Earliest Traces

Abstract The earliest known document of Tallis’s music is the single voice part that survives from an otherwise lost manuscript collection of early-sixteenth-century devotional music. It contains only one work by Tallis (the large votive antiphon Salve intemerata) and many works by other composers, almost all of them older. Some of this music goes back to the generation that produced the Eton Choirbook at the turn of the sixteenth century. It gives us a rare chance to see where Tallis’s musical style came from. This chapter is a detailed exploration of Salve intemerata and the manuscript where it makes its earliest appearance. Topics include early Tudor voice types, musical rhetoric, and the tradition of large polyphonic works Tallis knew during his first years as a composer.