John Taverner
John Taverner (c.1490–1545) was the most important English composer of the first part of the 16th century, and is known chiefly for his sacred music. He worked first at the collegiate church of Tattershall, then at Cardinals' College (now Christ Church) in Oxford and finally at the parish church of St. Botolph in Boston, Lincolnshire. In the latter part of his life, he seems to have retired from an active career in music and spent his last years as a respected burgher of his adopted town. Most of his works were likely composed in the decade 1520–30, and his most substantial works are those in the three traditional forms of large-scale writing—the mass, Magnificat, and votive antiphon. His early six-voice masses are all composed on cantus firmi and clearly illustrate the culmination of nearly a century of development of the English festal mass. They also contain certain other archaic features. However, there are three later masses, of which the Missa sine nomine (Mean Mass) is one, whose musical style is markedly different, and whose novel features are easier to explain in the context of the changed religious conditions of the last years of the composer's lifetime. By this time Henry VIII had rejected the papacy and staunchly adhered to what he saw as an orthodox Catholic faith and to the Sarum rite. The Mean Mass as curiously close parallels in the novel mensural structure and in the use of very similar melodic material to those by two contemporary composers—Sheppard's Francis mass and Tye's five-voice mass in the Peterhouse Partbooks. These three composers may have worked together, possibly at the Chapel Royal. Their three masses have more affinity with Lutheran methods than with the hallowed English traditions of their time.
Vocal Works Performed by the San Francisco Bach Choir
