Personalities | John Taverner | Renaissance | Classical

c. 1490–1545
English composer

Taverner’s career fell entirely within the reign of Henry VIII. Apparently on good terms with the king’s most powerful ministers (first with Wolsey and then with Cromwell), he must have been an astute politician. Most of his music, which is thought to have been composed mostly in the 1520s and 30s, is firmly in the medieval Catholic tradition; this is the subject of Peter Maxwell Davies’s (1934–2016) opera of 1975. Taverner was the unwitting founder of the In nomine, a type of contrapuntal fantasy built around a theme which appears in the Benedictus movement from his famous Mass Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas.

Recommended Recording:
Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas, Audivi vocem de caelo, The Sixteen (dir) Harry Christophers (Hyperion)

Introduction | Renaissance | Classical
Personalities | Philippe Verdelot | Renaissance | Classical

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