Sunday 15 March 2015

Obsessed with... 'Spem in Alium' by Thomas Tallis

I'm currently adding my two penn'orth/cents to KQED Arts' new Obsessed feature, "a weekly series featuring everything the KQED Arts gang can’t stop talking about." My contribution to Feb 20th's post:




Strictly speaking, I’ve been ‘obsessed’ with this gorgeous 450-year-old choral work for years. Thanks to an adolescent combination of insomnia and a precious tape-radio that received a particularly strong signal from the local classical station, early modern choral music (Tallis, Allegri, Byrd) is my lifelong jam, and I still remember hearing Spem in Alium for this first time like you’d remember falling out of a tree.

Written around 1570 for an unbelievable 40 voices, which overlap, build and soar for ten overwhelming minutes, Spem in Alium is almost unhumanly beautiful. (There are umpteen renditions out there, by the way, and this one by the Tallis Scholars is my favorite for its pacing.) It’s a rare month that goes by without me listening to this on full blast at least once, but I’ll be honest: with the inescapable release of a certain movie on Valentine’s Day, what reminded me to turn it up this week was remembering the horror of seeing my beloved Spem slapped with an “As featured in Fifty Shades of Grey!” banner on Spotify last year. Yes, apparently a Renaissance masterpiece makes a ‘special appearance’ in the book (although not the movie?) and I dread to think how, but you know what: I’ve gotten over it. Frankly, we can all use a reminder not to be a tedious snob about how and where people discover the good stuff.

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