Wanted - Thomas Muir!!!

[presbyter]

A search on Amazon and abebooks brings up either "unavailable" or a nil result.
Anyone know where I might purchase "Full in the panting heart...... " please?

[musicus]

Do you mean Roman Catholic Church Music in England, 1791–1914: A Handmaid of the Liturgy? ? This magnum opus by Thomas was reviewed in Music and Liturgy vol 35 number 2. It was published by Ashgate in 2008; its ISBN is 978-0-7546-6105-4; it is a 310 page hardback; and the price is £55.00, or £49.50 online.

Here's a link to the publisher's website: http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?pag ... n_id=10267

Of course, if this is not what you're after, then I don't know

EDIT: Hmm, this isn't what you want. Full in the Panting Heart of Rome was Thomas doctoral thesis. Perhaps he will post on here and tell us if this is in print.

[presbyter]

Amazon came up with the title - "Full in the...."

Thanks musicus

[presbyter]

Amazon came up with the title - "Full in the...."

Thanks musicus

Amazon has now come up with a book on Veterinary Anaesthesia - LOL

[dmu3tem]

Just a little note to clear up the confusion:

My book is called 'Roman Catholic Church Music in England 1791-1914: A Handmaid of the Liturgy? (Ashgate, 2009) They are offering it at a discount price for this month at least.

'Full in the panting heart of Rome': Roman Catholic Church Music in England 1850-1962' is my doctoral thesis; which I drew on heavily for the book; but obviously has other bits in it relating to the C20th scene, a chapter on organ music (very sketchy) and an enormous relational database of Catholic musical repertoire surviving in a cross section of collections or referred to in surviving programmes of music (the most extensive being that for Westminster Cathedral). Copies of the thesis can be found at the University of Durham, Douai Abbey, the Talbot Library in Preston and the Arundell Library Stonyhurst. The latter two are the original version before I modified it after my Viva. I think the text has been put on microfiche (but obviously not the database) which can be obtained through the Universities Inter Library Loan service.

There are also some other articles scattered through various journals. These are effectively earlier drafts of some of the thesis chapters. At least one can be obtained by search on the internet. Nineteenth Century Music Review has a paper on the C19th Revival of Renaissance Polyphony. Ashgate also published a collection of papers presented at the Nineteenth century Music in England Conference edited by Bennett Zon and Peter Horton. In Vol. 4 (I think) there is a paper on the development of C19th Catholic Hymnody in England.

[presbyter]

Just a little note to clear up the confusion:

My book is called 'Roman Catholic Church Music in England 1791-1914: A Handmaid of the Liturgy? (Ashgate, 2009)

I've now read Helen Murphy's review - and ordered the book. Thanks dmu3tem.

[presbyter]

It's arrived - and fallen open at Fortesque's diagram of his ideal choir placement in the chancel. Most go and dig out my Fortesque.....

[NorthernTenor]

If anyone wants more detail on the book, they should certainly follow the link musicus gives to its page on the publisher's site, which in turn conatins links to sample pages: the contents, introduction and index. The inroduction is a fascinating essay in its own right.

[Southern Comfort]

I only read a few pages of the intro, but noticed a rather glaring error early on. Thomas seemed to assume that the entire mass-going population attended High Mass and therefore experienced music in the liturgy. Actually only a tiny proportion of the mass-going population ever heard any music. Most of them went to Low Mass. The only music they might have experienced would have been at devotional services such as Benediction or Corpus Christi processions.

Did not get far enough to see if he had done any research into the music of churches in the southern half of the country (whose repertoire seems to have been significantly different from those in the north), or into the music of the London Embassy Chapels, which were so influential on music in London and the Home Counties. All the examples I saw quoted were for churches in the north-west. Perhaps I should have read further.

To be fair, yes, he did mention some significant composers, but not others, such as Westlake, Wingham, d'Evry........ and in later years Wardale.....

And Haller was not a rare composer at all. His Masses were sung all over the south east. And what about composers from elsewhere, such as Goller, Witt, etc?

Hmmm. I'd better stop, or I'll start to write the other half of Thomas's book. Perhaps I should actually buy it first to see what it contains, though my spies tell me that, despite its astronomical price (like all Ashgate publications), it is full of typos. Haven't seen for myself, so this is a second-hand opinion and may be wrong.

[Nick Baty]

I'll certainly be ordering a copy, partly because I'm interested in the subject but largely because I'm interested in Thomas. We first met a couple of years ago: I walked into a church near Wigan, to prepare for a diocesan event, and heard strange scurryings in the organ loft. This was Thomas researching, I don't think he ever stops! He later joined in the event and played and sang along with the rest of us, whipping out his clarinet to play some slightly funky harmonies on a piece by Yours Truly which wasn't even finished! I suppose I have a lot of time for someone who, while achieving academic success, encourages young musicians and composers and is willing to try all styles and genres from the year zero to last night. Now, is this a good reason for buying a book – because the author is an incredibly nice guy?

[NorthernTenor]

I only read a few pages of the intro, but noticed a rather glaring error early on. Thomas seemed to assume that the entire mass-going population attended High Mass and therefore experienced music in the liturgy. Actually only a tiny proportion of the mass-going population ever heard any music. Most of them went to Low Mass. The only music they might have experienced would have been at devotional services such as Benediction or Corpus Christi processions.

You might consider it worth reading all of an essay before going into print on it, SC. In this case, you'd have noticed the references to use of music in devotional contexts. Still, I admire your honesty - I know more than one professional who would not have provided the qualification.

[docmattc]

Dr Muir's book is the subject of this thread. Off topic posts will be removed.

[dmu3tem]

Dear Southern Comfort,

Many thanks for your comments. Just a few responses.

(1) I do mention the importance of Low Mass in the experience of many (if not most) Catholics later on. It is true though that I do not explore the implications of this very much. That is a huge subject in itself about which evidence might prove quite difficult to obtain (a useful starting point might be to look at the responses parish priests give to questionaires sent out by some dioceses on various occasions later in the C19th - I found some material of this sort in the archives of the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle). I do not think one should jump too quickly to the conclusion that the importance of Low Mass means that English Catholics necessarily had a limited experience of church music. They could hear it from other sources - e.g. at choral society concerts and I have encountered some evidence from Farm St, London in the 1920s and 1930s that music was sung there at Low Mass. This is very likely to be exceptional, of course, but it should give one pause.

(2) There is a whole chapter devoted to Embassy Chapel Music.

(3) Yes, there are some typos - despite my best efforts. The most obvious howler (triumphantly pointed out in the Music and Liturgy review) was my spelling of Pius X's 1903 motu proprio. I will not dare try and type it out here in case I get it wrong. My only comfort is that my supervisor and the external examiners for my Doctoral thesis missed it too!

(4) In a book of this size it is impossible to mention every single composer - even quite significant ones. The way I tried to square the circle was to construct a database of music in a cross section of collections and construct statistical patterns from that. This does contain references to virtually all the composers you mention. I am afraid that the only way you can see this (and an earlier version of it at that) is to look at the copies of my doctoral thesis which have CDs attached. The list of sources is given at the back of my book, however.

(5) Yes, your suspicion is quite correct. My collections are Northern weighted. Partly this was a matter of circumstance. I live in the North, there are so many collections (too many to see in the time available), and more keep turning up. I had to start somewhere and follow the easiest line that enabled me to cover as many as possible. That said, there is a basic justification for my Northern bias. For most of the C19th apart from London the Catholic heartland was in the North, and especially in Lancashire.

(6) I think everyone should appreciate that this is a first attempt by anyone (so far as I know) to hack out some sort of rough clearing in a huge forest of information that has never been systematically researched. It is inevitable that there will be some omissions - and even some quite large clumps; but that is the nature of such work. What I hope it will do is to encourage others to follow in my footsteps without falling into any pitfalls I might have stumbled into. Every new collection I have found contains some new compositions; and sometimes the extra material I have found has forced me to alter my thinking quite radically. For instance I would be very interested to know on what statistical evidence one can say that Haller was quite widely performed in the South before 1914. I am also keenly aware that the survival or destruction of collections (or even just sections of them) is often a matter of sheer chance. My method then has been to try and steer my on the ground research roughly in the direction of producing a representative cross section of music available to C19th English Catholics.

(7) I think the main thing then is to see my book as a starting point (however imperfect) for further research. Without it noone is in any position to make objective statements about English Catholic music in this period, let alone make comparisons between it and the present, as many people seem all too prone to do. I think we should also be alert to the danger of assuming that the scene in the early to mid C20th is simply a development from what had gone before. I do try in the first chapter to highlight some quite major differences.

[Southern Comfort]

I think Thomas has given a very gracious reply to what was probably an over-petulant post on my part. Thank you, Thomas. And yes, I think that there are probably quite a few people around who might be prompted by your work to do something themselves to fill out the picture, so thank you for blazing the trail.

SC