The Stripping of the Altars

"Duffy is a Catholic and he is writing very much from the point of view of Catholic England. This book, The Stripping of the Altars is, in a phrase that he uses, a description of the funeral rites of Catholic England. The basic thesis of his book is that we have come to accept this idea that the pre-Reformation Catholic Church was corrupt, and was venal, and was full of fat friars feathering their own nests and rich people paying for indulgences to buy their soul into heaven so they didn’t have to do any good works. He says there’s more to it than that, that this was an extremely rich cultural tradition that ran through every strand of English life. Yes, absolutely it was, and here you start to move away from music written by professionals, or written for professionals, and into music that exists for ordinary people: parish ceremonies, beating the bounds, going around the parish with a banner of your local saint, singing hymns as you go. Again, of course, we don’t know what the music was, nobody wrote it down. This was all folk song, there’d be no point writing it down because nobody could read it. They learnt it from each other; it’s an oral tradition. This is English church music in exactly the same way that ‘Stanford’ in G, or the Byrd Masses are English church music. They come from different places, but they’re all part of the tradition. Yes, it would indeed. Certainly for trained professional composers. I mean you’re talking about losing everything, your livelihood, your job, sometimes your home if you had a job working in a monastery. That happened to Tallis at Waltham Abbey. Perhaps more importantly than that, you had spent your life, from a very early age as a small child, learning these skills that had been handed down to you by your forefathers, built up over hundreds of years, and suddenly they weren’t needed anymore, nobody wanted them, so what were you going to do? “A great many leading composers of music for the English Church during the 20th century would by no means have described themselves as Orthodox believers.” But an interesting part of this story is the way that people dealt with that. They were very creative, a lot of these people were obviously very clever, and very able operators. People like Tallis and Byrd, who lived through these periods of change, always found a way. They actually ended up doing very well out of it. It didn’t always go in a straight line, but they made it work. That is one of the staggering things about it. Take a composer like Tallis, he was faced with so many challenges which came completely out of the blue. Tallis not only managed all the changes, but he contributed music to each period of change which is just perfect. That’s the thing that I think is just dazzling and mind-boggling about Tallis. You go from the early medieval type music, like an early piece, the ‘Alleluia’ for example, through those perfect little miniatures, ‘If Ye Love Me’ and ‘Hear The Voice And Prayer’, you’ve got the ‘Missa Puer Natus Est’ and the big Marian antiphons of Queen Mary’s reign, and then on into the ‘Cantiones Sacrae’ which he composed with Byrd in the 1570s when he was an old man. Not to mention pieces like ‘Spem In Alium’, and the English service music. Here was a composer who just had the rulebooks of his art torn up in front of his eyes every four or five years, and just did it better."