Music Notes - October 19, 2025

This Sunday’s music draws us into a luminous thread of Anglican tradition stretching from the 16th century to the present day. Through works by Thomas Tallis, Herbert Howells, David Hurd, and Charles Villiers Stanford, we hear how one musical and spiritual lineage continues to inspire new generations across five centuries.

Thomas Tallis (c. 1505–1585) served under four English monarchs—Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I—navigating the turbulent shifts of the Reformation with grace and musical ingenuity. His motet If Ye Love Me embodies the clarity and devotion of early Anglican polyphony. Composed soon after the introduction of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, the piece sets Christ’s words from John 14:15–17—“If ye love me, keep my commandments”—with transparent imitation and poise. Its simplicity belies its artistry: each phrase unfolds with perfect balance, giving voice to love not as sentiment, but as faithful obedience.

Herbert Howells (1892–1983), whose Master Tallis’s Testament serves as our prelude, was among the great English composers of the twentieth century and one of the foremost heirs of the Tudor and Renaissance revival. Composed during the outbreak of war in Europe in 1940, the piece is part of his Six Pieces for Organ and pays homage to Tallis with a haunting, modal melody that grows into radiant, almost orchestral harmonies. As you gather for worship on Sunday, allow the music to surround you as it builds to a climactic ending, disarmed by a pianissimo coda.

David Hurd (b. 1950) continues that same spirit of devotion in a modern idiom. Teach Me, O Lord, his 1977 anthem on verses from Psalm 119, is a beloved fixture in Episcopal and Anglican choirs. Its modal inflections and flowing counterpoint recall earlier homophony and polyphony, yet the harmonic language is distinctly twentieth-century—warm, searching, and quietly insistent. The result is a work that feels both ancient and new, a musical prayer for understanding and steadfastness in faith. 

The ending of this piece is written in an aleatoric style—this leaves much of the music making decisions to the performer. In this instance, each individual section of the choir is given a series of 8 pitches, notated by Hurd, which each individual singer will sing at their own tempo and dynamic. This creates an undulating push-pull in the music and harmony. The final chord of this piece is different every time—only God knows what it will be on Sunday!

Our postlude, Postlude on a Theme of Gibbons (Song 22), by Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924), celebrates another English master of sacred music, Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625). Stanford—professor to Vaughan Williams, Holst, Ireland, and Howells—crafted this noble setting as part of his Six Postludes, Op. 105. 

Gibbons’s sturdy seventeenth-century melody becomes, under Stanford’s hands, a grander more romantic and contrapuntal work. It provides a fitting and exultant conclusion to a service centered on the enduring beauty of sacred song. 

Together, these works trace a line of faith and artistry that connects past and present: Tallis’s serene obedience, Howells’s luminous remembrance, Hurd’s heartfelt supplication, and Stanford’s majestic affirmation.

Did you know?

Thomas Tallis and his younger colleague William Byrd were granted a royal monopoly by Queen Elizabeth I, giving them exclusive rights to print and sell music in England. It was the first license of its kind—making Tallis not only a musical pioneer but also one of the earliest composers to benefit from copyright law!

Fun Fact

Herbert Howells taught composition at the Royal College of Music for over half a century. Among his students was David Willcocks, who later directed the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge—and who frequently programmed If Ye Love Meand Teach Me, O Lord in chapel services, linking all three composers in a living Anglican tradition.