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 the "Third Mode Melody", inspired the composition of "Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis" by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1910. His setting of Psalm 67 became known as "Tallis's Canon" and the setting by Thomas Ravenscroft is an adaptation for the hymn "All praise to thee, my God, this night" (1709) by Thomas Ken. As a result of its widespread use in church services, it has become his best-known composition. Meanwhile, however, the Injunctions also allowed a more elaborate piece of music to be sung in church at certain times of the day, and many of Tallis's more complex