Contributions
Probably born in Lincolnshire, Taverner stands as the greatest polyphonist of the early English Renaissance. In 1526 Cardinal Wolsey called him to Oxford as first organist and master of the choristers of his foundation, Cardinal College (the future Christ Church), where he remained until Wolsey's fall in 1530. His almost entirely sacred output culminates in vast festal masses — Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas, Missa Corona Spinea, Missa O Michael — and in votive antiphons of sumptuous, melismatic writing, heirs to the Eton Choirbook style. His Western Wynde Mass is famous for its device: the popular tune migrates from one voice to another, repeated some twenty-eight times. From a single passage of his Gloria tibi Trinitas mass — the words "in nomine Domini" of the Benedictus — would spring the In Nomine, an instrumental genre English composers cultivated for over a century, down to Purcell.
Significance
Taverner embodies the height of pre-Reformation English polyphony, that exuberant and luminous art of unfurling vocal lines which filled the great Tudor chapels before the liturgy changed its language and its spirit. He is the last and most accomplished master of the grand English festal style. His significance also rests on an unintended legacy: the In Nomine, born of a fragment of his music, became a true laboratory of English instrumental writing, the recurring theme on which Tye, Tallis, Byrd and their successors would test their craft. A shadow falls across his figure: a stubborn tradition, shaped by the Protestant martyrologist John Foxe, cast Taverner as a penitent of his "popish ditties" turned agent of Thomas Cromwell in the destruction of the monasteries. Modern scholarship has dismantled that story: Taverner ended his days as a modest landowner and alderman of Boston, far from the legend of the musician-inquisitor. What remains is the essential: a music of a splendour England would never recapture in this form.
Influence
His most lasting influence is the In Nomine, the instrumental genre drawn from his Gloria tibi Trinitas mass, taken up by Christopher Tye, Thomas Tallis, William Byrd and even Henry Purcell. His great festal masses served as a model for the English polyphonic style of the mid-sixteenth century. He himself inherited the English tradition of the votive antiphon and the grand Eton Choirbook motet, carried before him by Robert Fayrfax and Nicholas Ludford, and absorbed the continental practice of the cantus-firmus mass.
Anecdote
Around 1528, at Cardinal College, Taverner was questioned for having helped students close to Lutheran ideas and holders of forbidden books. Shut for a time in a cellar beneath the chapel, he escaped punishment for a reason that became famous: Cardinal Wolsey judged him to be "but a musician" — too slight a thing to deserve the penalty. The contemptuous phrase may have saved the life of one of the greatest composers England ever bore.