Though King Henry VIII officially set the English Church on an independent course from Rome in the 1534 Act of Supremacy, Latin remained the lingua franca within Anglican church music for nearly 15 years. Only in 1547 did the English vernacular become a regularly valid option for the English Protestant Church, and in 1549 with Archiboshop Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer it finally became mandatory. For much of the intervening time, then, English church musicians retained Latin liturgical texts, and gradually around 1547 began experimenting with English. It appears that Thomas Tallis' Hear the Voice and Prayer of Thy Servants was one of the earliest efforts at an "anthem" composed in English. Its earliest manuscript source dates from right around 1547, and its scoring for four men's voices (without choirboy trebles) also tends to indicate this time period; though composers quickly moved to use antiphonal effects of divided treble voices, many observers of the time disparaged the practice as "like tennis play whereto God is called a Judge who can do best and be most gallant in his worship." Tallis' Hear the Voice and Prayer remains quite conservative and unassuming!

Like much of the early English anthem repertory, Tallis' Hear the Voice and Prayer follows a simple ABB repetition form and uses imitation somewhat sparingly at the outset of its musical sections. In this case, he is setting an English text that comes from Solomon's dedicatory prayers over the Temple of Jerusalem (2 Chron. 6:19-21). The text thus is appropriate to any church dedication or memorial; perhaps for Tallis and his contemporaries it also resonated with the founding of the new Anglican church. The first musical section is rather brief, with a single invocation of God, and a rhetorical first cadence. The second opens with "That thine eyes may be open toward this house," with a more active imitative motive that leads to two extended sequential passages. Tallis repeats the final imitative prayer, "And when thou hear'st, have mercy upon them," twice in each repeat for quadruple emphasis on the desired mercy.

© All Music Guide