Explore the vast range of titles available.

In Janet Cardiff's The Forty Part Motet (2001, 40Part), ‘a reworking of Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium (c. 1570)’, the forty voice parts of the motet are played back via forty speakers. Visitors walk through and around the encompassing speakers arrayed in eight groups of five. Still in constant demand, 40Part enjoys unparalleled success in the contemporary art scene. This article shows how 40Part became associated with New York City's rituals of remembrance and healing after 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy, and considers the politics of the installation's stagings as part of those commemorations. Here, 40Part took on a specifically comforting function that speaks to larger tendencies in twenty-first-century auditory culture, American cultural responses to trauma, and commemorative uses of music, which are built on white bourgeois sentimental attachments and the techno-social production of imagined spaces and times of privilege.

What happened to a music edition once it left the printing house? [...]recently, itineraries of printed music have attracted remarkably little comment - a matter too bibliographically esoteric for musicologists and too niche for book historians. Part I comprises five short chapters in which Greer surveys the corpus and discusses his selection criteria (Chapter One, consisting of a five-page list of publications from about 1520 to 1640, nearly 200 in all), and then categorizes the annotations to be found in early printed music editions: ex libris inscriptions and other signs of ownership; added text and music; numbers (usually page or folio numbers, but sometimes prices); and other additions not covered by these categories - scribbles, colorings-in, criticisms germane and otherwise, theoretical explanations and diagrams. [...]easily overlooked as graphic noise, a set of coarse children's drawings serves here to affiliate long-dispersed music books now found in UCLA, Harvard, the Huntington and the Royal Academy of Music in London.

It has been known for twenty-five years that Alessandro Striggio the elder, the most important composer at the Medici court in Florence in the 1560s and 1570s, wrote a setting of the Ordinary of the Mass in forty parts, with an Agnus Dei in sixty parts, but the piece has always been thought lost. This major artwork from the high Florentine Renaissance does in fact survive (F-Pn, Rés. Vmd. ms 52). EntitledMissa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno, it is Striggio's most imposing composition, and underlines the early eminence of Florence in the art of massive polychoral writing. The last movement is indeed in sixty real parts. The Mass also appears to have been used by the Medici as a political tool in the art of cultural diplomacy. Offered in January 1567 to Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II at exactly the moment when Cosimo de' Medici was seeking approval from Maximilian of a royal title (granted finally as “Grand Duke” by Pope Pius V in 1569), the Mass was also performed by Lassus's colleagues in Munich and under Striggio's direction at court in France, a few weeks before he visited the court of Queen Elizabeth I in London in June 1567. The links with Striggio's forty-part motetEcce beatam lucemand with Thomas Tallis's Spem in alium, are discussed, as are the reasons why the source of the Mass remained unknown throughout the twentieth century.

Email: roger.cline13@gmail.com Dickensians, and especially those with topographical enthusiasms, will be interested in this fine modern reproduction of Thomas Tallis's early-Victorian London Street Views. some will know this volume already. it was produced by the london Topographical society in 1969, and was revised for an edition in 2002. illustrations from Tallis have often accompanied articles in The Dickensian.

Thomas Tallis’s gravestone has been lost, but its rhymed epitaph is well known from a transcription in John Strype’s 1720 edition of the Survey of London. An earlier, longer and demonstrably more accurate version of Tallis’s epitaph, dated December 1585 (the month after the composer’s death), can be found in the poetic miscellany Cambridge University Library Ms. Dd.5.75. The epitaph was almost certainly written by Henry Stanford, the scribe of Dd.5.75, who at the time was tutor to the Paget household, a hotbed of Catholic sympathies and a musical centre where ‘songes of Mr Byrdes and Mr Tallys’ were sung. This new source offers a glimpse into the complex social and political realities of Tallis’s last years.

The compositional process behind the iconic Tallis forty-part motet, Spem in alium (ca. 1570) remains an enigma. Did he really check every pair of voices for illegal parallels? The author proposes a scenario based on Thomas Campion’s “Rule” for connecting notes in three voices above a bass. This very clever system ensures the presence of all three interval-classes above the bass (third, fifth, and root), and makes parallels impossible. The treatise was widely reprinted, and it is likely that the system was known well before its appearance around 1614. Any composer who knew this system could have grouped the melodic motions above the bass in such a way as to make the task of writing in so many parts more manageable. Campion believed that the bass was the principal melodic voice, and glimpses into the disposition of the soggetti in Tallis’s motet reveal that the bass is indeed the soggetto in the thick-textured sections.

The earliest documented polyphonic settings of a liturgical text in the English vernacular were a small group of unidentified Litanies, one of which, stated to have been for five voices, was published on 26 June 1544. Not one printed copy of that Litany is now known to be extant, the records of its issue have received but patchy notice in the historiography of English Reformation music, and beyond the odd passing reference no attention has been given to the all-too-obvious possibility that the setting contained in the lost print was none other than the celebrated five-part Litany by Thomas Tallis. Though no prints or manuscripts of Tallis's Litany survive from earlier than the 1630s, a textcritical study of the extant sources strongly suggests that their common original source was a printed one, while the make-up of Tallis's cantus firmus and a small but significant anomaly of liturgical structure imply that his setting predates not only the well-known monophonic setting issued on or before 16 June 1544 (STC 10621.5, 10621.7 and 10622), but also the first publication of the vernacular text on 27 May (STC 10620 and 10621). Given Tallis's pre-eminence among court musicians, and the absence from the sources of any other contemporary settings demonstrably in five parts, the chances seem slight indeed that the polyphonic setting printed in 1544 was the work of any other composer.