Music books

English Sacred Music 1549–1649

My first book, English Sacred Music 1549–1649, issued by Gimell in 1991, sold out some years ago. About 2000 copies were made at the time in two runs. I have no plans to reprint the original as it stood, since some updating is now necessary (I wrote the bulk of the text in the mid-80s). I have recently sold the last few copies.

What We Really Do

My second book, What We Really Do, was published by the Musical Times. It was indeed launched on October 15th 2003 on the occasion of my 50th birthday, and within three weeks of the 30th anniversary of the foundation of the Tallis Scholars, on November 3rd 1973. The book is much more concerned with the thirty years of the group than with my fifty, in support of which it is filled with 30-year's worth of photographs of us singing and touring. The chapters finally came out as follows:

Introduction
Chapter One: A history of the Tallis Scholars
Chapter Two: A history of Gimell Records
Chapter Three: Performing polyphony
Chapter Four: At home and abroad, the spread of interest in polyphony account of the different organisations which have invited me to direct them)
Chapter Five: On tour (what it's like to be on the road for many months of the year)
Chapter Six: Singers' 'argot' (the special language of our profession)
Chapter Seven: Not an interview with Peter Phillips (a spoof but earnest interview with me)
Chapter Eight: An extract from the Tallis Scholars Journal Epilogue
A complete discography
A complete list of all the people who have sung in the Tallis Scholars
Index

My original title for the book was 'Nobody stopped me', but I decided to shelve that until I write a genuine autobiography, if I ever do. However I start the first chapter about the history of the group with reference to it:

Interviewer: I've met a number of you English conductors who have come out of Oxford and Cambridge: Roger Norrington, John Eliot Gardiner, you and Harry Christophers, Andrew Carwood and Edward Wickham from the younger generation. You're all quite alike in not apparently having had much formal training in what you do. Was there any particular magic formula in what you experienced at Oxford?

PP: Nobody stopped me.

This was the simple truth. If we wanted to put on concerts, we just did it. Nobody cared if we did, nobody cared if we didn't. Nobody objected or put up barriers, but then nobody helped or encouraged. Maybe the Music Society of one's college would offer a small sum of money to get a project off the ground, but it was indeed small and it was certain that somebody else would get it next term. Concert-giving had nothing to do with the degree course one was engaged in: it did not count towards one's final result. There was and is no tuition in conducting at any of the British universities; and none of the conservatoires offers a course in choral conducting only. To all those people who have asked me how they can study and qualify in what I do professionally the answer is: you can't unless you either go to another country where such courses may for all I know be available; or you just get on with it and learn as you go along. All the conductors listed by my interviewer initially went to Oxford and Cambridge to do something else and left those places formally qualified in something else. But if one did decide to pass one's student days avoiding one's degree course in order to put on concerts, one gave oneself the chance not only to learn how to conduct but how to be an entrepreneur as well.'

Lighter-hearted are the entries in the Argot chapter:

Hostilities: an argot rewriting of the word 'hospitalities'. An engagement which involves staying overnight in the houses of the sponsors is not acceptable to professional singers, though the less thoughtful of those sponsors can never understand why. They think to themselves: 'we have this beautiful house; how much more must these sensitive artists want to stay with us than in a dreary hotel.' Which to the singer means not only having to make polite conversation around the breakfast table to the hosts while looking rapturously grateful for the privilege, but also to meeting their dog, the grandmother and the contagiously ill child. And any slightly awkward habits the singer may have picked up after a lifetime of actually being in hotels, like smoking or drinking or making long-distance telephone calls all night, usually serve to dim his or her lustre once off the stage, which arguably is best not discovered. The problem essentially is that musicians are all too used to being patronised by people who view them as some sort of clever toy, a fairy-ground source of delight (see also 'Boys, Girls'). An extension of this state of mind is the oft-heard remark: 'what a shame you have to rush away tomorrow. Next time you must stay for several days and visit all our friends as well as the local sights, not to mention the village organist who I know is dying to meet you. It would be such fun.'

'Noch ein Minibar, bitte': a request put to an unsuspecting hotel receptionist in the middle of the night, the contents of the minibar supplied in the guest's room having been consumed. History no longer relates who said this, though folklore insists it was a brass-player.

Future publications

I am considering a third book. This would take the form of a series of essays, in the nature of jottings, mopping up some of the untied ends which are loose in my head. Here is a possible list of topics:

The disconcerting effects of finding that two masterpieces one loved are not what we were told they were. This refers to the reattributing of two eight-voice motets from two composers we knew and respected (Clemens non Papa and Cristobal de Morales) to someone nobody had ever heard of, Thomas Crecquillon. As the years pass I find this has caused more and more unease, despite the fact that the reattribution is almost certainly correct.
Commentary on the 'think-piece' I did for the BBC about crossover, and my preference for concert-halls over churches, with reference to the ensuing discussion in which I distinguished between the sound and the visuals in the two types of venue. The piece is quoted below, without the discussion.
An abstract of the inter-disciplinary argument in renaissance painting and music, based in the development of perspective. This will of necessity be technical. Such a chapter will put an end to the promise I made years ago, routinely restated in my biography, that I am working on a book about renaissance culture. Here will be the essence of what I was thinking of years ago.
A chapter on to what extent polyphony, and especially that of Palestrina, can properly be thought of as being abstract.
A chapter on what I hold to be bad polyphony.
A commentary on John Ruskin's feeling that the so-called revival of learning in fifteenth-century Italy marked the beginning of a negative development in Western culture, in which aristocratic and elitist values established themselves thoughout art and learning. Such a radically untrendy view deserves analysis, not least in its application to music. Reference to its antithesis - the more populist counterreformation culture of the baroque - would be good.

As a matter of interest I was recently asked by BBC Radio to write a 'think-piece' based on the Epilogue of What We Really Do. I will leave you to read the original, but this is how I adapted it for radio broadcast. I wanted to quote it here because it contains some of my most recent thoughts on what we do in fact do, and why, thoughts which may not make comfortable reading to certain kinds of idealist:

Crossover has become a tired old word, almost an insult. Too much money has been made out of dumbing down music that originally was something of quality for anyone to have much respect for the processes involved. And once a piece has been thus dumbed, what do we think of it then? Can we ever hear Bach's Air on a G string or Vivaldi's Four Seasons - pieces mercilessly crossed over to TV advertising - again completely straight, as they were in their time of innocence? Crossover in whatever form - beat tracks, adding tacky lyrics to famous melodies, acoustically enhanced effects - so often seems to be no more than a way of avoiding difficult decisions about training and practice in order to make a quick buck.

But perhaps the word crossover still has a meaning which is not all bad: it implies that by some process of re-presentation, not necessarily a cheapening one, a piece of music can be made to appeal to people who would not normally find it interesting, or who would not hear about it at all. Every artist and every promoter dreams of finding new audiences for what they have been doing for years, often with the thought that something very simple about the packaging is eluding them. Here lies the opportunity and the danger. The hope is reasonable; the methods resorted to may destroy something fragile.

Something of this makes me feel that the Tallis Scholars and their performances of renaissance sacred polyphony may be called crossover. After all, we have taken music which was expressly conceived for church services and turned it into something unapologetically secular. We have taken music which was written to form one element in a complex act of worship, part of a highly stylised ceremony of significant words, gestures, smells, icons, costumes and music, deracinated it and put it up in lights by itself for our pleasure and financial gain. Everything has been changed: the words are put into the background; the gestures, smells and icons are banished altogether; the cassock and surplice of the choirman has been replaced, for our men at least - our women are beyond the original pale - with posh Victorian dinner wear; the church is often replaced with a concert hall for access to which people must pay. How can this be justified, and how can the music survive the upheaval?

All along my intention was to put the spotlight squarely on the music, with no distractions. I always believed that the best polyphony was good enough to withstand this kind of scrutiny; indeed I believed it was as good as any of the later concert repertoires which have always been paid the compliment of being listened to just for themselves, in silence. I objected to how bad so many church performances of sacred music have been, while suspecting that to have meaning polyphony does not necessarily need the context of a church service at all. For me the logical end-point to this argument was to present our music in as neutral a place as possible, where people can hear it to best advantage. Modern concert-halls may be the sonic equivalent of going to see a Bellini altarpiece in an art gallery, but I do not mind. In galleries one pays for the privilege of being able to see a great religious painting without difficulty. Everything is arranged so that one can enjoy it, interpret it, and then move on to another one hanging next to it. In such a space people from outside the Christian tradition can derive as much meaning as those from inside it, and though their conclusions may be different, they may be just as valid too. The same is true of sacred polyphony in concert halls, which we perform, like paintings in a gallery, one example after another.

Our crossover from sacred to secular and from church to concert hall, in my opinion has brought real benefits to the music, if not always to the performers. Not only can it now be heard without interruption from priests, but it can be heard in comfort. I am glad that our audiences can now listen to a votive antiphon by Tallis, which may last the length of a Haydn symphony, without freezing to death and while sitting on comfortable seats. Nor any more do all those present have to share the one lavatory on the premises with us the singers. And the sound can be much better in a concert hall than in a church. It is true that in both categories one finds acoustics which are really too dry for singers to be able to blossom in; but it is very rare to find a concert hall which is too reverberant. This can be the curse of so many church concerts. Many people still think that bathroom acoustics are the only ones for church music, the singing coming at them in a romantic wash from the far, far distance. They have heard too many backing tracks on Disney cartoons. Renaissance music is made up of tiny interlocking details, like the details in string quartet writing, which need to be heard in complete clarity. For this style of chamber music the best spaces are those which have been planned and built according to the most modern specifications, where the reverberation patterns can be controlled. The Birmingham Symphony Hall, the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, Angel Place in Sydney, the Taipei Symphony Hall and many other state-of-the-art halls worldwide are my idea of perfection for what we do. Few churches can rival them.

The problem with this is less for the music as for us. To many people we are now neither fish nor fowl, no longer fitting into any of the available neat categories which enable the casual concert-goer to feel completely relaxed with us. Are we a choir or a vocal ensemble? Are we making chamber music like string quartets, and if we are accepted as secular chamber musicians, is it appropriate simply to put us alongside other chamber musicians in International Artists Series in the local Arts Centre, or do we need helping on stage a bit, with - dread concept - candles and even incense? (Never mind that incense gets in the singers' throats and candles mean we can't read our copies).

It is our fault, in a way, for crossing over. But it had to be done. There is little future in the church for polyphony, especially not in the Catholic communion, for which almost all the music we sing was written, where the vast majority of priests seem to want either guitars and unison folk-style singing or, if they do have a sense of tradition, plainchant. Left to them this great repertoire would die. Whatever may be the opposite of dumbing down, I feel our corner of crossover embodies it.

^top