Tallis: Remember not, O Lord God; Hear the voice and prayer; If ye love me
Remember not, Hear the voice and prayer and If ye love me are very early
examples of the Anglican anthem (the word 'anthem' had been coined two or three centuries
earlier as an English version of the Latin 'antiphona'). All three anthems survived the
Marian reaction and came back into use in Elizabeth's reign, being published in John Day's
collection Certain Notes in 1560 (Day's version of Remember not is somewhat
longer and more elaborate than the original version sung here and is to be found on a
later disc in this series). On the evidence of these works, the anthem very early acquired
formal and stylistic mannerisms, notably a preference for four-part writing and syllabic
declamation, a tendency to alternate homophonic episodes with passages of simple
imitation, and the habit of sectional repetition, particularly of the final section. The
alternation of homophony and imitative counterpoint has precedents in some Latin works by
English composers, such as Taverner's Meane Mass and Tallis's own Mass for four
voices, but the fondness for repeated sections is harder to account for, unless it
came from the contemporary French chanson. Interestingly, only one of Tallis's four
surviving part-songs, Fond youth is a bubble, employs sectional repetition.
These three anthems make different interpretations of the basic concept. Remember
not is entirely chordal and includes several very short repeated sections; its text,
which consists of some verses of psalm LXXIX, was evidently taken from the King's
Primer of 1545. Hear the voice and prayer is considerably more ambitious, being
predominantly imitative (with one very tellingly placed piece of near-homophony at 'even
toward this place'), and having a lengthy repeated final section. The text is taken from
Solomon's prayer at the dedication of the first temple (I Kings VIII, 28-30), and one
wonders whether the setting was intended for a particular occasion. In Certain Notes Day
describes this anthem as being for children, but the written ranges imply performance by
broken voices as in the other anthems. If ye love me alternates chordal and
imitative sections, again with a repeated second half; the words, from John XIV, 15-17 in
the translation of Coverdale's Great Bible (1539), form the beginning of the Gospel for
Whitsunday in the Book of Common Prayer.
Nick Sandon, 15 June 1997