Thomas Tallis is one of those figures that you meet early in your career as a choral singer. His anthem, If ye love Me, has long been a standard of choirs all over the world. His motet for 40 voices, Spem in Alium, is one of the monumental achievements of the sixteenth century. His place in English music history was sealed when he persuaded Elizabeth I to grant him a patent in 1575 to print and publish music using the newly-invented moveable type technology. This monopoly was operated in partnership with William Byrd -- a situation which recalls the position of opera in France in the following century, when Louis XIV gave Lully the monopoly on opera in Paris, frustrating the stage ambitions of contemporaries such as Clerambault.
Tallis and Byrd live in a kind of mythological half-light for many musicians. We are familiar with the story told by choir directors all over the world that Byrd's masses for three and four voices were 'almost certainly' composed for clandestine performance at services in recusant households. Of course, this myth falls apart on so many grounds it's very easy to see why it persists: it's a beautiful romance, even if it doesn't hold water as history. Another element of the mythical fog is the conflicting narratives that accompanied the revival of their music in the early-twentieth century, but complicated particularly by Roman Catholic musicians appropriating Tallis's Latin church music as part of a wider project of integrating Catholicism with English identity. Tallis was better-known as a composer of Anglican music, and one of the great promoters of the alternative history was Richard Terry, a convert from Anglo-Catholicism who later became organist at Westminster Cathedral. Reception studies elsewhere deal more comprehensively with this issue, including one recent publication that I consider essential reading if you really want to come to grips with Tallis. On this issue of denominational claim and counter-claim, it is interesting to observe that If ye love me was chosen for the service at Westminster Abbey during the Papal visit to Britain last September.
Tallis's life spanned a remarkable set of swings and roundabouts in the sixteenth century. His fortunes were very much affected by the changing ground of the English reformation, and he can be counted as one of the key figures in developing a vernacular choral style to meet the changing liturgical needs this entailed. My first encounter with his Latin music was the remarkable motet for the first Sunday in Lent, In Jejunio et fletu. The astringent texture gives a description of fasting and mourning like nothing else I can think of to express the season.
You can find a score and translation for this piece here.
Tallis's contribution to keyboard music is superficially light on when compared with his choral music. Fewer than twenty pieces, mostly short settings of antiphons or hymn verses, survive. Yet here we find the same qualities that make Tallis's choral music so compelling -- astringent textures, the ability to move with freedom in a small space, contrapuntal inventiveness and that sheer sense of enough being said.
Today I have a small sample of Tallis's keyboard pieces to share. The first is a setting of the office hymn, Ecce tempus idoneum. For the sake of making things clearer, I've included the plainchant with the organ settings to create a sense of alternatim performance. This means that the organ replaces verses 2 and 4 of the hymn, with the melody given to create the effect of the remaining verses being sung. Listen to it here.
And for all the false-relation freaks out there, Ex more docti mistico should just about satisfy you.
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