The English Hymnal

I've lost track of who cited  me to this piece on The English Hymnal.  It's a lovely read full of good sense about many things including communal singing in general.  I was interested at first since this was our little parish's first choice of hymnal.  Alas, the few copies we could find were too expensive for our budget.

The musical editor of The English Hymnal was the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. This task came at an early stage in his career, and he told the story of how it began with an unexpected visit: 

It must have been in 1904 that I was sitting in my study in Barton Street, Westminster, when a cab drove up to the door and ‘Mr. Dearmer’ was announced. I just knew his name vaguely as a parson who invited tramps to sleep in his drawing room; but he had not come to me about tramps. He went straight to the point and asked me to edit the music of a hymn book. I protested that I knew very little about hymns but he explained that Cecil Sharp had suggested my name […] and the final clench was given when I understood that if I did not do the job it would be offered to a well-known Church musician with whose musical ideas I was much out of sympathy.

The rest of the essay can be found here.  It's worth a click and a read.

As something of an aside, Mr Dearmer is he of The Parson's Handbook fame.  And Cecil Sharp, aside from being the fons et origo of English folk music collecting was also one of the principal founders of the EFDSS.