Thomas Tallis

Thomas Tallis was an English composer, singer, and organist whose career extended across the changing religious settlements of Tudor England. His birth date is undocumented, though he is commonly placed around 1505. Records first locate him at Dover Priory in 1531; he later worked at St Mary-at-Hill, Waltham Abbey, and Canterbury Cathedral before entering the Chapel Royal in the reign of Henry VIII. He remained associated with the royal chapel under Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I, writing Latin and English sacred music suited to markedly different liturgical conditions.

In 1575 Elizabeth I granted Tallis and William Byrd a twenty-one-year patent to print and publish music. Their joint Cantiones sacrae appeared that year. Tallis's surviving output includes English anthems such as If Ye Love Me, Latin motets, two settings of the Lamentations, and the forty-part Spem in alium. Although evidence suggests continuing Catholic sympathies, his personal confessional identity is too complex for a simple denominational label.

The melody now called TALLIS' CANON was the eighth of nine tunes Tallis supplied for Archbishop Matthew Parker's metrical psalter in the 1560s. It originally carried Parker's version of Psalm 67. The shortened form transmitted by Thomas Ravenscroft in 1621 became the principal ancestor of the tune used for My Neighbor.