Supplement to article on John Taverner and John Tavener (Part 1) in Chandler's Ford 'Parish News'

For a picture of St Botolph’s, Boston (‘Boston stump’), google “Boston stump”.)

There are several good performances of music by Taverner on YouTube. (Links given below were working on 11 February 2010.)

You might like to begin with the one at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6SqfdSEIXg . In this you can hear the boys and men of Christ Church, Oxford (the successors of one of Taverner’s own choirs) singing the Gloria from the mass ‘The Western Wind’ (sometimes called ‘Western Wynde’). Throughout the movement Taverner repeats the tune that you can hear clearly in the treble part at the beginning (although not always in the treble). Surprisingly this anonymous tune is apparently secular (non-church), and no one knows quite why he used it in this mass.

At http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTLx7aL7dIQ the Tallis Scholars sing Taverner’s ‘Dum transisset sabbatum’, an Easter piece. The words are from Mark’s gospel, chapter 16, verses 1 and 2, plus ‘Alleluia’, and the first verse of the Gloria Patri (‘Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit’).

Some sections are sung in plainsong. Plainsong, anonymous music of great antiquity, was much more widely used in church in Taverner’s day than any other type of music. It is ‘monophonic’, with just one note at a time. In other words, plainsong is purely melodic, without any harmony (although modern performances of plainsong do sometimes have organ accompaniment).

The other sections of ‘Dum transisset’ are ‘polyphonic’ (with are several different notes at a time). The polyphonic sections are sung by a five-part choir of men and boys. The top three parts and the lowest part were composed by Taverner – but the tenor has the plainsong, in long equal notes. To put it slightly differently, the top three parts and the lowest are composed by Taverner around the traditional plainsong (not by him) in the tenor. The technical term for such a borrowed part is ‘cantus firmus’, Latin for ‘fixed song’. Composing on a cantus firmus was common in Taverner’s day, partly because people considered that a plainsong cantus firmus gave special authority to any piece based on it. (As we saw above, Taverner used a secular (not plainsong) cantus firmus in his mass ‘The Western Wind’ – and significantly this tune is not just tucked away in the tenor but often heard clearly in the top part, as if to show off how remarkable its use is.)

You may notice that some sections of ‘Dum transisset sabbatum’(notably the Alleluia section) are heard more than once: responsories (which followed readings) had certain repeats built into them whether said, sung to plainsong or performed in polyphony. Incidentally, the modern responsory setting that we sing at the annual Advent Liturgy at St Boniface (‘Let my prayer’, for cantor, unison choir, and organ, without plainsong) still has a typical responsorial structure.

You may also think that the music of ‘Dum transisset’ is hardly Easter-like – it’s restrained, without any obvious ‘excitement’. Music was principally thought of in pre-Reformation times as an offering to God, not as a means of preaching the word, as a way of sparking off an emotional response, or as a form of entertainment. Nevertheless, I am sure that church choirs then as now found their work very satisfying on a number of different levels!

At http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvLO-IZris0&NR=1 you can hear (or merely dip into) the Gloria in excelsis from Taverner’s mass for six voices ‘Gloria tibi Trinitas’ (‘Glory to you, O Trinity’). It lasts for about 10 minutes, without repeating any of the words. Accordingly, singers often have to sing many notes to the same syllable (in ‘melismatic’ style), so that at times you almost lose touch with where you are in the text – assuming that you know Latin in the first place! A plainsong melody entitled ‘Gloria tibi Trinitas’ is used as cantus firmus in sections where all six parts sing, and occasionally elsewhere (you might hear it in very long notes in the highest of the three voices, starting 5 minutes and 31 seconds into the performance). Some sections for less than six parts are freely composed – that is, they don’t use the cantus firmus at all.

The mass ‘Gloria tibi Trinitas’ may have been composed for Tattershall Collegiate Church by the mid 1520s, or perhaps for Cardinal College, Oxford a few years later.

If you persevere to the end of the movement, you’ve heard about a quarter of the whole mass. But remember that no one in Taverner’s day heard the whole mass in one go. As in the communion settings used in our Eucharists, each movement was sung separately with prayers, readings, etc. in between.

If you want to listen to more than is available on YouTube, you can buy some single tracks from CDs of Taverner’s music from iTunes (£0.79 each as at 11 February 2010).

Finally, a personal note. John Taverner was the subject of my PhD thesis, and of my book ‘John Taverner: his Life and Music’ (published by Ashgate in 2003). Parts of this book are available free online at http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_fZoVDYiifYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=&f=false .