The Lamentations of Jeremiah: Tallis Scholars vs. Hilliard Ensemble; Aesthetics vs. Historical Horror

A while back, I finally replaced my CD player and have been paying more attention to my CD collection. While going through some of my CDs, I came across two different recordings of Thomas Tallis’s The Lamentations of Jeremiah I’d bought on clearance at different times - one was a Tallis Scholars recording, the other was a Hilliard Ensemble recording. You can hear portions of the recordings here:

When I sat down to listen to them, there were a lot of layers to reflect on.

First, and most immediately, the text reflects on the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. But I’ve been immersed in news about Gaza this week. So the reflections on destroyed cities felt immediate. I was listening to sixteenth-century Christian music on an ancient Israelite text during an intensely violent stage of the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The whole chain of violence from the destruction of Jerusalem to millennia of Christian antisemitism to the current reiteration of the Nakba refracted through the music. I could intuit a long chain of causal links, yet in the moment, the three perspectives of the biblical text, the sixteenth-century musical interpretation, and current violence, were more distinct. That sense of relating to history as both a causal chain and as disconnected moments informs what I was doing in my book, Jonathan’s Loves, David’s Laments. The way in which the music kept me focused on contemporary violence also brought back to mind the struggle I had between my musician self and my activist self in college - sometimes manifest in decisions about whether to go a protest or to practice my viola. I was deeply conflicted about the value of music in a world of tremendous suffering. The music/text relation here brought that conflict right to the surface.

The title of this post might give the impression that I’m contrasting the Tallis Scholars and the Hillard Ensemble as representatives of aesthetics or history, but neither performance is concerned with connecting music to history. Both choirs participate in a pursuit of pure sound for sound’s sake - an idea that came to be known as “absolute music” in the nineteenth century. Peter Phillips, the director of the Tallis Scholars, has expressed exasperation with people who approach his performances through ideological lenses, insisting that the value of music stands on its own and offers the testimony of listeners who have found the Tallis Scholars’ music healing as evidence that it has value for a conflicted world. But I’m one of the people who, at least in part, approaches music through the lenses that Phillip finds annoying. When I read him describe what he is up to, he always sounds like someone I would not like - at all. When I’ve read books and articles by John Potter, a member of the Hilliard Ensemble, I’ve found his approach generally off-putting for similar reasons. So the aesthetics/history contrast isn’t about the contrast between these performances - it’s more about how deeply context informs meaning and about in what ways music is and isn’t a form of escapism from political responsibility.

I’ll want to connect these layers some more, but what I was most interested in when I came across this pair of CDs I’d bought but not listened to was what I could find when listening to these very different choirs perform the same composition back-to-back. I have a longer and more intense relationship with the Tallis Scholars. My best friend in high school introduced me to them and I bought their recording of Josquin’s Missa Pangue Lingua at the first opportunity. One of my teachers in graduate school, made the observation that I gravitated toward the Tallis Scholars because they’re such a contrast to the Vienna Boys’ Choir, which was the model for an incredibly abusive choir I was in from fifth to seventh grade. It’s an observation that is probably true, but I’m still too close to that truth to see or feel it. But the Tallis Scholars were in a profound way the true center of my musical experience in my late teens. They modeled and enabled a kind of spirituality that I was increasingly committed to - a spirituality that held spirit and flesh in opposition. Coming out as gay my first year of college disrupted that understanding of spirituality, so I later had to sort through a kind of confusion and even anger about the place of the Tallis Scholars in my musical and personal development.

I first heard the Hilliard Ensemble in college when I checked out their recording of Dunstable motets at my university library. I never had quite the intense connection with their performances as I did with the Tallis Scholars, although I now gravitate toward them equally. I don’t rank their differences, and I have the same kind of love/hostility relationship with their ideal of good music. Love and hostility don’t exist in equal measures here - the hostility is more of an irritant within a general love for this music. Both groups are fundamentally about the intersection of modern recording technology and sixteenth-century choral music. From the perspective of being immersed in classical music, their approaches end up sounding radically different. From the perspective of having spent a few years devoted primarily to country music, their differences seem much less significant than their similarities.

I started off listening to the Tallis Scholars recording. Thomas Tallis is a composer I’ve always liked, but haven’t heard that much of. So, my attention was divided between reconnecting with the Tallis Scholars sound generally and a new connection with Tallis’s style specifically. I caught a lot of his unique compositional techniques that differentiate him from other sixteenth-century composers. He has an ability to mark moments of tension with a kind of crunch and then quickly move to a kind of sweetness that’s more about contrast than resolution. I’d long struggled to grok how counterpoint holds together. When I was in my Ph.D. program, taking a class on medieval music, the teacher described the centrality of “variety” as guiding concept for counterpoint and that made a lot fall into place. And this contrast of “crunch” vs. “sweet,” in which the sweetness didn’t feel like it resolved the crunchiness made that sense that variety is something sixteenth-century composers were going after come alive in a new way. If you listen to sixteenth-century music with ears informed by later developments, “variety” is not going to be the thing that stands out, but here it did.

Listening to the general sound of the Tallis Scholars made clear why I found them so compelling. When I heard them, I knew I have a history of falling in love with them and reacting against them for embodying an ideal I came to find unhealthy, but hearing them didn’t make that history feel present. I could enjoy the sounds, enjoy being reconnected to the sounds - and that reconnection in our current moment brought back one layer of tension between music and politics that I struggled with in college, but not the other layer of the tension between it being music that justified a life in the closet and later rage against a closeted existence.

In contrast to the Tallis Scholars, which aims for a pristine - perhaps even anti-septic - sound, the Hilliard Ensemble goes for a warmth that doesn’t evoke the possibility of splitting body and soul in the way that the Tallis Scholars do. Their approaches were different enough that it took me a while to catch how they were singing the same composition. Eventually, I did catch some of those “crunch/sweetness” moments, although the contrast felt stronger in the Tallis Scholars.

There’s a lot more to say about how these different choirs sound, but I find myself resistant to just getting lost in sound. My opening reflections on a chain of violence evoked in the ancient biblical texts, Tallis interpreting these texts in the sixteenth century, and the Tallis Scholars and Hillard Ensemble interpreting Tallis in the twentieth century brought me back from pure sound to a text that describes the horrors of history. The text/music relation that hit me quickly in my listening brought back that internal split between a self that sought spirituality in a disembodied realm and a self that sought justice in the world. In college, Thomas Merton modeled bringing that split together for me, but it was a split that I never quite resolved. I still strive to find a kind of unity between what I learned from the ascetic practices of my college years and what I learned from the activism of the same period. In some ways, I can see it. In some ways, especially in Quaker worship, I can live it. But when I try to follow either path, the unity remains elusive.