Counterpoint & Thomas Tallis’s Miserere nostri
Music can give delight by conjuring powerful emotions within us, or by offering us pleasant sounds to savor, or by depicting some kind of extra-musical story, like Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf or Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. These kinds of musical pleasure are familiar enough to us. But a piece of music can also give another kind of pleasure, something more like the delight that a mathematician might find in discovering a new theorem: the satisfaction of uncovering an elegant pattern that is latent in creation.
A ripe example is Thomas Tallis’s (1505–1585) Miserere nostri, a piece for seven-part choir. Its Latin text, perhaps drawn from Psalm 123:3, is short: “Have mercy upon us, Lord; have mercy upon us.” The piece is only about two minutes long, and at a casual listening, it does not seem particularly virtuosic. It has the serene, arching vocal lines that we would expect from Renaissance music; lovely and graceful, certainly, but hardly a tour de force.
Or so one might think. Beneath its unassuming veneer, Miserere nostri is actually a superlative feat of musical counterpoint. Counterpoint, broadly speaking, is the art of setting one musical idea against another, combining them in such a way that the resulting whole is pleasing. The particular type of counterpoint that Tallis employs in his Miserere nostri is called “canon,” and he uses several varieties of it.
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Christopher Hoyt is the organist/choirmaster at Good Shepherd Church in Tyler, Texas, and teaches Sacred Music at Cranmer Theological House (Reformed Episcopal) in Dallas. He was general editor of the hymnal, The Book of Common Praise/Magnify the Lord (2017) and is a composer of hymns and other church music (hoytcomposer.com).
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