John Taverner

Life

Born: c. 1490?

Died: 25 October 1545

Biography While there was a John Taverner in London in 1514, there is no reason to assume this was the composer who surfaced at Tattershall in 1524 and founded the choir of Cardinal College Oxford (the predecessor of Christ Church) in 1526. In 1528 he was suspected but cleared of Lutheranism; in 1529 his patron Woolsey was disgraced and in 1530 he left Oxford, ultimately settling in Boston, Lincolnshire where he became an alderman. The martyrologist/propagandist John Foxe wrote that Taverner did "repent him very much that he had made songs to popish ditties in the time of his blindness" but Roger Bowers in New Grove discerns stylistic features in the masses that suggest a composing career that continued well past the 1520's. The artist who gives up music for politics makes an intriguing premise for Max Davies' opera Taverner (1972), however.

List of choral works

Taverner's work includes besides the following many incomplete pieces and 9 Mass fragments.

• Alleluyas 1 & 2
• Audivi: Media nocte
• Ave Dei Patris Filia
• Ave Maria (5vv, missing Tr, T)
• Christe Jesu, pastor bone
• Dum transisset Sabbatum I
• Dum transisset Sabbatum II
• Gaude plurimum
• In pace
• Kyrie Le Roy
• 3 Magnificats, of which Magnificat sexti toni (4vv) survives complete
• Mater Christi
• Missa Corona Spinea
• Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas
  • In trouble and adversity (Tudor contrafactum of Taverner's instrumental In nomine)
• Missa Mater Christi (5vv, missing T)
• The Mean Mass
• Missa O Michael 6vv
• Plainsong mass 4vv
• Small Devotion mass (5vv, missing T)
• Sub tuum praesidium
• O splendor gloriae
• Quemadmodum
• The Western Wind Mass
• Te Deum ("Te aeternum Patrem", 5vv missing T)

Other works not listed above (See Template:CheckMissing for possible reasons and solutions)

• In women is rest
• The bella

Click here to search for this composer on CPDL

External links

• Works by John Taverner in the Petrucci Music Library (IMSLP)