Music and Letters Advance Access originally published online on February 11, 2008
Music and Letters 2008 89(2):212-226; doi:10.1093/ml/gcm082
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© The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
Who is the Father? Changing Perceptions of Tallis and Byrd in Late Nineteenth-Century England
*University of Melbourne. Email: s.cole{at}unimelb.edu.au.
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Abstract |
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The extensive prefatory material of the Cantiones sacrae of 1575 casts Tallis and Byrd jointly as the parents of English music, but during the nineteenth century Tallis's position as ‘Father of English Church Music’ was undisputed, while Byrd's music was relatively neglected. The turn of the twentieth century, however, saw the beginning of a re-evaluation of the respective merits of the two composers. This article examines the nineteenth-century reception of Tallis and Byrd, paying particular attention to the change in attitude that occurred towards the end of the century, and to the role of Roman Catholicism in the early twentieth-century Byrd revival.
A version of this article was presented at the 2005 Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society in Washington, DC.