Webstory

Category: music

  • Hypocrisy, class and faith in Britten’s Borough

    Whether or not one enjoys Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes, its significance is hard to dispute. Premiered in London just a month after the declaration of victory in Europe in 1945, on June 7th, it represented a rebirth. The opening night, thought the Picture Post, ‘may well be remembered as the date of the reinstatement…

  • The Devil’s music: a review

    [A review published in July in Reviews in History.] The Devil’s Music. How Christians inspired, condemned, and embraced rock ‘n’ roll Randall J. Stephens Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2018, ISBN: 9780674980846 When viewed in a long perspective, the modern history of popular music has very often been one in which new styles are adopted…

  • ‘The swinging Dean peps up the Psalms’: Walter Hussey and Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms

    [An edited extract from my recent book on Walter Hussey, Anglican patron of the arts.] Walter Hussey is chiefly known for an extraordinary sequence of commissions of contemporary art and music, firstly for St Matthew’s church Northampton from 1943 and, between 1955 and 1977, for Chichester Cathedral of which he was Dean. Henry Moore, Graham…

  • Evangelicals, culture and the arts

    [This is an edited extract from my essay in the Routledge Research Companion to the History of Evangelicalism, edited by Andrew Atherstone and David Ceri Jones.] Download the full text (PDF) One evening in the early 1960s Michael Saward, curate of a thriving evangelical Anglican parish in north London, went to the Royal Festival Hall…

  • Walter Hussey and the Arts: chapter summaries

    Abstracts of each chapter of Church and Patronage in 20th Century Britain: Walter Hussey and the Arts (now available from Palgrave Macmillan, 2017 as ebook and hardback), with links to purchasable PDF versions of each. The book as a whole The first full-length treatment of Walter Hussey’s work as a patron between 1943 and 1978,…