Tye: Western Wind Mass

Christopher Tye was a chorister at King’s College, Cambridge, and subsequently gained a doctorate in music at the University. He wrote most of his music whilst Organist and Master of the Choristers at Ely Cathedral. Although much of his music has been lost, his extant compositions reveal a master rivalling his contemporaries, Tallis and Taverner. Another “benchmark recording” from The Choir of New College Oxford, conducted by Edward Higginbottom.

Christopher Tye flourished as a church musician in England during the mid-sixteenth century. A direct contemporary of Thomas Tallis, he held the prestigious post of Master of Choristers at Ely cathedral and successfully managed to compose music for both Protestant and Catholic services during a politically unstable time. Henry VIII was a fan, asserting: ‘England one god, one truth, one doctor hath for music’s art—and that is Dr Tye’ (Tye himself had Protestant leanings).

The composer was also described as ‘peevish and humoursome’, and these qualities are reflected in his remarkably individual music, characterized by unpredictable cadences and phrases of often unexpectedly startling beauty. The two major works on this recording are his masterful Missa Euge bone for six voices, and his Western Wynde Mass, probably an early work, and likely written as a complement to John Taverner’s own Mass based on this secular English song.

The peerless Westminster Abbey Choir directed by James O’Donnell performs these sparsely beautiful a cappella works with customary freshness and sense of grandeur.

“Of all the polyphony we have recorded, this early English style with its dazzling high treble parts and luminous sonorities is, for me, as good as it gets. Henry VIII would have known this sound from childhood and may well have included some of the music recorded here at his Coronation.” Peter Phillips