Music for Seventeenth Sunday of Pentecost

William Wordsworth, an expert in cloudy and expansive poetry, once wrote about the pleasure he found in the disciplined confines of the fourteen-line sonnet form: just as “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room; / And hermits are contented with their cells,” the poet says, so “for me, / In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.”

Perhaps Thomas Tallis, almost three hundred years earlier, felt similarly the liberating constraint of small forms. During his long life, Tallis negotiated the reigns of four monarchs—Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth I—quite different in (among other things!) their musical demands. In the 1530s and ’40s, the rule of the day was clear, intelligible word setting and a simple style. To a composer raised on the florid lines and ample dimensions of older music, this might have seemed like a restricted space in which to work. Tallis, however, found a new beauty and freedom in the concise structures and graceful gestures of his early English-texted anthems, If ye love me chief among them.

As much as musical languages have changed since Tallis’s time, the essential features of this disciplined style (four-part writing and fluent, chordal treatment of text) have had an evergreen appeal. We might think of Tallis as an early cultivator of the small but endlessly fruitful space in which listeners and composers—such as Francis Jackson, York master of music, eminent organist, and composer of today’s Communion Service in G—have exercised creative freedom ever since.

– Connor Page, organ scholar

Solemn Mass takes place at St. James’ Anglican Church, Vancouver at 10:30 am every Sunday.