The Tallis Scholars

Our 50th birthday season gives me an opportunity to program some of the pieces that have meant most to us over the years. For this reason I have chosen to do just one piece by my favorite composers—though there could have been many more.

In the first half, we start with the anthem that first excited my interest in Renaissance polyphony, Gibbons’ O clap your hands, an eight-voice tour de force. I was 14 when I first heard it in 1968, and I have never looked back. Obviously we needed to include a composition by Tallis; it didn’t matter very much which one, but his seven-voice Suscipe quaeso is one of his greatest. Nico Muhly, the New York-based composer, has recently written several wonderful settings for us: Rough Notes refers to the stars visible in the Antarctic. Byrd’s Tribue domine is one of our most performed pieces; we have sung it over 130 times, the first time in 1991.

The second half features music by Palestrina and Josquin, on whose sonorities we have largely founded our own sound and our international reputation. Josquin’s Absalon fili mi goes well with Gombert’s Lugebat David, since they are based on the same story of a father’s loss. We have made a special feature of Gombert’s music over the years, having recorded all his Magnificats in 1996. We have also made a special feature of Arvo Pärt’s music, having dedicated a disc to him in 2014. John Rutter needs little introduction, though his style is not always ours. This is a masterpiece.

I could have included so many other pieces, but I think these make a satisfying sequence. I am heartened to think there is plenty more to explore in the years to come.

—Peter Phillips

In 1973, Peter Phillips, then an undergraduate organ scholar in Oxford, founded a group dedicated to the performance of Renaissance polyphony. Fifty years, and well over 2,300 performances later, they are the premier modern interpreters of this music, while also developing fruitful relationships with the cream of today’s composers. This program celebrates those 50 years, honoring the composer and the style that have (literally) made the group’s name, while also reaching right up to the present by including several modern figures who have been inspired by that distinctive sound.

The group’s founder first encountered O clap your hands when he was 14 years old. This is Orlando Gibbons, the masterful 17th-century English composer, at his most direct, forceful, and exuberant. This celebratory piece was likely written to fulfil the requirements of the Oxford degree of Doctor of Music, for which composers would produce exercises in counterpoint in as many as eight vocal parts. Gibbons’ effort could not be further from dusty academia, exhibiting juggernaut-like momentum and a consummate command of choral texture.

It is no surprise that the music of Thomas Tallis has dominated the performance schedule of the group that bears his name. A shrewd navigator of the unpredictable political currents of 16th-century England, Tallis was canny enough to end up with a royal monopoly on music printing—a very handy source of income. Suscipe quaeso is drawn from the 1575 Cantiones sacrae, a collection published jointly with William Byrd, thanking Elizabeth I for her patronage and celebrating this new freedom. It is a prayer for absolution, cast in seven voices that enter slowly, building up a polyphony that is then abruptly stripped down for the word “peccavi”—“I have sinned.”

Rough Notes was written for the Tallis Scholars by the New York-based composer Nico Muhly. It sets two fragments from Robert Falcon Scott’s diaries, made towards the end of his doomed journey to Antarctica. Muhly writes: “The first part depicts the extraordinary aurora australis in quite musical terms, with ‘arches, bands, and curtains, always in rapid movement.’ The second is a severe foreshadowing of the crew’s deaths, promising that they will ‘meet death with as great a fortitude as ever in the past.’ The poetry leads to a sort of resolute but resigned conclusion, facing the inevitable but never quite reaching it in text or music. This is the first piece of secular music I’ve written for the Tallis Scholars, and tried, here, to maximize their skills as colorists and dramatic communicators.”

The aforementioned Cantiones sacrae publication suggests that, whatever their private sympathies—and modern scholarship suggests they may have been closet Catholics—both Tallis and Byrd were adept at playing the game of Tudor politics. They each contributed 17 pieces to the monumental collection, one for each year that Queen Elizabeth had been on the throne. Tribue Domine is one of the most extensive of the motets featured. Taking a text attributed to the early Church Father, Augustine, Byrd rapidly alternates textures as the words enumerate the virtues of the Trinity. In its use of smaller forces contrasting with rich homophony it evokes the English tradition of the composer’s forebears. A fantastically extended Gloria makes a fitting coda, a monument to the splendors of Tudor polyphony.

The text of the motet Tu es Petrus is of special importance to Rome, the seat of the Catholic Church, which derives its authority from the lineage of St Peter, the first Pope. (In the scripture, Christ anoints Peter as the “rock” upon which he will build his church.) As a Roman composer, Palestrina was called on to write multiple settings of this key passage. Tonight, we hear the version in six parts—a taut and masterly setting, sufficiently popular in the composer’s own age that he wrote an entire mass setting based upon it. Everything works to underscore the confidence and charisma of the Counter-Reformation Catholic church; high and low voices alternate and then cohere in rock-solid homophony, only to break into joyous melisma.

John Rutter’s genius for melody and its sympathetic arrangement has won him devotees from across the English-speaking world and beyond. The Hymn to the Creator of Light proves him equally capable in more ambitious forms. It was written for performance in Gloucester Cathedral, on the occasion of the dedication of a window com­memorating the great English composer Herbert Howells. At the beginning, ominous unison from one choir is answered by celestial harmony from the other. A more propulsive central section leads to a meditative finale that cleverly weaves the initial motif together with the melody of the chorale “Schmücke dich.”

In a moving passage of scripture in the Old Testament book of 2 Samuel, King David is brought the news that, following a battle, one of his sons has been killed. Despite the fact that Absalom had been in open rebellion against his father, David still weeps for his loss. The story has inspired countless composers across the centuries. Lugebat David Absalom has been attributed to Nicholas Gombert; it is a motet with a curious history, which may originally have had secular words and subsequently been given a contrafactum, or new sacred text. It is a profound meditation on grief, painted on a broad, 10-voice canvas. In Absalon fili mi, probably authored by Gombert’s teacher Josquin, the descent into grief is described in a piece that seems to constantly spiral downwards in pitch, lower and lower as it traces the depths of sorrow.

It is often said of a good composer that they could set the phone book to music and it would still be compelling. Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s Which was the son of… comes very close to proving this axiom—the phone book, in this case, being a chapter from Luke’s gospel listing the genealogy of Jesus. An impenetrable and entirely undramatic list of bizarre names, one might think, and yet in Pärt’s hands it is riveting. Crisp rhythms, syncopations, and shifts between meters barrel the piece towards its end—which is also its beginning: God.

—James M. Potter, 2023