The Mulliner Book

Abstract Tallis was known as an organist for fifty years, but only a small amount of his keyboard music has been preserved. Most of it is found in a manuscript called the Mulliner Book. This chapter takes a closer look at the Mulliner Book itself, at Tallis’s instrumental works, and at the context in which they were played. Much of this music was rooted in a flourishing Tudor tradition of keyboard improvisation. The organ substituted for the voices of singers or alternated with them, adding an extra dimension to the soundscape of church services. The latter part of the chapter discusses Tallis’s few surviving secular songs (also found in the Mulliner Book) and his equally few known works for viol consort—two groups of pieces that reveal some unexpectedly close ties with the music of the broader European Renaissance.