At 10am GMT on each day of Advent I have been posting a video of a piece which, in my opinion, celebrates the best of music made by the human voice – with the occasional quirky video thrown in for good measure! You can catch up with the full Choral Christmas here.
Introducing Spem in Alium:
Thomas Tallis: Spem in Alium, performed by the King’s Singers
For this final day of my choral advent calendar, I wanted you to be able to see the performers singing, rather than a still abstract image or album cover. So, we see this piece intended for 40 voices performed by just six, using multi-tracking to stitch together several different performances.
I hope you’ll take a few minutes to listen to the Audioboo above before enjoying the piece, and that you might feel that Reprieve is a worthy cause to donate to at this time of year.
In all it’s taken about three days – three consecutive Saturdays – to produce this series of blogposts. It’s been something of a labour of love. The overall traffic to the posts hasn’t been huge, but within the visits that there have been there have been a lot of tweets favourited, and recurring web visits. It’s been wonderful to know that people out there have appreciated some or all of the tracks, and I hope given the breadth of music covered there has been something for everyone. I heard many of the pieces for the first time when researching this series.
And, of course, there were the videos I would have liked to include but couldn’t. If you aren’t all sung out by now, I send you on your way with links to three bonus performances from the Tallis Scholars of Allegri, Byrd, and Palestrina.
Whether you came along for one day, or all twenty-four, thank you. Have a restful, peaceful, and very happy Christmas.
It’s a precious thing to hear a piece of music which never leaves you. To be absolutely confident that you know and may never forget every twist of the soundscape. For me there is only one work that has so comprehensively captured my soul, and burnt itself in to my memory. It goes by the title Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui Prater In Te Deus Israel – I have never placed my hope in any other but you God of Israel. More digestibly it is simply Spem in Alium.
Hearing that piece for the first time at the BBC Proms of 2005 ignited a love affair with its composer Thomas Tallis, that has stayed with me ever since. This coming week, BBC Radio 3 profile Thomas Tallis as their Composer Of The Week (thank you Scott). No doubt they will tell the story of Tallis’s masterpiece, Spem in Alium.
As direct historical records regarding Tallis are so sketchy, we often have to interpret and extrapolate from circumstantial evidence. Here, for what it’s worth, is my take on how Spem in Alium came in to being. My puny efforts at the British Library notwithstanding, Radio 3′s take will no doubt be better researched! Do have a listen.
The world around Tallis
The 16th century transformed the face of our planet, with repercussions still visible today.
As religious wars scorched continents, so too a fire of Renaissance arts and culture blazed out of Italy. Rome was devising a new “Gregorian” calendar – to all intents and purposes the calendar we use today. Time itself was changing, and the new calendar quickly spread its wings across Europe and beyond.
Burgeoning sea travel and the rapid expansion of trading markets saw many things spread faster and wider than they ever had before. Everything from the new calendar, to Smallpox. National boundaries were ever more hotly defended even as their lines, their power, and their meaning, were disintegrating.
Quite often I find myself driving home in the late evening, listening to Sue Marchant on radio Suffolk. One of her set piece questions is to ask her main guest where in time and space they would choose to travel if they could make a single trip in a TARDIS. It is a question that is simultaneously rather narrow (even geeky), and huge (sometimes inspirational) in scope.
I know what my answer would be. To the Chapel Royal of 1568, and lunch with Thomas Tallis. Like many enthusiasts of Tallis and his incredible composition Spem in Alium, I have questions I’d like to put to him. Not least of which is the piece’s relationship with Allesandro Striggio’s Ecce Beatam Lucem (embedded above).
Historial records indicate that Ecce was composed for a first performance in 1561, possibly a royal wedding. So far as we know, Spem was first performed seven or eight years later at Arundel house. As relatively little is known about the history of Spem a plausible if not definitive theory has gained currency – namely that the Duke of Norfolk, on becoming aware of Striggio’s work, commissioned Tallis to compose a work of equal or greater scale and complexity as a birthday gift to Elizabeth I.
While Tallis’s work makes a more finely developed use of counterpoint and spine-tingling antiphone, has seen greater enduring success, and could be argued to be technically superior, I prefer (on no rational basis whatsoever) to see the pieces as siblings. For example, both use the same technique of building steadily to great tutti moments – Striggio on the “O” of O mel et dulce nectar (oh honey of sweet nectar), and Tallis on the “respice” of respice humilitatem nostram (look upon our humiliation / lowliness).
But the killer commonality is the modesty. For me you will find it in the score of Ecce, and in the story of Spem. At the time he chose the words to use as a basis of Spem in Alium, a plea to the almighty to watch over us in our lowliness, Tallis was at the zenith of his career – a musical giant who had survived numerous seismic shifts in the religious and political fabric of England. He could have been forgiven an inclination towards triumphalism, particularly given his royal audience.
When I listen to Ecce Beatam Lucem it is the last minute which blows me away. The whole piece is a joy on the ears, but as the piece approaches what could be a rousing finale with the words “This delight, this peace, this goal, this mark. Draw us from here straight to Paradise” the dynamics take the deliciously unexpected turn of slipping away from us – ever diminishing until the final word paradisum -paradise – is almost a whisper. There are no such dynamics written in to the scores I have. I would love to know if this is interpretation, or the will of the composer. In either case it’s little short of genius.
Regular readers of my blog will know that I am an enthusiast of Thomas Tallis’s work for fourety voices, Spem in Alium. If you haven’t heard it performed live there is an opportunity coming up in just a few weeks, for those who have no objection to attending evensong.
Then a week later there is what true artists call “a real humdinger” of a concert at Southwark Cathedral. I’ll be attending this one too – it will be very interesting to hear how the forty individual voices are able to fill a space as cavernous as Southwark.
I had planned to go on a pilgrimage of the significant places in the life of Thomas Tallis this Summer, to add some sense of emotional and geographical connection to my amateur study of his forty-part motet Spem in Alium. If you’re not familiar with the piece you can find a version here, though at 12 minutes long its about 2 mins too long for me.
So far, my pilgrimage hasn’t been possible – the year has been busy, and I’ve been learning more about the piece and its composer at a rate which has lead to a constantly changing stream of thoughts and opinions, each needing further work to understand better. I’d like my thoughts on the piece to have settled down a little before going to the places of Tallis’s life and death. In particular, if there is anyone out there of a historical bent who could make an educated guess as to the probable locations of Court in the years 1568/69, I’d really like to hear from you.
In the meantime, some of you might enjoy sharing this moment i just recorded where I indulge in the idea of an eighty party motet. I should’ve done my hair. I could’ve been less effusive. I shouldn’t peer over my glasses. Singing was a mistake. It could probably have used a script, but I thought I’d just fire up the camera and record this moment of late-night Bank Holiday early music geekery. Enjoy.
Update: I have heard a couple of people be quite sniffy about the King’s Singers version of Spem. They are, whisper it….. populist.
As there are only six singers in the group, they used multi-tracking to produce their recording. I find it one of the most interesting recordings. Fascinated then to see that they made a video when recording it, which gives some sense of the technical complexity (though a minor gripe is that it doesn’t show off the key antiphonal moments well). These guys either have an incredible sense of timing, or a metronome ticking in their headphones!
