- published: 26 May 2012
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1585 (MDLXXXV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar and a common year starting on Friday of the 10-day slower Julian calendar.
Thomas Tallis (c. 1505 – 23 November 1585) was an English composer. Tallis flourished as a church musician in 16th century Tudor England. He occupies a primary place in anthologies of English church music, and is considered among the best of England's early composers. He is honoured for his original voice in English musicianship. No contemporary portrait of Tallis survives: the earliest, painted by Gerard van der Gucht, dates from 150 years after Tallis died, and there is no certainty that it is a likeness.
Little is known about Tallis's early life, but there seems to be agreement that he was born in the early 16th century, toward the close of the reign of Henry VII. Little is known about Tallis's childhood and his significance with music at that age. However, there are suggestions that he was a child of the chapel royal St. James's palace, the same singing establishment which he later went to as a man. His first known appointment to a musical position was as organist of Dover Priory in 1530–31, a Benedictine priory at Dover (now Dover College) in 1532. His career took him to London, then (probably in the autumn of 1538) to the Augustinian abbey of Holy Cross at Waltham until the abbey was dissolved in 1540. Tallis acquired a volume at the dissolution of the monastery of Waltham Holy Cross and preserved it; one of the treatises in it was by Leonel Power, and the treatise itself prohibits consecutive unisons, fifths, and octaves.