***This event has been cancelled due to bereavement.***
Tuesday, May 7, 2013
6-8 p.m.
Founders Chapel, Founders Hall
Directed by Edwin Basilio, featuring the Choral Scholars
Click here for a printable flier!
***This event has been cancelled due to bereavement.***
Thomas Tallis (c.1505-1585) was one of the most extraordinary composers of church music who lived in one of the most dramatic periods of English history. His life and work spanned the entire English Reformation when the country fluctuated between Catholicism and Protestantism, as the Church in England was gradually transformed into the Anglican Churchof England. Tallis was born under King Henry VII and lived and worked during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth 1st. It is believed that Tallis remained ‘in the old faith’, i.e. a Catholic, throughout his life, despite becoming the leading composer of Anglican church music through his great service to the development of distinctive English and Anglican forms of choral traditions. His skill and virtue in his work earned him the admiration (and protection) of successive monarchs.
His extensive compositions reflect the fluctuating times of change in the church – they range from Latin masses and devotional songs to the Virgin Mary, as well as a number of Lutheran pieces, to some of the earliest Anglican liturgical music in English, and back through the Catholic reign of Mary, when the Roman rite and extensive use of Latin returned and Tallis composed many pieces in the polyphonic style. Under Elizabeth, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer took a more definitive turn and a more plain style of church music is once again reflected in some of Tallis pieces, although some of his classic pieces (including the multi-choirSpem in Alium) also belong to this period.
Join us for an evening of splendorous choral delights in USD’s wonderful Founders’ Chapel as, following a brief historical introduction (from CCTC Director and Professor of Theology, Gerard Mannion) Dr. Edwin Basilio conducts the University of San Diego Choral Scholars through a selection of church music from this master of composition who refracted the story of the church in a time of change through the legacy of the works he left behind.
