composer's hand. Byrd would almost certainly have published it if the technical means had been available to do so. The dedicatee long remained unidentified, but John Harley's researches into the heraldic design on the fly-leaf have shown that she was Lady Elizabeth Neville, the third wife of Sir Henry Neville of Billingbear House, Berkshire, who was a justice of the peace and a warden of Windsor Great Park. Under her third married name, Lady Periam, she also received the dedication of Thomas Morley's two-part canzonets of 1595. The contents show Byrd's mastery of a wide variety of keyboard forms, though liturgical compositions based on plainsong are not represented. The collection includes a series of ten pavans and galliards in the usual three-strain form with embellished repeats of each strain. (The only exception is the Ninth Pavan, which is a set of variations on the passamezzo antico bass.)


title: William Byrd

text: There are indications that the sequence may be a chronological one, for the First Pavan is labelled "the first that ever hee made" in the "Fitzwilliam Virginal Book", and the Tenth Pavan, which is separated from the others, evidently became available at a late stage before the completion date. It is dedicated to William Petre (the son of Byrd's patron Sir John Petre, 1st Baron Petre) who was only 15 years old in 1591 and could hardly have played it if it had been composed much earlier. The collection also includes two famous pieces of programme music. "The Battle", which was apparently inspired by an unidentified skirmish in Elizabeth's Irish wars, is a sequence of movements bearing titles such as "The marche to fight", "The battells be joyned" and "The Galliarde for the victorie". Although not representing Byrd at his most profound, it achieved great popularity and is of incidental interest for the information which it gives on sixteenth-century English military calls. It is followed by "The Barley Break" (a mock-battle follows a real one), a light-hearted piece which follows the progress of a game of "barley-break", a version of the game now known as "piggy in the middle", played by three couples with a ball. "My Ladye Nevells Booke" also contains two monumental Grounds, and sets of keyboard variations of variegated character, notably the huge set on "Walsingham" and the popular variations on "Sellinger's Round", "Carman's Whistle" and "My Lord Willoughby's Welcome Home". The fantasias and voluntaries in Nevell also cover a wide stylistic range, some being austerely contrapuntal ("A voluntarie", no. 42) and others lighter and more Italianate in tone. ("A Fancie" no 36). Like the five-and six-part consort fantasias, they sometimes feature a gradual increase in momentum after an imitative opening paragraph.


title: William Byrd

text: The period up to 1591 also saw important additions to Byrd's output of consort music, some of which have probably been lost. Two magnificent large-scale compositions are the "Browning", a set of 20 variations on a popular melody (also known as "The leaves be green") which evidently originated as a celebration of the ripening of nuts in autumn, and an elaborate ground on the formula known as the "Goodnight Ground". The smaller-scale fantasias (those a3 and a4) use a light-textured imitative style which owes something to Continental models, while the five and six-part fantasias employ large-scale cumulative construction and allusions to snatches of popular songs. A good example of the last type is the "Fantasia a6 (No 2)" which begins with a sober imitative paragraph before progressively more fragmented textures (working in a quotation from "Greensleeves" at one point). It even includes a complete three-strain galliard, followed by an expansive coda (for a performance on YouTube, see under 'External links' below). The single five-part fantasia, which is apparently an early work, includes a canon at the upper fourth.


title: William Byrd

text: Byrd now embarked on a programme to provide a cycle of liturgical music covering all the principal feasts of the Catholic Church calendar. The first stage in this undertaking comprised the three Ordinary of the Mass cycles (in four, three and five parts), which were published by Thomas East between 1592 and 1595. The editions are undated (dates can be established only by close bibliographic analysis), do not name the printer and consist of only one bifolium per partbook to aid concealment, reminders that the possession of heterodox books was still highly dangerous. All three works contain retrospective features harking back to the earlier Tudor tradition of Mass settings which had lapsed after 1558, along with others which reflect Continental influence and the liturgical practices of the foreign-trained incoming missionary priests. "Mass for Four Voices", or the Four-Part Mass, which according to Joseph Kerman was probably the first to be composed, is partly modelled on John Taverner's "Mean Mass", a highly regarded early Tudor setting which Byrd would probably have sung as a choirboy. Taverner's influence is particularly clear in the scale figures rising successively through a fifth, a sixth and a seventh in Byrd's setting of the "Sanctus".


title: William Byrd

text: All three Mass cycles employ other early Tudor features, notably the mosaic of semichoir sections alternating with full sections in the four-part and five-part Masses, the use of a semichoir section to open the "Gloria", "Credo", and "Agnus Dei", and the head-motif which links the openings of all the movements of a cycle. However, all three cycles also include "Kyrie"s, a rare feature in Sarum Rite mass settings, which usually omitted it because of the use of tropes on festal occasions in the Sarum Rite. The "Kyrie" of the three-part Mass is set in a simple litany-like style, but the other "Kyrie" settings employ dense imitative polyphony. A special feature of the four-part and five-part Masses is Byrd's treatment of the "Agnus Dei", which employ the technique which Byrd had previously applied to the petitionary clauses from the motets of the 1589 and 1591 "Cantiones sacrae". The final words "dona nobis pacem" ("grant us peace"), which are set to chains of anguished suspensions in the Four-Part Mass and expressive block homophony in the five-part setting, almost certainly reflect the aspirations of the troubled Catholic community of the 1590s.


title: William Byrd

text: The second stage in Byrd's programme of liturgical polyphony is formed by the "Gradualia", two cycles of motets containing 109 items and published in 1605 and 1607. They are dedicated to two members of the Catholic nobility, Henry Howard, 1st Earl of Northampton and Byrd's own patron Sir John Petre, who had been elevated to the peerage in 1603 under the title Lord Petre of Writtle. The appearance of these two monumental collections of Catholic polyphony reflects the hopes which the recusant community must have harboured for an easier life under the new king James I, whose mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had been a Catholic. Addressing Petre (who is known to have lent him money to advance the printing of the collection), Byrd describes the contents of the 1607 set as "blooms collected in your own garden and rightfully due to you as tithes", thus making explicit the fact that they had formed part of Catholic religious observances in the Petre household.


title: William Byrd

text: The greater part of the two collections consists of settings of the "Proprium Missae" for the major feasts of the church calendar, thus supplementing the Mass Ordinary cycles which Byrd had published in the 1590s. Normally, Byrd includes the "Introit", the Gradual, the "Alleluia" (or Tract in Lent if needed), the Offertory and Communion. The feasts covered include the major feasts of the Virgin Mary (including the votive masses for the Virgin for the four seasons of the church year), All Saints and "Corpus Christi" (1605) followed by the feasts of the "Temporale" (Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension, Whitsun, and Feast of Saints Peter and Paul (with additional items for St Peter's Chains and the Votive Mass of the Blessed Sacrament) in 1607. The verse of the "Introit" is normally set as a semichoir section, returning to full choir scoring for the "Gloria Patri". Similar treatment applies to the Gradual verse, which is normally attached to the opening "Alleluia" to form a single item. The liturgy requires repeated settings of the word ""Alleluia"", and Byrd provides a wide variety of different settings forming brilliantly conceived miniature fantasias which are one of the most striking features of the two sets. The "Alleluia" verse, together with the closing "Alleluia", normally form an item in themselves, while the Offertory and the Communion are set as they stand.


title: William Byrd

text: In the Roman liturgy there are many texts which appear repeatedly in different liturgical contexts. To avoid having to set the same text twice, Byrd often resorted to a cross-reference or "transfer" system which allowed a single setting to be slotted into a different place in the liturgy. Unfortunately, this practice sometimes causes confusion, partly because normally no rubrics are printed to make the required transfer clear and partly because there are some errors which complicate matters still further. A good example of the transfer system in operation is provided by the first motet from the 1605 set ("Suscepimus Deus" a5) in which the text used for the "Introit" has to be reused in a shortened form for the Gradual. Byrd provides a cadential break at the cut-off point.


title: William Byrd

text: The 1605 set also contains a number of miscellaneous items which fall outside the liturgical scheme of the main body of the set. As Philip Brett has pointed out, most of the items from the four- and three-part sections were taken from the Primer (the English name for the "Book of hours"), thus falling within the sphere of private devotions rather than public worship. These include, "inter alia", settings of the four Marian antiphons from the Roman Rite, four Marian hymns set a3, a version of the Litany, the gem-like setting of the Eucharistic hymn "Ave verum Corpus", and the "Turbarum voces" from the St John Passion, as well as a series of miscellaneous items.


title: William Byrd

text: In stylistic terms the motets of the "Gradualia" form a sharp contrast to those of the "Cantiones sacrae" publications. The vast majority are shorter, with the discursive imitative paragraphs of the earlier motets giving place to double phrases in which the counterpoint, though intricate and concentrated, assumes a secondary level of importance. Long imitative paragraphs are the exception, often kept for final climactic sections in the minority of extended motets. The melodic writing often breaks into quaver (eighth-note) motion, tending to undermine the minim (half-note) pulse with surface detail. Some of the more festive items, especially in the 1607 set, feature vivid madrigalesque word-painting. The Marian hymns from the 1605 "Gradualia" are set in a light line-by-line imitative counterpoint with crotchet pulse which recalls the three-part English songs from Songs of sundrie natures (1589). For obvious reasons, the "Gradualia" never achieved the popularity of Byrd's earlier works. The 1607 set omits several texts, which were evidently too sensitive for publication in the light of the renewed anti-Catholic persecution which followed the failure of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. A contemporary account which sheds light on the circulation of the music between Catholic country houses, refers to the arrest of a young Frenchman named Charles de Ligny, who was followed from an unidentified country house by spies, apprehended, searched and found to be carrying a copy of the 1605 set. Nevertheless, Byrd felt safe enough to reissue both sets with new title pages in 1610


title: William Byrd

text: Byrd's last collection of English songs was" Psalms, Songs and Sonnets", published in 1611 (when Byrd was over 70) and dedicated to Francis Clifford, 4th Earl of Cumberland, who later also received the dedication of Thomas Campion's" First Book of Songs" in about 1613. The layout of the set broadly follows the pattern of Byrd's 1589 set, being laid out in sections for three, four, five and six parts like its predecessor and embracing an even wider miscellany of styles (perhaps reflecting the influence of another Jacobean publication, Michael East's "Third Set of Books" (1610)). Byrd's set includes two consort fantasias (a4 and a6) as well as eleven English motets, most of them setting prose texts from the Bible. These include some of his most famous compositions, notably "Praise our Lord, all ye Gentiles" (a6), "This day Christ was born" (a6) and "Have mercy upon me" (a6), which employs alternating phrases with verse and full scoring and was circulated as a church anthem. There are more carols set in verse and burden form as in the 1589 set as well as lighter three- and four-part songs in Byrd's "sonnets and pastorals" style. Some items are, however, more tinged with madrigalian influence than their counterparts in the earlier set, making clear that the short-lived madrigal vogue of the 1590s had not completely passed Byrd by. Many of the songs follow, and develop further, types already established in the 1589 collection.


title: William Byrd

text: Byrd also contributed eight keyboard pieces to "Parthenia" (winter 1612–13), a collection of 21 keyboard pieces engraved by William Hole, and containing music by Byrd, John Bull and Orlando Gibbons. It was issued in celebration of the forthcoming marriage of James I's daughter Princess Elizabeth to Frederick V, Elector Palatine, which took place on 14 February 1613. The three composers are nicely differentiated by seniority, with Byrd, Bull and Gibbons represented respectively by eight, seven and six items. Byrd's contribution includes the famous "Earle of Salisbury Pavan", composed in memory of Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, who had died on 24 May 1612, and its two accompanying galliards. Byrd's last published compositions are four English anthems printed in Sir William Leighton's "Teares or Lamentacions of a Sorrowfull Soule" (1614).


title: William Byrd

text: Byrd's output of about 470 compositions amply justifies his reputation as one of the great masters of European Renaissance music. Perhaps his most impressive achievement as a composer was his ability to transform so many of the main musical forms of his day and stamp them with his own identity. Having grown up in an age in which Latin polyphony was largely confined to liturgical items for the Sarum rite, he assimilated and mastered the Continental motet form of his day, employing a highly personal synthesis of English and continental models. He virtually created the Tudor consort and keyboard fantasia, having only the most primitive models to follow. He also raised the consort song, the church anthem and the Anglican service setting to new heights. Finally, despite a general aversion to the madrigal, he succeeded in cultivating secular vocal music in an impressive variety of forms in his three sets of 1588, 1589 and 1611.


title: William Byrd

text: Byrd enjoyed a high reputation among English musicians. As early as 1575 Richard Mulcaster and Ferdinand Haybourne praised Byrd, together with Tallis, in poems published in the Tallis/Byrd "Cantiones". Despite the financial failure of the publication, some of his other collections sold well, while Elizabethan scribes such as the Oxford academic Robert Dow, Baldwin, and a school of scribes working for the Norfolk country gentleman Sir Edward Paston copied his music extensively. Dow included Latin distichs and quotations in praise of Byrd in his manuscript collection of music, the Dow Partbooks (GB Och 984–988), while Baldwin included a long doggerel poem in his Commonplace Book (GB Lbm Roy App 24 d 2) ranking Byrd at the head of the musicians of his day:


title: William Byrd

text: In 1597 Byrd's pupil Thomas Morley dedicated his treatise "A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke" to Byrd in flattering terms, though he may have intended to counterbalance this in the main text by some sharply satirical references to a mysterious "Master Bold". In "The Compleat Gentleman" (1622) Henry Peacham (1576–1643) praised Byrd in lavish terms as a composer of sacred music:


title: William Byrd

text: Finally, and most intriguingly, it has been suggested that a reference to "the bird of loudest lay" in Shakespeare's mysterious allegorical poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle" may be to the composer. The poem as a whole has been interpreted as an elegy for the Catholic martyr St Anne Line, who was executed at Tyburn on 27 February 1601 for harbouring priests.


title: William Byrd

text: Byrd was an active and influential teacher. As well as Morley, his pupils included Peter Philips, Tomkins and probably Thomas Weelkes, the first two of whom were important contributors to the Elizabethan and Jacobean virginalist school. However, by the time Byrd died in 1623 the English musical landscape was undergoing profound changes. The principal virginalist composers died off in the 1620s (except for Giles Farnaby, who died in 1640, and Thomas Tomkins, who lived on until 1656) and found no real successors. Thomas Morley, Byrd's other major composing pupil, devoted himself to the cultivation of the madrigal, a form in which Byrd himself took little interest. The native tradition of Latin music which Byrd had done so much to keep alive more or less died with him, while consort music underwent a huge change of character at the hands of a brilliant new generation of professional musicians at the Jacobean and Caroline courts. The English Civil War, and the change of taste brought about by the Stuart Restoration, created a cultural hiatus which adversely affected the cultivation of Byrd's music together with that of Tudor composers in general.


title: William Byrd

text: In a small way, it was his Anglican church music which came closest to establishing a continuous tradition, at least in the sense that some of it continued to be performed in choral foundations after the Restoration and into the eighteenth century. Byrd's exceptionally long lifespan meant that he lived into an age in which many of the forms of vocal and instrumental music which he had made his own were beginning to lose their appeal to most musicians. Despite the efforts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antiquarians, the reversal of this judgement had to wait for the pioneering work of twentieth-century scholars from E. H. Fellowes onwards.


title: William Byrd

text: In more recent times Joseph Kerman, Oliver Neighbour, Philip Brett, John Harley, Richard Turbet, Alan Brown, Kerry McCarthy, and others have made major contributions to increasing our understanding of Byrd's life and music. In 1999, Davitt Moroney's recording of Byrd's complete keyboard music was released on Hyperion (CDA66551/7; re-issued as CDS44461/7). This recording, which won the 2000 Gramophone Award in the Early Music category and a 2000 Jahrespreis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik, came with a 100-page essay by Moroney on Byrd's keyboard music. In 2010, The Cardinall's Musick under the direction of Andrew Carwood completed their recorded survey of Byrd's Latin church music. This series of thirteen recordings marks the first time that all Byrd's Latin music has been available on disc.


title: Psychogenic amnesia

text: Psychogenic amnesia or dissociative amnesia is a memory disorder characterized by sudden retrograde episodic memory loss, said to occur for a period of time ranging from hours to years to decades. More recently, "dissociative amnesia" has been defined as a dissociative disorder "characterized by retrospectively reported memory gaps. These gaps involve an inability to recall personal information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature." In a change from the DSM-IV to the DSM-5, dissociative fugue is now subsumed under dissociative amnesia.


title: Psychogenic amnesia

text: The atypical clinical syndrome of the memory disorder (as opposed to organic amnesia) is that a person with psychogenic amnesia is profoundly unable to remember personal information about themselves; there is a lack of conscious self-knowledge which affects even simple self-knowledge, such as who they are. Psychogenic amnesia is distinguished from organic amnesia in that it is supposed to result from a nonorganic cause: no structural brain damage or brain lesion should be evident but some form of psychological stress should precipitate the amnesia, however psychogenic amnesia as a memory disorder is controversial.


title: Psychogenic amnesia

text: Psychogenic amnesia is the presence of retrograde amnesia (the inability to retrieve stored memories leading up to the onset of amnesia), and an absence of anterograde amnesia (the inability to form new long term memories). Access to episodic memory can be impeded, while the degree of impairment to short term memory, semantic memory and procedural memory is thought to vary among cases. If other memory processes are affected, they are usually much less severely affected than retrograde autobiographical memory, which is taken as the hallmark of psychogenic amnesia. However the wide variability of memory impairment among cases of psychogenic amnesia raises questions as to its true neuropsychological criteria, as despite intense study of a wide range of cases there is little consensus of which memory deficits are specific to psychogenic amnesia.


title: Psychogenic amnesia

text: Past literature has suggested psychogenic amnesia can be 'situation-specific' or 'global-transient', the former referring to memory loss for a particular incident, and the latter relating to large retrograde amnesic gaps of up to many years in personal identity. The most commonly cited examples of global-transient psychogenic amnesia are 'fugue states', of which there is a sudden retrograde loss of autobiographical memory resulting in impairment of personal identity and usually accompanied by a period of wandering. Suspected cases of psychogenic amnesia have been heavily reported throughout the literature since 1935 where it was reported by Abeles and Schilder. There are many clinical anecdotes of psychogenic or dissociative amnesia attributed to stressors ranging from cases of child sexual abuse to soldiers returning from combat.


title: Psychogenic amnesia

text: Neurological cause of psychogenic amnesia is controversial. Even in cases of organic amnesia, where there is lesion or structural damage to the brain, caution must still be taken in defining causation, as only damage to areas of the brain crucial to memory processing is possible to result in memory impairment. Organic causes of amnesia can be difficult to detect, and often both organic cause and psychological triggers can be entangled. Failure to find an organic cause may result in the diagnosis that the amnesia is psychological, however it is possible that some organic causes may fall below a threshold of detection, while other neurological ails are thought to be unequivocally organic (such as a migraine) even though no functional damage is evident. Possible malingering must also be taken into account. Some researchers have cautioned against psychogenic amnesia becoming a "wastebasket" diagnosis when organic amnesia is not apparent. Other researchers have hastened to defend the notion of psychogenic amnesia and its right not to be dismissed as a clinical disorder. Diagnoses of psychogenic amnesia have dropped since agreement in the field of transient global amnesia, suggesting some over diagnosis at least. Speculation also exists about psychogenic amnesia due to its similarities with 'pure retrograde amnesia', as both share similar retrograde loss of memory. Also, although no functional damage or brain lesions are evident in the case of pure retrograde amnesia, unlike psychogenic amnesia it is not thought that purely psychological or 'psychogenic triggers' are relevant to pure retrograde amnesia. Psychological triggers such as emotional stress are common in everyday life, yet pure retrograde amnesia is considered very rare. Also the potential for organic damage to fall below threshold of being identified does not necessarily mean it is not present, and it is highly likely that both psychological factors and organic cause exist in pure retrograde amnesia.


title: Psychogenic amnesia

text: Psychogenic amnesia is supposed to differ from organic amnesia in a number of ways; one being that unlike organic amnesia, psychogenic amnesia is thought to occur when no structural damage to the brain or brain lesion is evident. Psychological triggers are instead considered as preceding psychogenic amnesia, and indeed many anecdotal case studies which are cited as evidence of psychogenic amnesia hail from traumatic experiences such as World War II. As aforementioned however, an etiology of psychogenic amnesia is controversial as causation is not always clear (see above paragraph), and both elements of psychological stress and organic amnesia may be present among cases. Often, but not necessarily, a premorbid history of psychiatric illness such as depression is thought to be present in conjunction to triggers of psychological stress. Lack of psychological evidence precipitating amnesia doesn't mean there isn't any, for example trauma during childhood has even been cited as triggering amnesia later in life, but such an argument runs the risk of psychogenic amnesia becoming an umbrella term for any amnesia of which there is no apparent organic cause. Due to organic amnesia often being difficult to detect, defining between organic and psychogenic amnesia is not easy and often context of precipitating experiences are considered (for example, if there has been drug abuse) as well as the symptomology the patient presents with. Psychogenic amnesia is supposed to differ from organic amnesia qualitatively in that retrograde loss of autobiographical memory while semantic memory remains intact is said to be specific of psychogenic amnesia. Another difference that has been cited between organic and psychogenic amnesia is the temporal gradient of retrograde loss of autobiographical memory. The temporal gradient of loss in most cases of organic amnesia is said to be steepest at its most recent premorbid period, whereas for psychogenic amnesia the temporal gradient of retrograde autobiographical memory loss is said to be quite consistently flat. Although there is much literature on psychogenic amnesia as dissimilar to organic amnesia, the distinction between neurological and psychological features is often difficult to discern and remains controversial.


title: Psychogenic amnesia

text: Functional assessment of brain activity can be assessed for psychogenic amnesia using imaging techniques such as fMRI, PET and EEG, in accordance with clinical data. Some research has suggested that organic and psychogenic amnesia to some extent share the involvement of the same structures of the temporo-frontal region in the brain. It has been suggested that deficits in episodic memory may be attributable to dysfunction in the limbic system, while self-identity deficits have been suggested as attributable to functional changes related to the posterior parietal cortex. To reiterate however, care must be taken when attempting to define causation as only "ad hoc" reasoning about the aetiology of psychogenic amnesia is possible, which means cause and consequence can be infeasible to untangle.


title: Psychogenic amnesia

text: Because psychogenic amnesia is defined by its lack of physical damage to the brain, treatment by physical methods is difficult. Nonetheless, distinguishing between organic and dissociative memory loss has been described as an essential first-step in effective treatments. Treatments in the past have attempted to alleve psychogenic amnesia by treating the mind itself, as guided by theories which range from notions such as 'betrayal theory' to account for memory loss attributed to protracted abuse by caregivers to the amnesia as a form of self-punishment in a Freudian sense, with the obliteration of personal identity as an alternative to suicide.


title: Psychogenic amnesia

text: Treatment attempts often have revolved around trying to discover what traumatic event had caused the amnesia, and drugs such as intravenously administered barbiturates (often thought of as 'truth serum') were popular as treatment for psychogenic amnesia during World War II; benzodiazepines may have been substituted later. 'Truth serum' drugs were thought to work by making a painful memory more tolerable when expressed through relieving the strength of an emotion attached to a memory. Under the influence of these 'truth' drugs the patient would more readily talk about what had occurred to them. However, information elicited from patients under the influence of drugs such as barbiturates would be a mixture of truth and fantasy, and was thus not regarded as scientific in gathering accurate evidence for past events. Often treatment was aimed at treating the patient as a whole, and probably varied in practice in different places. Hypnosis was also popular as a means for gaining information from people about their past experiences, but like 'truth' drugs really only served to lower the threshold of suggestibility so that the patient would speak easily but not necessarily truthfully. If no motive for the amnesia was immediately apparent, deeper motives were usually sought by questioning the patient more intensely, often in conjunction with hypnosis and 'truth' drugs. In many cases, however, patients were found to spontaneously recover from their amnesia on their own accord so no treatment was required.


title: Psychogenic amnesia

text: Psychogenic amnesia is a common fictional plot device in many films, books and other media. Examples include William Shakespeare's "King Lear", who experienced amnesia and madness following a betrayal by his daughters; and the title character Nina in Nicolas Dalayrac's 1786 opera.


title: Psychogenic amnesia

text: In the 2009 Televisa-produced telenovela "Sortilegio", the main female protagonist (Jacqueline Bracamontes) is kidnapped and her memory is wiped using drugs. In OMORI, one of the main characters (Sunny) has dissociative amnesia.


title: Psychogenic amnesia

text: In the 2009 Breaking Bad television program's second season episode Bit by a Dead Bee, the main protagonist, Walter White, fakes a fugue state to account for his whereabouts.


title: Mr. Monk and the End

text: "Mr. Monk and the End" is the two-part series finale of the USA Network original criminal mystery dramedy television series, "Monk". It is the fifteenth and sixteenth episodes of the eighth and final season, and is the 124th and 125th episodes in the series overall. Adrian Monk (Tony Shalhoub) finally discovers his wife Trudy's (Melora Hardin) murderer after twelve years of searching, concluding a seven-year, eight-season long arc. When "Part 2" aired, it set a series high and a new viewership record for the most watched episode of a regular drama series ever in basic cable with 9.4 million viewers. Both parts were written by series creator Andy Breckman and directed by Randy Zisk.


title: Mr. Monk and the End

text: In a flashback to December 14, 1997, Trudy Monk asks her husband about his latest investigation, the disappearance of a midwife named Wendy Stroud. Monk and Captain Stottlemeyer question Dr. Malcolm Nash, director of the birthing center where Stroud worked. Stottlemeyer receives a phone call and informs Monk that Trudy has been killed.


title: Mr. Monk and the End

text: In the present day, Monk finds that his latest case is taking him back to the same birthing clinic. Although Stottlemeyer offers Monk the chance to sit the case out, he insists he is okay. The pair learn that Dr. Nash had been shot dead while digitizing patient records. Monk concludes that the murder was committed by a professional hitman, and the police soon find a partial fingerprint that identifies the suspect as Joey Kazarinski. Seeking a warrant for his arrest from Judge Ethan Rickover, the group overhear Rickover telling his wife that he will never move out of his house, learning that he has been nominated for the State Supreme Court. That night, Kazarinski's employer instructs him to kill Monk.


title: Mr. Monk and the End

text: When attending a dinner the following day at Natalie's house, Monk is poisoned with a powerful synthetic toxin based on ricin. Stottlemeyer forms a task force to find out who hired the hitman to kill Dr. Nash and what poison was used on Monk. The group track down Kazarinski to a train station, only for him to be hit by a freight train and killed.


title: Mr. Monk and the End

text: Monk discovers a videotape recording made by Trudy before her death, where she confesses to having had an affair with Rickover when he had been a law professor at Berkeley. The affair resulted in a child, which only lived for a few minutes. Trudy suspected that Rickover might be silencing everyone who knew about the affair, so she made the video just in case. Monk remembers the conversation between Rickover and his wife about his house and deduces that a crucial clue is connected to it.


title: Mr. Monk and the End

text: Natalie realizes that the poison was planted in Monk's hand wipes; the hospital is given this information to make an antidote.


title: Mr. Monk and the End

text: Monk goes to Rickover's house and forces Rickover to dig up the remains of the missing midwife. Rickover admits he committed the murders in order to ensure that he would get the position of appellate judge. Twelve years ago, Wendy Stroud, the nurse who delivered the child, told Rickover she intended to tell the press about his affair with Trudy and their child, forcing him to kill her and bury her in his front yard, which explains why he refused to move. Rickover also killed Trudy, as she was the only person who could connect Stroud's disappearance to him. Twelve years later, Dr. Nash came across references to the child when digitizing the birthing clinic's patient records, and thus suspected what had happened to Stroud. He then tried to blackmail Rickover, causing Rickover to hire Kazarinski to kill him and poison Monk so he wouldn't be able to piece everything together. Rickover steals Monk's gun and commits suicide.


title: Mr. Monk and the End

text: A few days later, Monk finds an old newspaper article concerning Stroud's disappearance, and discovers that Trudy's child did not die, but was adopted. Stottlemeyer tracks her down. Monk meets Trudy's daughter, Molly Evans, who bears a striking resemblance to Trudy and, much like her mother, is a writer, working as a film critic for a local paper.


title: Mr. Monk and the End

text: "Mr. Monk and the End" has received generally positive reviews. Allison Waldman of "TvSquad" called the cliffhanger at the end of "Part 1" great and said that she was "dying to know how [it would be] resolved". She also praised Tony Shalhoub's acting in the bed scene in which he talks to Trudy. Waldman called the drama "tense" in "Part 2", and praised Shalhoub and Craig T. Nelson's acting. Jonah Krakow of "IGN" had mixed feelings about the finale, saying that Molly's introduction was a nice way to send the show off, although he felt cheated that the show's biggest mystery was literally handed to Monk in a box. Like Waldman, he praised Shalhoub's and Nelson's acting, and the tension of their scene in which Nelson digs up the midwife's body. Overall he gave it an 8 out of 10. "The A.V. Club" Emily VanDerWerff called it "a surprisingly sweet ending to a show that I haven't watched regularly in a few years", and gave it a "B+".


title: Mr. Monk and the End

text: "Part 1" gained 5.8 million viewers. "Part 2" set various records in television history, with 9.4 million viewers. It was the series high (previously set by the prior season's finale "Mr. Monk Fights City Hall"), USA Network's most-watched scripted television show (previously set by "Burn Notice"), and basic cable's most-watched hour-long drama (previously set by "The Closer" with 9.2 million viewers).


title: Mr. Monk and the End

text: Tony Shalhoub was nominated for the 2010 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for this episode. Additionally, Randy Newman won the 2010 Primetime Emmy Award for Original Outstanding Music and Lyrics for the song "When I'm Gone".


title: Anurag Kulkarni

text: Kulkarni was born in a Marathi family in Kamareddy, Telangana. He started learning Hindustani classical music with late Kakunoori Jangaiah, a Hindustani vocalist and guru in Hyderabad. He was trained in kirana gharana style of singing.


title: Anurag Kulkarni

text: On 24 January 2015, he won the Telugu reality singing show, I"dea Super Singer" Season 8. In August 2021, in an interview with "Cinema Express", Kulkarni said that he has recorded over 800 songs in Telugu language.


title: Civilian casualties from U.S. drone strikes

text: Since the September 11 attacks, the United States government has carried out drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya.


text: Drone strikes are part of a targeted killing campaign against militants. Determining precise counts of the total number killed, as well as the number of non-combatant civilians killed, is impossible; and tracking of strikes and estimates of casualties are compiled by a number of organizations, such as the "Long War Journal" (Pakistan and Yemen), the New America Foundation (Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya), and the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism (Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan). The "estimates of civilian casualties are hampered methodologically and practically"; civilian casualty estimates "are largely compiled by interpreting news reports relying on anonymous officials or accounts from local media, whose credibility may vary."


text: Taken together, independent estimates from the non-governmental organizations New America and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism suggest that civilians made up between 7.27% to 15.47% of deaths in U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia from 2009–2016, with a broadly similar rate from 2017–2019. Civilian casualties as a percentage of overall deaths were highest in Yemen and lowest in Somalia.


text: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) reported the following figures for U.S. strikes from January 2004 through February 2020. For Pakistan, the BIJ figures below cover only U.S. drone strikes; for Yemen, Afghanistan and Somalia, the BIJ figures include both drone strikes and other actions, including airstrikes, missile attacks, and ground operations.


text: Both the 2009-2015 and the 2016 DNI reports state: "Non-combatants are individuals who may not be made the object of attack under applicable international law. The term 'non-combatant' does not include an individual who is part of a belligerent party to an armed conflict, an individual who is taking a direct part in hostilities, or an individual who is targetable in the exercise of U.S. national self-defense. Males of military age may be non-combatants; it is not the case that all military-aged males in the vicinity of a target are deemed to be combatants."


text: As the DNI reports acknowledge, the government's reported numbers of civilian casualties are far lower than estimates from non-governmental organizations. Scholar Nicholas Grossman, who studies drone strikes, wrote that the official figures "systematically underestimated civilian casualties" and notes that independent estimates suggest a substantially higher rate of civilian casualties, which is likely attributable to the government methodology for classifying an individual as a "combatant." DNI explains this discrepancy as the result of three causes: (1) the U.S. government "uses post-strike methodologies that have been refined and honed over the years and that use information that is generally unavailable to non-governmental organizations," such as sensitive intelligence reliably indicating "that certain individuals are combatants" although but are being counted as non-combatants by nongovernmental organizations; (2) that the U.S. government uses "post-strike reviews involve the collection and analysis of multiple sources of intelligence before, during, and after a strike, including video observations, human sources and assets, signals intelligence, geospatial intelligence, accounts from local officials on the ground, and open source reporting" and that this often unique set of information "can provide insights that are likely unavailable to non-governmental organizations" and "frequently enables U.S. Government analysts to confirm, among other things, the number of individuals killed as well as their combatant status"; and (3) some terrorist groups and other actors deliberately promote misinformation "in local media reports on which some non-governmental estimates rely."


text: Assessing civilian versus militant casualties is difficult. The New America count relies on multiple sources, such as reporting from international and local journalists, corroborating evidence from social media, reports from non-governmental organization (NGOs), and official reports from the U.S. military. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism count also draws from a variety of sources.


text: Some scholars and human rights activists, such as Sarah Knuckey and Radhya Al-Mutawakel, criticize the U.S. Defense Department failing to "regularly interview" eyewitnesses as part of investigations into civilian casualties, arguing that this is "a critical flaw in their investigation methodology" and that the U.S. military could overcome obstacles such as a "lack of on-the-ground networks, security concerns and/or issues related to impartiality." In response, scholar Charles J. Dunlap argues that the Defense Department does incorporate witness accounts in its assessments, and that over-reliance on witness statements can be problematic since eyewitness testimony and memory are often unreliable.


text: In February 2013, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a hearing, "But for the past several years, this committee has done significant oversight of the government's conduct of targeted strikes and the figures we have obtained from the executive branch, which we have done our utmost to verify, confirm that the number of civilian casualties that have resulted from such strikes has typically been in the single digits."


text: Leaked CIA documents provided to "The Washington Post" in 2013, showed that top Pakistani government officials "have for years secretly endorsed the [CIA’s drone] program and routinely received classified briefings on strikes and casualty counts". The documents indicate that the CIA has "remarkable confidence" in the accuracy of the drone strikes, with the documents often showing no civilian casualties. "The Washington Post" said this was "at odds with research done by human rights organizations, including Amnesty International".


text: During the Obama administration, proposed U.S. drone strikes in locations outside active war zones (i.e., in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia) required high-level approval. The Obama administration process for approving drone strikes in such locations featured centralized, high-level oversight, based on intelligence about individuals suspected of terrorism activity. Obama's approval was required for every strike in Yemen and Somalia, as well as "the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan" (about one-third of the total as of 2012), and insisted on deciding whether to approve a strike unless the CIA had a "near certainty" that no civilian deaths would result. The process, formalized in a 2013 Presidential Policy Guidance document, was intended to reduce civilian casualties and blowback risks by requiring the targeted person to present a "continuing and imminent threat" to Americans. The process often required multiple interagency meetings to decide whether to go forward with a strike. However, some U.S. military and intelligence officials opposed the restrictive nature of the system, and some Republicans criticized it as too cautious. However, in the pre-strike review, Obama "embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties" that effectively counted "all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent." Counterterrorism officials defended this approach on the idea that people located in close proximity to known terrorists were likely combatants; some Obama administration officials were critical of this approach, who said that it led to implausibly low official counts of civilian deaths, with one administration official telling the "New York Times" that it amounted to "guilt by association."


text: In October 2017, Trump abolished the Obama-era approval system in favor of a looser, decentralized approach, which gave the military and CIA officials the discretion to decide to launch drone strikes against targets without White House approval. This policy reduced accountability for drone strikes. After Joe Biden took office, he halted counterterrorism drone strikes without White House approval and initiated a broad review of U.S. policy on drone use.


text: On July 1, 2016, President Barack Obama signed an executive order requiring annual accounting of civilian and enemy casualties in U.S. drone strikes outside war zones ("Areas Outside of Active Hostilities"), and setting a deadline of May 1 each year for the release of such report. However, soon after taking office, President Donald Trump designated large areas in Yemen and Somalia to be "areas of active hostilities," thus exempting them from disclosure. the Trump administration also ignored the 2017 and 2018 deadlines for an annual accounting, and on March 6, 2019, Trump issued an order revoking the requirement. However, since 2016, Congress has enacted legislation separately requiring the Defense Department to release "annual reports about bystander deaths from all of its operations" including strikes inside war zones (such as Afghanistan and Syria). For example, disclosure is required pursuant to Section 1057 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018. This legislation requiring disclosure of bystander deaths, however, covers only Defense Department drone strikes and does not extend to separate CIA drone strikes.


text: After more than 30 UAV-based strikes hit civilian homes in Afghanistan in 2012, President Hamid Karzai demanded that such attacks end, but the practice continues in areas of Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter has criticized such use of UAVs: "We don't know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these attacks ... This would have been unthinkable in previous times."


text: The U.S. launched an investigation following an August 2021 drone attack in Kabul that killed 7 children, their father who worked for a U.S. employer, and other family members. On September 17, the Department of Defense confirmed that the strike was a "tragic mistake" and killed 10 civilians.


text: In October 2013, the Pakistani government revealed that since 2008, civilian casualties made up 3 percent of deaths from drone strikes. Since 2008, it alleges there have been 317 drone strikes that killed 2,160 Islamic militants and 67 civilians. This is less than previous government and independent organization calculations of collateral damage from these attacks. S. Azmat Hassan, a former ambassador of Pakistan, said in July 2009 that American UAV attacks were turning Pakistani opinion against the United States and that 35 or 40 such attacks killed 8 or 9 top al-Qaeda operatives.