Thomas Tallis- Spem in Alium

Moving from music from the 1960s, to that of the 1560s, I have spent a great deal of the past week reading, listening, and analyzing Thomas Tallis' "Spem in Alium," his grand motet for FORTY voices. Not forty musicians, as many choral works and masses are performed today, but forty distinct voices, each given their own part unique from all other singers. Given the strictures of Renaissance voice leading and harmonic movement, this is an exceptional feat, perhaps more clever in compositional resources than, say, Penderecki's "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima," whose 52-voice texture was made possible through the explosion of strictures regarding harmony, pitch, and extended technique throughout the 20th century. Given that only triadic and seventh harmonies were allowed, and voice leading could not involve parallel fifths or octaves, it is a remarkable feat, a drastic extension of Renaissance compositional techniques.

I wish to pivot upon the word "drastic" for a moment. Clearly a work for forty voices by a composer who rarely strayed above five or six (which is no small feat in itself) in a time and place (Tudor England) with few works for even a quarter of these voices could be considered extreme, or drastic. It is no surprise that the general history of this piece has been anxious, existing among its peers like Robert Wadlow. It has been called a curiosity, an amazing feat, and put on a pedestal for its astonishing features. Tell anyone who doesn't know about this piece but who is aware of basic counterpoint, and watch their jaw drop. Forty voices? That can't be possible! Until the past thirty years, it was analyzed as a compositional exercise, a drastic feat of compositional wit, rather than a piece of music.

Luckily, recent scholarship has attempted to "normalize" the work through showing its relationship with other forms and composers. Paul Doe has seen the work as a blown-up version of the Elizabethan respond-motet, a type of motet that, while I'm not particularly familiar with its specifications, would have been composed by Tallis and Byrd. Davitt Maroney has indirectly proposed a possible link with Alessandro Striggio, an Italian string virtuoso at the Florentine court. Striggio is known to have composed a 40-voice motet, "Ecce beatam lucem" (which is a fascinating work in its own right, full of virtuosic counterpoint), as well as a 40-voice Mass that concludes with a 60-voice Agnus Dei II. Striggio is known to have visited England during 1567 on his trip around Europe as essentially the musical ambassador for his Excellency, a voyage where he carried at least the mass with him. While we do not have any record of exactly what transpired while Striggio was in England, he ostensibly visited the court, as he later wrote a piece glorifying Queen Elizabeth. It would stand to reason, then, that he came into contact with her composer, Thomas Tallis. It has been hypothesized that "Spem in Alium," for stylistic reasons, was dated in the late 1560s or early 1570s. Thus, Striggio's influence, though still cirucmstantial, is highly likely, given the shared number of voices in the respective pieces. Clearly, "Spem in alium" does not exist in a vacuum. It can be seen as a mixture of a genre Tallis was well versed in, and the influence of Striggio, though one cannot claim this definitively.

If we can forge a link between composers and genres for "Spem in alium," the question then becomes, how should this work be analyzed? This work, given its gargantuan size and Trivial Pursuit-Music Version regard, seems optimally primed for an analysis of the notes, to look at the little details and harmonic patterns to understand just how Tallis created a piece at once stylistically cogent and aesthetically stunning. However, at this point I wish to recall the description of this piece as "drastic." Cannot this work be analyzed in a drastic manner, one that focuses on a different reading of its "drasticness?"

In a recent article, the musicologist Carolyn Abbate creates a binary between "drastic" analysis and "gnostic" analysis. In it, gnostic analysis is seen as analysis of music made into monuments, through listening to recordings and reading scores in order to discuss the Work. Drastic analysis instead looks at the performers and performances themselves, remembering that music (and here she is talking about Romantic Opera, and the same is true for Renaissance Motets) is given life only through performers who, lest we forget, are human. I unfortunately have not heard this piece live, and all I can be in contact with is a recording and score. But, perhaps this can be transcended by reading the score as a live performance, rather like a conductor than a music theorist.

It is just these large works, those that seem ripest for formal blow-by-blow musical analyses, that can be best understood from the performance aspect. Recordings cannot differentiate forty voices- they can be a tool for hearing the notes, but not the affects. Likewise, while looking at the notes on this score is helpful for understanding compositional strategies, the individual pitches and lines are swallowed up during performance. Furthermore, the piece is not all that interesting harmonically or registerally- it never moves outside of a three-octave span, from the G on the bottom line of the bass clef to the G perched atop the treble, and it is, compared to other contemporaneous works, progressively static. What is missing is the phenomenological affects of the music in performance. After all, this is what ought to be the fundamental draw to such a work- if it offered nothing interesting aesthetically, it would be just a curiosity. But it does, and that something must be evident in performance.

I wish to give an example of what such an analysis could entail by looking at the opening of the piece. Given that the work is written for forty unique voices who are not compositionally grouped off (though they are in the score), one can imagine the choir standing in one large semi-circle or circle, 1 to 40. (As a sidenote, Striggio's large works are divided into choirs, which allows for an antiphonal feel.) The opening introduces the voices almost exactly in order, from 1-40, with anywhere between 5-10 voices singing at any given time. Imagine this experience live- a wash of sound slowly moving down the line from beginning to end. Two or three measures after the 40th voice enters, all 40 voices erupt together, the explosion at the end of a lit fuse. What happens next? The voices reverse, with voice 40 beginning and the voices moving back along the line until voice 1, when the fuse erupts again and all 40 voices enter. In this opening bit, Tallis clearly utilizes the performative aspect of the ensemble. The movement and overwhelming of the sound are effects that, while evident in the score, do not come alive until actively heard, whether in performance or an imagined version thereof.

"Spem in alium" deserves better than its label as an interesting factoid in music history. Thankfully, scholars are committed to providing context for the work that can help it sit comfortably among its peers. In attempting to find a way to do so, I do not want to diminish its special qualities; after all, it is a motet for FORTY individual parts, and that's pretty damn astounding. Instead, I want to redirect analysis and appreciation of its unique attributes from a drastic compositional example to a drastic performative experience.