Contributions
A Bachelor of Music from Cambridge (c.1536), Tye became master of the choristers at Ely Cathedral, documented in the post by 1543, and took the Doctor of Music degree at Cambridge in 1545 and at Oxford in 1548. A composer of Latin masses and motets — including a Missa Euge bone and his own Western Wynde Mass — he was above all a pioneer of the Anglican music born of the Reformation. In 1553 appeared his only publication in his lifetime, The Actes of the Apostles: a rhymed English paraphrase of the biblical Acts set for four voices and dedicated to the young King Edward VI, whose music master tradition holds Tye to have been. The work illustrates the effort to give the new reformed worship a music in the vernacular. Tye is also one of the great founders of the English consort: his twenty or so In Nomines for viols rank among the earliest major pages of English instrumental chamber music. Ordained priest in 1560, he became rector of Doddington and gradually set composition aside.
Significance
Tye is the pivotal figure of English music, the man who carried chapel art from the Latin splendour of the pre-Reformation era to the vernacular sobriety of reformed worship. His importance is twofold. On one hand he helped invent an Anglican sacred music, clear and intelligible, suited to a new rite in which the words had to be understood; The Actes of the Apostles, with its simple and fervent melodies, is an early manifesto of this, and one of its tunes would become the famous chorale "Winchester Old." On the other, through his In Nomines for viols, he shaped the English instrumental consort, that repertory of learned and experimental chamber music which would flourish into the seventeenth century. That tradition credits him with the musical education of King Edward VI only underlines his place at the heart of the reforming court. A transitional figure, Tye lacks the universal fame of a Byrd, but without him Anglican music and the English consort would have lacked this founding foothold.
Influence
His In Nomines for viols fed the great English consort tradition carried on by Byrd, Gibbons and, later, Jenkins and Purcell. His sacred music in English stands as an early landmark of the emerging Anglican repertory. He himself inherited the In Nomine model inaugurated by John Taverner, which he reworked in many variants, absorbed pre-Reformation Latin polyphony, and then turned toward metrical psalmody and the aesthetic of simplicity imposed by the new Protestant worship.
Anecdote
A story recorded in the seventeenth century, unverifiable, paints Tye as an organist of difficult temper: playing before Queen Elizabeth, he is said to have vexed her with playing she judged out of tune; when the queen sent a verger to tell him so, Tye reportedly answered that it was the queen's ears that were out of tune. True or legendary, the retort has crossed the centuries as the emblem of a learned musician sure enough of his art to stand up to a sovereign.