THOUGHTS ON THE PROGRAM (scroll down for notes on individual pieces)

Today’s program celebrates Thomas Tallis and the “various languages” his music speaks. The general sense emerging from the scant biographical clues modern musicologists can piece together is that of a composer who, through his extraordinarily long life (1505-1585), kept his head down, worked steadily, and survived–indeed prospered–amidst significant political and religious upheavals. His very early career was formative. Mozart’s father dragged him through the courts of Europe as a youngster, allowing young Wolfgang to absorb regional styles later to be assimilated and iterated upon. The young orphan Johann Sebastian Bach copied out music in the French and Italian styles and traveled to study with Buxtehude. As for Tallis, before he turned 37, he had worked in all of the situations available to a church musician of his time: a small priory, an urban parish, a large wealthy abbey, and a cathedral. The Dissolution of the Monasteries put an end to the monasteries, priories, and abbeys, and the music they harbored. But Tallis, to his great fortune, was appointed to the Chapel Royal in 1542. He remained there the rest of his life, which meant he worked, in a guaranteed post, under four monarchs and within four decidedly different religious situations: Henry VII and a quasi-Catholicism, without the Pope; Edward VI (1547-53) and an increasingly extreme Protestantism; Mary (1553-1558) and a restored and conservative Catholicism; and Elizabeth (1558-1603), with a more moderate Protestantism. 

During Elizabeth’s reign, especially in the time after Tallis’s death, Tallis’s younger colleague and Catholic William Byrd pushed back against Protestantism explicitly, both in word (in his final will and testament) and in deed (in his refusal to attend Protestant worship), and implicitly, in the red-hot smolder of his later Latin polyphony. We have no equivalent evidence for Tallis; he appears to have remained quiet. We have no reason to believe that, for Tallis, creativity and conformity were incompatible. What we do have is a staggering body of work–compositions of exceptional quality and craft. Today’s program aims not to discern characteristics of Tallis, the man, by reading between the staves of his scores, but to celebrate Tallis, the composer, the variety of his work, and the fecundity of his imagination. In the sixteenth century, the most ambitious and significant musical works were all created for unaccompanied voices (no symphonies yet!) Tallis gifted us not only the most towering, colossal pieces, spanning some eighteen minutes, scored for as many as seven (or forty!) parts, but also some of the most perfectly miniature pieces in the repertoire. 

The variety and ingenuity arose as much by fiat as by choice. In the reign of Henry VIII, composers wrote richly embroidered, expansive devotional polyphony meant to adorn the equally elaborate liturgies of the Sarum Rite for which they provided the soundtrack. The traditionalists centered the performance of polyphonic compositions and admitted both liturgical and non-liturgical texts, believing professional-quality performance of music on a grand scale to be an act of praise and honor in itself. The ascension of Edward VI and Protestant religious reformers, who regarded music as a distraction from the purpose of worship by its rendering unintelligible the words it set (themselves perhaps of spurious, unscriptural origin), imposed changes in language and liturgy, from Latin to English and Mass to Matins and Evensong, and required composers to write on a much smaller scale. Upon Mary’s ascension and restoration of Catholicism, composers returned to elaborate polyphony in Latin. In his remaining two and a half decades under Elizabeth I, Tallis was able to write and publish Latin polyphony in a more Continental and modern style. (While Elizabeth officially worshiped in English, Latin polyphony was sometimes sung as Catholic dignitaries visited court). Tallis was the only composer of his time who lived through all of the changes; others either bowed out or died young.

The lack of evidentiary documentation shouldn’t lead us to think that Tallis was a bystander. No: He was a driver of the rapid and intense stylistic change in the sixteenth century in England. The thoughts of his recent biographer Kerry McCarthy work well here: “He was much more than a chameleon who took on the colors of his volatile environment, writing with Calvinist severity or with unreconstructed Catholic extravagance as his current monarch demanded. Like the best literary and visual artists of his time, he was at ease with a broad range of styles and could move freely among them while keeping a distinctive voice of his own.”

This program doesn’t aim to sum up Tallis’s output or to trace any particular “development” within it. You just can’t. (Plus, no summation could leave out Spem in Alium). Because his career spanned so much upheaval, Tallis couldn’t continue working for long stretches in the same compositional style and ripen on the vine, as it were. The Latin polyphonic works published in the 1570s are simpler with respect to scoring and scope than those written in the 1530s. The English-texted hymn tunes and anthems from the middle-late part of his life are blatantly less imitative, occult, and obscure than either. The teleological and evolutionary frameworks that (for better or worse) sometimes anchor analyses of composers’ outputs simply don’t make sense. (In fact if one were to try to order Tallis’s pieces based on apparent complexity or maturity they might get things backwards; the most complex piece on today’s program, by far, is possibly the earliest).  

Though I said above that we’re not trying to read between the lines, it’s nevertheless impossible, learning and performing Tallis’s works, not to imagine a composer ignited by the sheer love of his craft. Peter Phillips, founder of The Tallis Scholars, lauds the experimental quality in Tallis’s work: “If I’m right about what motivated Tallis, he must have indeed been a happy man, because no one has so fluently or relentlessly asked questions of form and style. His solutions may have happened to end up historically as culs-de-sac (how could anyone follow up on Spem?) but as achievements in themselves they deserve far more profile than they have received so far.”

Thus we must meet each piece face to face, on its own terms. When we do, we encounter a flexible and fecund musical mind, unperturbed by proscriptions and prescriptions, who, at any size and on any scale, can simply craft works that maximize the magical thing that happens when a group of human voices work together. There’s something of Mozart about it: Regardless of style, scale, and subject, the pieces just work. Our ensemble’s name, Res Facta, comes from an ancient term referring to Medieval and Renaissance compositions that were written down, a “thing made,” rather than improvised. We exist to honor the craft of composition by giving performances of these “res fact” that dare to connect across the centuries our own musical passions with those that led composers to make permanent the fruits of their own imaginations. Rarely has that endeavor been easier–or more satisfying–than when singing a score by one of the greatest and most ingenious composers, of any era, Thomas Tallis.  

THOUGHTS ON INDIVIDUAL PIECES

We open with Loquebantur Variis Linguis, a respond, or motet that alternates sections of polyphony with plainchant. The tenors, dispatching the pitches of the plainchant in long note values, are surrounded by six other voice parts deliberately working at cross purposes, scattering their vigorous polyphony in all directions to evoke the apostles’ preaching in tongues. Audivi Vocem de Caelo is another respond, scored for high voices. In Audivi we get a glimpse of the rather theatrical bent of the liturgies for which such a piece might have been composed: trebles were given extra compensation to be able to sing Audivi unaccompanied, without the aid of lower, adult voices, and at a physical remove from them. For a similar piece written for Christmas, the trebles were directed to ascend if possible to “a high place above the altar” to evoke something heavenly and angelic. In other words, were Tallis ever tasked to write music evoking the sound of angels, this is it. 

Four of the motets (Suscipe Quaeso, Domine; In Manus Tuas; O Sacrum Convivium; Salvator Mundi) come from the 1575 Cantiones Sacrae volume that Tallis published late in life with his younger colleague, William Byrd. The two Lamentations settings also were written during Elizabeth’s reign. In these, we hear Tallis’s absorption of some characteristics of the Continental approach to imitative polyphony: highly rhetorical, nearly syllabic, the individual vocal parts rising and falling with the inflection of the Latin texts, discrete “points of imitation.” But where Palestrina’s polyphony famously sanded down corners and polished rough edges, Tallis’s leaves in place some of the melodic spikes and snags of his pre-Reformation polyphony. We marvel at the pristine harmonic clarity of the Palestrina style. In some passages Tallis writes music as clear as quartz. But where he wants to, he can tug taut the harmony, contracting two or three voices into a dissonant arm wrestle before releasing into consonance all the more sweet for the preceding tension. Peppered throughout are Tallis’s famous “false relations:” moments where, say, A-natural sounds simultaneously with A-flat, often within a texture-thickening cadence. Heinrich Hertz wouldn’t codify what would become his eponymous cycles-per-second unit of measurement and describe the way sound waves of varying complementary or interfering wavelengths vibrate with and against each other until 300 years after Tallis’s death, but Tallis and the people who sang and heard his music surely felt the same sonic squeeze and release that so beautiful shakes the air in precisely the same way, 450 years later. We’re fortunate Elizabeth I knew great music when she heard it and allowed Tallis to publish and thus preserve some pieces he’d been polishing for years, and that those who lived in his own time (and had the means to do so) copied into private part-book collections some of his works. One such collector, Dow, wrote in the early 1580s beneath his copy of Tallis’s O Sacrum Convivium: “Such and so great a musician are you, Tallis, that if the Fates carried you off in your old age, Music would be mute.”

A New Commandment and If Ye Love Me demonstrate Tallis’s response to the mandates imposed by Protestant authorities: English text, set clearly, unobscured, amongst just four parts. Though other pieces on this program show Tallis’s contrapuntal prowess, these anthems show how deftly he deploys straightforward homophony: the easy chordal conveyance is perfectly, tastefully measured. Tallis biographer Kerry McCarthy notes of the importance of the hinge points in Tallis’s career:

“He lived through them all in one secure post that was guaranteed for life. Public worship in England did not begin to change until Tallis was safely ensconced in the royal household in the mid 1540s. Within five years, it was unrecognizable. Tallis was at the center of the musical Reformation as it happened, and he was lucky enough to experience it from a unique position of stability and power. Where other mid-century English composers reacted to events going on around them, he often seems to have taken the initiative in forging new musical ideas and styles. This was a musical language that had both staying power and political clout. Superficially unglamorous music such as If ye love me deserves as much attention as Tallis’s more extravagant works, not least because it gives us a glimpse of Tallis at a crucial point of influence. He found himself in an unexpected place during the Reformation as the old certainties began to collapse one by one. He had inherited a set of traditional techniques and worked with them for many years. Now he was acting as one of the chief architects of a new musical ideal. He was now in a position of real musical authority for the first time, even as he was deprived of many of the options and resources he had known as a younger man. At this stage of his life, less was indeed more. He did not restrict himself permanently to composing in four parts–he would be composing in forty parts before long–but these astringent first years of reform left a mark on the rest of his career.”

Perhaps the starkest example of Tallis’s understanding of the essence of human vocal expression is the contribution he made to Archbishop Matthew Parker’s 1567 psalter: a set of tunes designed for the singing of metrical glosses in English on the Psalms, one in each of the eight musical modes. We offer two. The second is the psalter’s version of the famous Psalm 42, set to Tallis’s “fifth tune,” a simple song with major mode implications. The first is the setting of Psalm 2 to the “third tune,” a deceptively simple harmonization of a tune in the phrygian mode so haunting that it would inspire Ralph Vaughan Williams’s sprawling Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis for multiple string orchestras several centuries later.

We close with Gaude Gloriosa, Tallis’s towering masterpiece. (I admit that Spem in Alium is immense and important, but even with eight five-part choirs, it doesn’t match the variety and scope of Gaude). Gaude presents Tallis’s working on the biggest imaginable choral canvas, stretching six voice parts from bass low D to soprano high A, juxtaposing earthy basses with stratospheric sopranos, tightly coiled trios with tsunami tuttis, exuberance with reverence. Its nine sections each open with a “Gaude.” At the time that Tallis worked at Canterbury Cathedral, it had a set of seven stained glass windows showing the seven joys of the Virgin Mary, each with a “Gaude” inscription. Other churches had similar sets. The polyphony is unabashedly melodic and melismatic (pouring out long cascades of notes on one syllable). Of this freewheeling, jubilant paean to Mary, Peter Phillips says: 

“The votive antiphon had been the jewel in the crown of English composition for many decades before Tallis’s first essays in the form, but in Gaude gloriosa he significantly expanded it. This is not a comment about sheer length–at 17 minutes it is uncommonly long–but about breadth of conception and the technique required to convey it. The melodies are longer and more graceful than before, they fit together better, resulting in a grander sweep of phrase, the scoring is more varied and impressive, especially in the double gimmell, and the ranges more taxing. The stamina required from the singers to do justice to this masterpiece–not least when Tallis asks his top part to reach an almost unprecedented high A in the closing moments–is of a quite different order from any earlier composition of this type. It is as if Tallis, like Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony, simply would not be constrained by human considerations.” 

For those whose ears had never heard the symphonies of Mahler or film scores of John Williams, beefed up by massive sections of steel-stringed violins sawing away, the blare of modern brass and wind instruments, and the punctuating plink of metal percussion instruments, surely a sonic construction such as the final amen of Gaude, barreling down the homestretch after some sixteen minutes to slam into a final chord with the major third doubled in the two highest voice parts, all voices splayed across more than three octaves, must have been completely ravishing. The project carries with it, too, the sense of performers and composers such as Tallis newly unbridled in the brief reign of Mary, relishing the return to expansive polyphonic creations.