In Search of the Historical Taverner

Abstract

The visitor to the Cathedral Church of Christ in Oxford, the Parish Church of St. Botolph's in Boston, Lincolnshire, or the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity in nearby Tattershall, will find them in much the same condition as did John Taverner more than four hundred years ago. But he will find no trace in these noble piles of the man who served them so well. Nor is he likely to hear in their devotional services, or in any others in England, the music Taverner wrote for their choirs. Reasons for this neglect are not difficult to find. Very little church music composed by Taverner and his contemporaries was copied (and none printed) in score during their lifetime. Most of the part-books in which their music was inscribed were treated carelessly and later lost or destroyed. With the rapid religious and musical developments that followed the death of Henry VIII in 1547, the compositions of these men became liturgically irrelevant on the one hand and stylistically outdated on the other; compared with the melodic restraint and textural clarity of Elizabethan music, their writing sounded old-fashioned, extravagant and impenetrably thick, and it was far more difficult to sing. Therefore, from the beginning of the Elizabethan era to the end of the Victorian, the compositions of men such as Taverner, Robert Fayrfax and Nicholas Ludford remained unseen and unheard except by the occasional musical antiquarian.