feeling listless

Music Whilst I wait for Firefox 3 to download (I'm on dial-up -- so it'll be half an hour) I've been reading about the early Elizabethan composer Thomas Tallis. Tallis wrote church music, masses and litergies, works which even now astound because of the complexity and beauty of their vocal harmonics. The man lived to the ripe old age of eighty, bucking the trend of his fellow man (or woman) but it wasn't until he was in his forties that he really hit his stride when in 1943 he began working directly for the crown under Henry VIII.

Only five years later though, the old king died, the new monarch Edward, whose uncle declared the state Protestant banning the old Catholic liturgy forcing Tallis and his contemporaries to adopt a whole new musical style. As the English Language service took hold, Tallis simply adapted to the needs of the new regime and changed his style to fit what they wanted.

The works flooded churches desperate for these replacements and Tallis had 'arrived' in a very real sense. But then Edward died. Mary his half-sister reversed the Catholic reformation and all of this new material was set aside and the country returned to the Latin, so Tallis reworked his style again, and it's said that it's in this period that he composed his best material.

Hold on though -- within another five years Mary was gone too and in strode Elizabeth I to reinstate the Protestant reformation and Tallis was back to writing in English, and many of the works which had made his name a few years before went back into circulation and over the next two decades he composer a fair few more, though not many of those have survived for one reason or another.

What I find so impressive in all of this is how ready Tallis was to simply adjusted his processes to fit within the prevailing religious weathers which were buffeting the country and its churches. My interpretation is that Tallis understood that to continue working he simply had to change his way of working to fit the prevailing market forces and though his religious leanings aren't clear, it didn't matter anyway because he just wanted to compose, so he composed what was required.

If only everyone could be this flexible. As far as I can see, many of the financial problems which we're experiencing are as a result of a certain intransigence in which businesses are unwilling to change themselves to fit the new situation that we're in, on global and local levels. Partly that's because they simply don't see why they have to, or because they think that it'll all blow over. More fool them. I wonder what Thomas Tallis could teach them.

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