Creating that unique sound in my head for fifty years

Peter Phillips director and founder of the Tallis Scholars talks about his relentless pursuit of a distinctive Renaissance choral sound formed over fifty years ago and his mission is to share this with audiences the world over.

Over 2,530 concerts later, and now celebrating their 50^th anniversary, this engaging, lively and energetic man shows no sign of slowing down. The 2024 schedule alone takes in the US and Canada, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Germany, Austria, UK, Helsinki, and Greece.

Critically acclaimed and ground-breaking recordings on their own record label, Gimell established in 1980, have kept them at the forefront of people’s minds. Phillips’ enthusiasm for the repertoire performed for so many years, is testament to the success of the Tallis Scholars and his dedication to the art.

Regarded by BBC Radio 3 as “one of the UK’s best cultural exports”, the Tallis Scholars first performed in St John’s College, Oxford in 1973.

“The sound got in my head by listening to the choirs in Oxford as an undergraduate organist scholar,” Phillips explained. “I learned the music and got to love it. These wonderful choirs, always with boy sopranos, mixed with the quasi professional choirs who had sopranos. So I instinctively pieced together this ideal sound.”

Contemporaries, Trevor Pinnock and Christopher Hogwood also formed their respective Baroque ensembles in 1973 (the English Concert and The Academy of Ancient Music respectively). However, Phillips’ interest lies in Renaissance polyphony which was the “ideal vehicle for the sound in my head”.

Phillips defines his sound as essentially “clear, bright and agile with very little vibrato. It has to be clear because polyphony is made up of a lot of tiny details”. Vibrato, which distorts the tuning, is avoided.

The result: “beauty on the surface, so it draws people in”.

The Tallis Scholars over the years as collated by the Gramophone Magazine, Nov 2023

Creating that unique sound

With a core of ten singers (and a total of just 25 to 30 regular members over the fifty years) I wondered how Phillips has maintained the sound. Has he stayed true to the original vision?

“I don’t change the sound for different repertoires. There isn’t a Spanish sound for Spanish music because I don’t know what that is. The Tallis Scholars are just like an instrument, like a keyboard. A pianist will play music of different nationalities and periods, but the keyboard remains the same. So whether performing John Taverner or Avro Pärt, it’s the same basic sound at the service of great music.

“As (the composer Avro) Pärt pointed out, what he loves about the Scholars performing his work is that he can hear all the chords. He can hear everything he wrote, in tune, and in balance. And he says that’s extremely rare.”

In order to achieve this sound, how do the Scholars’ approach and learn new music?

“Modern music,” Phillips explains, “is more taxing initially because the notes are more difficult. In contrast, Renaissance music has easier notes. Instead, it’s a question of understanding the inner workings of a difficult Renaissance piece. But they’re all excellent sight readers. That’s the English ability.

“Pärt, Taverner or Nico Muhly (who amongst other things, composed the film score for The Reader starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes in 2008) which we sing a lot of, and will sing this evening, are tricky. Sometimes you have to find notes that are not in the chord, and just pluck them out of nowhere.

“We learn a piece. We make sure we’ve got all the notes and then we leave it to sort of cook,” sometimes returning to it just “the day before a performance”.

Phillips expands: “In the rehearsal, I will sort of indicate things. That’s my job as an interpreter, but I know that we don’t really know it until we’ve sung it twenty times.

“So your question would be then, is this not rather disappointing for the people who are hearing it the first time?” Phillips thinks not, “because the audience don’t know the music either and we’re introducing it to them. In a way, we’re all sort of learning it as we go along. It’s a wonderful process”.

The 50th Birthday celebrations from Middle Temple Hall on Friday 3rd November, 2023

I wondered if they ever got bored with works like the Allegri Miserere which they have sung over six hundred times over the course of the fifty years. It is at this point that Phillips reveals himself most humbly to be the servant of great music: “There’s nothing I personally can do for the Allegri. I’m not interpreting anything. It’s all there. Either they can it sing it, or they can’t and if they do, of course the audience goes wild”.

“But the magic, you can’t invent the magic.”

How would this vision translate in the concert hall?

To find out, I attended a Tallis Scholars’ concert in November 2023 in the Netherlands.

Opening with Gibbons’ O clap your hands, there was a clarity, even a simplicity to their sound. Twelve singers standing in a single line filled an immense concert hall and drew the audience close. Dissonances and complex harmonies sounded effortless; entries seemed innate. The Scholars sang as one. Their listening skills perfectly attuned, so the music was always perfectly balanced.

Soprano lines in Rutter’s Hymn to the Creator of Light floated in the air; contrasting beautifully with resonant bass lines which provided the softest of cushions for the rest of the choir to rest upon.

So, where do the Tallis Scholars sit amongst the many and varied choral ensembles performing works from this era? Are they part of the period movement of the past fifty years which has made such a difference to our understanding of music from the Baroque era and beyond?

In a BBC Radio 3 programme looking back at the events of 1973, “an extraordinary year in which many of the UK’s pioneering early music ensembles were established”, Nicholas Kenyon asked this very question. Phillips recalls how Kenyon, “had a problem fitting us into the narrative of the authentic revolution because that was all to do with instruments and sounds that you could justify from the past, which you can’t do with singing? I don’t really feel as though we’re part of it, but I’m quite happy to say we are if it suits”.

Words I had read earlier from Phillips’ final column for The Spectator after 30 years, bounded around. “Beauty should always be the primary goal.”

Quoting the French medieval monk, Abbot Suger of Saint Denis, he continued: “We can only come to understand absolute beauty, through the effect of precious and beautiful things on our senses. Get your ego out of the way, and let the beauty speak for itself”.

Web link to details of 2024 performances here.

Last words from Peter Phillips, writing in the The Spectator in 2016

A little listening

Peter Phillips in interview, talking about ‘the first real musical superstar’ Josquin de Prez before a performance in the Muziekgebouw, Amsterdam in 2023. The Tallis Scholars’ performance of Absalon fili mi in Enschede featured bass lines so rich and resonant, that we were transported to a bleak, desolate and wild monastery in medieval Britain, as monks warmed the cold winter air with the warmth of their singing.