Messiah United Methodist Church

“Write choral music as befits an Englishman and a democrat.” (Hubert Parry, to Ralph Vaughan Williams). The son of a pastor, Ralph Vaughan Williams sought his whole life to be of service to his fellow citizens and believed in making what he regarded as “good” music as available as possible to everyone. His beliefs led him to compose music that was at once didactic (in its use of folk traditions and Tudor church music) and progressive in its use of advanced harmony and dissonance control, all while remaining accessible and palatable to the amateur singer. He founded the amateur Leith Hill Music Festival and was involved in adult education in the Oxford University Extension Lectures, the Society for the Promotion of New Music, and the Purcell Society. During the First World War, he enlisted in the army medical corps as a private and served as a stretcher bearer in the ambulance crew in France and later in Greece, despite being significantly older than his comrades at nearly forty years of age. Many of his friends and colleagues were killed, and continual gun noise damaged his hearing and led to deafness in his later years. After returning to civilian life, he took some time before composing new works again, writing an anti-war cantata: "Dona nobis pacem." During the Second World War, he was active in civilian war work, chairing the Home Office Committee for the Release of Interned Alien Musicians, organizing daily National Gallery Concerts, and serving on a committee for refugees from N**i oppression and on the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. He wrote “Thanksgiving for Victory” for the BBC to celebrate the end of the war, and famously also composed “O Taste and See” and “The Old Hundredth” (which we will be singing on May 31st) for Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation. Though he was offered knighthood and the post of Master of the King’s Music, he refused both, accepting only the Order of Merit. Vaughan Williams’s contributions to the hymnal are extensive, including “For All the Saints,” “Come, My Way, My Truth, My Life,” “I Sing the Almighty Power of God,” “Hail Thee, Festival Day,” “Come Down, O Love Divine,” and “Lo He Comes With Clouds Descending.”

On May 31st, the music ministry will be leading worship with a service centering the works of 20th century British composers Ralph Vaughan Williams, his friend and colleague Gustav Holst, and their teacher Sir Charles Villiers Stanford.

On May 31st, Messiah's music ministry will be leading worship with a service centering the works of 20th century British composers Ralph Vaughan Williams, his friend and colleague Gustav Holst, and their teacher Sir Charles Villiers Stanford.

While music of the Anglican church and the Hymnal 1982 represent excellence in the sacred repertoire today, this ascension arguably began with the work of Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. An organist at Trinity College and co-founder of the Royal College of Music, Stanford wrote many settings of liturgical music attributed with Anglican church services regaining their full place beside the anthem as a worthy object of artistic invention.

Stanford was a staunch political and musical conservative; he was skeptical of modernism and loved the music of Brahms and other neo-classicists. Despite having composed several operas and symphonies that never rose to international fame (the comic operetta style of Gilbert and Sullivan being much more popular), Stanford’s greatest legacy was as a teacher.

In addition to Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, his students included John Ireland, Rebecca Clarke, Frank Bridge, Arthur Bliss, William Hurlstone, Herbert Howells, and Ivor Gurney. Dominated by melody and driven by strong basslines, his music was sometimes criticized as lacking passion or deep feeling, though his excellence in compositional technique was undisputed. At Stanford’s funeral, Holst said, “The one man who could get any one of us out of a technical mess is now gone from us.”

While many of his hymn settings were later replaced by those of his students (most notably “For All the Saints”, replaced by Vaughan Williams), his contributions to the hymnal as composer or harmonizer include “When in Our Music God is Glorified,” “The King of Love My Shepherd Is,” “I Bind Unto Myself This Day,” “Love Came Down at Christmas,” and “Once in Bethlehem of Judah.”