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Thomas Tallis: The Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet, Part I
BG-551, original LP cover

The Lamentations of Jeremiah, the section in the Bible that follows the Book of Jeremiah the Prophet, is a set of compelling verses of specific structure. These verses demand a high degree of depth and discipline from any composer setting them musically. Their poetry has challenged the imagination of a long line of distinguished composers, beginning with the Renaissance master, Ockeghem, and including Arcadelt, Claude le Jeune, Morales, Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Palestrina, and François Couperin. In the Jewish tradition, the text is adopted on days of fasting and mourning; in the Christian tradition, the musical work is sung during Tenebrae (Ténèbres, the "dark hours" marked by the extinguishing of candles) celebrated the Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of Holy Week before Easter.

Both Thomas Tallis (c. 1505-1585) and François Couperin (whose version of the Lamentations, the , can be heard on disc 8 of the present volume) set the text for the lessons as follows: the work begins with the introductory line Incipit Lamentation Jeremiae Prophetae announcing the source of the Lesson. The first five stanzas are then sung, each stanza prefaced by a singing of the Hebrew letter (Aleph, Beth, Ghimel, Daleth, He…) which identifies it. (Curiously, Tallis begins his "Daleth" stanza with a line from the prior stanza.) The fifth stanza closes with a line of text, Jerusalem convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum, enjoining Jerusalem to turn to the Lord. Tallis's work concludes there. Like others before them, Tallis and Couperin followed Gregorian example in setting all of the text, from the announcement (Incipit Lamentatio) to the exhortation (Jerusalem convertere), including musical renditions of the Hebrew letters.

A giant among Tudor polyphonists, Tallis earned a lasting reputation in sixteenth-century England, not only because of the remarkable quality of his work, but also because his fourscore years had enabled him to serve four monarchs: Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth. Before he served as Organist and Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, he gained wide musical experience in such varied ecclesiastical establishments as Waltham Abbey, the city church of St. Mary-at-Hill, Billingsgate, and Canterbury Cathedral. These appointments drew mainly upon Tallis's skill as a singer and organist, and although here is little doubt that he began to compose before the year 1540, which saw the dissolution of Waltham Abbey and the immediate loss of his Post there, it was not until the more leisured years of service in the Chapel Royal that he produced the bulk of his liturgical polyphony.

Tallis was a prolific composer of both Latin and English church music, much of which has come down to us in reasonably complete form. His music for strings, for keyboard instruments, and for madrigal groups has survived in such small quantity that it is certain to represent only a fraction of what he actually wrote. His church music, however, is still sung today and still retains those ineradicable signs of nobility and greatness that gave it power to endure the ages. Besides the anthems and services he composed for the Anglican ritual, he contributed nine tunes to Archbishop Parker's Whole Psalter. One of these tunes, slightly re-arranged, has gained fame as a hymn-tune under the name of Tallis's Canon, while another was used by Vaughan Williams in his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis for double string orchestra. Churches all over the world continue to use Tallis' settings of the Litany, and of the Versicles and Responses. The anthems fall into a number of classes whose margin of overlap has so far not been satisfactorily defined. Certain of them were undoubtedly written in the first instance for use in the earliest services in the vernacular, and were eventually published by Day in his Morning and Evening Prayer. Others were adapted, possibly by Tallis himself, from Latin motets; and after his death, the process of adaptation continued, even to the extent of providing a prayer against the success of the Spanish Armada.

In his deeply emotional and expressive setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, Tallis has drawn upon part of the text chanted in the first Nocturn of Maundy Thursday. The awe and solemnity of Holy Week is faithfully mirrored in the contemplative polyphony of five men's voices. There is no place here for the brightness of choirboys' voices, the range of the music as well as the occasion for which it was written giving ample evidence of the darker tone colors required. In this work, Tallis has excelled himself, and has created sixteenth-century vocal art that has few, if any, peers. He has structured the work in two parts, divided between beth and ghimel. To help define this division, he adds two lines of text: he concludes Part I with the line "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum" and begins Part II with the line "De lamentatione Jeremiae Prophetae."

In 1575 Queen Elizabeth granted Tallis and his pupil William Byrd a joint monopoly of the printing of music and music-paper, and the two composers replied by dedicating to her their Cantiones Sacrae, published in the same year. Elizabeth had by then reigned for seventeen years, and accordingly each composer contributed seventeen motets to the collection.

Hidden away amongst Tallis' so-called motets are freely-composed psalm settings and cantus firmus compositions including antiphons, responsories, and hymns. The two last-named categories normally require the addition of plainsong verses if the true liturgical form is to be recreated; and it is precisely this contrast between plainsong and polyphony that provides not only form but artistic cohesion and integrity. Usually Tallis composed only the alternate verses of hymns, and took it for granted that a set beginning "Adesto nunc propitius" would be, in performance, begun Salvator mundi Domine, these three words being intoned by a single voice and followed by the remainder of the verse, entirely in plainsong, by the choir or congregation. Although there are occasional exceptions to the custom (O natal lux de lumine) the majority of Tallis' hymn settings adhere to the old tradition of alternatim performance, hallowed by rubrics in medieval service-books such as the Erlyngham Breviary, now in the chapter library of Salisbury Cathedral. One page of this beautifully illuminated manuscript tells us that in hymn singing "the ruler of the choir should begin the hymn as far as the second or third word; and the choir on the side of the officiating priest continue that verse, and the other part of the choir on the other side, the next verse; and so they alternate each verse to the end: which is to be observed throughout the whole year: the choir at the end of the last verse responding Amen."

– From notes by Denis Stevens and Abraham Veinus

William Byrd and His Age
BG-557, original LP cover

Just as the splendid Elizabethan dramas had their roots in folk plays, so the Elizabethan songs and madrigals drew from popular songs and ballads, sung by "tinkers, milkmaids and carters" (in other words, English folk music). The audience for the new plays and songs was the London population, not just the high-born, but also the low-born, perhaps because of these folk roots. The best secular documented music, like the best drama, occurred after 1588, but the works of the 1570s and early '80s are fascinating too, as they represent this transition from folk to art songs, as in Buy New Broom.

The influential and respected William Byrd (c. 1543-1623), a great composer of religious music, turned to secular song in the 1580s. His first such publication, Psalms, Sonnets and Songs of Sadness and Piety, made into Music of Five parts, was the first madrigal book by any composer to be published in England. It appeared in 1588. The "Epistle to the Reader," with which Byrd prefaced his volume, is a perfect example of the "music for daily use" approach:

Ye Sacred Muses, Byrd's elegy on the death of Thomas Tallis, evokes a sense of personal loss, as Byrd was "bred up to musick under Thomas Tallis." The drop of the voice, first a fourth and then a fifth, illustrates the words "come down, come down." Lullaby, My Sweet Little Baby is found in Byrd's 1588 publication quoted above, in the third section of the book, "Songs of Piety and Sadness." This was one of the solo songs, with viol accompaniment, rearranged by Byrd as a madrigal. With his usual attention to the practical considerations of performance, Byrd in his foreword lists this song with a number of others as those "of the highest compasse." The words refer to the "massacre of the innocents" unleashed by King Herod.

The first selection, My Sweet Little Darling, a consort song from an early 17th-century set of viol partbooks in the British Museum, was originally attributed to William Byrd, but is now considered of doubtful authenticity. A second copy of this song, in a manuscript in Christ Church, Oxford, is next to the song Ah, Silly Poor Joas. Because of the attribution to William Byrd of the former song, the latter was also speculated to have been composed by Byrd. Both songs are now listed with anonymous authorship.

Ah, Silly Poor Joas and Guichardo belong to a genre of consort song labeled by Peter Warlock the "death song." These songs were usually settings of set speeches in plays performed by schoolboys. They were through-composed rather than strophic and more chromatic, using more use of cross relations than other consort songs.

Thomas Whythorne (1528-96) left an autobiography, which was discovered in 1955. A Protestant, he left England for Italy after Mary Tudor came to power, returning in 1555. He served the Duchess of Northumberland, later moving to Cambridge to work as a private tutor and business assistant for the family of a merchant. In 1565, he decided to devote himself exclusively to music. His song Buy New Broom is found in a volume published in 1571, of "Songs for three, fower, and five voyces composed and made by Thomas Whythorne, Gent., the which songes be of sundry sorts, that is to say, some long, some short, some hard, some easie to be songe, and some betwene both, also some solemne, and some pleasant or mery." Part songs in Whythorne's collection are in the solo style of the lutenist composers of a generation later, with the melody on the top and the lower voices subordinate. Buy New Broom, the earliest printed example of an English solo song with viol accompaniment, is apparently based on a genuine street cry of the period.

William Corkine, composer of What Booteth Love?, was probably a lutenist. He published two books of airs accompanied by lute and bass viol, along with dances for lyra viol, in 1610 and 1612. Richard Nicholson, long-time choirmaster and organist of Magdalen College at Oxford (from 1595 to his death in 1639), wrote the spirited song In a Merry May Morn. Nicholson, although not well known today, was held in high regard by his peers, as is evidenced by the inclusion of one of his madrigals in Morley's by-invitation-only anthology Triumphes of Oriana (1601).

The music of Robert Parsons (d. 1570) is notable for its inventive harmony. It is believed that his song Pandolfo was written for a stage play. Parsons might also have written Guichardo, although speculation also attributes it to Richard Farrant (d. 1580). The alliterative poetic style of Guichardo is early Elizabethan.

A considerable role in Elizabethan music was played by the illustrious Ferrabosco family. Alfonso the elder, originally from Bologna, moved to England in 1562, where he became a member of Queen Elizabeth I's court. Alphonso Ferrabosco II (c. 1575-1628) was illegitimate and was abandoned by his father at an early age, when Alfonso the elder found himself embroiled in political intrigue and returned to Italy. The son was then brought up by a Dutch court musician. Alphonso the younger, who composed music for Ben Jonson's masques, was described by the 17th-century music historian Anthony Wood as "the most famous man in all the world for Fantazias of 5 or 6 parts." And indeed, his many fantasias for viols are considered outstanding contributions to the genre. Two are presented here.

Of the anonymous songs in this anthology, O Death, Rock Me Asleep enjoyed perhaps the greatest popularity. The poem has been ascribed to Anne Boleyn, written on the eve of her execution, and also to her brother, George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, who was executed for the crime of incest with his sister, the Queen. Its popularity is indicated not only by the presence of other musical settings, but also its mention in Act II, Scene iv, of the Second Part of Shakespeare's King Henry IV. This is the roistering, bawdy scene in the Boar's Head Tavern with Falstaff, his entourage, and Prince Henry, which Shakespeare brings to so dramatic and sober an end with news of war. At the height of the hilarity, the braggart Pistol, pretending to be insulted, draws his sword, crying, "then death rock me asleep, abridge my doleful days."

Many madrigals currently in circulation owe a debt to Edmund Fellowes (1870-1951), an Oxford-educated priest who, although trained only as an amateur musician, became highly respected as a musical scholar and editor. It was his experience in amateur madrigal societies that first inspired him to transcribe songs from the original partbooks and to ascertain poetic sources; eventually he published the English Madrigal School (36 volumes), English Madrigal Verse, Orlando Gibbons, The English School of Lutenist Song-Writers, William Byrd, and he edited the 20-volume collection of Byrd's works. Several other songs on this album were arranged by "Peter Warlock," the pen-name adopted for composing and editing by the English musical writer Philip Heseltine (1894-1930). Heseltine was the first to champion Whythorne, but he also edited and arranged works by more widely known composers, including Purcell's Fantasias. His literary writings were incisive and critical; is editing always served what he surmised to be the composer's intentions.

Originally released as Vanguard/The Bach Guild BG-551 (1-16) and BG-557

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