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Views from the Choir Loft

Sir Richard Terry: Hymns, Congregational Singing, and Avoiding “Violence” to the Elders

Jeff Ostrowski · September 4, 2020

IR RICHARD Runciman Terry (d. 1938) was an English organist, choirmaster, composer, and musicologist. He has often been mentioned on Views from the Choir Loft because he was a great writer and musician. We might not always agree with everything he says, yet his writing is always interesting and provocative. Sir Richard’s words below (in some ways) seem to apply to our current situation:

Biography of Sir Richard Terry

Richard Terry was born in 1864 in Ellington, Northumberland. At the age of 11 he started playing the organ at the local church. He studied at Oxford and Cambridge. At Cambridge, he was much influenced by the Professor of Music, Charles Villiers Stanford and the King’s Chapel organist Arthur Henry Mann who taught him the techniques of choral singing and the training of boys’ voices. Terry left Cambridge in 1890 without taking a degree. Terry underwent conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1896. In 1896, he was appointed organist and director of music at the Roman Catholic Benedictine Downside School in Somerset. (Dom Gregory Murray says Terry was his choirmaster, but this was years later at Westminster.) It was here where he began the massively important work of reviving the Latin music of Tudor English composers such as William Byrd and Thomas Tallis. He was greatly inspired by the revival of Gregorian chant by Dom Prosper Guéranger at Solesmes Abbey in France, which was to be an important part of the Downside musical repertoire.

In 1899 Terry took his Downside choir to Ealing for the opening of the new Benedictine church, where they sang William Byrd’s Mass for Five Voices and motets by Palestrina, Philips, and Father Allegri. The Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Herbert Vaughan (d. 1903), was the preacher on the occasion and he decided that he would have Terry as his Master of Music at the newly built Westminster Cathedral. Terry’s time at Westminster Cathedral was marked by admiration and praise, as well as frustrations. While Terry’s relation with Cardinal Vaughan was excellent, it was less so with his successor, Cardinal Francis Bourne. Bourne’s different view on church music, a continual shortage of financial means to support the choir, the decrease in the number of lay clerks during and after the World War I, together with Terry’s engagements in other things outside the Cathedral led to a prolonged period of tension.

Terry was forced to resign from the Cathedral in 1924, after coming under increasing criticism for his erratic behavior and neglect of duty (including neglecting administrative work, taking off without leave for weeks at a time, cancelling choir rehearsals without notice, dismissing Lay Clerks without proper procedure, taking on too many engagements outside his Cathedral work, and tensions due to his inconsistent approach to congregational singing at the Cathedral). Nonetheless, during this time he was able to establish a choral tradition of great merit at the Cathedral, developing a repertoire of both Gregorian chant and polyphonic music.

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

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Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Sir Richard Runciman Terry Last Updated: September 5, 2020

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Jeff Ostrowski

About Jeff Ostrowski

Jeff Ostrowski holds his B.M. in Music Theory from the University of Kansas (2004). He resides with his wife and children in Los Angeles.—(Read full biography).

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Corpus Christi Watershed

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Surprising Popularity!

One of our most popular downloads has proven to be the organ accompaniment to “The Monastery Hymnal” (131 pages). This book was compiled, arranged, and edited by Achille P. Bragers, who studied at the Lemmensinstituut (Belgium) about thirty years before that school produced the NOH. Bragers might be considered an example of Belgium “Stile Antico” whereas Flor Peeters and Jules Van Nuffel represented Belgium “Prima Pratica.” You can download the hymnal by Bragers at this link.

—Jeff Ostrowski
15 February 2021 • To Capitalize…?

In the Introit for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost, there is a question regarding whether to capitalize the word “christi.” The Vulgata does not, because Psalm 27 is not specifically referring to Our Lord, but rather to God’s “anointed one.” However, Missals tend to capitalize it, such as the official 1962 Missal and also a book from 1777 called Missel de Paris. Something tells me Monsignor Knox would not capitalize it.

—Jeff Ostrowski
15 February 2021 • “Sung vs. Spoken”

We have spoken quite a bit about “sung vs. spoken” antiphons. We have also noted that the texts of the Graduale Romanum sometimes don’t match the Missal texts (in the Extraordinary Form) because the Mass Propers are older than Saint Jerome’s Vulgate, and sometimes came from the ITALA versions of Sacred Scripture. On occasion, the Missal itself doesn’t match the Vulgate—cf. the Introit “Esto Mihi.” The Vulgate has: “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in domum refúgii…” but the Missal and Graduale Romanum use “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in locum refúgii…” The 1970s “spoken propers” use the traditional version, as you can see.

—Jeff Ostrowski

Random Quote

“Worse, composers are now setting the introits of the missal [instead of the Graduale] to music, even to chant, though these texts were explicitly for spoken recitation only.”

— ‘Dr. William Mahrt (Fall, 2015)’

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