Choral Christmas: Tallis’s Christmas Mass

At 10am GMT on each day of Advent I am posting a video of a piece which, in my opinion, celebrates the best of music made by the human voice – with the occasional quirky video thrown in for good measure! You can catch up with the full Choral Christmas here.

Thomas Tallis:Audivi vocem, from the Christmas Mass

This is the second, but not the final, appearance by my musical icon Thomas Tallis in this Choral Christmas series of blog posts. If you’ve followed my blog for any length of time you probably knew what is coming up on the 24th December, on day one.

As Peter Phillips of the Tallis Scholars, who we hear in today’s performance, says:

“Not long ago neither Tallis’s Missa Puer natus est nobis nor his antiphon Ave Dei patris filia could have been recorded: the manuscripts for some of the voice-parts were missing and were believed to be lost for ever. It is a privilege to put such significant works together on disc for the first time.”

This piece forms part of Tallis’s Christmas Mass, and for me is one of those works which neatly encapsulates the transition in choral music from plainchant and monody (one voice) to polyphony (many voices) which was raw and very modern in the days of Tallis’s compositional career.

There is no score to be found online for the Christmas Mass, but more information and the option to buy the music, can be found on the website of Gimell Records.