Chapter 1 - ‘It is here that we must look for Tallis’: Tallis's music

Summary

In the course of this book I will examine many different pieces of music: music that ranges from simple harmonisations of plainsong to the pinnacle of technical complexity; that was performed by farm labourers and ‘country boys in frocks’, and in the Chapel Royal and at the creations of Princes; that was published in elaborately bound volumes selling for many pounds and in single sheets costing only pennies; that was attributed to Tallis, written by Tallis, and written about Tallis. The one thing that unifies these disparate musical phenomena into an entity that could be considered a valid subject for investigation is the over-arching figure of the composer. To someone immersed in the musical and academic culture of the West in the early twenty-first century (characterised by Bruno Nettl as a ‘denizen of the Music Building’), this may seem to be an unremarkable way of approaching music, but as Nettl points out in his ‘Ethnomusicological Study of Western Culture’, the current musicological primacy of the composer is neither universal nor self-evident. Michael Talbot has argued that the change in status of the composer is one of the most important that took place in the musical practice of Western Europe around the turn of the nineteenth century, giving rise, in response to Lydia Goehr, to his own ‘central claim’:

between 1780 and 1820, approximately, a genre-centred and performer-centred practice became a composer-centred one. Ordinary music-lovers in their mass [… began to ‘sort’ music in their minds primarily according to composer, and not, as previously, according to genre […] or performer.