Tudor Church Music Vol.1 - The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips

Tudor Church Music - Volume 1
The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips
Gimell CDGIM 209

English sacred music of the sixteenth century has formed the backbone of everything The Tallis Scholars have done, right from the beginning. The original reason why we chose to have ten core singers in the group was because the English composers of this period had developed a choir with five basic voice-ranges, instead of the more normal four, and I had decided that the dazzling sonorities inherent in their writing benefited from having two singers on each part. This dazzle is emphasized if the music is sung at a high pitch, which led us increasingly to perform with four sopranos - two high and two lower - above two countertenors, two tenors and two basses. Thus was born the classic Tallis Scholars line-up, which later could be adapted to sing much mainland European renaissance music as well. Such a line-up sounds almost inevitable now, but it wasn't in 1973.

This volume contain some of the most substantial music written anywhere in Europe in the early years of the renaissance; and it shows just how different English music was from what the Franco-Flemish composers had developed on the Continent. Instead of an inward-looking, contemplative mood, there is extrovert, brilliant writing. Instead of melodic lines which tend to move by step, chant-like, there are leaps and jumps so virtuosic that they rival the coloratura writing of solo vocal music from centuries later. Where Josquin has a reliably developing harmonic background, Browne sets down massive chords which change slowly, allowing the upper voices to festoon them with ornaments. Looked at historically the English composers of this period can almost be classified as ‘late medieval' for their archaic compositional practices and quirky scorings, yet the sound world they created is one of the most identifiable and compelling of all time. Once the listener is hooked on these sonorities nothing else ever seems quite so good. The second volume of The Tallis Scholars sing Tudor Church Music (CDGIM 210) shows how this characteristically English sound developed in the high renaissance, a picture which is amplified and brought to a conclusion in The Tallis Scholars sing Thomas Tallis (CDGIM 203) and The Tallis Scholars sing William Byrd (CDGIM 208).

There is no better place to start in illustrating pure sonority than with the music of John Browne (d.1505). The sheer length of these five antiphons shows that something unusual is happening; and then one notices the scorings, each different from the last. It seems that once Browne felt he had squeezed every last nuance from a sonority, it was time to try a new one. The largest in every sense is the eight-voice O Maria salvatoris (TrMAATTBB). This is backed up by three six-voice compositions, all for different groupings: Stabat iuxta (TTTTBB), O regina mundi clara (ATTTBarB), and the Stabat mater (TrMAATB). The most ‘normal' is the five-voice Salve regina (TrMATB). All the pieces come from the Eton Choirbook, in which Browne was given pre-eminence: O Maria salvatoris, the only eight-voice composition in the volume, opens it.

The Salve regina and the Stabat mater are the pieces which for years have maintained Browne's reputation as a composer. They are both highly expressive, though for many commentators the Stabat mater is the supreme masterpiece of the period, contrasting dramatic writing with contemplative passages in an emotional world of contrasts thought to have surfaced first with Monteverdi. This drama famously breaks through the surface at the word ‘Crucifige', which Browne hammers into place before turning inwards again with the phrases which follow: ‘O quam gravis illa poena' (‘O how bitter was your anguish'). For me, however, the piece which sums Browne up most perfectly is the Stabat iuxta. Its scoring (TTTTBB) has probably militated against frequent performances, but it is just that scoring which makes such an impact. With six voices operating within a compass of less than two octaves the opportunities for dense, almost cluster chords are unrivalled. The use of low thirds in chordal spacing is not encouraged by text-books of correct polyphonic procedure, but Browne simply couldn't avoid them with this scoring, and they are thrilling. Density of sonority leads to other delights, like false relations and other dissonances, which characterize much of the piece and culminate in the final bars.

William Cornysh's four-voice Gaude virgo mater Christi (AATB), also in the Eton Choirbook, is a brief example of the genius of a very different composer, a kind of alter ego to John Browne. Where Browne was inward and at times mystical in mood, Cornysh (d.1523) was typically extrovert and clear-textured. In Gaude virgo he sends his four low voices rushing around with characteristic verve, towards the end employing strict imitation between them at the resonant words ‘Mortis in periculo'. Later in this volume there are two more pieces by Cornysh: the ineffable Salve regina, one of his grandest and at times most theatrical conceptions, and the more modest and purely beautiful Ave Maria, mater Dei, a concert favourite of ours. The miracle of the Salve regina is how Cornysh never lets the momentum sag over such a broad canvas, constantly alternating powerful trios between the lower voices with more luminous sections involving the higher ones. All this culminates in a rhapsodic passage in praise of the Virgin, building unforgettably to the final word ‘Salve'. Never was Cornysh's dramatic sense more tellingly on display.

The remainder of the music in this volume is made up of two of the three Western Wind Masses - those by John Taverner (c1490-18 October 1545) and Christopher Tye (c1505-before 15 March 1573). The third one - by Sheppard - is included on The Tallis Scholars sing Tudor Church Music - Volume Two (CDGIM 210). Together these three Western Wind Masses make a unique set. Not only was there no other example in English renaissance music of a linked series of Mass compositions by different composers, there was also no precedent in English composition for a Mass based on a secular tune. If Taverner's was the first of this set to be written, it was breaking important new ground, probably deliberately emulating the justly famed continental Mass-settings on such popular songs as L'homme armé and Mille regretz. Tye and Sheppard then took up the challenge of turning Taverner's initiative into a Continental-style series. From the listener's point of view the linking is both obvious and satisfying since the three settings use the same unusual four-part scoring of treble, mean, tenor and bass; and the Western Wind melody, beautifully tuneful in itself, is almost always audible within the polyphony.

It is always assumed that Taverner's setting was the earliest, and that the other two were written to complement it. Certainly it is the most inventive, using the melody thirty-six times in all and treating it as the scaffolding for a set of variations. These variations were written without any free passages in between the quotations of the melody, nine variations in each of the four movements. Twenty-one of the statements are in the top part (where they are at their most audible), ten in the tenor and five in the bass. The melody is never used as a traditional cantus firmus. The end result is that the Taverner version is the most varied and the most sectional of the three, the beginning of a quotation almost always bringing with it a new scoring and new figuration. It is for this reason that tribute is paid to Taverner's resourcefulness in inventing these figurations and their counterpoints - he came up with well over thirty of them, each one adding something to one's appreciation of the melody itself.

The one thing Taverner did not do was put the melody in the second voice down - the mean. It was surely to fill out the scheme, and to pay a kind of homage, that Tye put the melody in the mean only. Keeping it in one part made it easier for him to elide the quotations, as happens at the very beginning where three statements run into each other. This in turn means that Tye's setting is more homogeneous than Taverner's, though also more virtuosic, for example at ‘Benedictus'. In this, and in some truly bizarre harmonies elsewhere, one has the sense that Tye, like his contemporaries White and Sheppard, was searching for new expressive options. They did not look to Europe to find them.

Peter Phillips 2008

Renaissance Giants - The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips

Renaissance Giants
The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips
Gimell CDGIM 207

The High Renaissance is well known for its cultural giants. Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and above all Michelangelo epitomize a period when the human spirit seemed to grow and gain in confidence. There is no more visible proof of this than Michelangelo's seventeen-foot-tall statue of David, more than twice the height of any major piece of sculpture before it. And Italy was not the only country which suddenly seemed to be populated by more-than-life-size men of genius, Shakespeare and Cervantes among them. This collection is designed to illustrate the musical side of this astonishing period in European history, from England via Flanders and Spain to Rome.

Music and musicians can bestride their world in one of two ways. They can either write a masterpiece which is in itself colossal; or they can write so many great works that they slowly change the countryside around them. Thomas Tallis did both. By writing music of the highest quality in every style of the period for nearly sixty years he influenced everybody who followed him. And he also wrote Spem in alium, perhaps not his most influential composition - who could follow it? - but unquestionably the largest single work of the period. Conceived for forty independent voice-parts arranged in eight five-part choirs, Spem in alium, like Michelangelo's David, seems to break through what lesser men had come to accept as normal in music and enter a new world. The effect of forty parts coming together in properly argued polyphony is quite staggering. How did Tallis do it, without modern aids like computers or even sufficiently large pieces of manuscript paper on which to line up all the voices? There is much about Spem in alium which is not known - like why he thought of such a thing in the first place - but the greatest imponderable is how any mind could invent so much detail. Nothing comes close to rivalling it.

The Western Wind Mass by John Taverner is big in a quite different way from Spem in alium. Throughout the Renaissance period there was a vogue for taking popular tunes of the day and dressing them up, a technique which jazz musicians were to emulate in later times. Taverner chose the beautiful melody known as ‘Westron Wynde', a love song which encourages the wind and the rain to do their worst so long as the singer and his beloved can be together. In choosing such a profane model for a Mass-setting Taverner was not in fact doing anything very uncommon; what was unusual was quoting the tune thirty-six times. I do not know any set of variations before Purcell's ‘grounds' to go so far; and, like Purcell, Taverner has the imagination to make them all interesting. He is quite deliberate about it: nine statements in each of the four movements, each one taking on new ideas and counter-themes. No one can miss the tune itself, since it is quoted twenty-one times in the top part, where it is always perfectly audible. It also comes ten times in the tenor part and five in the bass, though it is never sung by the altos. Taverner also helps the listener by making each variation self-contained and running them straight into each other without extra material. This makes the music quite sectional, alternating solo and full passages, but with the melody always present. Taverner was sufficiently a giant of his time to start a brief tradition of Western Wind settings: there are examples by his younger contemporaries Christopher Tye and John Sheppard.

If ever there was a giant among Renaissance composers, it was Josquin. It has become something of a modern cliché to compare his standing with that of Beethoven: a composer who could take any form of music and transform it. Part of his great influence came from the fact that he travelled throughout Europe, the first super-star among composers, a fact which was acknowledged at the time not least because he expected to be paid more than anyone else. He was especially present in Rome, from where he undoubtedly shaped the course of Italian polyphony in general, and Palestrina's style in particular. Josquin's Missa Pange lingua is perhaps his best-known work and possibly his last Mass-setting. In general outline it is not dissimilar from Taverner's Western Wind Mass: a set of variations on a well-known tune, but in this case the tune is a chant melody from the liturgy for the feast of Corpus Christi; and Josquin almost never quotes it straight. Indeed it is so hidden in the polyphonic texture that one may think of the whole composition as a fantasy on a plainsong, rather than a set of variations. The clearest statement is at the beginning of the third Agnus Dei, where the melody finally emerges in recognizable form in the soprano part.

Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was by far and away the most celebrated Italian composer of the High Renaissance and, like Josquin, a legend in his lifetime. He was also, unlike any other Renaissance composer of any nationality, celebrated from his own time to ours without interruption. I wonder if any other composer in the history of music, apart from Wagner, has had so much written about him. And apart from all this he was working in and around the Vatican at the same time as Michelangelo in his later years, whom he must have known. As a result there is no other composer who is so closely identified with the culture of the Italian Renaissance period. His Missa Brevis was probably written for the Sistine Chapel choir to sing, which would mean that its first performances would have taken place surrounded by Michelangelo's newly painted frescoes. Why the piece is called ‘Brevis' is something of a mystery, since the music is not especially short and all the usual movements are present. It may be because it is scored for only four voices, though this was quite commonplace. The final, glorious Agnus Dei increases the number of voices to five by introducing a second soprano part, in canon with the first. Unlike his teacher Tallis, William Byrd didn't write any single gigantic work by which he may be remembered. Indeed he is best remembered for his many small-scale pieces which, despite their size, revolutionized English composition. Like several of the other giants in this collection, Byrd turned his hand to every form of music available to him, transforming them as he went: music for keyboard, lute, viol consort, voices with viol consort, sacred vocal writing for both the Catholic and Protestant churches, and madrigals. To compare him with Shakespeare has some force since their lives overlapped, they both worked in London at the same time, and they both had the same characteristic intelligence of mind which penetrated to the heart of the words they were involved with. Byrd's Mass for four voices is one of the three Masses he wrote in the 1590s and published, without title pages, in defiance of the Protestant ban on Catholic artefacts. This is not gigantic music in any sense, but subtle, intimate writing which in recent times has achieved greater renown than many much weightier musical edifices of the period.

The Spanish sixteenth century had its own great men and women to celebrate, from St Ignatius Loyola and St Teresa of Avila, to El Greco, Morales and Victoria. It will be seen from these names that the accent there in the High Renaissance was on the Catholic Church and spiritual life. Tomás Luis de Victoria was no exception to this. After being ordained priest in Rome in 1575 he spent the years from 1587 until his death employed at the court in Madrid, initially acting as chaplain to the Dowager Empress Maria, for whose funeral he wrote this Requiem in 1603. It comes as no surprise to discover that Victoria only wrote sacred music, and not very much of it by some standards, but what he did write is of such intensity that for many people his larger works, and especially the six-voice Requiem, are without rival amongst High Renaissance masterpieces. The slow, inevitable unfolding of this music, movement by movement, in complete serenity surely has a message for all time.

Peter Phillips 2006