English
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Samuel Sebastian Wesley, grandson of hymn-writer Charles Wesley and son of Sebastian Wesley, a celebrated organist though socially ostracised for leaving his wife for a servant, served four cathedrals and provided original and stimulating music for services. His verse anthem Blessed be the God and Father has precedents beyond his own earlier works in the… Read more
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Beside the death-bed of his brother, one of England’s foremost composers made a second attempt at setting some words of poet Adelaide Procter. Arthur Sullivan’s setting of The Lost Chord became one of the most famous parlour ballads of its time and afterwards; a version of it was one of the very first recordings of… Read more
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Continuing through Lent, I have been listening to Tallis’s settings from the Lamentations attributed to Jeremiah. Understood to have been written in the 1560s and setting the Latin vulgate (despite the English church’s general adoption of the vernacular), the setting in part one is of the first two verses of the first lamentation and the… Read more
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I remember when, as a young Director of Music in a parish church, I was teaching my choir Charles Wood’ anthem ‘O Thou the central orb’, one of my sopranos said to me “I’m sure this is very lovely, but what does it actually mean?” Some might consider that a very fair question; indeed, at… Read more
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Arguably the most common form of theology in the form of music that most of us come across is the singing of hymns. As this post is to be published on the feast of the transfiguration, I will indulge by writing about my favourite hymn (there may be readers who breathe a sigh of relief… Read more
Theology in Music 