This week’s theme is…“New” Music! Today I often find that the label “New” is applied to music that is self-consciously experimental, unconventional, or cutting edge in some way, although technically any music that has been recently created is new. But then I suppose you have to answer the question “how recently created does something have to be to be called new?”, and that can end up in some seriously shameless naval-gazing! The truth is that every piece of music was new at some point. Beyond that, some music is based on the theme of newness. This week we explore some such examples.
“New” Music, Day 4 – A New Commandment by Thomas Tallis
The music of England’s Common Practice Era was shaped by a peculiar feature: the composers most admired during much of the time that classical music was created on Continental Europe, were devoted in England to the admiration and imitation of an opportunistic expatriate, George Frideric Handel. Because of this, England does not really have its own great Classical or Romantic composers; not until Elgar anyway. The 18th and 19th centuries in Britain were largely dominated by Handel’s unstoppable legacy of English choral music, as typified by his oratorios, and all other composers who created music for British soil, domestic and otherwise (Felix Mendelssohn, for example, experienced notable fame in Great Britain, becoming close friends with Queen Victoria, largely because of his success in writing bilingual oratorios that fit the Handelian/British cast).
Wagner once expressed his frustration with the state of British music in his typically polemical way. I’m paraphrasing here, but he described British subjects sitting in concert halls, listening to fugal chorus after fugal chorus in British oratorios and anthems, secure in their sense that they were most certainly doing their duty to God and country. He would have been describing music in Mendelssohn’s style, but both Handel and Mendelssohn were Germans; and other critics have wondered how British music would have developed had it not been for the playing out of Handel’s life story.
England was not the only place something like this happened. The story of French music is similarly shaped by an expatriate settling and steering the course of the natives. In the 1630s the young Florentine Giovanni Battista Lulli went to France and proceeded to create French national opera and ballet, almost from scratch. A darling of the great Sun King, Louis XIV, all of his successors were required to write almost exactly as Lully (the Gallicized name he assumed upon naturalization) had. So an apt comparison can be made between Handel and Lully. But Lully is not spoken of in the same way as Handel, with the dear Saxon sometimes being said to have stifled creative progress in England. Lully seemed to save French music, providing a stable medium in which French text setting was able take root and fluorish. Indeed, Lully’s works feel very “French”, and his successor Rameau’s even more so. Berlioz is thoroughly French, not Italian, so Lully’s legacy does not seem to have suppressed whatever national spirit was waiting to speak in France.
And yes, perhaps it is would be interesting to play the historical “what-if” game with Handel and Great Britain: what if Handel had never gone to Great Britain? What if he had merely visited and not settled? To which influences would British musicians have looked to find their models?
By 1600 Great Britain boasted a rich and significant body of choral music. Franco-Flemish polyphony (for more on Franco-Flemish polyphony see this post) in its early phase had reached the island in the figure of John Dunstable, a champion of the Burgundian School who lived and worked in the early 1400s. His influence on British music, and on the development of Western harmony, is far-reaching. He is often recognized to be among the first composers to favor 3rds over 4ths in his harmonic language, which really warms up the musical texture. Compare this…
…to this…
Do you hear the difference? There’s probably about 50 years of musical development between the two and the comparison can be seen as an indication of the transition between Europe’s Middle Ages and Renaissance, although Dunstable doesn’t quite make it that far, but he definitely sensed it on the horizon. Most of Dunstable’s co-Burgundians were Flemish, and Dunstable’s music stands apart from theirs for a suavity, a rich and creamy character that, I think, finds its ultimate expression in the works of Britain’s greatest Renaissance polyphonist, Thomas Tallis.
This suave, serene character seems to pervade the music of the English polyphonists in a way that we don’t hear in the Flemish and the Italians. It’s hard to put my finger on, but the music of John Taverner and Thomas Tallis just feels…different than Palestrina and di Lasso. It breathes differently, moves through space and time differently. It has a quirky, but wonderful kind of motion and breath. It somehow exhibits a rougher, more down to Earth quality while also managing to be more ethereal. Palestrina is so…perfect. And as much as I delight in that perfection, it can be a little unimaginative and square at times. The music of Tallis and Taverner is anything but – in their best works the unfolding gestures are constantly surprising and mystifying. These are rather personal observations and, like so much of music, I think you really have to listen to it more to understand that, but it’s how I’ve always felt about listening to Tallis and Taverner.
Thomas Tallis worked during a time when Great Britain’s religious landscape, and the royal powers with which it intersected, were in a state of flux. At times merely uncertain, and at other times violent, the governing faith of the land vacillated between Roman Catholicism and the Church of England in a disorienting tug-of-war carried out by monarchs and religious leaders which played out over the middle of the sixteenth century. By the seventeenth the Anglican Communion had formed as sort of a balance between the two religious sensibilities, the rigidly Calvinist pilgrims had sailed off to the New World in protest of the “popish” practices the via media could be seen to embrace, and a bloody civil war broke out after the death of Queen Elizabeth (a stabilizing monarch) which unleashed pent-up religious and political unrest.
Thomas Tallis, though he remained a Catholic through this turbulent time of British history, was not exactly of the uncompromising stripe of someone the likes of Thomas Moore. He was more pragmatic like Queen Elizabeth, seemingly happy to contribute his talents to the music of whatever religious establishment was currently in power. And so we have a variety of output from Thomas Tallis, including both solemn Latin-language works for Catholic services, and also English-language anthems for the Anglican episodes. The anthem came to be a most significant form in Anglican church music and remains so in many denominations of Protestant worship to this day. A short song in the vernacular to be placed somewhere in a church service, composers today turn out numerous anthems in every vernacular. Here is one of Tallis’ best-known anthems, based on a text from the Gospel of John’s 13th chapter, “I give you a new commandment: love one another”. It is for 4 parts and quite easily sung by amateur church choirs, as is its frequent companion piece, another anthem based on a text from the same gospel, “If ye love me”:
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