Music by the sixteenth-century Catholic composer William Byrd came to the Tower of London this week for the official launch of a project to shed new light on his work from a twenty-first century viewpoint. Byrd’s music is regularly sung in the chapel royal of St Peter ad Vincula at the Tower, but it was the troubled aspect of his life that the new “über-choir” Ora focused on in new works designed to match specific compositions by Byrd himself, relating to the establishment of the Church of England and the outlawing of the composer’s faith. The commissions are the idea of conductor Suzi Digby, the creator of Ora.Digby tells me that the starting point was Byrd’s setting of the poem Infelix ego (“unhappy me”), by the Catholic reformer Savonarola