The cetacean pun goes back to the 14c Office for St. David. 'Schola' seemed a bit too on-the-nose.

FOr the curious, here's the program; everything available on CPDL:

[loco introitus:] The Sacred Saints (contrafactum of Were I a king) John Mundy (c.1550-1630)

[loco epist.:] Justi autem (Cantiones sacrae, 1619) Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1591-1652)

Candidi facti sunt (Cantiones sacrae, 1575) Thomas Tallis (c.1505-1585)


Justorum animae (Gradualia, 1605) Byrd

Ave verum corpus (Gradualia I, 1605) Byrd

Alleluia, I Heard a Voice Thomas Weelkes (1576-1623)

In the century of religious violence leading up to the Thirty Years War (1618-48) one can be startled at how easily patonage and friendship could cross denominational lines. One such humane example is the career of Ludwig Senfl, a Lutheran priest protected by the Holy Roman Emperor Maximillian and subsequently employed as composer by several Catholic princes. Even more famous is the case of William Byrd, a favorite of Elizabeth I.
But there were reminders of how disasterously politics and religion could collide. In 1594, as Byrd was printng his three masses, John Mundy (son of the more famous William) published Were I a king ("...were I obscure, unknown should be my cares... a doubtful thing to crave, a kingdom or a cottage.") Several editors have pointed out how well it fits words by Philip Howard, an Earl executed for treason in 1595 and one of the 40 martyrs of the English reformation canonized by Pope Paul VI in 1970.

Byrd shared a monopoly on music printing with his teacher Thomas Tallis, also a lifelong Catholic, and wrote both English and Latin church music; while the Queen's chapel used Latin, police reports confirm that many copies sold were used in clandestine Catholic services. Pieces explicitly for the counter-reformation tridentine rite were included in Gradualia, the first volume of which appeared two years after Elizabeth's death, in 1605. After the discovery of the gunpower plot that fall ("Remember, remember, the 5th of November" in the schoolchild's rhyme) Byrd temporarily withheld copies and turned to composing the Psalms of the Babylonian captivity, but by 1610 both volumes were back in print. The offertory Justorum animae is from the Propers of All Saints, and Ave verum is part of a set of Eucharistic motets that includes all the music required for Corpus Christi.

We include Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck as an honorary English composer on the strength of his enormous influence as a teacher, even though spent his whole career in Calvinist Amsterdam (not far from Ons' Lieve Heer op Solder, the famous Church of Our Lord in the Attic). Cantiones sacrae (1619) is dedicated to a Catholic friend. Like Sweelinck, Thomas Weelkes belongs to the first generation of the baroque era. Alleluia, I heard a voice is from the Anglican Burial Service.