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Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) was a French composer, organist, pianist, and teacher. Born into a cultured but not especially musical family, his talent became clear when he was a small boy. At the age of nine, he was sent to the École Niedermeyer music college in Paris, where he was trained to be a church organist and choirmaster. Among his teachers was Camille Saint-Saëns, who became a lifelong friend. By his last years, Fauré was recognized in France as the leading French composer of his day, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers. His Requiem is firmly entrenched in the core choral repertoire and is sung the world over.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) was an English composer and some-time organist and choir director. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century. Vaughan Williams was born to a well-to-do family with strong moral views and a progressive social outlook. Throughout his life he sought to be of service to his fellow citizens, and believing in making music as available as possible to everybody, he wrote many works for amateur and student performance. Vaughan Williams is among the best-known British symphonists, noted for his very wide range of moods, from stormy and impassioned to tranquil, from mysterious to exuberant. Among the most familiar of his other concert works are Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) and The Lark Ascending (1914). His vocal works include hymns, folk-song arrangements and both small and large-scale choral pieces. Two episodes made notably deep impressions in Vaughan Williams’ personal life. The First World War, in which he served in the army, had a lasting emotional effect. Twenty years later, though in his sixties and devotedly married, he was reinvigorated by a love affair with a much younger woman (Ursula Wood), who, by all accounts, seems to have been adopted by his wife Adeline in the most amicable way, to be her successor, and who did indeed become his second wife when Adeline passed away at the age of eighty. Vaughan Williams composed his last symphony just months before his death at the age of eighty-five.

William Walsham How (1823-1897) studied at Wadham College, Oxford, and Durham University, and was ordained into the Church of England in 1847. He served various congregations and became the Bishop of Wakefield in 1888. Called both the “poor man’s bishop” and “the children’s bishop”, he was known for his work among the destitute in the London slums, and among the factory workers in west Yorkshire. For All the Saints is considered to be How’s finest hymn text. It was sung to the melody Sarum, by the Victorian composer Joseph Barnby, until the publication of the English Hymnal in 1906. This hymnal used a new setting by Ralph Vaughan Williams which he called Sine Nomine (literally, “without name”) in reference to its use on the Feast of All Saints, November 1st (or the first Sunday in November – All Saints Sunday). Like How’s text, Vaughan Williams’ hymn tune has been described as one of the finest of the 20th century.

Athelstan Riley (1858-1945) was an English hymn writer and translator. He was born in London, and attended Eton College and Pembroke College, Oxford. Active in the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England, he helped edit “The English Hymnal” in 1906, and the 1911 revision of the “Prayer Book”. He was living on the island of Jersey when it was invaded in World War II, and spent the rest of his life there. “Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones” is his best known hymn text.

Edward Elgar (1857-1943) was an English composer whose works in the orchestral idiom of late 19th-century Romanticism – characterized by bold tunes, striking colour effects, and mastery of large forms, stimulated a renaissance of English music. In fact, Elgar was the first English composer of international stature since Henry Purcell (1659-1695), and liberated his country’s music from its insularity. The son of an organist and music dealer, he left school at age 15 and worked briefly in a lawyer’s office. He was an excellent violinist, played the bassoon, and spent periods as a bandmaster and church organist, but had no formal training in composition. After working in London (1889-1891), Elgar went to Worcestershire and began to establish a reputation as a composer. One of his most popular works is his D Major Pomp and Circumstance March which contains the famous trio section that was later to become Land of Hope and Glory. Elgar appreciated its worth: he had prophesied:”I’ve got a tune that will knock ‘em flat! … a tune that comes once in a lifetime.” His Enigma Variations for orchestra are based on the countermelody of an unheard theme, which he said was a well-known theme he would not identify – hence the “enigma”. Repeated attempts to discover it have been unsuccessful. Elgar was knighted in 1904, and in 1928 he was created Knight Commander of the Victorian Order.

One of the most versatile composers in Britain, John Cameron (b. 1944) is best known for his work as a composer and arranger of popular music, and as a writer of some 40 film, television and musical theatre scores. His diverse background includes roots in jazz and the folk music of the British Isles. He wrote the orchestral score for every staging of Les Misérables, including the original Paris version (1979), the Royal Shakespeare Company in London (1985), as well as Washington and New York (1986). Among his many awards is a Silver Disc for Lux Aeterna, his eight part choral setting of Elgar’s Nimrod, heard sung by the famed choral ensemble VOCES8 in this morning’s anthem.

Melchior Vulpius (ca. 1570-1615) was a German singer and composer of church music, and was an important musical figure during the first century of Protestantism in Germany. Little is known of Vulpius’ early life. Born around 1570 in Germany’s Thuringia region, he started out attending a school in his hometown, but somehow his musical talent was recognized. In 1588, he is recorded as having studied music and Latin in the ancient cathedral city of Speyer, hundreds of kilometers away from Thuringia. He married in 1589 and was hired to teach Latin and to compose music at a school in Schleusingen, back in Thuringia. His appointment was made permanent there in 1592, and he was given the added post of Kantor at Lutheran services. In 1596, Vulpius accepted a similar position, involving teaching, singing, and composition, at the Latin School in the larger city of Weimar, and remained there until his death. He wrote a complete cycle of four-voice settings of Scripture passages for an entire Lutheran liturgical year, nearly 200 motets, a St. Matthew Passion that was performed in Scandinavia as well as Germany, and about 400 hymns and religious songs. Some of these remain in use to this day (including his hymn melody “Vulpius” – heard in this morning’s closing hymn).

Sir Ernest MacMillan (1893-1973) was a Canadian orchestral conductor, composer, organist, and Canada’s only “Musical Knight”. He is widely regarded as being Canada’s pre-eminent musician, from the 1920s through the 1950s. His contributions to the development of music in Canada were sustained and varied, as conductor, performer, composer, administrator, educator, lecturer, adjudicator, writer, humorist, and statesman.

Frederick Lucian Hosmer (1840-1929) was an American Unitarian minister who served congregations in Massachusetts, Illinois, Ohio, Missouri, and California. He graduated from Harvard College in 1862, and from Harvard Divinity School in 1869. Beginning in 1875 and continuing for nearly four decades, he and his friend William Channing Gannett worked together, making a contribution to hymnody comparable to that of “the two Sams”, Samuel Longfellow and Samuel Johnson, a generation earlier.

John Rutter (b. 1945) is an English composer, conductor, editor, arranger, and record producer, mainly of choral music. He studied music at Clare College, England, and later became the College’s first full-time Director of Music in 1975, leading the choir to international prominence. In 1981 he founded his own professional choir, the Cambridge Singers, with which he has made many recordings of the sacred choral repertoire. Rutter’s music is very well known and much beloved in choral circles, and is performed worldwide. His larger-scale works – particularly his Gloria (1974), Requiem (1985), and Magnificat (1990) are also well established in the choral repertoire, and the late Sir David Willcocks considered him to be the most gifted composer of his generation.