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Many members, especially lovers of Anglican chant and hymnody, will be aware that 1997 is the centenary of the death of Dr. George Garrett - whose work on Wesley’s E major service is so evident in the Society’s publication of Dr. Shaw’s notable edition of the Evening Canticles which graces our Catalogue. Through the kindness of Dr. George Guest, we have been provided with a copy of the gracious obituary from The Eagle (the college magazine of St. John’s, Cambridge). Of particular interest is the assessment by G.F. Cobb, himself an active Cambridge musician, of Garrett’s music. Cobb’s verdict is given below in full:

‘Like his eminent master, S.S. Wesley, and the equally-gifted Cambridge professor (Walmisley) to whom he owed his earliest appointment, and whom he eventually succeeded as organist of the College, Dr. Garrett mainly confined his work as a composer to the music of the Church; and though he has left besides a few publications of a secular kind, they are vocal works of a form closely allied to that of his principal writings and implying, for the most part, the same order of creative gift. Into the realm of absolute music, unallied with words, he has hardly ventured - at any rate not in its higher orchestral forms - though the MS. of a Quartet for Pianoforte, Violin, Viola and Violincello, dated 1852, is evidence that in the old Winchester days he was not without the ambitions of youth.

‘Within the particular limits, however, which he preferred to assign to himself, his work has been of exceptional excellence, and its influence has not only been widely felt (more widely, perhaps, than that of any Church composer of recent times), but it has been distinctly sound and beneficial in character. Of its salient characteristics the most important, perhaps, is that it is always pleasant to sing; Dr. Garrett was not above studying the special capacities of the human voice, as the medium through which his musical ideas were to be realised, and conforming to its requirements; hence the vocal effectiveness of his writing. Next to this is the smoothness and continuity of his musical style; his periods are well rounded off, his phrases well balanced, and his progressions natural and coherent; there is nothing angular, or jerky, or sensational about them. Again, he had an undoubted gift of melody of just that restrained and justified expressiveness best suited to the use and occasion for which he wrote. As regards the general character of his work, whilst he skilfully avoided those features in the phraseology of previous generations of Church writers, which by their much repetition have assumed the character of "conventionalism," he nevertheless adheres in the main to the broad traditions which, allowing for the varying subsidiary influence of each age, have been so continuously passed on by the long chain of composers of English cathedral music. At the same time his claims to the credit of appropriate invention and development are not to be ignored. He was, perhaps, the first of his generation thoroughly to perceive the good effect to be obtained by the occasional introduction of unison passages by way of contrast and relief to too prolonged a continuity of vocal harmony; whilst in the beautiful Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in E flat, the most exquisite of all his writings, the frequent repetition of the initial phrase and its final ‘recapitulation’ in the Gloria gives us an instance of a singularly felicitous attempt to introduce into Church music something of the form or design common to the higher branches of absolute music.’

SGL writes: Garrett’s influence on his choristers and pupils was considerable, not least his direct line of tutelage to the volatile yet clearly brilliantly gifted Hugh Blair, whose Service in B-minor of 1887 (revised in 1892 by the composer and in 1933 by Ivor Atkins) is one of the masterpieces of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Had it not been for Garrett’s documentation, we might not have had handed down a clarity of conduct for some of his master S.S. Wesley’s more tricky rhythmic lacunae and matters of performance practice. The most spectacularly wayward of Wesley’s own treatments was at the start of the Gloria from the E-major Canticles, where the great man was wont to omit half a bar’s worth of rest (see the CMS Shaw edition of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis). Garrett it was, too, who popularised the famous Choral Song and Fugue. Strictly, the Fugue is merely indicated in the manuscript as the second part of Choral Song. Walter Emery’s post Second World War edition was based on that of Garrett; not until more recent times has Wesley’s actual manuscript version been readily available for players and scholars alike.

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