It’s Wednesday a week ago (Oct 20), and Peter Phillips, director and founder of the world-famous Renaissance vocal group, the Tallis Scholars, has just arrived stateside for the first of three trips he’ll make across the Big Pond before Christmas. Ask how he is — he had only a few days in England, after a Swedish tour, before hopping on a plane to Seattle — and he answers in one word: “Tired.”

But get him talking about music, and he is more awake and articulate than travelers without the excuse of jet lag brought on by a quick voyage across an eight-hour time difference. The subject of conversation is the program the Tallis Scholars designed for this fall’s new Lincoln Center White Light Festival — and which audiences in Ann Arbor and Sault Ste. Marie get to hear before Big Apple Tallis Scholars fans.

“How do you pronounce ‘Sault’? an uncertain Peters inquired, never having been to the Upper-Michigan town before, and a little confused after finding out there are two “Soos,” one in Michigan one in Canada.

Ann Arbor is more familiar turf, thanks to visits under University Musical Society auspices. And when UMS brings back the group Thursday at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church, some of the music will doubtless be familiar to Tallis Scholars fans — the Allegri “Miserere,” for example, which the group has recorded twice.

But the program veers far from the Renaissance — in this case, composers like Allegri, Byrd, Palestrina, Praetorius and Tallis — to incorporate the suspended “mystical minimalism” of contemporary Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. He is represented on both halves of the program: first by his “Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen” and later by his “Nunc Dimittis” and “Magnificat.”

Though the group’s focus has been the Renaissance, performing Pärt is an unusual, though not sole, foray into contemporary fare. The group has long incorporated the music of John Tavener into its programs and recordings. “We took him up years ago, and he has become a great friend,” Phillips said.

The idea for incorporating Pärt has to do with the “White Light” theme. “I think we were asked to be imaginative about it,” Phillips said of the festival’s focus on “music’s transcendent capacity to illuminate our larger interior universe.” “My idea of white light is not a meteor or star throwing a dash of white light. I thought of a voice doing that.”

The Allegri “Miserere” came immediately to mind, he said, with its famous high, top C. “The voice shoots light across,” he said. He also played with the idea of the harmony of the spheres.

“I love that idea, so I programmed music which evokes that image, like the Tallis ‘Miserere’ and the two Byrd ‘Misereres.’

“The Pärt is another impact of the festival, the White Light. Estonia is a northern country -- further north than England anyway — so that’s why that’s there. Then, of course, in quite a different context, the concert is all about Magnificat and Miserere settings.”

The settings, Phillips said, are “astonishingly different,” ranging from the heavily canonic English settings — he calls the Tallis “Miserere nostri” “one of the most mathematically clever pieces, a cathedral of sound, intensely complex” — to pieces like the Allegri, based on chords and embellishments on the chords, the most notable of which is that high C. “It’s really a simple piece,” he said, “not mathematically complicated at all.”

But effective it is. “The Allegri, everyone (in the group) can sing more or less by heart, and everyone can understand it,” he said. “It breaks down cultural barriers; in Japan we sing it pretty much in every concert. You don’t have to know the meaning of the words, or be Christian. It just makes everyone happy.”

And as for the Tallis, it, too, creates an instant atmosphere, he noted. “The singers don’t have any idea how complicated it is,” he said. “The effect is made somehow, and I’m very interested in the power of that effect. The performers don’t necessarily know what they’re doing, but they are doing it.”

The Pärt, too, makes an effect, a deep and spiritual one for most listeners, but Pärt’s music, said Phillips, is utterly different from the Renaissance music the Tallis Scholars usually perform.

“We did this program in Rome,” he said, “and I was asked to talk about it on the radio. The interviewer assumed that Pärt and Palestrina were similar. He assumed that because they both create this other-worldy, religious atmosphere and are God-centered. The music has the power to remove the secular world for as long as it lasts, in any listener. He assumed Pärt and Palestrina were doing the same thing in the same way, but that Pärt was just doing it in a modern idiom. It’s an attractive idea — both composers do have the power to take you out of yourself and relax you, but they do it in two very different ways.”

In Pärt’s “holy minimalism,” Phillips explained, you have “long spans, paragraphs of music, it just sits there. Palestrina is not like that at all. It’s really complicated. Each line has its own business, and the artists fit lines into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.”

Interestingly, Phillips said, both the long spans of the Pärt and the shorter, more complicated spans of the Palestrina appeal to modern audiences. “The aesthetic of both is kind of an antidote to today’s shorter attention spans,” he said. The same could be said of another Renaissance-modern couple: Tallis and Tavener.

Is there more modern music in store for Tallis Scholars’ fans? Phillips said probably not, though he doesn’t rule it out with other groups he’s associated with. And the Tallis Scholars, in conjunction with the BBC, runs a yearly competition for a modern piece that the group performs live each year.

“In creating the Tallis Scholars as an instrument for Renaissance music,” Phillips said, “I basically created an instrument that could be likened to an organ or any sort of perfectly tuned and balanced instrument. When asked to apply that instrument to (more modern) music, we can do it — unless instruments are involved because that changes the phrasing and the tuning. But if the music is a cappella and we are clean, well-balanced and in tune, then the music will speak. In this context, the Tallis Scholars is as an instrument that I play on. Of course, it’s really 10 individuals singing with an instrumental quality that can be applied to modern music.”

Susan Isaacs Nisbett is a free-lance writer who covers classical music and dance for AnnArbor.com.