Tallis, Spem in alium

Thomas Tallis (c. 1505-1585) held positions early in his career as organist in Benedictine priories and at Canterbury Cathedral. With Henry VIII’s suppression of the monasteries in 1536-1541, Tallis found employment with the Chapel Royal. He served four monarchs and played a significant role in the subsequent development of Anglican church music during the reign of Elizabeth I.

Tallis enjoyed success in his lifetime and a lasting legacy. He does not have a reputation as an innovator, but rather as a solid and restrained compositional master. But Paul Doe writing in The New Grove Dictionary notes that Tallis’s works occasionally soared above those of his contemporaries, and he notes in particular the Latin motet Spem in alium:

. . . [T]he 40-voice motet Spem in alium[] is such an astonishing technical achievement, and so completely without precedent anywhere in Europe, that to call it “experimental” seems an absurd understatement. . . . What significance there may be in a composition for eight five-voice choirs can at present only be a matter for conjecture.

It appears that Tallis intended to arrange the eight choirs in a horseshoe shape. The music begins with a single voice in Choir I and gradually adds voices moving along the horseshoe to Choir VIII with all 40 parts singing simultaneously. It then reverses the process beginning with Choir VIII and adding voices in the opposite direction. It has also been speculated that the work was commissioned by the Duke of Norfolk for a performance in the octagonal hall at his Nonsuch Palace.

The text is adapted from the Book of Judith, and some suggest that it was part of a dramatic enactment of that story for the 40th birthday of Queen Elizabeth in 1573.