ABSTRACT
Other performance issues concern vocal resources and pitch standard, tempo, text underlay and pronunciation, and accidentals. Most present-day singers would experience considerable difficulty if required to sing John Taverner's music from facsimiles of sixteenth-century partbooks. Although reference to solo performance is clear, a single account from the second half of the sixteenth century cannot be taken as proof that the manner of singing was universal in Taverner's lifetime. No source of Taverner's music carries any explicit tempo direction, and no English writings survive to shed light on contemporary practice. In The mean mass, which has more frequent changes of time signature than any other of Taverner's works, the relationship between and is unclear. The most perplexing performance issue is whether or not singers in Taverner's day added substantially to the number of accidentals notated in the sources, as was necessary in some types of medieval and renaissance music.
