Tag Archive: 0church music

Although famously dubbed ‘das Land ohne Musik’, England has in fact always enjoyed a rich choral tradition, in large part thanks to its cathedral choirs of boys and men (now finally with female voices among them, too) who have sung daily services for, quite literally, centuries, broken only by the dictates of Oliver Cromwell and, […]

William Crotch (1775–1847) ‘was an exceptional child prodigy and became one of the most distinguished English musicians of his day …  At the age of about 18 months he began to pick out tunes on a small house organ which his father had built, and soon after his second birthday he had taught himself to […]

Here’s rare book: the first (and probably only) edition of A Selection from the Music in use at the Church of St John the Divine Fairfield, privately printed in—presumably—a small number of copies, in 1858.  (This is Fairfield, Merseyside, by the way, not Connecticut.)  The compiler was one J. B. Cooper. The whole thing is […]

These are the page proofs, with autograph corrections by the composer, of Aleksandr Grechaninov’s Liturgia Domestica (1926/7). Grechaninov (1864–1956) is best known for the sublime choral music he wrote for the Russian Orthodox Church.  It is what you expect to hear in Russian church music, comparable to, say, the style of Rachmaninov’s Vespers.  But there was […]