Who is the Father?

Changing Perceptions of Tallis and Byrd in

Late Nineteenth-Century England
Suzanne Cole

Music and Letters, Volume 89, Number 2, May 2008, pp. 212-226 (Article)

Published by Oxford University Press

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mal/summary/v089/89.2.cole.html

Access Provided by Azusa Pacific University at 02/24/11 9:38PM GMT

Music & Letters, Vol. 89 No. 2, ß The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1093/ml/gcm082, available online at www.ml.oxfordjournals.org

WHO IS THE FATHER? CHANGING PERCEPTIONS OF

TALLIS AND BYRD IN LATE NINETEENTH-CENTURY
ENGLAND
BY SUZANNE COLE*

A S IS WELL KNOWN, in 1575 Tallis and Byrd jointly published a collection of motets,
Cantiones, quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur . . ., the first fruits of the monopoly for the
publication and sale of music and music paper recently granted them by Queen
Elizabeth I.1 This publication was accompanied by a series of dedications,‘commenda-
tory verses’,2 and other prefatory material that contains multiple references to child-
birth and parenthood. The composers are referred to in Richard Mulcaster’s ‘In
Musicam Thomae Tallisii, et Guilielmi Birdi’ as the progeny of ‘Our England’;3 they
in turn, in their dedication to the Queen, call the music in the collection their ‘off-
spring’, and ask her to protect it.4 This procreative metaphor is developed, somewhat
unexpectedly, in the brief verse that follows the last motet:
THE AUTHORS OF THE SONGS TO THE READER
Like the woman still weak from childbirth who entrusts her infant to the care of the faithful
wetnurse, we thus commend these firstborn [songs] to you, friendly reader, for your esteem
will be their milk.5

The verse ‘De Anglorum Musica’ concludes: ‘Proclaiming Tallis and Byrd her parents,
[British Music] boldly advances where no voice has sung.’6 John Milsom has described
the care and attention that Tallis and Byrd lavished upon this publication,7 and there is
a sense in which they can be seen, through this prefatory material, to be constructing
an image of themselves and of their music to present to the world, an image in which
the metaphor of paternity features prominently.

*University of Melbourne. Email: s.cole@unimelb.edu.au. A version of this article was presented at the 2005
Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society in Washington, DC.
1
For more on this patent, see D. W. Krummel, English Music Printing 1553^1700 (London, 1975), 15^17.
2
John Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (1776) (1853 edn., repr. New York, 1963), 456.
3
‘Tallisium, Birdumq[ue], duces iam nacta lubenter, Quae peperit, patitur pignora luce frui . . .’; trans. as
‘But now, gladly having found leaders in Tallis and Byrd whom she bore, she permits her offspring to enjoy the light’
in Cantiones sacrae, ed. Craig Monson (The Byrd Edition, 1; London, 1977), p. xxvi.
4
‘quae prolem hanc nostram . . . tueare’; trans. ibid., p. xxv.
5
‘AUTORES CANTIONUM AD LECTOREM. / Has tibi primitias sic commendamus, amice / Lector, ut
infantem depositura suum / Nutricis fidei vix firma puerpera credit, / Queis pro lacte tuae gratia frontis erit. / Hac
etenim fretae, magnam promittere messem. / Audebunt, cassae, falcis honore cadent’; trans. ibid., p. xxvii.
6
‘Tallisium, Birdumque suos testata parentes / Audacter quo non ore canenda venit’; trans. ibid., p. xxv. After
Tallis’s death, Byrd was similarly described in the preface to the second book of the Gradualia (1607) as ‘Britannicae
musicae parenti’çFather of British Music.
7
John Milsom, ‘Tallis, Byrd and the ‘‘Incorrected Copy’’: Some Cautionary Notes for Editors of Early Music
Printed from Movable Type’, Music & Letters, 77 (1996), 348^67 at 358^9.

212
PL. 1. Gerard van der Gucht, engraving (shortly before 1730) showing images of Tallis and
Byrd. ß Copyright the Trustees of the British Museum.

This joint image of the two composers is captured in the engraving of Tallis and
Byrd, made by Gerard van der Gucht shortly before 1730, that graces most books, CD
covers, and internet sites devoted to either of these composers (see Pl. 1).8 In this article
I show that while their reception has often run in tandem, as implied by this double
portrait, by the mid-nineteenth century the popular image of the two composers had
become strongly differentiated. Tallis’s Anglican church music was very popular, and he
was fe“ted as the ‘Father of English Church Music’, while Byrd’s music was relatively
neglected. This situation began to change towards the end of the century, with a revival

8
The engraving may have been made for a general history of music proposed by Nicola Francesco Haym, which is
described at some length by Hawkins (General History of Music, 821^2). See also Nicola Francesco Haym, Complete
Sonatas, Part 1, ed. Lowell E. Lindgren (Recent Researches in Music of the Baroque Era, 116; Middleton, Wis., 2002),
p. xii.

213
TABLE 1. Works byTallis and Byrd inJohn Barnard’s First Book of Selected Church Music (1641)

Tallis Byrd

First (‘Dorian’) Service First (‘Short’) Service

First Preces and Psalms Second Service ‘with Verses to the Organs’ (Evening)
Responses Third Service (Evening)
Litany First Preces and Psalms
O Lord give thy holy spirit Second Preces and Psalms
With all our hearts (Salvator mundi I) Prevent us, O Lord
Blessed be thy name (Mihi autem nimis) O Lord make thy servant Charles
I call and cry (O sacrum convivium) O Lord turn thy wrath (Ne irascaris)
Wipe away my sins (Absterge Domine) Bow thine ear, O Lord (Civitas sancti tui)
Sing joyfully
O Lord rebuke me not
Hear my prayer O God
Thou God, that guidest
Christ rising
Christ is risen again

of interest in Byrd alongside a reassessment of the relative merits of Tallis’s English

church music and his Latin polyphony. I also examine how the popular images of the
composers changed over this period and show the powerful role these changes played
in shaping the reception of their music.
A very brief survey of surviving seventeenth- and eighteenth-century copies of their
music suggests that for most of the first 200 years after their deaths, Tallis and Byrd
enjoyed a roughly similar popularity. Both are well represented in early seventeenth-
century manuscript sources and in John Barnard’s 1641 First Book of Selected Church
Musick (see Table 1). Ian Spink has described the importance of Barnard as ‘a core
round which new repertoires could be built’ at the Restoration.9 For example,
Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum MS 117, which according to Spink represents the
repertory of the Chapel Royal around 1680, includes four anthems and the Short
Service (later known as the Dorian Service) by Tallis and seven anthems and the
three services by Byrd, that is, most of the works by these composers published in
Barnard.10 Tallis’s and Byrd’s Short Services both appear on a music list from June
1680 that survives in Durham Cathedral, along with anthems by both composers.11
Thomas Tudway’s collection of English services and anthems, dating from 1715, just a
few years before the estimated date of the combined engraving, also includes many of
these same works, with roughly equal representation of the two composers (see Table 2).
His introduction to the collection provides a useful insight into perceptions of them

9
Ian Spink, Restoration Cathedral Music:1660^1774 (Oxford, 1995), 76.
10
Ibid. 81.
11
Brian Crosby, ‘A Service Sheet from June 1680’, Musical Times, 121 (1980), 399^401 at 400.

214
TABLE 2. Works by Tallis and Byrd in Tudway’s Collection of the most celebrated Services and
Anthems used in the Church of England, British Library, MS Harley 7337

Tallis Byrd

Short Service Short Service

I call and cry Sing joyfully
(O sacrum convivium)
Wipe away my sins O Lord, turn thy wrath/Bow
(Absterge Domine) thine ear (Ne irascaris/Civitas sancti tui)
With all our hearts and O Lord, make thy servant
mouths (Salvator mundi I)
O Lord, give thy holy spirit Save me, O God
Prevent us, O Lord

There are some serious doubts about Byrd’s authorship of this motet; see The English Anthems, ed. Craig
Monson (Byrd Edition, 11; London, 1983), pp. vi^vii.

at this time. Tudway treats the two composers as playing an equal part in ‘setting the
standard’ for Anglican church music:
The Pious Reformers of our Church, from the Errors of Popery, haveing settl’d the Doctrines
therof, thought it very necessary, & advisable allso, to appoint a standard of Church Musick
which might adorn the dayly Service of God. . . . I dare affirm my Lord, that there cou’d never
have been any thing better devis’d, than what was compos’d first of that Kind, by Mr Tallis &
Mr Bird. . . . though both of them Papists, [they] have sett an inimitable Pattern of solemn
Church musick. . . . Mr Tallis was the Senior. . . . Mr Bird was his schollar, & allso a Contem-
porary with him; He imitated so well the copys his master set him, that tis a hard matter to
know which exceeded . . .12

While Tudway felt unable to distinguish between the merits of the pupil and the
master, over the course of the eighteenth century the gap in popularity between Tallis
and Byrd gradually widened. When William Boyce, for example, published his Cathedral
Music in 1760, like Barnard and Tudway before him he opened his collection withTallis’s
Short Service, but Byrd’s Short Service did not appear until the third volume, pub-
lished thirteen years later.13 By the time of the so-called Anglican Choral Revival in the
1840s,14 the differences in the perception of Tallis and Byrd had become marked.
One of the earliest manifestations of this renewed interest in church music was a
series of annual ‘Tallis Days’, briefly celebrated at Westminster Abbey in the early
1840s.15 These Tallis Days were reputedly extremely popularçalthough not quite as
popular as the Purcell Days that were celebrated at the same time16çwith reports of
over a thousand people attending.17 Cathedral choirs were on the whole grossly under-
resourced at this time, but for the Tallis Days the choir was augmented ‘by the

12
London, British Library, MS Harley 7337, quoted in Spink, Restoration Cathedral Music, 434.
13
H. Diack Johnstone, ‘The Genesis of Boyce’s ‘‘Cathedral Music’’’, Music & Letters, 56 (1975), 26^40 at 30. Boyce
also included Tallis’s I Call and Cry and Byrd’s Sing Joyfully and O Lord,Turn thy Wrath / Bow thine Ear in Vol. 2.
14
For more on this revival, see Bernarr Rainbow,The Choral Revival in the Anglican Church (1839^1872) (London,1970).
15
A more comprehensive examination of the reception of Tallis and his music will be found in my forthcoming
monograph on this subject (Woodbridge, 2008).
16
Edward Taylor, The English Cathedral Service, its Glory, its Decline, and its Designed Extinction (London, 1845), 31.
17
‘Musical Intelligence. Metropolitan. Westminster Abbey’, Musical World, 16 (1841), 232.

215
voluntary assistance of eminent professors’ to about forty, which was considered the
minimum necessary to do justice to the main attraction: the performance of the
‘Service in D’, which it was claimed had not been performed in London since 1827.18
The dramatic impact of these performances is captured in the Musical World review
of the 1841 Tallis Day:
On Wednesday . . . this venerable fane was the very appropriate arena for the performance of
the grand old gothic service composed by Tallis. . . . The characteristics of Tallis’s work . . . are
vastness, gloomy grandeur, and ponderous solemnity, achieved by the most elaborate combi-
nations and harmoniesçfeatures which to us continually associate it with the gothic in archi-
tecture, its groinings and tracery; and listened to in this most sacred of all holy places,
the performance presents as near an approach to the sublime, as to minds in general is
comprehensible.19

Although the Tallis Days appear to have been relatively short-lived,20 there were
many other signs of interest in Tallis and his music at this time. Several of his anthems
were published as supplements to popular periodicals, such as the Parish Choir and the
Musical Times,21 and the 1840s saw a flurry of editions of Tallis’s English service music,
particularly the Responses and Litanyçthe British Library Catalogue of Printed Music to
1980 lists eleven editions published during the 1840s alone, and a further twenty-four
between 1850 and 1914.
The Responses were not only frequently published and widely performed, but were
also the subject of sweeping claims about their national, religious, and musical signifi-
cance. The Musical Times review of the Charity Children’s Festival in St Paul’s
Cathedral, London in 1863 is typical:
The ‘Preces’ and ‘Responses’ were those of our Elizabethan Tallisçwhose music to this part of
the Church Service seems to be a solid rock of harmony, against which the waves of time are
likely to beat, for century after century, without producing any appreciable effect. There it has
been, there it is, and there it is likely to remainçmassive, solid, and indestructible, because
built upon the eternal principles of truth.22

A full analysis of the popularity of the Responses is beyond the scope of this article,
but it can be at least partly attributed to their strong association with the origins of
the English liturgy, and indeed with the origins of the Church of England itself. This
association is examined at some length in an intriguing article published in 1865. The
author concludes with a clear statement of the significance not only of the Responses
but also of Tallis as their composer:
May we not take fresh confidence that God was specially over-ruling our Reformation, each
time we think of the men raised up to bring the work to perfection. Probably, there never was
an English musician in any age so fitted to settle the musical service of the church of his

18
‘Musical Intelligence. Metropolitan. Westminster Abbey’, Musical World, 14 (1840), 281
19
Musical World, 16 (1841), 232.
20
They were mentioned in the press in 1840 and 1841, but the reference to them in Taylor’s The English Cathedral
Service suggests that they were still taking place in 1845.
21
If Ye Love Me, for example, was published in the Parish Choir in 1847, the Musical Times in 1862 and The Choir in
1864, and O Lord, Give thy Holy Spirit in the The Choir in 1864.
22
‘The Charity Children at St Paul’s’, Musical Times, 11 (1863), 83. A review of the 1865 Sons of the Clergy Festival
makes a similar claim, stating that the performance of the Responses could be ‘taken for granted’and that they would
probably still be performed at the festival a hundred years later (‘Festival of the Sons of the Clergy’, TheTimes, 18 May
1865, p. 14).

216
country as Thomas Tallis, the personal friend of Archbishop Parker. . . . To Tallis we owe that
great perfecting of Merbecke’s work that has given to our Church an heirloom [i.e. the
Responses] that seems beyond the power of time to antiquate, that stands out the more
majestically for each attempt to supplant it that successive generations of musicians have
made.23

What makes such extravagant claims particularly intriguing, however, is that, although
the Responses were perceived as a ‘solid rock of harmony’, there were almost as many
different versions of the Responses as there were editions. Such fundamental questions
as whether the Responses were originally written in four or five parts and whether the
plainsong should be in the tenor or the treble remained undecided. Furthermore, the
most common version of the Responses was based on that published by Boyce in 1760,
even though it was widely known that at least two of these responses were actually by
Byrd, rather than Tallis.24
Similarly, of the handful of anthems by Tallis that were performed and/or published
during the nineteenth centuryçnamely If Ye Love Me, Hear the Voice and Prayer, All People
that on Earth Do Dwell, and Come Holy Ghostçonly the first two are actually by Tallis.
The ‘solid rock of harmony’ on which Tallis’s nineteenth-century reputation was built
turns out to be very shaky indeed, but even so by the middle of the century Tallis’s
reputation as the ‘Father of English church music’ had been firmly established.
While the origins of this idea of Tallis’s musical paternity can be traced back to 1575,
similar references are scattered throughout history: Hawkins refers to him as the ‘father
of the cathedral style’,25 for example, and an 1836 review of an early performance of
Spem in alium dubs him ‘father of EnglishVocal Harmony’.26 By the 1870s this occasional
usage had become ubiquitous. In 1876, enough money was raised by subscription
for a brass plaque to be mounted in the church of St Alphege, Greenwich, where
Tallis is buried. The plaque reads simply: ‘In Memory of Thomas Tallis, the Father
of English Church Music’.27 Likewise, in 1889 W. H. Husk began his entry on Tallis
in the first edition of Grove’s Dictionary thus: ‘Tallys . . ., Thomas, the father of English
cathedral music’.
While Tallis’s paternity of English church music was becoming increasingly institu-
tionalized, the reception of William Byrd and his music had taken a very different path.
If we return to the early 1840s, we find another manifestation of the renewed interest
in early English choral music in the publications of the Musical Antiquarian Society.
This society was active from 1840 to 1848 and produced nineteen publications,28 the
first of which was an 1841 edition by Edward Rimbault of Byrd’s Mass for Five Voices.29
This was followed in 1842 by William Horsley’s edition of the first book of Byrd’s
Cantiones sacrae, prefaced by an extremely unsympathetic introduction, described

23
J. Powell Metcalfe, ‘The Music of the Church of England, as Contemplated by the Reformers’, Musical Times,
12 (1865), 157^60 at 158^9.
24
See e.g. John Jebb, The Choral Responses and Litanies of the United Church of England and Ireland, Collected from
Authentic Sources (London, 1847), 6, 8.
25
Hawkins, A General History, 456.
26
‘The Madrigal Society’, Spectator, 23 Jan. 1836, p. 80.
27
The inscription is reproduced in Order of Service. ‘Tallis’ Commemoration Service held in St. Alfege Church, Greenwich,
November 23rd, 1885 . . . (Greenwich, [1885]).
28
Richard Turbet,‘The Musical Antiquarian Society, 1840^1848’, Brio, 29 (1992), 13^20 at 17^18.
29
William Byrd, Mass for Five Voices, Composed between the Years 1553 and 1558, for the Old Cathedral of Saint Paul . . ., ed.
E. F. Rimbault (London, 1841).

217
nearly a century later by Richard Terry as ‘a monument of pontifical pedantry’.30
A proposed edition by William Crotch of Tallis and Byrd’s Cantiones sacrae of 1575
never came to fruition,31 and no music by Tallis was published in this series. As early
as 1826 Samuel Wesley had also attempted to publish, by subscription, ‘15 fine Latin
Anthems of Byrde’ (he does not identify which ones), taken from the copy of Cantiones
sacrae in the Fitzwilliam Museum, but this too came to nothing.32
The evidence of these publications might seem to suggest a greater interest in the
music of Byrd than that of Tallis, yet, unlike the many editions of Tallis’s Responses, the
two Musical Antiquarian Society publications were not translated into performance.
A brief note in the Musical World in 1842 records that ‘a few of the professional members
of the Musical Antiquarian Society, assisted in the treble parts by the Misses Williams
and six of the senior boys of St. Paul’s and Westminster abbey’ sang through Horsley’s
edition of Byrd’s Cantiones sacrae from the proof copies in order to check for errors,33 but
I know of no records of performances of the five-voice mass at this time.
Anti-Catholic sentiment remained strong during most of the nineteenth century, so it is
perhaps not surprising that Byrd’s masses and Latin motets were not widely performed;
but Byrd’s English church music also failed to achieve anything like the popularity
of Tallis’s. A couple of Byrd’s anthemsçSingJoyfully and BowThine Earçwere performed
occasionally,34 but while the Short Service was known, it does not appear to have been
performed often.35 In his 1843 Choral Service of the United Church of England and Ireland, the
Revd John Jebb concedes that Byrd’s Service had its‘peculiar excellencies’, but argues that
it is inferior in harmony toTallis’s.36 Terry mentions a Novello publication of one of Byrd’s
English services,37 but the British Library catalogue lists no nineteenth-century editions of
Byrd’s English service music other than in reprints of Boyce’s Cathedral Music. Similarly,
while Byrd’s settings of the Preces and Responses were published in Jebb’s exhaustive
Choral Responses and Litanies of the United Church of England and Ireland (1847) and in reprints
of Boyce, they do not appear to have been published separately in the nineteenth century,38

30
Richard R. Terry, ‘William Byrd’, in A. L. Bacharach (ed.), Lives of the Great Composers (London, 1935), i. 51. See
Richard Turbet, ‘Horsley’s 1842 Edition of Byrd and its Infamous Introduction’, British Music, 14 (1992), 36^46, for a
more considered evaluation.
31
Turbet,‘The Musical Antiquarian Society’, 14.
32
A letter from Wesley to J. P. Street, the librarian of the society, asking the Madrigal Society to take over the
project, which Wesley could not bring to completion because of financial difficulties, was published in the Musical
Times, 64 (1923), 567. For more on this proposed publication, see Philip Olleson and Fiona M. Palmer, ‘Publishing
Music from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge: The Work of Vincent Novello and Samuel Wesley in the 1820s’,
Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 130 (2005), 38^73.
33
‘Musical Antiquarian Society’, Musical World, 17 (1842), 237.
34
e.g. these anthems, both published in the second volume of Boyce’s Cathedral Music, were performed at a lecture
on church music given by a Mr William Dawson at Maidstone, Kent on 7 Jan. 1847 (William Dawson,‘Church Music
in Kent’, Parish Choir, 1 (1847), 124) and at the opening of St Barnabas, Pimlico, in June 1850 (‘Consecration of
St. Barnabas, Pimlico’, Parish Choir, 3 (1850), 117).
35
e.g. the cathedral music lists published in the short-lived periodical Concordia (1875^6) record occasional perfor-
mances of Tallis’s Service and ‘Gibbons in F’, but not of Byrd’s service music. The Church Music Society’s Forty Years
of Cathedral Music 1898^1983 (London, 1940) lists Tallis’s Service as a ‘perennial’, in the repertory of 22 of the 50
cathedrals surveyed in 1898 and at 28 of 37 cathedrals in 1938, while Byrd’s Short Service was performed in fewer
than ten cathedrals in 1898 (the exact figure is not given), but at 31 in 1938 (pp. 11, 13^14).
36
John Jebb, The Choral Service of the United Church of England and Ireland; Being an Enquiry into the Liturgical System of
the Cathedral and Collegiate Foundations of the Anglican Communion (London, 1843), 339.
37
Terry,‘William Byrd’, 51^2.
38
Richard Turbet identified J. Guggenheim’s facsimile of Edward Lowe’s 1661 A Short Direction for the Performance of
the Cathedral Service . . . as a publication of Byrd’s Second Preces (‘J. Guggenheim as Music Publisher: Tallis and Byrd
Restored’, Brio, 41 (2004), 49^52 at 49^50). While this is technically correct, in the 19th c. Lowe’s version of the Preces
was universally attributed to Tallis, largely because of its similarity to Boyce’s versions of Tallis’s Preces, on which
almost all 19th-c. editions were based.

218
which is particularly remarkable when compared with the frequent publications of Tallis’s
version.The relative obscurity of Byrd’s setting is confirmed by a suggestion in the Musical
Times as late as 1920 that Byrd’s Responses ‘would well be worth the attention of any
enterprising choir on the look-out for something off the beaten track.’39 In fact, the only
piece attributed to Byrd to achieve widespread popularity during the first half of the
nineteenth century was the spurious canon Non nobis, Domine, and most of the limited
space devoted to Byrd in the musical press before 1880 is devoted to discussions of
the merits of Byrd’s claim to authorship, compared with the rival claims of Mozart and
Palestrina.40
While the impressive and expensive volumes of Byrd’s masses and motets produced
by the Musical Antiquarian Society might seem to suggest a greater interest in Byrd,
an examination of less scholarly publications paints a rather different picture, showing
that Tallis was clearly the more popular of the two composers. The abundance of cheap
if unreliable editions of Tallis’s Responses, together with press reports and other records
of performances, indicates that Tallis enjoyed a type of grass-roots popularity that Byrd
never came close to achieving until the twentieth century.
In much the same way that van der Gucht’s engraving captured the joint image
of Tallis and Byrd in the early eighteenth century, the relative popularity of the two
composers in the mid-nineteenth century was also captured in physical form. The base
of the Albert Memorial, erected after the death of Prince Albert in 1861 in Kensington
Gardens, London, one of the Royal Parks, is decorated with 169 figures representing
the Parnassus of the fine arts. It is divided into four sections: Painters, Sculptors and
Architects, Poets, and Musicians. English composition, heavily weighted in favour
of church music, is represented by Tallis, Orlando Gibbons, Henry Lawes, Purcell,
Arne, Boyce, and Bishop.41 Tallis stands to the right of Beethoven, facing Gibbons and
Lawes (see Pl. 2). The strong movement of Tallis’s arm across his body towards the later
English composers reinforces his perceived position at the head of English music,
pointing the way forward for his successors. Byrd is conspicuous by his absence.
The 1880s, however, saw the beginning of what Terry described as a ‘resurrection’
of interest in Byrd,42 and a rediscovery of his music, particularly the keyboard music
and his mass settings.43 This process of discovery encompassed both the literal discov-
ery of lost copies and a figurative discovery of music that, while not lost, had been long
neglected.
Although the existence of the three masses was well known, for most of the nine-
teenth century the three- and four-part masses were lost (the following discussion
is summarized in Table 3). A copy of these masses, the only one known to Rimbault at
the time of his 1841 edition of the five-part mass, was purchased by the bookseller

39
J. M. Duncan, ‘The Preces, Responses, and Litany of the English Church: A By-Way of Liturgical History’,
Musical Times, 61 (1920), 692^4 at 692.
40
See e.g. the extended correspondence on the origins of Non nobis and God Save the Queen in the Musical World
between Sept. 1839 and Feb. 1840, and in a further correspondence, triggered by Robert Schumann, in late 1848.
David Humphreys has recently identified the origins of this canon in Philip van Wilder’s Aspice Domine (‘Wilder’s
Hand?’, MusicalTimes, 144 (2003), 4). For a comprehensive list of early publications of Byrd’s music, see Richard Turbet,
‘The Fall and Rise of William Byrd, 1623^1901’, in Chris Banks, Arthur Searle, and MalcolmTurner (eds.), Sundry Sorts
of Music Books: Essays on the British Library Collections, Presented to O.W. Neighbour on his 70th Birthday (London,1993),119^28.
41
Stephen Bayley, The Albert Memorial:The Monument in its Social and Architectural Context (London, 1981), 67.
42
R. R. Terry,‘The Resurrection of William Byrd’, Music Student, 13 (1921), 429^30.
43
The important role played in the revival of interest in Byrd by the keyboard music, and in particular by
J. A. Fuller Maitland and William Barclay Squire’s edition of the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (1894^9), should be noted,
though it is of course beyond the scope of this article.

219
PL. 2. Statues of Beethoven, Tallis, Gibbons, and Lawes on the base of the Albert Memorial in
Kensington. Photograph by the author. ß Royal Parks, by permission.

Robert Triphook at the sale of the library of William Bartleman in 1822,44 and then
seems to have vanished. In June 1887 Barclay Squire announced in the Athenaeum the
discovery (presumably his, although he does not state this explicitly) of two sets of
manuscript copies of the three-part mass in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.45
One, MS 112, was a complete set of parts in the hand of John Immyns, the founder

44
Mass for Five Voices, ed. Rimbault, 11.
45
W. Barclay Squire, ‘A Lost Mass by Byrd’, Athenaeum, no. 3113 (1887), 841^2.

220
 TABLE 3. Summary of copies, editions, and performance of Byrd’s masses

Copy Provenance Date Performances

Mass for Three Voices, ed. Squire (1901)

unknown
Cambridge, Fitzwilliam 112
Cambridge, Fitzwilliam 179
(lacking Kyrie and part of
Gloria)
British Library, Add. 29382^5
British Library shelf-mark
K.8.d.10
221
owned Bartleman, purchased
Triphook
Immyns copy
donated by Vincent Novello,
1841
Immyns copy, in Oliphant’s
library until purchased by
Pickering, Apr. 1873
print, bound in with Gradualia,
bk. 2
vanished 1822 May have been performed by
the Madrigal Society in the
found c. June 1887 18th century. Revived by
Terry and choir of Downside
found c. June 1887
Abbey, 1898.
found June 1887^May 1888
found May 1888

MS copy made by Wingham June 1888

Mass for Four Voices, ed. Squire and Rockstro (1890)
unknown owned Bartleman, purchased vanished 1822 Revived by London
Triphook (Brompton) Oratory under
British Library shelf-mark print, bound in with Gradualia, found May 1888 Thomas Wingham, Advent
K.8.d.11 bk. 2 1891.
Royal College of Music 102 in Squire’s hand with correc- June 1888
tions by Rockstro
Mass for Five Voices, ed. Squire and Terry (1899)
Rimbault’s edition made from copy in possession of 1841 Revived by Downside Abbey
William Chappell under Terry, Nov. 1899. Also
British Library shelf-mark print, bound in with Gradualia, found May 1888 performed at Brompton
K.8.d.12, missing CT bk. 2 Oratory, Lent 1900, and at
Birmingham Festival, 5 Oct.
1900.
of the Madrigal Society; the other, MS 179, was lacking the Kyrie and part of
the Gloria and had been in the possession of Vincent Novello, who donated it to the
museum in 1841. In his article on Byrd for the Appendix of Grove’s Dictionary, Squire
mentions another copy in a set of partbooks, again in the hand of Immyns, in the
British Museum (Add. 29382^5).46 These partbooks had been in the collection of
Thomas Oliphant and were purchased for five shillings by ‘Pickering’ at the sale
of his library on 24 April 1873.47 In 1888, the British Museum purchased printed
copies of all three masses, bound in with a set of parts of the 1610 edition of the
second book of Byrd’s Gradualia.48
The Immyns copies of the three-part mass suggest strongly that the Madrigal
Society may have performed it during the eighteenth century, possibly on more than
one occasion.49 The association with the Madrigal Society continued into the nine-
teenth century: Bartleman was a member, and Oliphant was honorary secretary from
1832 and president from 1871. Given the existence of several copies in the libraries of
enthusiasts and antiquarians such as Oliphant and Novello it seems that the Mass for
Three Voices was more ignored than lost during the nineteenth century, and this neg-
lect continued even after the copies were unearthed, as their discoveries led to neither
immediate publication nor, to the best of my knowledge, performance. A letter from
Thomas Wingham, organist and choirmaster at Brompton Oratory, to Squire, dated
28 June 1888, shows that Wingham made a copy of the mass from parts lent to him by
Squire,50 but there is no evidence that it was performed at this time by the Oratory
choir. Terry claimed to have revived the three-part mass over a decade later while he
was at Downside Abbey,51 and it was not published until 1901, in an edition by Squire.52
The Mass for Four Voices was, however, more genuinely ‘lost’, and its rediscovery
elicited greater immediate interest, possibly because of its relatively conventional
voicing: it was published in an edition by Squire and W. S. Rockstro in 1890, only
two years after its discovery.53 Unlike Rimbault’s 1841 edition of the five-part mass,
this publication led directly to performances under the direction of Wingham at the
Brompton Oratory.54
The five-part mass also underwent a metaphorical discovery at the end of the 1890s.
It was performed on 21 March 1899, the Feast of St Benedict, by the choir of Downside

46
‘Byrd, William’, 573.
47
Catalogue of the Important Musical Collections Formed by the Late Thomas Oliphant, Esq . . ., Puttick & Simpson Sales
Catalogue, Vol. 155 (London, 1873), item 572.
48
The copies are date-stamped ‘30 MY 1888’. Squire’s article on Byrd published in the Appendix to Grove must
have been written before this date, as no mention is made of these copies, but the omission is made good in his
Appendix article on the ‘Mass’. Henry Davey, in his History of English Music (London, 1895), 159, claims that complete
copies of all three masses were also found at Lincoln by a Mr J. E. Matthew, and that he himself had uncovered
parts of the masses at the Bodleian Library.
49
The British Library also holds another Immyns copy of the Kyrie and Gloria of the three-part mass (Mad. Soc.
A. 52^55), although it was not mentioned by Squire.
50
‘Miscellaneous Letters to W. B. Squire, 1879^1909’, British Library, Add. 39680, fo. 44.
51
‘Magister Choralis’, ‘From our Roman Catholic Correspondent’, Organist and Choirmaster, 7 (1899) 47. This claim
appears to have gone unchallenged, and given that Terry vigorously contested a mistaken attribution of the first
performance of the Mass for Five Voices to the Oratory in the same publication (‘The Revival of Byrd’s Five-Part
Mass’, ibid. 271), it seems unlikely that it would have gone unremarked if it had been incorrect.
52
Mass forThree Voices, ed. W. B. Squire (London, 1901). This was the first in a series of ‘Arundel Masses, selected by
Henry Duke of Norfolk and C. T. Gatty’, published by R. & T. Washbourne.
53
Missa ad quatuor voces in
quales auctore Gulielmo Byrd, ed. Gulielmus Smith Rockstro and Gulielmus Barclay Squire
(London, 1890). A manuscript copy dated June 1888, in Squire’s hand, with corrections by Rockstro, suggests some-
thing of a pupil^teacher relationship between the two editors (Royal College of Music, 102).
54
See e.g.‘Byrd’s Mass at the Brompton Oratory’, Musical Times, 32 (1891), 26.

222
Abbey under the direction of Terry (with the exception of the Gloria, taken fromTallis’s
Mass for Four Voices, also recently revived by Terry).55 An account of the performance
in the Downside Review claims, with some justification, that they believed it was the
first performance in almost three centuries,56 yet the parts to this setting had never
been lost. In November of the same year, Terry’s Downside choir performed the com-
plete mass at the opening of the abbey church at Ealing.57 Terry and Squire published
a new edition, also in 1899,58 and over the next few years it was performed liturgically
at Brompton Oratory and at the newly built Westminster Cathedral,59 and in a concert
version at the Birmingham Festival.60
At the same time as this resurrection of interest in Byrd’s music, early signs of
a reassessment of the relative merits of Tallis’s English and Latin music were starting
to appear. While Husk was proclaiming Tallis the Father of English Cathedral Music,
for example, elsewhere in the same publication Rockstro was questioning the merits of
Tallis’s English music, and championing his then largely unknown Latin polyphony. In
his lengthy ‘Schools of Composition’article in the first edition of Grove, Rockstro wrote:
[Tallis] is, perhaps, better known, and more fairly judged, than any other English Composer
of the time, though his most popular works are not in all cases his best. To speak to English
Organists of his Responses, his Litany, or his Service in the Dorian Mode, would be super-
fluous. But, how many are equally well acquainted with his Motet, ‘Salvator mundi,’ or his
fearfully intricate Canon, ‘Miserere nostri’? How many know that the original of ‘I call and
cry’ is an ‘O sacrum convivium’ worthy of any Church Composer in the world short of
Palestrina himself ? How many have looked into the ‘Cantiones Sacr
’ . . . ? Yet it is here that
we must look for Tallis, if we wish to form any idea of his true greatness.’

This position was reiterated by many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
writersçthe Gothic intricacies of the Dorian Service had now been recast as ‘a
dreary succession of full chords’.61 This re-evaluation of the English liturgical music
was accompanied by a reconsideration of the significance of the title ‘Father of English
music’. Henry Davey, for example, in his 1895 History of English Music, suggested that
‘Tallis can only be fairly judged by his great contrapuntal works; the title of ‘‘Father of
English Cathedral Music’’ is not his most honourable title’.62 Terry developed the theme
further, arguing that the English service music of Tallis and his contemporaries was so
dull that ‘I venture to think that few are disposed to wish them joy of their paternity’.63
The metaphor of fatherhood was not, however, completely abandoned. One of
the first signs of the Byrd resurrection was the publication in 1883 of a biograph-
ical article in the short-lived Musical Review by Squire, entitled ‘A Father of Music’.64

55
Terry later published his edition ‘with an English text added from the Book of Common Prayer’ (London, 1935).
56
‘Odds and Ends’, Downside Review, 18 (Mar. 1899), 112. In the introduction to his 1935 English edition of the mass,
Terry claims that portions of the masses had been performed in 1898.
57
J[ohn] F. R. [unciman],‘William Byrde, his Mass’, Saturday Review, 38 (1899), 703^4.
58
Gulielmus Barclay Squire and Ricardus Terry, Missa ad quinque voces in
quales auctore Gulielmo Byrd (Leipzig, 1899).
59
‘Brompton Oratory’, The Times, 5 Mar. 1900, p. 8; Musicus, ‘Holy Week Music: Westminster Cathedral’, Daily
Telegraph, 3 Apr. 1909, p. 15.
60
The Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei were performed on 5 Oct. 1900 under Hans Richter in a
programme that included the Parsifal prelude and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. For more on this performance see
Richard Turbet,‘Bits of Byrd at Birmingham, 1900’, Early Music Review, 118 (Apr. 2007), 9.
61
R. R. Terry, ‘Anglican Church Music’, Chord, 3 (Dec. 1899), 17^25 at 21.
62
Davey, History of English Music, 147.
63
Terry, ‘Anglican Church Music’, loc. cit.
64
W. Barclay Squire, ‘A Father of Music’, Musical Review, 1 (1883): 299^300, 317^18, 331^2.

223
The phrase is taken from the record of Byrd’s death in the Cheque Book of the Chapel
Royal, but takes on a more complex significance in the light of other contemporary
references to musical paternity. The term ‘Father of Music’ is not only considerably
broader in scope than the earlier ‘Father of English church music’, embracing secular
and instrumental music as well as sacred music, but also avoids the suggestion of
Protestantism implicit in references to English (i.e. Anglican) church music.
This latter point is of particular importance for the Byrd revival. Except for that at
the Birmingham Festival, all of the early performances of the Byrd masses took place in
Roman Catholic liturgies. Although the Catholic Emancipation Act had been passed
in 1829 and the Roman Catholic hierarchy re-established in 1850, it was only towards
the end of the century that Roman Catholic institutions, such as Brompton Oratory
(dedicated in 1884) and, from 1901, Westminster Cathedral, began to provide a public
forum for the performance of English music for the Roman Rite. While Squire’s
academic interest in Byrd was responsible for uncovering the lost parts and for provid-
ing a well-researched biography, it was performances in Roman Catholic liturgies that
brought the music to life. The introduction to the 1890 edition of the four-part mass
states that it was ‘intended for practical purposes, and not merely as an antiquarian
curiosity’, and the Latinized names of the authors and editors are clearly directed at
Catholic choirs. Although Squire was an Anglican, many of the musicians involved in
the study and promotion of early English polyphony were Catholic, including Terry,
Rockstro, W. H. Grattan Flood, and H. B. Collins.
In 1715, Tudway had blithely described Tallis and Byrd as ‘both of them Papists’,
a position that is now generally accepted,65 but in the mid to late nineteenth century
the religious and cultural associations of the two composers had become sharply differ-
entiated. As the quotation I cited above from J. Powell Metcalfe shows (see p. 217),
Tallis was generally portrayed as unambiguously Protestant: the friend of Archbishop
Parker, chosen by God to establish the music of the English liturgy. Byrd, on the other
hand, was long suspected of having, in Rimbault’s words, ‘retained his predilection for
the Romish communion’,66 and Rimbault includes evidence of Byrd’s recusancy in his
1872 edition of the Cheque book of the Chapel Royal.67
It is hard to draw firm conclusions from this brief survey about the role of Byrd’s
suspected Catholicism in the nineteenth-century reception of his music, but there can
be no doubt that, for the new generation of Catholic musicians such as Terry, Byrd’s
unwavering faith became his primary virtue. Although Terry also worked hard to
reconfigure Tallis as a Catholic musiciançhe argued that ‘So far from Tallis being
considered the founder of the Anglican School of music, he would be more properly
described as one of the last of the Catholic composers’68çhis attitude towards Tallis
seems to have been adversely affected by the high regard in which he was held in the

65
There is still no firm evidence about Tallis’s religious affiliations, although recent scholarship leans towards
accepting his lifelong allegiance to Catholicism. See e.g. John Bennett, ‘A Tallis Patron?’, R.M.A. Research Chronicle,
21 (1988), 41^4.
66
See his edition of the five-part mass,1. His lengthy discussion in the introduction to this edition of the legend that
the canon Non nobis, Domine was to be found engraved on golden plates in the Vatican Library can only have reinforced
the association of Byrd with Roman Catholicism.
67
Edward F. Rimbault,The Old Cheque-Book, or Book of Remembrance of the Chapel Royal (London,1872, repr. NewYork,
1966), 189^90.
68
Terry, Catholic Church Music (London, 1907), 187. This point is argued at some length in his article ‘Tallys, Byrde,
and Some Popular Fictions’, Downside Review, 19 (1900), 75^81.

224
Anglican church. Around the turn of the twentieth century, at the same time as
his revival of Byrd’s masses and Tallis’s Lamentations, Terry was engaged in an active
campaign to challenge the prevailing beliefs about the history of English church music,
and an essay he published at this time explicitly compares not only the music of the two
composers, but also their spiritual convictions:
Tallis lacked the spiritual exaltation which could carry Byrd though a long work . . .Tallis was
frankly human, and it is in the nature of purely human emotion to wear itself out by its very
intensity. It is otherwise when the motive force is spiritual in character, hence we find Byrd,
right to the end of a long work like the five-part Mass, carried to flight after flight of ecstasy.
I am convinced that an auctioneer’s bill of sale would have inspired him had he known
beforehand that he was setting it for use in church . . .69

Throughout this essay Terry damns Tallis with the faintness of his praise, to the extent
that when he republished it in 1929 he added footnotes acknowledging that he had
modified his opinions over the intervening decades.70 Terry’s animosity towards Tallis
in this article can only be understood in the context of the prevailing attitudes towards
the two composers, and of Terry’s campaign to promote the music of the Catholic
Church. He finishes his article with a plea for the publication of more of Tallis’s music,
which includes an explicit attempt to reverse the popularity of the two composers:
Finally, not the least among the advantages likely to accrue from a more general study
of Tallis, would be the dissipation of the absurd yet generally accepted notion that Byrd,
though more an ‘all round’ man than Tallis, is yet his ‘inferior in breadth and grandeur’.
The more Tallis is known the more will he be appreciated, but a study of his works in conjunc-
tion with those of Byrd will sufficiently prove that in this case the disciple is indeed above the
master.71

Van der Gucht’s portrait of Tallis has been reversed at some point: he is shown
writing backwards with his left hand. Joseph Kerman has suggested that the images
of Tallis and Byrd may also have been reversed or interchanged at some point in their
historyçpresumably the portrait of Byrd is more in accord with his mental image of
Tallis and vice versa.72 Given the late date of the engraving, and the lack of any
evidence to suggest that it was based upon genuine likenesses of the composers,73 the
question must remain in the realm of speculation. But if such a reversal has taken place,
it would not be unique. For even though these are the most literal images of these
two composers that have been constructed over the centuries, they are far from the
only ones, and such invented images have exerted a powerful influence on the
popularity of the music of Tallis and Byrd and on their right to the title of Father of
English Music.

69
R. R. Terry,‘Some Unpublished Tallis’, Chord, 5 (Sept. 1900), 64^72 at 66, repro. in id., A Forgotten Psalter and Other
Essays (London, 1929), 84^90.
70
Id., A Forgotten Psalter, 86, 89.
71
Terry,‘Some Unpublished Tallis’, 72.
72
Joseph Kerman, ‘A Tallis Mass’, Early Music, 27 (1999), 669^71 at 671.
73
Alistair Dixon, in the notes accompanying the first volume of the Chapelle du Roi recording of the complete
works of Tallis (Signum SIGCDOO1 (1997), 41), claims that the style of dress in the portrait is Jacobean rather than
Tudor, and a new image was commissioned for this series of recordings. Lindgren also points out that one of the other
surviving ‘heads’ from Haym’s history has an identical frame, suggesting that the engravings were prepared specif-
ically for that project (Haym, Complete Sonatas, Part 1, ed. Lindgren, p. xii); see n. 8, above.

225
 ABSTRACT

The extensive prefatory material of the Cantiones sacrae of 1575 casts Tallis and Byrd
jointly as the parents of English music, but during the nineteenth century Tallis’s
position as ‘Father of English Church Music’ was undisputed, while Byrd’s music was
relatively neglected. The turn of the twentieth century, however, saw the beginning of a
re-evaluation of the respective merits of the two composers. This article examines
the nineteenth-century reception of Tallis and Byrd, paying particular attention to the
change in attitude that occurred towards the end of the century, and to the role
of Roman Catholicism in the early twentieth-century Byrd revival.

226