Thomas Tomkins: The Last Elizabethan

In recent years, the works of composer and organist Thomas Tomkins (1572–1656) have enjoyed a renewed popularity among early-music performers, resulting in some outstanding recordings as well as increased audibility in the concert hall. This collaborative study of his life and works continues the trend into the relative silence of scholarship, and represents the first new full-length biography of the composer in almost half a century. Although the book is timely and solidly researched, it is by no means the academic counterpart of the vibrant and innovative performances of Tomkins's music released since 2000. Just as the subtitle proclaims the composer to have been a relatively old-fashioned figure for his time, Boden and his coauthors have compiled a work that hearkens back to an era of musical positivism and biographies for general audiences.

Thomas Tomkins was born into a musical family in St. Davids, Pembrokeshire, where his father served as vicar-choral at the cathedral. The greater part of his own life was spent as organist at Worcester Cathedral, although he was also associated with the Chapel Royal as a young chorister and, again, as an adult. Far more importantly, Tomkins's life coincides with one of the most turbulent periods of British religious and cultural history, and with the transition between the musical styles of the high Renaissance and early Baroque. He belonged to the first generation of English composers to be steeped from earliest childhood in the sound of the metrical psalms of the Reformation, and to the last to write madrigals influenced by sixteenth-century Italian models. Tomkins wrote in nearly every native musical genre of his era, and contributed pieces to such historically-significant events as the death of Henry, Prince of Wales, and the coronation of Charles II: a staunch royalist and religious traditionalist, he made a somber and moving comment on the execution of the latter and his country's general political situation in 1649 with a "Sad Pavan: for these distracted times." Although most often considered a musical conservative, Tomkins was especially sensitive to melody and was extremely adept at conveying the meaning and sense of the texts he set, during an era in which musical-textual relations underwent continuous prescriptive and descriptive revision. It is the expressive qualities of his finest pieces, both instrumental and vocal, that has most likely accounted for his increased recent popularity.

Thomas Tomkins: The Last Elizabethan is divided into three parts: presenting the composer's biography as a member of a musical dynasty and product of his era, an analytical discussion of his musical oeuvre, and further commentaries on his music. In the first and most significant part, Anthony Boden conveys a sense of Tomkins's life against the rich background of Elizabethan and early Stuart political and religious history. Using an impressive range of archival documents and early modern publications in a wide range of fields, Boden establishes Tomkins as a member of the growing and increasingly respectable class of educated artisans during the golden age of English literature and drama, and provides a fascinating glimpse into late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English choral establishments of the sort in which he, his father, and three half-brothers spent their lives. This great strength is also the book's main weakness. Although Boden's citations tend to be useful and detailed, he assumes such familiarity with the history and documents of the Church of England that he often dispenses with the scholarly apparatus altogether, or presents vague references in his footnotes such as "From the injunctions of 1559" or "1559 prayer book, preface," without discussing the items elsewhere or including them in the book's copious bibliography. Perhaps more importantly, he oversimplifies the extremely nuanced range of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English Protestantism, while deemphasizing the secular styles and institutions that helped to shape Tomkins's music. The shorter musical sections of the book are, likewise, models of meticulous scholarship, but fail to integrate the wider disciplinary trends of recent musicology: indeed, the most important of these, Denis Stevens's very useful summary of the composer's works, is revised from extracts from the author's full-length 1957 biography of Tomkins and the additional preface to the 1967 reprint. Nonetheless, this is a very useful and engaging book for scholars of early modern England and for general readers with an interest in its music.