Remembrances

This final chapter returns to the details of Tallis’s biography. It examines his will and the will of his wife Joan, two documents which offer considerable insight into his social circles and the everyday material surroundings of his household, as well as what little we can deduce of his family background. The chapter also discusses Tallis’s epitaph (very recently rediscovered by the author in a more accurate version) and the other memorial poems written at his death in 1585, including Ye sacred Muses, set to music by Byrd. It concludes with some reflections on Tallis’s enigmatic life and his musical gifts.

John Baldwin’s Partbooks

John Baldwin (d. 1615) was a singer and music scribe, affiliated with St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, and later with the Chapel Royal, who copied more than 400 pieces of music. He had a special liking for old, obscure, complex, and politically unfashionable pieces; much of his energy as a copyist was spent on what his own generation would have considered “early music.” As a result, he rescued some of Tallis’s most important works (especially Latin-texted works) from oblivion or near-oblivion. This chapter takes a detailed look at a number of pieces by Tallis in Baldwin’s collection, including the psalm-motets, the Lamentations, and big responsories such as the six-voice Videte miraculum.

Archbishop Parker’s Psalter

Printed books of psalms in English verse were extremely popular in Elizabethan England. Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, published his own metrical psalter in 1567. It includes eight deceptively simple musical settings by Tallis, one in each of the eight traditional modes. The third of these settings has become famous as the theme of a fantasia by Vaughan Williams. This chapter looks at Tallis’s eight “tunes” and the tradition of metrical psalms, as well as Elizabethan views on musical mode and expression. It also discusses the printer John Day, who published (sometimes with questionable accuracy) these and various other works by Tallis during the 1560s.

The Wanley and Lumley Partbooks

At this point in Tallis’s story, musicians have begun singing in English for radically simplified church services. The Wanley and Lumley partbooks are two of the oldest musical documents of the English Reformation. They contain some of Tallis’s earliest works in the new reformed style. This chapter traces the changes in English music during the 1540s and looks at the origins of Tallis’s English anthems and services. At this point, he was in a position of great authority in the royal household chapel (itself the arbiter of liturgical taste for the rest of the nation) and under considerable pressure to write successful works in a new style. He thrived under this pressure, as we can see in a perfect miniature such as the anthem If ye love me.

Earliest Traces

The earliest known document of Tallis’s music is the single voice part that survives from an otherwise lost manuscript collection of early-sixteenth-century devotional music. It contains only one work by Tallis (the large votive antiphon Salve intemerata) and many works by other composers, almost all of them older. Some of this music goes back to the generation that produced the Eton Choirbook at the turn of the sixteenth century. It gives us a rare chance to see where Tallis’s musical style came from. This chapter is a detailed exploration of Salve intemerata and the manuscript where it makes its earliest appearance. Topics include early Tudor voice types, musical rhetoric, and the tradition of large polyphonic works Tallis knew during his first years as a composer.

The Chapel Royal (1543–85), II

The life of a sixteenth-century Chapel Royal musician was highly itinerant. Tudor kings and queens did not live in one place; they moved freely among their many residences, bringing their musicians and other staff with them. The most important royal residences in Tallis’s day were located along the River Thames within easy reach of London. This chapter is a tour of these Tudor palaces and their chapels, with notes on the daily routine and working conditions of the Chapel Royal singers. Some of the chapels (at Hampton Court Palace, St. James’s Palace, and the Tower of London) are still intact to some degree. Others (at Windsor, Richmond, Whitehall, and Greenwich) have been destroyed but are documented in sixteenth-century descriptions and pictures. The journey ends in Greenwich, where Tallis lived when he was not traveling with the royal household.

The Chapel Royal (1543–85), I

Tallis spent the last four decades of his life with the English Chapel Royal, singing and composing as a member of the private royal household. He held this post under four successive English monarchs. This is by far the best documented phase of his career, showing him as part of a close-knit musical community associated with the Chapel Royal. He lived through immense ideological and liturgical changes during his time at court; he soon found himself in one of the few situations in England where elaborate church music was still being cultivated by professional musicians. He experienced these forty years from an almost unique position of stability and power.

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.

The Gyffard Partbooks

The Gyffard Partbooks are a priceless source of Tallis’s music because 95 percent of their contents are found nowhere else. Unlike most surviving collections of Latin church repertory in England, this is an anthology of three-voice and four-voice music. It shows Tallis and his mid-century colleagues (some of them considerably younger) writing on a smaller scale. The chapter looks in detail at a number of Tallis’s works in the Gyffard books, including an enigmatic four-voice mass and a motet (Sancte Deus) that shows close ties to the distinguished Tudor court musician Philip van Wilder. This is the last pre-Reformation chapter in the book. Starting with the music described in Chapter 12, Tallis will begin writing for services in English.

The Peterhouse Partbooks

This chapter takes a close look at the Peterhouse set of partbooks, an impressive anthology of five-voice sacred music that contains several works by Tallis, including a mass he based on his own motet Salve intemerata (see Chapter 8). That mass gives us an unusually direct view of Tallis at work, revisiting, adapting, and making new decisions about his music. The Peterhouse collection shows the surprising stylistic diversity of Latin-texted church music during its last years in England. The partbooks also reveal hints of religious reform in its earliest stages, as well as the cosmopolitan tastes of the people who used them. They are copied on French paper and they include some Italian repertory. They may be linked to Tallis’s brief employment at Canterbury Cathedral around 1541.