Christopher Tye

Tye was an English organist and composer of choral and instrumental music. Tye was a contemporary of Thomas Tallis, and contributed to the assimilation of continental structural principles into English music during the first half of the sixteenth century. Rather little survives of his sacred choral music, but what does remain represents an interesting personal synthesis of the older English florid style and the techniques of structural imitation and syllabic text setting. Tye’s sparing use of imitation and the general absence of soloist passages gives his music a tighter cohesiveness than that of the previous generation.