Tallis by McCarthy Kerry;

Author:McCarthy, Kerry;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 12.1 Bass part of If ye love me in the Wanley partbooks (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Mus. Sch. e. 422, f. 55r). Bodleian Library. Reproduced by permission.

If ye love me may well be Tallis’s most frequently performed work today. Much of its fame has to do with the fact that it is short, in English, easy to sing, and suitable (with some discreet transposition) for a modern four-part church choir, but it is also an excellent piece of music in its own right. The religious upheavals of the 1540s may have been deeply unsettling for a person in Tallis’s position, but this anthem shows no external signs of turmoil. It is as serene and confident as his best Latin motets.

Where did this musical style come from? By far the closest parallel is with a type of plain, accessible music that Tallis and his colleagues already had at their disposal: the secular songs that had become so popular in England during the reign of Henry VIII. Songs of this kind were imported from abroad, written by émigré musicians such as Philip van Wilder, and cultivated (often anonymously) by Tudor composers in their own language. We have already seen two such songs by Tallis himself in the Mulliner Book. French and Flemish chansons, and their local English cousins, had a lot to offer the church musician who needed a fresh start. These pieces had clearly discernible words. Their dimensions were modest. They could be written down without arcane notation and performed without decades of specialist training. They already had a sterling pedigree in English courtly circles, where anything in an international style was in high demand. It is no surprise that many of the earliest English anthems bear a very close resemblance to chansons of just this type. In fact Thomas Caustun, one of Tallis’s colleagues in the Chapel Royal, furnished a number of foreign secular songs with pious words and published them as sacred music under his own name—a ruse that went undiscovered until recent years.12 Tallis did not do that (as far as we know), but a piece such as Hear the voice and prayer or If ye love me uses exactly the same musical devices found in Northern European chansons: plain declamation of the text, tightly organized little passages of polyphony alternating with four-part block chords, and the practice of repeating whole sections of music note-for-note. The style of the earliest English anthems would not have felt the least bit unfamiliar to singers in the late 1540s. It was a style they already knew from court and chamber. Now it was being brought into church.

Tallis went on composing this kind of small English anthem, at least occasionally, for the next two decades. The humble four-voice style was a highly useful resource in his rhetorical armory, and he did not abandon it when the turbulent years of the early Reformation were over. One anthem of this exact sort, O Lord give thy Holy Spirit, was not composed before the 1560s, probably not before the mid-1560s.

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