St. Mary-at-Hill (1536–38)

The second document of Tallis’s career shows him as part of a flexible roster of half a dozen musicians at the London parish of St. Mary-at-Hill. He was paid for a total of twelve months’ work across two different annual accounts. This parish expended a great deal of money and effort on music. Polyphonic music was regularly copied, chant books were bought, and the organ was maintained. There was also a small choir school for boys. By the time Tallis was there in the later 1530s, the English church had already cut all religious and administrative ties to Rome, but the full round of complex traditional music was still in place. St. Mary-at-Hill often served as a springboard to more prestigious jobs; many of Tallis’s colleagues there went on to serve at cathedrals or in the Chapel Royal.

Bach the Student

Although little is known for certain about Bach’s early training, he clearly was a precocious student. As youngest son of a town and court musician at Eisenach, he must have received the rudiments of a musical education there. Professional training would have continued with his older brother at Ohrdruf and at the choir school in Lüneburg, where he must also have studied with the town organist Böhm. Visits to Hamburg would have expanded his musical horizons, but what he heard there and whether any compositions survive from this period are unknown.

Intelligibility Redux

The medieval composers of polytextual motets have been charged with rendering multiple texts inaudible by superimposing them. While the limited contemporary evidence provided by Jacobus’s comments in theSpeculum musicaeseems at first sight to suggest that medieval listeners would have had trouble understanding texts declaimed simultaneously, closer scrutiny reveals the opposite: that intelligibility was desirable, and linked to modes of performance. This article explores the ways in which 20th-century performance aesthetics and recording technologies have shaped current ideas about the polytextual motet. Recent studies in cognitive psychology suggest that human ability to perform auditory scene analysis—to focus on a given sound in a complicated auditory environment—is enhanced by directional listening and relatively dry acoustics. But the modern listener often encounters motets on recordings with heavy mixing and reverb. Furthermore, combinations of contrasting vocal timbres, which can help differentiate simultaneously sung texts, are precluded by a blended, uniform sound born jointly of English choir-school culture and modernist preferences propagated under the banner of authenticity. Scholarly accounts of motets that focus on sound over sense are often influenced, directly or indirectly, by such mediated listening.

Music Belongs to Everyone: Moments of Progress in Community Music Therapy with Musicians with Severe Disabilities

The article describes novel and successful projects involving musicians with severe disabilities and adolescent music students. The Nádizumzuzum Orchestra consists of adult members of a nursing home. They are able to play music with a newly developed method called Consonate. The young musicians are students of the Zoltán Kodály Hungarian Choir School. This article presents the historical and socio-political background of the project to illustrate how music therapy grows from particular cultural and political circumstances of Hungary, and therefore takes a particular Hungarian form and flavour. The article also reflects on the wider context of the international research and practice of Community Music Therapy.