Sound Bites: If Ye Love Me by Thomas Tallis
Subscribe to my monthly newsletter here for all my latest writing.
Who was Thomas Tallis? This is the question that nobody seems to know and everyone seems to ask. And it’s a good question. Wouldn't we all love to know just a little bit more about his personality, his daily habits, did he put milk in his tea first like Andy Burnham or not? But we don't, we can't and we never will. He was born in 1505 and died in 1585, or at least we think that's when he lived – again, nobody really knows. But, maybe there's something liberating about the fact we don't know when he lived; in a way, in not knowing these things, we're liberated from the biography and can just enjoy his music for what it is. 'How can we know the dancer from the dance?' wrote Yeats, and in the case of Tallis we could go even further and ask: how can we know the composer from his compositions? Well, I think we can, and that Tallis is a case in point.
So, what do we hear when we listen to the music of Thomas Tallis? I think we can hear in this piece a lover of harmony, melody, and someone who was nothing short of a genius. Moreover, listening to a recent episode of Composer of the Week which focused on Tallis, you get the sense of someone who was utterly devoted to his life as a composer. Not only that, but we get a sense of someone who was devoted to the idea of creating something of utmost beauty through the human voice. Not only that, someone who had made something so well crafted that it could last for centuries afterwards.
In 'Ozymandias' by P. B. Shelley, he paints the picture of a cruel tyrant whose statue is left to crumble in the desert long after their death and we infer from this that the life of a human will be forgotten long after their death. And perhaps, for those whose lives are/were built on pursuit of wealth this is what befall them. While the record of the life of Tallis has all but disappeared (and let's face, we're all a bit a shaky even on the details of the life of someone like Shakespeare) it is his music that remains, and not just on paper, but in the throats of singers. And when the choristers sing Tallis, they are reviving his life, his time, his temperament, his sense and sensibility, and that's the lesson to be learned from the the music of Tallis. This was a lesson professed by Hippocrates: ars longa, vita brevis.
Tallis is dead; long live Tallis.
