Tallis by Kerry McCarthy

Tallis by Kerry McCarthy
New York: Oxford University Press, 2020; 280 pp., $39.95
Review by R. T. M. Sullivan

Tallis is Kerry McCarthy’s biography of Renaissance composer Thomas Tallis, whom she describes as the “beloved elder statesman of English music.” In 1542, in his late 30s, Tallis became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, where he composed and performed for Henry VIII, Edward VI, Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth, while the pendulum of faith swung from Catholic to Anglican to Catholic and back to Anglican again. 

Tallis is McCarthy’s second contribution to Oxford University Press’s Master Musician Series. The first was her highly regarded biography of William Byrd. Byrd became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1572, thirty years after Tallis, and became his pupil, friend, and fellow composer. In 1575, Queen Elizabeth granted them a monopoly on printing music in the kingdom and even an exclusive right to own the paper on which music was printed. 

McCarthy’s writing is a pleasure to read. She is never heavy-handed or pedantic. There is a deft lightness in how she speaks and writes about topics relating to early music and early musicians, a lightness that cannot be managed unless a speaker or writer has a deep understanding of the material. 

I was first introduced to and learned to love Byrd and Tallis along with many other previously unknown-to-me composers when I started singing for a few years in 2006 in The St. Ann Choir. The choir had started at the Stanford University Newman Center before the introduction of the Mass of Pope St. Paul VI in 1969, and somehow the choir had managed to continue singing Gregorian chant and sacred polyphony—at Ordinary Form Masses—during the ensuing decades when many Catholics at all levels erroneously believed the Church had banned that kind of music. 

I also met McCarthy at the St. Ann Choir. She had started singing in the choir while she was a Stanford PhD student, where she had come to study under William Mahrt, the professor of early music who directs the choir. McCarthy had earned her PhD in 2003 and was teaching music history at Duke. At the time, McCarthy still sang with the choir whenever she was on vacation from Duke, and the choir benefitted from her outstanding alto voice. 

Before I joined, I naively thought I knew everything there was to know about traditional sacred music. After all, I thought smugly, I’d been taught to sing chant in the fourth grade at parochial school in the mid-1950s! To my delight, a much larger world of music, of glorious chant and polyphony, opened to me. I learned the Byrd Masses and motets that the choir regularly sing, and much, much more. 

One evening soon after I joined, I tagged along, totally ignorant about the significance of what I was about to witness, on a choir excursion to hear Tallis’s forty-part “Spem in Alium,” his masterpiece for eight choirs of five voices each, in a rare performance in Berkeley.

After this experience I was eager to read and review Tallis, as I had previously read and written about McCarthy’s Byrd. In it, I had found a lively revelation of the composer’s personality, while at the same time I learned a lot from McCarthy’s expertise about his music and its significance. 

Part of my interest in reading Byrd had been to find out how an at-times blatantly Catholic musician could have survived in the court at a time when the Catholic liturgy and music were discarded and replaced by new Protestant forms—and Catholics were being persecuted after the Church of England broke away from Rome. Then, because Tallis is almost always said to be Catholic too, I came to McCarthy’s biography hoping to solve the same mystery about him.

As it turns out, Tallis is the account of a very different type of man from Byrd. Because of the lack of explicit evidence in the Tallis biography, I was left wondering why Tallis is called a Catholic. In an email from McCarthy in answer to this question, she wrote: “After working through all the documents, such as they are, I have no strong views about Tallis’s own religious convictions. If I had to guess, I’d guess reluctantly conforming Anglican, but who knows. . . .”

Tallis’s relationship to Catholicism, of course, is not the point of this book. McCarthy is not only an impressive scholar but an extraordinarily engaging storyteller. Still there is much less material on Tallis available for her to work into one of the narratives she is so good at constructing, and Tallis was much less of a “character” than Byrd. 

During a talk titled “In the Footsteps of Thomas Tallis,” which McCarthy gave in 2017 at Newcastle University, she made some relevant remarks about the limitations she faced: “This composer didn’t leave much of a trail at all. Mostly a very light scattering of crumbs. No letters, journals, trivia, or gossip.” His life, she said, is a puzzle in which “most of the pieces have been lost.” Her approach, she said, would be to provide clues from the context of his life and the musical world he inhabited. The danger was “to create a wonderful tapestry of context and have this composer-shaped hole in the middle.”

In the end, I fear that danger was not completely avoided, through no fault of McCarthy’s. Although it would be fascinating if she could have completely filled in that composer-shaped hole, McCarthy has succeeded in painting a vivid picture of Tallis’ musical personality and of his contribution to the development of music. In her preface, McCarthy wrote: “After some reflection and a few false starts, I decided to build this book around what we still have, rather than lamenting or trying to extrapolate what we no longer have.”

Incidentally, there is one striking parallel between what Tallis experienced as an out-of-work musician after the monastery where he worked was dissolved by Henry VIII and the plight of many Church musicians after Vatican II, when the mistaken impression prevailed that chant and sacred polyphony were no longer allowed. Sacrosanctum Concilium, the council’s document on the liturgy, says that chant is “specially suited to the Roman liturgy: therefore . . . should be given pride of place in liturgical services.” And sacred polyphony was mentioned specifically as being allowed. But, nonetheless, chant and polyphony were replaced almost completely with hymns in the iconoclastic times that followed the council, and musicians who were trained in the traditional sacred music of the church either adapted to the new norms, as Tallis apparently did, or they lost their livelihoods.

Sacred music composer Frank LaRocca wrote to me after I sent him a link to an excerpt: “This looks fabulous!” Others who know far more about the technicalities are bound to add their own equally enthusiastic—and much longer—reviews. For now, a unanimous verdict “fabulous” from one expert and one amateur will have to do.