A Song for Forty

Before 1750, musical “greatness” was often treated like a technical contest: the best composer was the one who could weave the most independent melodies into one coherent fabric. By the end of that long contrapuntal era, though, it wasn’t sheer quantity that mattered so much as how deeply a few lines were worked out—think of the tight, intense counterpoint in Bach and Handel.

Still, some composers went for scale. The English master Thomas Tallis wrote a piece for forty separate voices—forty singers, each with their own independent line, different from the other thirty‑nine. For 138 bars, everyone is meant to go “each to his own way”… just not “like sheep,” because sheep follow one leader, not forty.

And Tallis wasn’t the end of it. In the early 1800s the Italian composer Pietro Raimondi wrote a fugal work for sixteen choirs of four voices each—sixty‑four different parts at once. Some called that kind of writing “Gothic.” Either way, it’s comforting to live in an age where technique is a tool, not the point.