From nearly half a millennium away, the prayers, lamentations, and glorias of Thomas Tallis (who was probably born in 1505) resound with a persuasive fervor that can lead contemporary listeners to call into question who we are and what we believe (or want to believe).Tallis lived a more complex faith than ours, one tested – perhaps thwarted – by the ruptures of religion and history. And you can hear it in his works.

“I have never placed my hope in any other than you, O God of Israel,” begins an English translation of Tallis’s setting of the Latin “Spem in alium” (sing and glorify) “who can show both anger and graciousness, and absolve all the sins of suffering man.” “Lord God, creator of heaven and earth,” the prayer concludes, “be mindful of our humiliation.”

The words may read as dirge-like, but they rise in a shimmering corona, 40 voices in eight five-part choirs. “Spem in alium” remains Tallis’s greatest achievement, bearing an eloquence and perfection it is almost impossible to imagine anyone bettering. We are thrilled by its a capella voices, rising and falling like souls making their slow way to Heaven (or making less sought-after stops along the way).

Tallis served as a composer and organist in the Chapel Royal for four decades, and it is his music we most likely hear in our heads whenever we try to think ourselves back to 16th-century Britain. Henry VIII, the quick-todie Edward VI, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth I heard the man’s playing and his pieces as they sat to Mass – the most vehement battleground of Renaissance England. For in Tallis’s lifetime his country’s Catholicism fell to the marriages of Henry VIII, the liturgies and languages of worship changing from bloody skirmishes over Protestants and Popery. Centuries of cultural and theological tradition headed underground in the wake of Elizabeth’s successful religious renovations, so effectively its remnants are only recently beginning to resurface.

Tallis, a cradle Catholic who probably remained one (though, incredibly, he kept his job in Elizabeth’s own church), emerged from this holy war as the finest composer of his day. Its explosions are echoed in the changing styles he composed in: Latin motets and masses as well as English-language hymns come down to us from his hand. If anyone in his own time had bothered to really listen to his almost absurdly devout music, they might have drawn a lesson about the validity of a variety of worship, a Christianity that can express its certainties in old and new ways – and not just in the winning way.

We don’t know very much about how Tallis survived such times, because we know little about him at all. Pay-books and lists of staff members give us glimpses of him in places like Canterbury, or playing for monks in a priory in Dover (one of his earliest gigs). More facts appear once he joins the Chapel Royal in the 1540s, where he remained until his death in 1585. (The church he was buried in was demolished a century and a half later, so we know Tallis’s epitaph only from its inclusion in a late-16th-century survey of London.)

In 1575 Elizabeth I granted to Tallis and his great pupil (and even greater successor) William Byrd an exclusive license to print and publish music, which gave these two musicians the means to perpetuate their work. While it would be nice to know more about his actions during these dark years, when Catholics determined to maintain their religion were on the run or led to the block, a fuller Tallis biography might divert our attention from his music itself – and we can never have enough time to spend with that.

What, exactly, do we enjoy in Tallis? In a post religious society like ours, how can pages of music living and breathing by religious conviction continue to reach us? This is the question almost never addressed in critical and professional discussions of Tallis, or of the other great British musicians, Byrd and Purcell. Though the secular side of a composer like Purcell- his operas, masques, and dances – is now preferred, these men did not write for venues like Carnegie Hall. They were trying to be heard by God, and to strike chords of Godliness in their music’s hearers. The art of Tallis and his fellow composers was at once affirmative, persuasive, and desperate – people were arrested, fined, even killed for participating in rituals Tallis and his colleagues composed to.

And though it may seem we have little contact with his historical circumstances, the way his music has won our attention again after 500 years suggests its original function remains valid. Even though some of us don’t believe in a place such music might transport our souls to, or refuse to be part of the creed these melodies enshrine, or have objections to the very idea of “religious music” remaining a needed form of theological and artistic expression, the revival of Tallis’s music indicates he knows us better than we know him. He still has much to say to listeners of all kinds, and we may be more in tune with such visionary sounds than we realize.

Tallis, ‘live’ and on Disc

In New York, the most prominent musical celebrations of Thomas Tallis will take place at Columbia University, beginning January 22, when the Vox Ensemble sings an all-Tallis program in the Low Library at 8 p.m. (212-854-7799). On April 9, the Tallis Scholars will appear at the Miller Theater in New York to celebrate the 500th birthday of their favorite (2960 Broadway, at 116th Street, 212-854-1633).

The Tallis Scholars was founded by its current conductor, Peter Phillips, in 1973 to perform works by Tallis and other Renaissance composers. Their recordings, nearly all of which are issued on their own label, Gimell, remain essential listening. My favorites include:

“Spem in Alium” (Gimell CDGIM 006), which contains Tallis’s masterwork as its title track, as well as half-a-dozen other Latin pieces, including the “Gaude Gloriosa.”

“Lamentations of Jeremiah” (Gimell CDGIM 025) is a summa of Tallis’s ability to turn potentially stiff Latin devotionals into fluent, passionate song. The “Lamentations” appear with similar works by Tallis’s Italian and English contemporaries in “Lamenta” (Gimell CDGIM 996), the best Tallis disc for hard times and/or Lent.

“The Complete English Anthems” (Gimell CDGIM 007). From the other side of the holy war come the composer’s Protestant, vernacular hymns.

“The Tallis Scholars Sing Thomas Tallis” (Gimell CDGIM 203), a two-disc reissue of “best ofs” from these earlier albums, makes a good starting point. “Christmas with the Tallis Scholars” (Gimell CDGIM 202) and “The Essential Tallis Scholars” (Gimell CDGIM 201) provide glimpses of additional composers and sounds of a musical period that benefits from a richer acquaintance with its context. The group’s two DVDs, “Live in Rome” (GIMDN 904) and “Playing Elizabeth’s Tune” (GIMDN 902), are also commendable.

Excellent Tallis recordings by other ensembles include:

“The Lamentations of Jeremiah” by the Hilliard Ensemble (ECM 1341), which offers a Tallis a bit more modern, more impetuous, than the reverent composer conjured by the Tallises.

“Spem in Alium; Lamentations,” by the King’s College Choir (Argo D 115496), on the other hand, gives a window into how Tallis is performed by singers who are the latest practitioners of a British choir tradition that has lasted centuries.

Finally, the Kronos Quartet, who do not sing but play stringed instruments, and created their own version of “Spem in alium.” Without voices, the Renaissance polyphonies are purified to a skeletal, unnervingly modern keen; “post-Holocaust Tallis” is a worthy description. The quartet’s recording is included on “Black Angels” (Nonesuch 07559792422).