Festival Toccata

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Who dares stand idle? Thomas Tertius Noble: A Life in Church Music 1867-1953

Thomas Tertius Noble (1867-1953) was a British organist, who,after completing successful tenures at Ely Cathedral and York Minster, uprooted his life and immigrated to America to establish a choir school, in the English cathedral tradition,at New York’s illustrious St Thomas’s Church, Fifth Avenue.Noble’s early training at the Royal College of Music, under Charles Stanford, Frederick Bridge and Walter Parratt, equipped him with extraordinary skills, which coupled with his charismatic persona, made him one of the finest musicians of his generation.Noble’s unique ability for forming lasting relationships and inspiring musicians of all levels and backgrounds,created the ideal situation for achieving the task he undertook during his thirty years in New York.With the support of the rector, the music committee and vestry of St Thomas’s, he formed a choir school for the boy choristers, which served (and still serves) as the epitome of taste and musical quality within the tradition of Anglican choral music in the United States.The convergence of primarily source material and personal accounts of Noble as a man and musician, have brought about a significant contribution to knowledge surrounding the life of this extraordinary individual. Through insight gained in his unpublished autobiographical Memoirs, personal and professional papers, vestry minutes, parish yearbooks and considerable archives of both the church and choir school, an understanding of Noble’s successful career and his unfortunate departure from St Thomas’s, has been brought to light for the first time.The importance of St Thomas’s Church in the international world of cathedral music is profound. Alongside Westminster Abbey, it possesses the only remaining choir school that exists for the sole purpose of training and educating the boy chorister. If not for the vision and expertise of Noble, this tradition in the new world would be merely a legend, rather than a thriving reality

Complete poems of Francis Thompson

358 p

'A Source of Innocent Merriment in an Object all Sublime': A Critical Appraisal of the Choral Works of Sir Arthur Sullivan.

This thesis seeks to give a full assessment of a surprisingly and much neglected area of academic research - the Choral music of Sir Arthur Sullivan - over a period of 36 years from Kenilworth (1864) to the setting of the Te Deum (1900), written during the Boar War and the year of his death. Although not extensive, the list of Sullivan's choral music reveals that he was not only drawn to the idiom of choral music but that he exercised no less of his creative imagination in their gestation and performance than he did in his more famous and exalted theatrical works. Indeed, the list exhibits an impressive variety of sub-genres ranging from the masque, the Te Deum, the oratorio and the sacred drama to the dramatic cantata. Here the originality and coherence of these works are assessed analytically and critically within the context of the development of Sullivan's career (with particular emphasis on his conductorship of the Leeds Triennial Festival) and the composer's style. In addition the works are studied in conjunction with an appraisal of Sullivan's own particular brand of eclecticism, his creative approach to choral forms, and his instinctive empathy with the stage in which we see an individual melange of Teutonic influences (of Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann and, later, early Wagner), those of the French (namely Offenbach and Gounod) and Italian theatres (Rossini, Donizetti and Verdi), not to mention the impact of English dramatic music and of Sullivan's own Savoy operas. Indeed, one of the central elements of the thesis examines the very aesthetic nature of the choral works within the perspective of Sullivan's dramatic predilections and, notwithstanding the self-evident differences between choral music and opera, to what extent his choral music crossed the boundaries of these dissimilar idioms. Finally, the choral works are also considered within the controversial and complex context of Sullivan's own reception among his peers and critics, and how his role as an 'outsider' and as a composer who 'squandered his talents' affected the perception of his 'serious' works within a choral world dominated by Teutonic symphonic values

The choral music of Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924 and the press c.1875-1925

This detailed survey of Stanford's choral music is divided into two parts. Part One outlines those influences in the composer's family background and career path that encouraged him to produce so much music for choirs, both sacred and secular, and seeks to contextualise the British cultural environment in which he lived and worked. The sight-singing movement of the 1840s and the rapid spread of choral singing, the development of parish church choirs, choral societies and musical festivals, the slower improvement of musical standards in cathedrals and college chapels, and the growth of music publishing are each examined in turn, with frequent reference to Stanford himself. A complete chapter is devoted to the rapid expansion of the press and the steady evolution of musical journalism during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Part Two contains a chronological examination of Stanford's choral output with particular emphasis on the reception of individual works by critics and the general public, making direct and extensive reference to critical articles in more than forty different newspapers and journals. From this evidence attempts are made to identify the most and least successful of the composer's choral works. A concluding chapter refers to the English Musical Renaissance and Stanford's recognised status as one of its chief protagonists, and also examines the concept of academicism (or 'cleverness') and its impact upon critical appraisal of the composer's works, especially from Shaw and his disciples. Three appendices provide statistical and factual information on Stanford's choral output, and include some material not previously available in published writings on the composer

Cinderella in the South

https://commons.und.edu/settler-literature/1187/thumbnail.jp