John Taverner (c. 1490 – 18 October 1545) was an
English composer and organist, regarded as one of the
most important English composers of his era.
Nothing is known of Taverner's activities before 1524.
He appears to have come from the East Midlands,
possibly being born in Tattershall, Lincolnshire, but
there is no indication of his parentage. According to
one of his own letters, he was related to the
Yerburghs, a well-to-do Lincolnshire family. The
earliest information is that in 152...(+)
John Taverner (c. 1490 – 18 October 1545) was an
English composer and organist, regarded as one of the
most important English composers of his era.
Nothing is known of Taverner's activities before 1524.
He appears to have come from the East Midlands,
possibly being born in Tattershall, Lincolnshire, but
there is no indication of his parentage. According to
one of his own letters, he was related to the
Yerburghs, a well-to-do Lincolnshire family. The
earliest information is that in 1524 Taverner travelled
from Tattershall to the Church of St Botolph in nearby
Boston as a guest singer.[3] Two years later, in 1526,
Taverner became the first Organist and Master of the
Choristers at Christ Church, Oxford, appointed by
Cardinal Thomas Wolsey. The college had been founded in
1525 by Cardinal Wolsey, and was then known as Cardinal
College. Immediately before this, Taverner had been a
clerk fellow at the Collegiate Church of Tattershall.
In 1528 he was reprimanded for his (probably minor)
involvement with Lutherans, but escaped punishment for
being "but a musitian". Wolsey fell from favour in
1529, and in 1530 Taverner left the college. He married
a widow, one Rose Parrowe, probably in 1536, and she
outlived him until 1553. During the last five months of
the composer's life, he was an alderman in the city
council of Boston. For about three years, previously,
he was the treasurer of the Corpus Christi Gild, there
in Boston.
As far as can be told, Taverner had no further musical
appointments, nor can any of his known works be dated
to after that time, so he may have ceased composition.
It is often said that after leaving Oxford, Taverner
worked as an agent of Thomas Cromwell assisting in the
Dissolution of the Monasteries, although the veracity
of this is now thought to be highly questionable. He is
known to have settled eventually in Boston,
Lincolnshire, where he was a small landowner and
reasonably well-off. He is buried with his wife under
the belltower at Boston Parish Church. (In the few
existing copies of his signature, the composer actually
spelled his last name "Tavernor.") The 20th-century
composer, Sir John Tavener claimed (even in his early
teens), to be his direct descendant.
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.
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taverner).
Although originally composed for Voices, I created this
Interpretation of the "O splendor gloriae et imago
substanciae" (O, the splendor of glory and the image of
the substance) for Flute Trio (2 Flutes & Alto Flute).
