Music and Vinyl: Thomas Tallis

BBC Music Magazine has this introduction to the famous 40-part motet Spem In Alium by Thomas Tallis (1505-1585):

"Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium was composed in c1570 and is scored for 40 voices. It is arranged for eight choirs with five voices in each. Tallis set the text of the Matins response Spem in alium and it is likely that he designed it to be heard ‘in the round’, with the audience seated within a circle of singers. Beginning with a single voice, the composer deploys as many effects as he can, displaying a mastery of counterpoint and scoring all 40 voices together at four key moments.

"According to the notebook of a London law student, Thomas Wateridge (writing in 1611), a song was ‘sent into England of 30 parts’ from Italy. He recalls that a music-loving duke ‘asked whether none of our Englishmen could sett as good a songe’. The nobleman is thought to be Thomas Howard, the Fourth Duke of Norfolk. Wateridge notes how Tallis took up the challenge. ‘Tallice…would undertake ye Matter, wch he did and made one of 40 partes…’.

"The Italian work that inspired Tallis is likely to have been Striggio’s 40-part motet or mass. The two composers probably met each other in London in 1567 when Striggio was on a European tour with this work.

"It is unclear when the first performance took place. It may have been at London’s Arundel House, after the Duke of Norfolk’s release from prison in 1570, or maybe in the octagonal hall of Nonsuch Palace in Surrey."

David Wulstan and his choir Clerkes if Oxenford broke new ground in performing Spem in Alium at a higher pitch than was normal and with just one person to a part. Robert Hugill commented that the performance was "notable for its transparency and beauteous clarity of line. Listening to this recording, I was struck again by the striking difference between it and most other recordings. Not everyone will like the sound-world that Wulstan conjures up, but one cannot help but admire the wonderful control of his high (very high) sopranos. And the recording transformed the way we think of the piece."

Linked below is a BBC Radio 3 Early Music Show programme interviewing David Wulstan.