TALLIS, THOMAS

Thomas Tallis was one of the best-known English composers of the sixteenth century. Little is known about his early life, but he began his fifty-year musical career as an organist and choirmaster, first at Dover Priory, then at St. Mary-at-Hill near Billingsgate, then at Waltham Abbey. When the abbey was dissolved in 1540 by Henry VIII,* that monarch made Tallis a gentleman of the Chapel Royal, in which group of musicians he remained during the reigns of Edward VI, Mary I,* and Elizabeth I.* Tallis was known as a mild and quiet man, and this temperament probably enabled him to survive these years at court under both Protestant and Catholic monarchs. Tallis was famed as a teacher as well as a composer. With his most famous pupil, William Byrd,* he was granted a monopoly over printed music and music paper by Elizabeth I in 1575; producing only one book, their unsuccessful jointCantiones sacrae(Sacred songs, 1575), their business was a failure. Tallis was godfather to Byrd's son Thomas, to whom he left his share of the monopoly. Tallis was survived by Joane, his wife of thirty-three years; the couple had no children.

Tallis's Latin works include two masses, two magnificats, a number of lam­entations, and fifty-one motets; in English he composed eighteen anthems and numerous other works. He was much respected by his contemporaries; Byrd's elegy for him concludes, "Tallis is dead, and music dies." He is well represented in twentieth-century hymnals, and the ten-person early-music chorus the Tallis Scholars bears his name.

P. Doe, Tallis, 1968.