Tallis served as an organist and in other professional capacities for four English monarchs, including in the Royal Chapel. Together with his most famous student William Byrd, he obtained a monopoly right from Queen Elizabeth I for the publication of vocal music. He presided over the most dynamic period in English musical history, during which the continental style of structural imitation was largely adopted by English composers in the wake of the reformation and supression of the monasteries.

Though Tallis' music includes a wide range of styles and objectives, the bulk of his output is choral music, both in the older Latin motet style and the newer English anthem style. Lyrical ideas usually dominate his musical impulses, and his polyphony is often primarily chordal or homophonic.

He was not especially interested in technical counterpoint as such, and his settings have a consequent air of serenity about them that arises from the straight-forward musical means used to develop melodic ideas.

His sacred Latin choral music is his most highly regarded achievement; this large output is mostly in the motet genre with a wide range of personally selected texts, set syllabically in the style of the continental Renaissance masters of Italy and the North. His English Anthems also played an important role in the early development of this long-lived genre.

Most of Tallis' music is in a conservative vein, but there are a handful of compositions illustrating an experimental nature. These include a pair each of ...

Read the complete biography here