A Cappella Artistry

One night at Oxford University in the 1970s, Peter Phillips heard voices, and he has been listening for them ever since.

The young Phillips had developed a taste for Renaissance composers of the 15th and 16th centuries from singing in high school. But it was during an a cappella performance of Thomas Tallis’ music by an Oxford choir that the sound seized the undergraduate organ “scholar’s” imagination.

“I knew that I liked the music already, but when I heard them sing it, I went into a sort of dream world,” says Phillips, 45, from a rocking chair in his sitting room in the London neighborhood of Islington. “I heard it sung so well that I just couldn’t believe it,” he says, looking out of the ground-floor window onto the autumn leaves of Gibson Square. “But of course there’s no documentary evidence of what I actually heard; there was no recording. I might be very disappointed. But I’ve had that dream sound in my head, and I’ve been trying to re-create it ever since.”

Twenty-five years later, driven by the memory of that perfect sound, the Tallis Scholars, the group that Phillips founded as an undergraduate in 1973, have been hailed as “a cappella superstars,” and critically praised for their “unity,” “purity” and “superbly balanced” performances. The Scholars sing the music of their namesake and other polyphonic Renaissance church composers. The group has now made some 40 recordings, with the label Phillips founded, Gimell Records, now part of PolyGram. As part of a 25th anniversary tour, the Tallis Scholars perform a U.S. tour that includes a concert at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Friday.

It took many years until the group perfected what is now its trademark sound. And for more than a decade, Phillips struggled in obscurity until the Tallis Scholars won the Record of the Year award from the British magazine Gramophone, in 1987. “We became a name and something that seemed mainstream,” says Phillips. “It was suddenly OK to come and hear a concert by the Tallis Scholars.” Nevertheless, Phillips has often been asked why he limited himself to obscure church music most people had never heard of.

“I could have tried to make my singers produce that sound in Bach but I’d heard that sound in Tallis,” he says. “Every concert we give I’m still doing the same thing that I heard that first time: trying to imperfectly produce an ideal sound.”

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On a sunny morning at a church called St. Andrew by the Wardrobe, the voices hit you as you walk in the doors. To make the pure, perfect, blended sound, the five women and five men who make up the core group--Phillips often draws on a larger pool for some 80 concerts a year--aren’t holding back. They appear to be singing their hearts out.

During a coffee break, Patrick Craig, 29, the newest member of the group, says he grew up listening to Tallis Scholars recordings. “The recordings are very edited and very perfect, so you get a slightly false impression,” he says. “When I came to sing I imagined it as being really sort of careful--just do it really perfectly. It’s not like that at all. A lot of the reviews say that it’s a pure, perfect sound, but you really sing. We’re not going to screw ourselves up making it all beautiful, we’re just gonna really get into the music.”

The Tallis Scholars are considered the finest performers of Renaissance music in England, says Deborah Roberts, 46, who has been singing with Phillips for 21 years, “because this group has never been dominated by one personality--it’s been allowed to evolve in a very organic way. That’s a credit to Peter. He doesn’t try to impose anything on you in any way at all. He’s overall controlling, but not in the same way as these egotistical conductors who want these interpretations of the music.”

“I’m just acting as a medium really,” Phillips says later. “I react very strongly to the music and I rely on that. I’ve created a flexible system where I’m free to react as I want to react and they’ll have to follow me.”

Phillips stresses that he usually rehearses a particular piece of music only once before a performance: “I want them to be on edge slightly,” he says.

This is possible, he says, because of the highly developed English sight-reading tradition. “There are all these cathedral choirs dotted around the country. Because they have to sing services--often with new music every day--it is expected that they pick up a piece [and] give a performance straight away and it [will be] nearly perfect.”

Phillips claims he doesn’t know what a piece will sound like until he hears it on stage. “I never rehearse things with strict marks of expression or even strict tempi. It always annoys me when the singers want to know exactly how it’s going to read,” he says. “I won’t give a definite answer until the performance is happening. It means if we do the same program night after night, you could come every night and you wouldn’t get exactly the same thing. The sound would be, I hope, reliable, but the interpretation will subtly vary all the time. This keeps my interest going in pieces that we’ve done nearly 200 times.”

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In early November, the Tallis Scholars held their 25th anniversary concert in the Sainsbury wing of London’s National Gallery, surrounded by Renaissance paintings to match the music. The event was an indication of how far the Tallis Scholars have come since those early Oxford days. Guests shelled out as much as $180 each to hear a program of Tallis, Obrecht, Isaac and Allegri. The “special guest” was TV personality David Attenborough, and the evening included a premiere by British composer John Tavener, with text spoken by Sting.

As an encore, the ensemble tried to take advantage of the crossover possibilities, singing along with their rock star guest in a half-period-practice, half-pop rendition of “Fields of Gold”--a repertory digression Phillips later pronounced “great” and the Times of London deemed an “error of judgment.”

Still, the gallery was packed with a posh and appreciative audience, and even the Times ultimately gave the “interesting” event an overall celebratory review.

Perhaps no one is more surprised than Phillips that the Tallis Scholars can attract such support and glitter 25 years later. But he’s convinced in the end that its popularity comes from the same thing that seduced him: the radiant surface beauty of the sound.

“It’s endlessly subtle music--elitist music,” he says, admitting that, laced as it is with mathematical constructs, it’s so complex that even for him it can take 50 performances before some pieces begin to reveal all their facets. “I really am surprised, that everyone likes it so much in fact. I wonder if they really do like the music, or if it’s just the sound that’s selling it.”

It has almost nothing to do with religion, he thinks, despite the fact that so much of the music is liturgical and half the venues are churches.

“We’re not religious, the audiences aren’t religious, there’s no attempt to re-create a religious service,” he says. “[But] the religious element in the music is obviously helping people to get into a sort of dream, a trance; they’re being taken out of themselves, just like so much other music does.”

He says the singers were once mobbed by fans in Japan, but their largest following overall has been in the United States, where they perform as many as 30 concerts a year, sell more records and draw larger crowds, Phillips says, than all the other countries put together.

“My impression is that this is music, this is a sound that appeals to people who live in rather a hectic way--which implies the Japanese, which implies the Americans--which applies,” he says, “to Western culture.”

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TALLIS SCHOLARS, Royce Hall, UCLA, West L.A. Date: Friday, 8 p.m. Prices: $9-$30. Phone: (310) 825-2101