From the Organist & Choirmaster
This Sunday the lay clerks will sing Thomas Tallis’ setting of text from Saint John’s Gospel “Verily, verily I say unto you.” A simple but effective motet, it is a lovely Renaissance work from the 16th century.
Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) was a versatile English composer, organist and singer. Notably, he served four Tudor monarchs, two notable reformers, and was also the first to compose church music in the English language. You probably have heard his music in several different forms of media such as in The Keep (1983), Master and Commander: The Far Side of The World (2003), The Crown (2013-2023), The Tudors (2007-2010), and Elizabeth (1998).
Tallis was born somewhere in the county of Kent in southeast England. Tallis had a cousin recorded in his will but his family was not recorded (commoner baptismal records were not introduced until the 1530s). Tallis likely showed talent from an early age and was educated as a chorister, and later organist, at the Benedictine Priory at Dover. Coming from more humble origins than your average Tudor composer, Tallis studied treatises from the medieval composer Lionel Power, while also producting lead sheets for works for the prominent composer John Tavenrner (1490-1545) in order to improve his understanding of counterpoint. He also must have had an unknown professional teacher at the priory, perhaps the organist or a leading singer. Tallis’ compositional career started when he was still a student, as his earliest works date before he was promoted to being the “beater of the organs” at Dover in 1531. That term came about because some early organs were operated by the beating of the wrists and it was common to refer to keyboard playing as beating even though organs were played by fingers by the 15th century.
Tallis’ career became uncertain during the dissolution of the monasteries. Dover priory itself was dissolved in 1535. Skilled organists, although admired, became less in demand as the population of chanting monks decrease. Tallis was paid as an organist at Saint Mary and Hill Parish in what can only be described as a zero hour contract: Tallis received four payments for two years of work from 1536-1538. IN a stroke of luck, Tallis ran into the abbot of Waltham Abbey during his stay at Saint Mary and Hill, and he was then recruited as a singer at Waltham Abbey, which itself eventually being destroyed in 1540.
Tallis was quick again to find work at Canterbury Cathedral, the seat of the harbinger of the English reformation, Thomas Cranmer. Tallis was unique int hat he was the first composer commissioned to write Latin music that applied to Cranmer’s initial liturgical forms; the Mass for four voices (although a Catholic setting) is written in a homophonic “choral” style the makes the words easier to understand. This reflects the reformist attitude that Latin choral music had become too florid and the original meanings of the texts had been lost. When Cranmer began to introduce English liturgy with the 1544 Exhortation and Litany, Tallis produced a setting for the Litany that is thought to be the first liturgical music in English. (The text is that of the Great Litany found on page 148 of the Book of Common Prayer)
Thomas Tallis first came into royal contact when Katherine Parr commissioned Tallis to set her psalm translation to music, “Se Lord and Behold,” as a war anthem for Henry Vii and his men before their French campaign of 1544. Tallis, only having only a month to produce the song, recycled music from an old but particularly brilliant votive antiphon name “Gaude Gloriosa.” The antiphon is so innovative in its use f imitation, that musicologists thought the music was actually much newer, until and older copy was found stuffed down a wall during a renovation in Oxford. Henry VII must have been particularly pleased with Tallis’ work, as Tallis was recruited into the Chapel Royal, the place where the finest musicians of England served the king in his chapel, that very same year. Tallis would go on to serve in the Chapel Royal as a singer, organist, and tutor for the next forty years.