Elegant anthems by Thomas Tallis

Abstract

The intricate polyphony of the early Tudor era has stirred up some strong opinions over the past 500 years. Here is one of those opinions: In the end, the music of Fayrfax, Sheppard and John Taverner will not yield all of its mystery, however scrupulously we analyse it. It is not simply that the music is technically complex, though it often is. Rather it is the case that this repertory signals the kind of high mannerism possessed by a style in a stage of late decline, opaque and impenetrable. That was written in 1991. It appears in a review of another edition in the Early English Church Music series, a volume of Masses by Taverner. ‘A style in a stage of late decline, opaque and impenetrable’: those words recall the well-known complaints of Erasmus upon encountering pre-Reformation English singing. They evoke a musical language not just overwrought and overgrown but having already reached an advanced state of decay. Of course Erasmus could be grumpy about practically all the genres and registers of English polyphony. Virtuosic music, to him, was ‘lascivious whinnying’ from ‘agile throats’; simple faburden was ‘perverse’; other types of group singing distorted the liturgical chant in the manner of an officious reader who is incapable of just reading something out loud without paraphrasing it or adding his own clever asides. Erasmus had little time for any of this, but he (like his late 20th-century successor—John Aplin in Journal of the Royal Musical Association, cxvi/2 (1991), pp.304–6, for those who wish to read more) saved his most vicious invective for music in high style. The book under review here is a monument of Tudor high style: David Skinner’s beautiful volume of Tallis’s votive antiphons and related works, the newest addition to the Early English Church Music (EECM) family.