Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- I • 1840–1857 A Musical Youth: St Paul's Cathedral (1)
- II • 1857–1859 ‘I saw the Lord’: Ouseley and Tenbury
- III • 1860–1872 ‘Drop down, ye Heavens, from Above’: Oxford (1)
- IV • 1872–1882 Reform and National Renown: St Paul's Cathedral (2)
- V • 1882–1888 H. M. Inspector of Schools and The Crucifixion
- VI • 1889–1901 ‘Love Divine, all loves excelling’: Oxford (2)
- List of Stainer's Works
- Bibliography
- Index
II • 1857–1859 - ‘I saw the Lord’: Ouseley and Tenbury
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of Abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- I • 1840–1857 A Musical Youth: St Paul's Cathedral (1)
- II • 1857–1859 ‘I saw the Lord’: Ouseley and Tenbury
- III • 1860–1872 ‘Drop down, ye Heavens, from Above’: Oxford (1)
- IV • 1872–1882 Reform and National Renown: St Paul's Cathedral (2)
- V • 1882–1888 H. M. Inspector of Schools and The Crucifixion
- VI • 1889–1901 ‘Love Divine, all loves excelling’: Oxford (2)
- List of Stainer's Works
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In 1857 I found myself, after a railway journey to Worcester and then twenty miles on the top of a coach, settled in the charming building which he [Ouseley] had raised at his own cost for the advancement of church music. From it a short cloister led into a church of beautiful design, rich in carved woodwork and stained glass, containing a fine organ, and served by an admirable choir. Here, day by day, choral services of a high standard of excellence were maintained.
Stainer appositely described his decision to undertake the assistantship at Tenbury as ‘a turning-point in [his] life’. There were of course great musical opportunities afforded by his employment there; apart from services, he had much time for organ practice, private study and the extraordinary luxury of individual tuition from Ouseley. But the wider experience offered by the almost monastical isolation of Tenbury, a unique establishment of a college attached to a parish church, was a new kind of ecclesiastical discipline shaped by its founder's vision of church music as a quintessential and ordered component of Christian worship, rather than the tolerated appendage that it had become in so many services throughout the country. For Stainer, whose only experiences had been of political turmoil and liturgical malaise at St Paul's, Tenbury offered a quite new and deeply influential perspective that would ultimately crystallise his view of church music for the rest of his life.
St Michael's, Tenbury, had materialised after years of spiritual, emotional and physical gestation on Ouseley's part. The son of a baronet, he had been educated privately under the tutelage of a clergyman, the Rev. James Joyce, before embarking on his studies at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1843. A year later, at the age of nineteen, his father died; as the only son, he came into a substantial inheritance, a fortune which in time allowed him to realise a steadily coalescing fusion of his education and career.
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- Information
- John StainerA Life in Music, pp. 38 - 62Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007