Tallis Festival Tallis Festival The Tallis Festival, hosted by Exmoor Singers of London, forms the Tallis Festival Choir for just one weekend every 12 to 18 months. The Festival always includes Thomas Tallis' Spem in Alium for 40-part choir, but in addition has commissioned new 40-part works by modern composers, as companion pieces to Spem in Alium. In 2007 the Festival was recognised by the BBC for its contribution to new music and highlights from the Festival were broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 28 October 2007. The Festival originated from "Tallis Performance Weekends", held periodically over a number of years. The
Thomas Tallis was dissolved in 1540. Tallis was paid off and acquired a book about music which contained a treatis by Leonel Power that prohibits consecutive unisons, fifths, and octaves. Tallis's next post was at Canterbury Cathedral. He was sent to Court as Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1543, where he composed and performed for Henry VIII, Edward VI (1547–53), Queen Mary (1553–58), and Queen Elizabeth I (1558 until he died in 1585). Throughout his service to successive monarchs as organist and composer, Tallis avoided the religious controversies that raged around him, though he stayed an "unreformed Roman Catholic" in the