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Thomas
Tallis: The Complete Works Charivari Agrèable, Lynda Sayce, Laurence Cummings, Stephen Taylor, Andrew Benson Wilson
This ninth and final volume of The Complete Works of Thomas Tallis explores the most obscure and enigmatic corner of Tallis’s output: the secular music. The very existence of this music calls for some explanation. Tallis was a professional church musician for his entire adult career, and in that capacity he served as an organist, a singer, an administrator and, most importantly from our modern point of view, a composer of church music for voices and organ. His official duties did not require him to write secular songs, or pieces to be played on viols, virginals or harpsichord. Why, then, do these ‘unofficial’ works by him exist? There is probably more than one explanation. Some pieces may have been destined for performance at the Tudor court. The English monarchs, from Henry VII onwards, retained an impressive staff of secular musicians: keyboard players, lutenists, consorts of instrumentalists, and a small ensemble of chamber singers. Their personnel is well documented, but almost nothing is known about the music they played and sang. Tallis, who was a member of the Chapel Royal—a wholly separate department of the royal household—had no formal link with these court musicians, yet there may have been occasions when the boundaries between court and chapel were briefly blurred. It is even possible (although this is mere speculation) that some of Tallis’s keyboard pieces were composed for England’s most celebrated amateur performer, Queen Elizabeth herself. An alternative performance context comes to mind for some of the secular music. As a member of the Chapel Royal, Tallis worked alongside generations of choirboys, and almost certainly there would have been times when he assisted in their training, or wrote pieces for them to perform outside their chapel duties. In fact, there is a strong case for linking several of Tallis’s secular songs with choirboy plays. His instrumental consort music, too, and some of the keyboard pieces, possibly connect with pedagogy and the musical training of choristers. Not all the music on these discs, however, is ‘secular’ in its origins. Some works that Tallis conceived for choral performance in church were taken over by amateur musicians, to be arranged, sung and played in circumstances quite different from those the composer originally had in mind. These annexed pieces underline the fact that Tallis’s music was used and admired far beyond the Chapel Royal and the court; amateur musicians, too, acknowledged him as the finest English composer of the age. In the words of the Oxford don Robert Dow, writing around 1580, ‘Talis es et tantus Tallisi musicus, ut si / Fata senem aufferent musica muta foret’ (‘Thou art so renowned and great a musician, Tallis, that if fate should carry thee away in thine old age, music would be mute’). William Byrd echoed those same sentiments in his elegy Ye sacred muses (track 23), which closes with the words ‘Tallis is dead, and Music dies’. Issues of performance context are of more than historical interest, for they can have implications for performance practice. This is true, for instance, of Tallis’s consort works (tracks 1-5). Today, these pieces tend to be linked automatically with viols, and that is certainly a viable performance option. In Tallis’s lifetime, a band of professional viol players existed at court; and viols were also apparently played by boy choristers. In the will of Sebastian Westcott, Master of the Children at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, there is mention of a ‘cheste of vyalyns and vialls to exercise and learne the children and choristers there’. If the St Paul’s boys were encouraged and instructed to play these instruments, the same may have been true of the Chapel Royal choristers. But is performance on viols the only possibility? The Tudor manuscripts containing Tallis’s consort works make no mention of specific instruments, and in the most important of them, dated c. 1578, the book’s heading leaves matters quite open: ‘A booke of In nomines and other solfainge songes of v, vi, vii and viii parts for voyces or instrumentes’. More than one interpretation is possible for the word ‘solfainge’. At face value, it implies vocal performance in which the singers articulate the traditional solmization syllables (‘ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la’) used in music theory at the time. But ‘solfainge’ might mean vocalization without any words at all. Or ‘solfainge songes’ could equate with our modern concept of ‘chamber music’, evading the issue of performance medium altogether. Whichever, there is no disputing the fact that Tallis was one of the founding fathers of English consort music. He was, for instance, among the first to write so-called ‘In nomines’—pieces structured around the ‘Gloria tibi Trinitas’ plainchant, laid out as in the ‘in nomine’ section of the Benedictus from John Taverner’s Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas. (The genre flourished long after Tallis’s death; even Henry Purcell contributed to it.) There are two In nomine settings by Tallis (tracks 1, 2). Both are for four-voice consort, and in each the plainchant melody is given to one of the inner voices of the texture, leaving the treble and bass free to engage in the dialogue of melodic invention.* The five-voice Solfing song (track 3) lies on the margins of authentic Tallis. In its main manuscript source it is placed anonymously among a cluster of works by the Tudor court musician, Philippe van Wilder, and has the words ‘Je nilli croyss’ written in a corner of one page. Had a second manuscript not named Tallis as the composer, the piece would surely have been claimed as an otherwise unknown French chanson by van Wilder, not least because it bears all the hallmarks of his style: busy imitative texture, incisive rhythms, and an overall ABA form. But the case is not quite clear cut, for Tallis must have known van Wilder’s music, and may have tried to emulate it. If the Solfing song is indeed by Tallis, then it must be reckoned a nod of tribute to his foreign-born colleague. Salvator mundi (track 4) takes us down a path of speculation. There is a five-voice piece by Tallis that survives in two different forms: as an anthem (set to the words ‘When Jesus went into Simon the Pharisee’s house’; included in Vol. 8) and as a motet (Salvator mundi [II]; Vol. 7); but in neither of these versions does the music seem to grow out of the words, and although the anthem and motet agree about the music’s foundation three-voice texture—a two-voice canon with accompanying bass—they differ significantly in the content of the two remaining voices. Perhaps, then, Tallis conceived the piece as an instrumental trio, and subsequently expanded it with both words and additional voice-parts. The three-voice version recorded here has been reconstructed by Alistair Dixon. Tallis’s five-voice Fantasia (track 5)
survives incomplete; only its top two voices are known to exist, in an
early Elizabethan manuscript where the piece has no title, text or
attribution. In places, however, its musical content significantly
overlaps with Tallis’s O sacrum convivium, and there is one passage that
recurs in his Absterge Domine. It seems likely, then, that the Fantasia
precedes both of those pieces, and was subsequently carved up for
redistribution. The lower voices of the Fantasia, as recorded here, have
been reconstructed by John Milsom, partly using the models of the work’s
successors: O sacrum convivium (Vol. 7; also two versions of the same
music with English words I call and cry and O sacred and holy banquet, in Not a single note of lute music by Tallis is known ever to have existed, and the few pieces by him that survive in lute arrangements were almost certainly made by other hands. Among them is one of the most unlikely pieces in the entire repertory of Tudor lute music: an adaptation of Tallis’s longest and most complex keyboard piece, Felix namque II (track 6). The keyboard version of this piece, composed apparently in 1564, belongs to the long-established English tradition of writing elaborate organ works based around the ‘Felix namque’ plainchant melody. (There are also settings by Preston, Redford and Blitheman, among others.) Tallis contributed two pieces to the genre: a relatively modest first setting in 1562 (track 7) and, two years later, the more adventurous and virtuosic second setting. Why anyone should have attempted to adapt this latter work for lute is unclear; but in a separate note below, lutenist Lynda Sayce ponders this strange arrangement at greater length, and describes some of the problems it poses for the player. (The keyboard original of Felix namque II is included in Vol. 5.) The Felix namque settings apart, relatively few of Tallis’s keyboard works survive. Of those that do, the longest and most striking is the Lesson of Mr Tallis: two partes in one (tracks 15 and 18). In one of the work’s two surviving manuscript sources, it is attributed to the much younger John Bull, but this seems unlikely on two counts: first, stylistically the piece belongs to the mid 16th century; and second, it is based upon a canon (‘two partes in one’), a technique Tallis uses with some frequency. (An example is Salvator mundi, track 4.) In the Lesson, the player’s right hand plays the canon, which resolves at the lower fifth, worked in close stretto. Against it, the left hand plays a fast-moving accompaniment. The piece may therefore be a ‘lesson’ in two ways simultaneously: as a study in canon, and as an exercise in independence of the player’s two hands (and specifically in left-hand agility). As for the remainder of Tallis’s keyboard music, almost all of it has come down to us solely in a manuscript anthology known today as the ‘Mulliner Book’ (London, British Library, MS Add. 30513). This functional little volume, written out by Thomas Mulliner in the late 1550s and early 1560s, arises from his years of study with the keyboard player, poet and dramatist, John Heywood. Its contents are extremely miscellaneous; they include, for instance, many of Tallis’s liturgical organ settings (all of which are recorded in Vol. 5). But Mulliner also copied out music that may have been meant for other purposes, such as the study of counterpoint and harmony. The most obviously didactic of these is A point (tracks 13 and 17), one of six tiny pieces in the Mulliner Book that bear this name. Possibly these minuscule works were meant to be used as intonations, establishing the key in advance of an unaccompanied vocal work. But the word ‘point’ suggests ‘point of imitation’, and the pieces do indeed include imitative points passed from voice to voice; so it is equally possible that they are compositional studies, notated in score in order that the budding student might learn from their example. Per haec nos (tracks 12 and 16), too, could have been scored up for study purposes, since it is a straight transcription of a three-voice extract from Tallis’s earliest known vocal work, Salve intemerata (performed complete in Vol. 1). But there is another possibility too: was it intended that the player of this extract should improvise ornamention around the music’s bare bones? Several of Tallis’s English-texted works survive as unornamented scores in the Mulliner Book. One of them, the anthem Remember not, O Lord God (track 14), may have been meant for actual liturgical use, as an organ accompaniment to the choir. But it is less clear why Mulliner should have copied out four of Tallis’s partsongs (tracks 8-11). Are these for playing, or for study? Whichever, we must be grateful to Mulliner for including them, since two of the songs would otherwise have been lost altogether. A possible context can be suggested for these songs. From 1539 onwards, choirboy plays were regularly staged by members of the Chapel Royal, typically for performance before the monarch on New Year’s Day. Two of Tallis’s partsongs may have been meant for inclusion in them. Like as the doleful dove is a setting of words by William Hunnis, who from 1566 served as Master of the Choristers at the Chapel Royal. In that capacity he was responsible for writing and staging choirboy plays, a genre that regularly included songs; Like as the doleful dove was probably one of them. It is performed here in two versions, first as notated in the Mulliner Book (track 9), then in a modern arrangement for voice and lute (21). When shall my sorrowful sighing slack, with its strongly alliterative text, may also have come from a choirboy play, although in this case the author of the words is unknown. It too is presented twice, first as given in the Mulliner Book (track 8), then in a modern reconstruction for solo voice and viols (20). The Mulliner Book is our only source for O ye tender babes (track 10), the original words of which are lost. Admittedly the title hints at its missing text, and a passage beginning ‘O ye tender babes’ has been located in the prose introduction to William Lily’s Grammar, a textbook decreed by Henry VIII for use as the standard schoolboy introduction to Latin. The passage in question, which advises children to study hard for the benefit of themselves, their parents and their country, can just about be squeezed into Tallis’s music (track 22), but it is not a comfortable fit, and almost certainly the music calls for a text in verse, not in prose. If the original poem did indeed echo the words of Lily’s Grammar, then this too would seem to be a song suited to boy choristers. As for the fourth Tallis partsong copied out by Mulliner, Purge me, O Lord (track 11), it has a religious text, and for that reason it is usually classified as an anthem. (It is performed as such in Vol. 6.) The words, however, are in rhyming verse, and Tallis may have had domestic use in mind, not choral performance in church. Inexplicably, the keyboard reduction of it in the Mulliner Book is prefaced with the words ‘Fond youth is a bubble’. This prompted Edmund Thomas Warren-Horne in the late 18th century to devise a poem opening with those words that would fit to the music. The result has been published in modern times, but it has absolutely no claim to authenticity. Standing apart from the songs proper is Tu nimirum (track 19), which like Per haec nos is a three-voice extract from Tallis’s Salve intemerata. The adaptation performed here, for solo voice and lute, was made during Tallis’s lifetime, and it hints at a manner of performance that may once have been common, but was very rarely written down—or at least, not until the rise of the lute ayre in the age of Dowland and Campian. Disc 1 closes with Ye sacred Muses (track 23), a musical tribute paid to Tallis by his close colleague and friend, William Byrd. The tradition of writing elegies for composers stretches back at least to the fourteenth century; Josquin des Prez’s lament for Johannes Ockeghem, Nymphes des bois, is perhaps its most celebrated example. In England, however, the genre appears to have begun with Byrd. When Ye sacred Muses was first heard—presumably soon after Tallis’s death in 1585—some listeners may have wondered that homage to Tallis should be made in words that are explicitly pagan. (They appeal to the ‘sacred Muses, race of Jove’ to ‘come down from crystal heavens above’.) Byrd’s imagery, though, surely derives from continental models, and perhaps specifically echoes the Musae Iovis elegies for Josquin composed by Appenzeller and Gombert, copies of which were accessible to Byrd through the collection of printed music at Nonsuch Palace. Unlike those motet-elegies, Byrd’s Ye sacred Muses calls for the typically English texture of solo voice accompanied by four viols. Not surprisingly, the subject-matter brought out the best of Byrd’s invention, and the resulting song has justifiably become one of his most popular works. John Milsom, 2004 Felix Namque - version for lute The lute version of Felix namque II (track 6) is preserved in a manuscript compiled by the singing-man Matthew Holmes, and stands alone in the English repertory of English lute music in both duration and complexity. It is a direct transcription of the keyboard original, transposed down a tone and shorn of its introduction and coda, but otherwise faithful in every detail. However, the density of the writing, the large range, and especially the metrical complexity, all make the work spectacularly ill-suited to the lute. It is possible that it served as a study score adapted for Holmes’s favoured instrument; many uncorrected errors suggest that it was never performed. Holmes’s tablature is problematic on three counts. First, it frequently disagrees with the keyboard sources on issues of accidentals. My policy has been to retain any chromatic oddities confirmed by other versions, but to rationalize others. Second, it is difficult to notate metrical relationships in tablature, especially the interplay between different simultaneous metres. When, in the keyboard original, one hand plays nine notes in the time of the other hand’s four, the tablature result was hopelessly garbled and had to be reconstructed. Third, in several instances the lute part suggested proportional relationships between sections that are quite different from those in the more prescriptive keyboard notation. To avoid some implied but intolerably slow tempi, I have followed the keyboard instructions. The biggest problem was the sheer technical difficulty of the piece. Perversely, Holmes often selected the most awkward fingerings possible, preferring stopped notes to open strings, and making much use of high positions and large stretches. It is possible that he conceived his transcription for the orpharion, a wire-strung instrument tuned like the lute but with a shorter string length and a relatively longer neck. His manuscripts include a great deal of music for wire-strung instruments, and his fingerings would make more sense on orpharion than on lute. I have not hesitated to refinger awkward passages, always retaining the original note content; this practice is not inauthentic, since few sources agree exactly on fingerings. In spite of that, the piece appears on this disc only by virtue of the considerable assistance which modern recording techniques can offer, and I would like to record here my gratitude to Adrian Hunter, my long-suffering producer and editor. Lynda Sayce, 2004 [8] When shall my sorrowful sighing slack?
When shall my sorrowful sighing slack? How long shall I in woe lament? [9] Like as the doleful dove Like as the
doleful dove delights alone to be, [10] O ye tender babes of England O
ye tender babes of England, shake off slothfulness, [19] Tu nimirum Tu nimirum universas Doubtless, in the
untarnished conscience [23] Ye sacred Muses Ye sacred Muses, race of Jove,
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