Thomas Tallis spent more than fifty years composing music in the volatile world of Tudor England. Tallis is a clear, readable biography of a great Renaissance musician, which places the composer's music in its rich historical, cultural, and architectural context.

John Harley’s Thomas Tallis is the first full-length book to deal comprehensively with the composer’s life and works. Tallis entered the Chapel Royal in the middle of a long life, and remained there for over 40 years. During a colourful period of English history he famously served King Henry VIII and the three of Henry’s children who followed him to the throne. His importance for English music during the second half of the sixteenth century is equalled only by that of his pupil, colleague and friend William Byrd. In a series of chronological chapters, Harley describes Tallis’s career before and after he entered the Chapel. The fully considered biography is placed in the context of larger political and cultural changes of the period. Each monarch’s reign is treated with an examination of the ways in which Tallis met its particular musical needs. Consideration is given to all of Tallis’s surviving compositions, including those probably intended for patrons and amateurs beyond the court, and attention is paid to the context within which they were written. Tallis emerges as a composer whose music displays his special ability in setting words and creating ingenious musical patterns. A table places most of Tallis’s compositions in a broad chronological order.

The sixteenth century was a time of religious upheaval in England. From Henry VIII's protestant reformation through Queen Mary's staunch but short-lived Catholic revival to the return of Anglicanism in Elizabethan times, it would have required careful diplomacy for a Roman Catholic like Thomas Tallis simply to stay alive. In fact he became the most respected composer of his generation and is now recognised as one of the country's greatest composers. 2005 was the five hundredth anniversary of Thomas Tallis' birth and his genius is celebrated in this collection of English-texted sacred music, selected and edited by Jeremy Summerly to provide an invaluable source of introits and anthems for choirs. The volume contains: If You Love Me * Hear the Voice and Prayer * A New Commandment * O Lord, Give They Holy Spirit * I Call and Cry to Thee, O Lord * With All Our Heart * Discomfit Them, O Lord * Why Fumeth in Sight (the theme upon which Ralph Vaughan Williams based his Fantasia). If you are interested in this volume why not look at these other titles in the choral programme series: Fair Oriana (ed. Jeremy Summerly), Musicke's Praier (ed. Tim Brown) and Passetime with good company! (ed. Jeremy Summerley).

Includes hymnody from medieval plain chant to the early twentieth-century classics. This work includes hymns that are grouped according to theme and contains material suitable for any festival or occasion in the life of a church.

A fresh look at Anne of Cleves’ life as a German noblewoman, and the Continental politics that affected her marriage. Did the doomed union really cause the fall and execution of Thomas Cromwell?

A survey of the huge importance of Thomas Tallis, the `Father of Church Music', on Victorian musical life. In Victorian England, Tallis was ever-present: in performances of his music, in accounts of his biography, and through his representation in physical monuments. Known in the nineteenth century as the 'Father of English Church Music', Tallis occupies a central position in the history of the music of the Anglican Church. This book examines in detail the reception of two works that lie at the stylistic extremes of his output: Spem in alium, revived in the 1830s, though generally not greatly admired, and the Responses, which were very popular. A close study of the performances, manuscripts and editions of these works casts light on the intersections between the antiquarian, liturgical and aesthetic goals of nineteenth-century editors and musicians. By tracing Tallis's reception in nineteenth-century England, the author charts the hold Tallis had on the Victorians and the ways in which Anglican - and English - identity was defined and challenged. Dr SUE COLE is a research associate at the Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne.