This week’s selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Composed in 1910, and revised in 1913 and revised again in 1919, the work is one of the most radiant and distinctive English orchestral works of the 20th century.

At the turn of the 20th century, England’s musical culture was in the midst of rediscovering its own past. Composers such as Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, Edward Elgar and Frederick Delius were seeking to free themselves from German and French Romantic music styles and to develop a distinctly English voice in classical music.

Vaughan Williams was at the center of this movement. Between 1903 and 1906, he was editing The English Hymnal — a project that profoundly shaped his musical outlook. While preparing the hymnal, he delved deeply into Tudor and early Stuart church music, including the works of Thomas Tallis (c1505–1585), William Byrd (1540-1623) and Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625). It was in the course of this editorial work that he encountered the Tallis theme that would become the basis of the Fantasia.

In 1567, Thomas Tallis contributed nine psalm tunes to the Psalter published by Archbishop Matthew Parker (Queen Elizabeth I’s first Archbishop of Canterbury). Each tune was paired with a metrical English psalm translation. The melody that caught Vaughan Williams’s imagination was Tallis’s setting for Psalm 2 (“Why fumeth in fight”). Vaughan Williams discovered this melody in Parker’s Psalter and then reused it in harmonized form as hymn no. 92 in The English Hymnal (1906).

After studying with Maurice Ravel in Paris, Vaughan Williams returned to England inspired by new ideas about orchestral color and texture. In 1909, the Three Choirs Festival commissioned a new work from him for its 1910 Gloucester Cathedral program. Vaughan Williams chose to base his new composition on the Tallis psalm tune he had edited four years earlier.
The work premiered on Sept. 6, 1910, in Gloucester Cathedral, conducted by the composer, as part of a program including “Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius.”

Vaughan Williams described his purpose as creating a “tune for the glory of God.” The Fantasia evokes the ancient spiritual heritage of English sacred music. In effect, it is both a homage to Tallis and a manifesto for an English musical Renaissance — one rooted not in imitation of the Continent but in rediscovery of native tradition.

In this performance from the 2012 Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales is conducted by Tadaaki Otaka.