The figure of John the Baptist was, perhaps, a potential embarrassment to the early Christians: why would Jesus have implied subordination to the proclamation of another? Why would He seek baptism for repentance? And yet, all four Gospels mention him, and imply approbation.

Nevertheless, and increasingly with the passage of time (if one accepts the consensus academic view of the relative dates of composition of the Gospel accounts), the evangelists tend to show explicitly that John himself accepted that the Messiah to come was one greater than he.

The College in Oxford dedicated to St John the Baptist claims that it was a commission from their president William Laud that led the leading keyboard player of the Jacobean court, Orlando Gibbons, setting John 1:19-23 as the verse anthem This is the record of John. Musically, the structure of the work is three short solo lines to which the full choir respond with an echo from the same text as the soloist, reinforcing twice the willingness of the Baptiser to say ‘I am not’ and then echoing the more positive claim to be ‘the voice of him that crieth in the wilderness make straight the way of the Lord.’

Among historical musicologists the discussion seems to be whether accompaniment by organ or by viol consort (or possibly both) is most authentic. Although manuscripts exist with organ part and with viol parts, they tend not to coexist in the same source, and indeed variants may be taken as implying that one or the other, but not both, might have been done by seventeenth-century performers – though it remains perfectly acceptable to ask why that should be taken as a measure of ‘authenticity’.

Theologians are more likely to fix on the text, which appears to be from the Geneva Bible rather than the Authorised Version, though variance between the two in this text is small. That said, by using ‘the voice of him that crieth’, rather than the KJV’s ‘the voice of one crying’, the text set turns out to be closer to the KJV’s rendering of Isaiah 40, even though not of John 1. For the linguists who might be interested, it renders the Greek φωνὴ βοῶντος, in which βοῶντος is a genitive participle.

The musical setting is not word-painting; we do not hear John’s answer to the enquiry as itself the cry of that lonely voice; that said, perhaps it was a pointed decision to end the text at ‘make straight the way of the Lord’. The Gospel consciously refers back to Isaiah, and the conversation continues into John’s justification for the practice of baptism; the anthem leaves us with the Christological centrepiece. It is for the Lord that the proclamation of repentance prepares us, and to the Lamb that the Baptiser goes on to point.