diumenge, 11 de setembre del 2022

BOYCE, William (1710-1779) - The charms of harmony display (c.1738)

John Keyse Sherwin (1751-1790) - Portrait of the composer William Boyce


William Boyce (1710-1779) - Ode 'The charms of harmony display' (c.1738)
Performers: Patrіck Burrowes (boy soprano); Willіam Purefoy (alto (boy);
Andrew Wаtts (counter-tenor); Richard Edgar-Wilson (tenor); Michael George (bass-baritone);
Choir of New College Oxford; Hаnover Band; Grаhаm Leа-Cox (conductor)

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English composer, organist and editor. Though formerly best known for some of his anthems and his editing of Cathedral Music (1760-73), the significant contribution he made to instrumental music, song, secular choral and theatre music in England is now widely recognized. Boyce’s family came from Warwickshire, where his grandfather was a farmer. His father, John, the youngest of five sons, came to London in 1691 to be apprenticed to a joiner. He settled in the City of London, as a joiner and cabinetmaker, and married Elizabeth Cordwell in 1703. They were living in Maiden Lane (now Skinners Lane) when William, the last of their four children, was born. His earliest musical education was as a chorister at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, after which he was a student of Johann Pepusch and Maurice Greene. In 1734 he obtained his first position as an organist at the Oxford Chapel, and in 1736 he became a composer for the Chapel Royal. In 1738, along with George Frideric Handel, Thomas Arne, and Pepusch, he founded the Society of Musicians, later the Royal Society. By 1755 he was well known for his stage works, including the 1740 masque Peleus and Thetis and The Chaplet, a favorite pastoral opera from 1749. In 1755 he was appointed as master of the King’s Musick, and three years later organist of the Chapel Royal. Boyce married Hannah Nixon on 9 June 1759, and his son William was born in March 1764. He suffered from slowly increasing deafness, which appears to have made it difficult for Boyce to perform his church duties by the 1760s. As a composer, although his list of works includes over 75 anthems and 4 other settings of the Te Deum, Boyce was known in his own lifetime mostly for his stage music, including six masques and contributions of incidental music and songs to many other productions, for his odes (mostly composed after 1755 when he succeeded Maurice Greene as Master of the King’s Musick), and a famous publication in 1747 of 12 sonatas for two violins and continuo. He also composed 3 later sonatas for two violins, 10 voluntaries, 12 overtures, and 6 concertos. Today, the most frequently heard music of Boyce is his set of eight symphonies of 1760. 

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