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English choral music in the fifteenth century was highly florid and ornate. While most part writing in Europe was done in three or four parts; English composers often wrote in five or six parts and as many forty parts. They relied heavily on Plainchant and cantus firmus. The disruption of the social and musical fabric was much more severe in England then in Germany or the rest of Europe. Henry VIII's break with Rome in 1534 and his subsequent dissolution of the monasteries, with their musical institutions, imposed a restraint on the development of the Latin motet which is based on the Plainchant. His barring of the use of old church forms and Latin services caused composers to develop different setting that relied heavily on polyphonic psalm settings, these would replace the plainchant, which was no longer in use. These Plainchants were called Sarum chants. Sarum is merely a distortion of the word Salisbury. This tradition went back for hundreds of years. In 1547 this tradition was abolished.
In the rule of Edward VI even more surrpression took place. The praryer books that Edward approved had little potential for polyphonic treatment. The damage that was done could not be undone even by the overturning of most of the changes made in the years of Henry VIII or Edward VI. It was Mary, who confirmed the Anglican church as the state religion. It was from this lack of availible traditional musical vehicles that new ones were able to grow. Anthems, Lamentations, and many others appeared that created an environment rich in possibilites. It was Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) who is the towering figure in choral music for most of the latter half of the fifteenth century. Tallis served under Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary Tudor, and finally for more then half of the reign of Elizabeth I. Tallis's style changed over the years so it is hard to sterotype it.
Tallis was fortunate in being a composer of high stature during the reign of Mary. After Edward VI's near complete repression of the Catholic liturgy, the old musical forms that were Tallis's areas of expertise came back into service. The mass that used dense polyphony, florid embellishments, with little stress put on the relationship between words was music in sharp contrast to what was being composed on the continent, where the reformation had taken hold. Another musical vehicle that was very common up to the 1530's, was the 'votive antiphons'.(A liturgical chant with a prose text, sung in association with a psalm.) On the continent it was simplicity and intelligibility that were the rule. Tallis was able to adapt throughout his career and even in his final years was able to take on bold compositional challenages that standout in the literture as it's finest examples. The forty-part mass 'Spem In Alium' is a tour de force polyphonic complexity. The private services of Elizabeth that Tallis composed contained Latin texts that may not have been tolerated by many of the Protesant churches elsewhere, but Elizabeth was a great patron of the arts and tolerated a great deal that may of had Catholic roots. Tallis was one of the first composers to use English in services for the newly formed Anglican church, thus providing some of the best examples of the new forms of church music like anthems, that might have otherwise never fully have developed.
