There is no surviving evidence to suggest that Stainer aspired to leave Oxford. By 1871 Bulley had seen to it that he was on a salary of £200. This sum, however, was not considerable, and with a wife and five children to provide for (and another expected – Elizabeth Stainer was pregnant with a sixth child in January 1872), it seems likely that Stainer was looking for a higher-paying job. Nevertheless, Oxford was an amicable, comfortable and intellectually stimulating environment which he did not consider giving up unless a new and more rewarding opportunity presented itself.

In 1871 Stainer was invited to join the Rev. John Bacchus Dykes, W. H. Monk, Sir Henry Baker and the Rev. G. W. Huntingford on the committee of the revised Hymns Ancient & Modern. During August of that year Stainer went up to Monkland near Leominster to spend time with his colleagues, painstakingly going through the tunes of the hymnal to see what should be jettisoned and what should be retained. ‘No greater privilege have I ever had’, Stainer later recalled, of participating on that committee, and with the encouragement and enthusiasm of Dykes and Monk for the hymn genre he declared: ‘I plunged deeply into the fascinating study of hymnody, and have lost no opportunity of employing myself as a humble labourer in a sphere congenial and dear to me from the time of my childhood.’ The matter of hymn tunes and hymn texts instigated some correspondence between Stainer and Liddon in September 1871 as is evidenced by the following letter from Stainer:

The same letter also divulged the fact that a letter from Liddon had also raised the matter of music at St Paul's and that major reform was anticipated.

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.

John Stainer's letter to Frederick George Edwards, organist, writer and editor of the Musical Times since 1897, was written in response to one of numerous invitations Edwards had extended, and would continue to extend, to eminent men in Britain's expanding musical profession for a series of leading biographical articles. These commenced in 1898 and concluded five years later in 1903. Stainer's first reaction to Edwards’ suggestion of an article had been entirely negative: ‘as regards your kind proposal to introduce me into the Mus. Times, I hope you will not be offended if I ask to be excused. Find younger men! it will give them a leg up into the stirrup! Best thanks all the same, for thinking of me.’ Yet the subject of biography, indeed autobiography, had been on Stainer's mind prior to Edwards’ suggestion for an article, and that he, still only fifty-eight years old, was duly aware of the extraordinary variety of work that had absorbed his life from the age of seven and of the part that he had played in the rapidly burgeoning environment of Britain's musical life. But it seems that Stainer, who by 1898 was close to retirement and desirous of the need to withdraw from the public gaze, required time to dwell on the prospect of a more fulsome biographical intrusion.

Any study of the Victorian musical world and the later nineteenth century sooner or later brings one into contact with John Stainer. A towering figure in the field of Anglican church music and in the nation's ‘organ’ world, he was also deeply influential in pedagogy, scholarship, the country's institutional development of musical training and the musical lives of London and Oxford. Born three years after Queen Victoria came to the throne (and during the year of her marriage to Prince Albert), he died prematurely at 60, his life spanning her entire reign. In this respect he was the archetypal Victorian composer, embodying many of those central values associated with the era – the supreme position of the cathedral organist, the pre-eminence of the organ loft as the musical locus of training and the role of church music as a compositional aspiration.

He died a much-respected man for his contribution to the musical life of the nation – the dinner thrown for him on his retirement from St Paul's in 1888 has rarely if ever been equalled – yet in the Edwardian age, and especially after World War I, he suffered the ignominy of almost total neglect and excoriation from a generation who wanted to turn its back on the composer of The Crucifixion and ‘High Victorianism’ as aberrations of an artistically infertile era and a period of musical values which, as Ernest Walker commented in 1907, were characterised by ‘a tide of sentimentalism’, ‘cheaply sugary harmony’ and ‘palsied part-writing’, and ‘whose normal attitude involved the sacrifice by the musician of some of his musicianship in the supposed interest of religion’.

Without the major tie of services and practices at St Paul's, the unremitting pressure of work on Stainer's daily existence was lifted. The house in Oxford was comfortably situated, close to the university and the Bodleian, and, though he was still called away for college inspections – in 1889 he visited thirty-eight of the forty-three teacher-training institutions – there was more time to devote to composition, scholarship, the publication of the ever expanding series of Novello primers and the third edition of the Dictionary of Musical Terms. There was also more freedom for him and his wife (and his children if they chose to accompany them) to visit the Continent for relaxation. Mentone, a favourite resort for the British (as reflected in the many British-named hotels there), especially during the winter months, was often favoured by Stainer, who found the warmer climes more conducive to his declining health. In 1889, however, he chose to visit southern Germany, first to hear Parsifal at Bayreuth, and then to witness the famous Domspatzen in Regensburg (Ratisbon), renowned for its singing of polyphony, plainchant and its role in the Cecilian movement (notably with scholars such as Haberl and Proske). Indeed Stainer much admired the Ratisbon edition of plainchant and retained a scepticism about the new hegemony of performance doctrine that was now being promulgated by Solesmes:

On 1 March 1889 the death of his old friend and colleague W. H. Monk was announced, and just over a month later came the sad news of Ouseley's death on 6 April in Hereford. One of Ouseley's greatest concerns before his death had been the welfare and continuance of his foundation at Tenbury, which had never been properly endowed and had largely relied on regular subventions from its founder.

The facility, artifice and brilliant technique of ‘I saw the Lord’, a prodigious, indeed precocious exhibition by such a young man, undoubtedly impressed Ouseley even if he may have been out of sympathy with the anthem's contemporary style. Ouseley, however, must have sensed that, for all its conducive attributes, Tenbury was too isolated a spot for Stainer to pursue his musical career and that, before long, his pupil would be looking for fresh and more advantageous opportunities elsewhere.

Such an opportunity presented itself at the end of 1859 when the post of organist and informator choristarum became vacant at Magdalen College, Oxford, after the resignation of Benjamin Blyth on 1 December, and after his assistant, E. Vine Hall, turned down the offer to replace him. The post was available through open competition. Among those who put themselves forward for consideration with appropriate testimonials were Samuel Reay (a one-time chorister of Durham Cathedral and organist of Radley College), George Mursell Garrett (formerly a chorister at New College, Oxford under Stephen Elvey, and now organist at St John's College, Cambridge) and George Benjamin Arnold (a pupil of S. S. Wesley and organist of St Mary's, Torquay). Stainer's appointment to the post was by no means a foregone conclusion. Reay (b. 1822), Arnold (b. 1832) and Garrett (b. 1834) were older, more experienced professionals and came with testimonials from eminent church musicians; next to them, Stainer, with only just over two years at Tenbury, and not even twenty years of age, must have seemed almost absurdly young to the President of Magdalen, Frederic Bulley. However, Stainer, who could already boast of an Oxford music degree, came with excellent testimonials, one of them from Ouseley who commanded respect within the University as the Professor of Music.

Having accepted Mundella's invitation, Stainer and his wife spent July and part of August 1882 in Holland and Belgium, visiting Rotterdam, Antwerp, Amsterdam, The Hague and Brussels. A few weeks after his return he was asked by Grove to join the staff of the RCM, due to open its doors in 1883:

It was a most tempting offer, not least because Stainer had lent his full support to the Prince of Wales's venture. ‘I should only have been too glad to be attached to the staff of the Royal College, as Sir George Grove asked me to be’, he later admitted, ‘if Mr Mundella … had not asked me to work under the educational department.’

In a comparative study, François-Bernard Mâche defines structural processes that apply equally to mythology and music as “universal procedures of treatment.” By “universal,” Mâche understands that certain formal procedures of both myth and music, due to their similar trans-historical presence in different contexts, are separate from stylistic differences and historical evolution:

Mâche's universal procedures of treatment clearly parallel Lévi-Strauss's concept of molds. These include binary opposition, repetitiveness, variability, symmetry, and numerical organization. Also related is Lévi-Strauss's notion of “bricolage,” which refers to one of the ways in which the principle of variability unfolds, but it also can be considered a relatively autonomous means of structuring. Bricolage corresponds to combinatorics, which by itself stands for combinatorial mathematics, the field concerned with problems of selection, arrangement, and operation within a finite or discrete system, and the closely related area of combinatorial geometry. For the specific purposes of comparing myth and music, I use the derivative term “combinatoriality” in place of the more mathematically oriented term “combinatorics.” Combinatoriality is defined as a type of structuring, based on a finite set of elements. Combinations of these elements form larger entities between which elements can be traded.

Twentieth-century composers developed an interest in structuring elementary material. While in the nineteenth century chord and motive served as the finite atoms of musical creation, in the twentieth century, especially with Webern, this limit shifted to a single pitch, timbre, and dynamic, all of which gained independence. “Bare” structures, such as symmetrically organized series, formed the basis of a composition; the search for the components of a single tone led composers to acoustical experiments with the sources of sound. As other structural forces began to co-exist with tonality, the prime structural molds grew increasingly independent from the logic of tonal relationships. Though these molds were always part of music, the tonal system obscured their pure and untamed forms.

Victoria Adamenko: Could you tell me, how did you come to circular notation? Were you influenced by the notation used by Ross Lee Finney— your teacher—in his Spherical Madrigals?

George Crumb: I did not know this piece. I knew Stockhausen's Refrain before I did any of my own circular works, but his work was not a direct influence on me. I use a different principle when drawing my scores. My pieces of circular notation are aleatoric just in a sense that they erase the vertical alignment of the score. My first circular notation was a piece called Night Music I, in 1963. It was also my first setting of a [Federico García] Lorca poem. The poem set with circular notation was called “The Moon Is Rising.” The two circles in the score were supposed to represent the moon, and so it was suggested by the poem. Another composition in which I used circular notation was The Songs, Drones and Refrains of Death, of 1968. That has a title, Casida of the Dark Doves, which refers to the sun and the moon. One of the circles is titled “The Sun.” So the circular notation here was suggested by the sun.

VA: So you refer here to heavenly bodies. Is it therefore connected to the concept of the music of the spheres?

GC: It is later, in the Star-Child, that the circles are connected to the medieval concept of the music of the spheres, as well as in Makrokosmos. There is another work called Night of the Four Moons, where I used “Musica Humana” and “Musica Mundana.” It has Lorca's text. At the end of the work I have the two musics going at the same time. The “Musica Mundana” is quasi-pentatonic: it has really four notes, only white notes. “Musica Humana” is in F# major. I was thinking very much about the opposition of those two. The “Humana” is kind of Ragtime—the music of the people—and the “Mundana” is in the strings, just open fifths throughout the whole piece, a sort of a metaphysical kind of music, a representation of nature. I was thinking of the dichotomy of a similar kind that Ives uses in his Central Park in the Dark: the music of nature opposed to the popular music of the time.