ABSTRACT
Generations of Tudor choirboys had learned their elementary keyboard technique on the clavichord, and Thomas Tomkins must have owned a clavichord if only for that purpose. His comfortable though by no means affluent financial circumstances may well have permitted him the luxury of a pair of virginals, or even a small harpsichord, for it is the instruments whose characteristics are suggested by the greater part of his extant keyboard music. The influence of the liturgical element, however distant in point of time, must always be seriously considered in the keyboard music of Tomkins. The music book is a human document as well as a musical one, for it displays the agile and resourceful workings of Thomas's mind, his considerably less agile penmanship, and his determination to say in forthright musical terms what he thought and believed to be the best in works of that kind.
