Cats in January

The advent of Christmas and the associated holiday festivities is but one highlight of the long Australian summer. Another, much less known, is the annual Tallis Scholars Summer School held during slow hot January at St John's College, University of Sydney. The TSSS is for people who like to sing unaccompanied Renaissance music for several parts, which is the specialty of the Tallis Scholars and their director, Peter Phillips.

Their mission seems to be not just to sing everything singable from this period - say the century from about 1550 through the 1600s - but also to turn a blinkered and uneducated modern world away from its lightweight and evanescent fascinations, and to remind us of the beauties of Renaissance polyphony. It works for me, I have to say, though I don't mind a good jazz session either.

The beautiful manuscript shown here, which can be found in the small library of the Duomo in Siena, is an antiphonary (or large-print edition chant book), transcribed by some diligent monk in the 15th century. Confession time: strictly speaking it's at least a hundred years older than the music of the Renaissance   And while I am at it, it's quite inappropriate on entirely another score (no pun intended); it's not polyphony at all, having only one part or line of music. And finally, by the time of the Renaissance this attractive and mysterious square notation had gone out of fashion, not least because while it could indicate whether the tune went up or down and by how much, there's no hint as to how long each note should be. OK I admit it - it has nothing to do with the subject other than the fact that it's old music.

But hey, I love the atmospherics and the calligraphy. And what about when they really get going and play fast and loose with the coloured ink quills and gold leaf and all - hang the expense, surely some rich Prince is paying? 

However, in those days around 1500 there was a general feeling that the dark ages had not produced the creative best. Looking back nostalgically to the classical era and feeling the new yearnings of humanism, leaders of town and gown alike felt that music was not doing justice to great poetry and ideas:

“You know how much music was valued among those good ancients as the finest of arts. With it they worked great effects that today we do not. Today … with certain wails, bellows and bleating …  they sound like cats in January.”

So wrote one Bernardino Cirillo of Santa Casa di Loreto in February 1549, presumably during a long hard winter. That sentiment was the incentive that drove some of the giants of secular and sacred music during these Renaissance years to write some magical and inspiring works. So that's why I started here, a century or so early.

Back to the Future

Peter Phillips, the founding director of the 'a cappella superstars' the Tallis Scholars  with dozens of acclaimed CDs to his credit, comes out from London to run the TSSS. Peter's knowledge of music of this era is immense and he is full of insights that bring new life and meaning to the pages of sterile 'dots'. He's accompanied and assisted by two other experienced singers from the Scholars. 

About 60 of us will split into various groupings of various sizes and voices and sing all day and until 10 at night for a week. We sing evensong at Christ Church St Lawrence on the Thursday of that week, then a big concert in Oxford St on the final Saturday night. O yes, and a party to follow.

Quite a bit of the music to be sung is in Latin, with some in English.  The aforementioned munificent Prince presumably did not pay translators, since they all knew the Latin in those days, or if they didn't, probably just as well. And of course there's some music on the menu by the good Thomas Tallis Esq. his-self, who lived 1505 - 1585. Actually, that's not a bad innings for those days, considering Byrd and Tallis were variously in or out of favour depending on whether the reigning monarch decided to be Catholic or Protestant that day. Heads rolled for lesser indiscretions. He tended to keep his Latin masses up his sleeve while the king was persecuting Catholics.

For example, from the Choral Public Domain Library, see an 8-part work by Henry Purcell. We shall no doubt be singing this little number; in fact I would not mind swinging it, but it's probably not done in this august company. Other composers might include William Byrd, Robert White and the Spanish composer Tomas Luis de Victoria from around that era.

Other works are frequently in 5 or 6-part harmony, sometimes 8, so one rather has to concentrate as you will know. These days we tend to allocate them to soprano, alto, tenor, bass line one or two like the example above, but in those days it was often just parts for various high and low voices, take your pick. (The double staves below the sung parts are a reduction for keyboard for rehearsal only if desired; but at a TSSS it's infra dig to resort to such props, as you are expected to be a good enough singer and sight reader not to need help. Gulp!) 

After a bit of practice, the outcome is usually quite enthralling in the good acoustics at St John's and the other halls. An acquired taste perhaps, but all in all it's a great week of letting the rest of the world go by. Not as good as the real Tallis Scholars, I'm sure - but I hope we don't sound like winterised cats this January.