Tallis, Thomas

Tallis studied music and was a chorister at the Royal Chapel (London). From 1532 he worked as an organist of the Benedictine monastery in Dover ( Kent ), in 1538 - 1540 - as an organist of the Augustan Abbey in Waltham ( Essex ), in 1540-42 as a singer in the Canterbury Cathedral . Having become a regular member of the Royal Chapel in 1543, Tallis composed music for the royal court until the end of his days. Despite the decisive changes in the life of the church that Anglicanism promised, Tallis only slightly expanded (unlike his famous student and colleague W. Byrd ) the genre-stylistic palette of his work and generally adhered to the traditions of "Catholic" vocal polyphony .

His most significant Latin motets are written on various liturgical and secular occasions ( magnificates , lamentations , hymns, antiphons , Sacrae cantiones ), of which the most famous is Spem in alium (1573) - a grandiose repository for 8 five-voice choirs, that is for 40 votes ^[1] . Tallis also owns two complete masses (Salve intemerata virgo and Puer natus est nobis) and a number of separate parts of the mass . Tallis’s Protestant anthems (about 20 in total) are often counterfeitings of his motets (for example, the armes “Arise, o Lord”, “When Jesus went” and “With all our hearts” are three counterfeits of the Salvator mundi motet). Antem Tallis's “If ye love me” ( John 14: 15-17 ) is one of his most popular works.

Intravital portraits of the composer have not been preserved, the images known today are created more than a century and a half after his death.

• William Bird wrote the elegy of Ye Sacred Muses on Tallis’s death, her last line: “Tallis passed away, music died.”
• Fantasy on the theme of Tallis was written by Ralph Vaughan Williams ( 1910 ).
• In 1973 , the UK created the vocal ensemble The Tallis Scholars , performing Renaissance music. Its leader is Peter Phillips .
• The complete works of Tallis since 1997, on the label Signum, began recording the band Chapelle du Roi under the direction of Alistair Dixon. The last (ninth) volume of this collection was published in 2005.

• Morning and evening prayer and communion, set forthe in 4 parts, to the song. London, 1565.
• Cantiones quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur. London, 1575.

• Doe P. Tallis. London New York: Oxford UP, 1968; 2nd ed. 1976.
• Milsom JR English Polyphonic Style in Transition: A Study of the Sacred Music of Thomas Tallis. Diss. Univ. of Oxford, 1983.
• Doe, Paul and Allinson, David : Thomas Tallis // Grove Music Online. N, Y., London, 2001; accessed 5 May 2007 (subscription access)
• Cole, Suzanne. Thomas Tallis and his Music in Victorian England. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2008.

• Biography, discography