Thomas Tallis

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Thomas Tallis died on the 23rd of November 1585, and by the time his body was carried to the chancel of St Alfege Church in Greenwich, he had served four English monarchs without once losing his position, his freedom, or his head. That was no small feat in a century when royal favour was a moving target and religious loyalty could end a career - or a life. Tallis had composed sacred music for Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, quietly reshaping his style to suit each ruler's demands while remaining, in the words of the historian Peter Ackroyd, an "unreformed Roman Catholic". How did one man navigate that tightrope for more than four decades? And what did he leave behind that still resonates nearly five centuries later?

• 2. The Obscure Beginning

  ›

  No birth record, no family document, and no account of his childhood survives for Thomas Tallis. Historians have placed his birth somewhere in the early part of the 16th century, with estimates ranging from 1500 to 1520, during the final years of Henry VII's reign. His only known relative was a cousin named John Sayer. Because both the Sayer and Tallis surnames have strong ties to Kent, scholars have generally assumed he was born somewhere in that county.

  The first concrete trace of Tallis in any archive appears in 1531, when accounts from Dover Priory, a Benedictine house in Kent, record a "Thomas Tales" serving as the "joculator organorum" - the keeper of the organs - and receiving an annual wage of £2. He was also responsible for directing six singing-boys. The priory was dissolved in 1535, and no record of his departure survives.

  From Dover, Tallis moved to St Mary-at-Hill in London's Billingsgate ward, where records show he received four half-yearly payments between 1536 and 1538. Toward the end of 1538 he joined Waltham Abbey in Essex, a large Augustinian monastery, after meeting its abbot, whose London home was near St Mary-at-Hill. When that abbey too was dissolved in March 1540, Tallis left without a pension - having been there only briefly - and received instead a single payment of 40 shillings. He did, however, take away something valuable: a volume of musical treatises copied by John Wylde, a former precentor at Waltham, which contained a treatise by Leonel Power prohibiting consecutive unisons, fifths, and octaves.

  By summer of 1540, Tallis had secured a place at the newly secularised Canterbury Cathedral, heading the list of singers in a freshly expanded choir of ten boys and twelve men. He brought along manuscripts of his early votive works and stayed for two years, working in the shadow of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer's drive toward a plainer, more syllabic style of church music.

• 3. Four Sovereigns, One Composer

  ›

  Tallis's appointment to the Chapel Royal most likely began in 1543, and it would define the rest of his life. A lay subsidy roll from 1544 records his name, and in 1577 he claimed to have served the crown and its royal ancestors for forty years. He worked as composer, teacher, and performer - and, from after 1570, was formally designated as organist, though he would have been playing the organ throughout his service.

  The challenge Tallis faced was one that no earlier English composer had confronted on the same scale. Henry VIII demanded grand Catholic ceremony; Edward VI's short reign from 1547 to 1553 required English anthems and music suited to the Book of Common Prayer; Mary I restored the Sarum Rite and brought in Philip of Spain's chapel choir, exposing Tallis to Flemish vocal practices; Elizabeth I then re-established Protestant worship but allowed Latin polyphony to persist at court. Each monarch required a different musical language, and Tallis switched fluently between all of them.

  His students shaped English music for a generation after him. Tallis taught William Byrd, later associated with Lincoln Cathedral; Elway Bevin, an organist of Bristol Cathedral and Gentleman of the Chapel Royal; and Sir Ferdinando Heybourne, also known as Richardson, who became a favourite of Queen Elizabeth. Around 1552, Tallis married Joan, the widow of a gentleman of the Chapel Royal. According to both his epitaph and Joan's will, the couple had no children. Byrd kept so close a relationship with Tallis that Tallis became the godfather of Byrd's second son, Thomas Byrd.

  Queen Mary I granted Tallis a lease on a manor in Kent, and he was present at her funeral on the 13th of December 1558 and at Elizabeth's coronation the following month. He remained a prominent member of Elizabeth's household chapel, though as he aged his role became gradually less central.

• 4. The Monopoly and the Cantiones

  ›

  In 1575, Elizabeth I granted Tallis and William Byrd a 21-year monopoly over polyphonic music printing, one of the first arrangements of its kind in England. The patent gave them exclusive rights to print any music in any language - English, Latin, French, and Italian - and sole control over the paper used in music printing. The only publication issued under the monopoly during Tallis's lifetime was the 1575 Cantiones quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur, prefaced by Sir Ferdinando Heybourne, who wrote that Tallis and Byrd intended to place themselves among the great European composers: "Lassus, Gombert, and Ferrabosco."

  The collection did not sell well. Buyers were wary of new publications, and the situation was made worse by the fact that both composers were Roman Catholics. As Catholics, Byrd and Tallis were forbidden from selling imported music and were denied rights to music fonts or printing patents outside their own. They lacked a press of their own and were forced to appeal to Elizabeth for relief. A second petition in 1577 resulted in a joint lease of crown lands granted to the two composers.

  The sombre texts Tallis chose for his two final surviving works in the 1575 collection - In Jejunio and Derelinquat Impius - point toward his deepening ties to recusant Catholic communities then facing persecution. The Paget Household, a known centre of devout Catholicism until Thomas Paget's attainting in 1587, was a place where "songes of Mr Byrdes and Mr Tallys' were sung." Tallis was also closely associated with Anthony Roper, a wealthy recusant who was the grandson of Sir Thomas More and the owner of the Theewes Claviorganum. After the 1575 publication, Tallis is thought to have ceased composing entirely, as no works from his final decade survive.

• 5. Spem in alium and the Great Works

  ›

  Spem in alium, Tallis's most celebrated composition, is scored for eight five-voice choirs - forty voices in total. It is thought to have been commissioned by the Earl of Arundel after he heard a secret performance of Alessandro Striggio's 40-part motet Ecce beatam lucem. The text comes from the apocryphal Book of Judith, which concerns the slaying of Holofernes to save Israel. The musicologist John Milsom proposed that the Earl of Arundel or the Duke of Norfolk - both of whom held Catholic sympathies, with the latter later implicated in the Ridolfi plot - may have commissioned a work whose text carried covert political meaning, reading it as an allegory for a possible assassination of Elizabeth. There is no evidence that Tallis himself was involved in any such scheme.

  The numerology embedded in the motet is striking. The forty voices correspond to the forty days of Christ in the Desert. The motet's length of 69 "longs" encodes T-A-L-L-I-S in Latin letter values. Spem in alium appears in the Nonsuch Palace catalogue, suggesting it was performed for Arundel and Norfolk in that setting.

  David Allinson, musicologist and director of music at Canterbury Christ Church University, remarked in a 2005 NPR segment that Tallis's piece is "about twenty times better" than Striggio's 40-part motet, because where Striggio relies on large harmonic effects and contrasts, Tallis produces a "truly woven polyphonic piece of music." In 2012, Spem in alium reached the number one spot on the Classical Singles Chart after appearing on a classical album tied to the publication of Fifty Shades of Grey.

  Tallis's other significant Elizabethan works include his settings of the Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet for Holy Week and the motet O nata lux. His two large keyboard works, Felix namque I and Felix namque II, preserved in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book as FVB 109 and FVB 110, were described as composed in a virtuosic manner unparalleled by any European keyboard tradition of the period.

• 6. The Parker Psalter and the Canon

  ›

  Archbishop Matthew Parker commissioned Tallis to write nine psalm chant tunes for four voices, and these were published in Parker's Psalter in 1567. One of the nine, known as the "Third Mode Melody," inspired Ralph Vaughan Williams to compose his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis in 1910. Another tune, a setting of Psalm 67, became known as "Tallis's Canon" and was published in a version by Thomas Ravenscroft; that version became the tune for Thomas Ken's hymn "All praise to thee, my God, this night."

  The religious climate in which these tunes were written was demanding. The 1559 Injunctions under Elizabeth required that music in church be "playnelye understanded, as if it were read without singing." Tallis threaded that needle carefully: the nine psalm tunes fulfilled the letter of Protestant plainness, while his more elaborate motets and anthems served the court, where some complexity was permitted at appointed hours of the day. Many families also sang sacred polyphony at home, providing another audience for his more intricate works.

  Earlier in his career, at Canterbury Cathedral in the 1540s, Tallis had already been shaped by Cranmer's push toward syllabic simplicity, where each syllable was set to a single pitch. His Mass for Four Voices, though written in Latin, is built in syllabic homophony with a diminished use of melisma, reflecting that influence. Gaude gloriosa Dei mater, once thought to be a work from Mary I's reign, was redated after renovations at Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1978 uncovered earlier fragments using an English text translated by Queen Katherine Parr, placing the work in the 1540s or earlier.

• 7. Legacy and Rediscovery

  ›

  When William Byrd learned of Tallis's death in November 1585, he wrote Ye Sacred Muses, a musical elegy for his teacher and mentor. Joan Tallis, whose will is dated the 12th of June 1587, survived her husband by nearly four years, spending her remaining time in the care of Richard Cranwell, a gentleman of the Chapel Royal. Anthony Roper received Tallis's gilt cup in Joan's will for the "good favours showed to her late husband," while William Byrd received Tallis's gilt bowl. Thomas Byrd received Tallis's share of the printing monopoly, though it was his father William who made use of it.

  Tallis was buried in the chancel of St Alfege Church, Greenwich. A brass memorial plate placed there after Joan's death was later lost, and his remains may have been disturbed by labourers during the 1710s when the church was rebuilt. His epitaph, recorded by the English clergyman John Strype in his 1720 edition of John Stow's Survey of London, and most likely written by Henry Stanford, a recusant tutor to the Paget Household, read in part: "He serv'd long tyme in chappel with grete prayse / Fower sovereygnes reygnes (a thing not often seen)."

  The Victorian period brought renewed interest, and the epithet "father of English Church music" - never applied to Tallis in his lifetime - was attached to him retrospectively, though Byrd had actually received the title "Father of Musicke" in 17th-century chapel rolls. Thomas Morley, writing in his 1597 Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, named Fairfax, Taverner, Sheppard, Mundy, White, Parsons, and Byrd as equals to Lassus - conspicuously omitting Tallis.

  In the 1920s, the monumental Tudor Church Music series, produced with Carnegie Trust support, revived Tallis's Latin works across his full career. Early music groups including the Clerkes of Oxenford and The Tallis Scholars carried that revival further. Chapelle du Roi recorded his complete works in 2005 to mark five centuries since his estimated birth. The Thomas Tallis School in Kidbrooke opened in 1971, a mixed comprehensive school carrying his name into a very different England than the one where he quietly served four monarchs and outlasted them all.