HAYES, William (1708-1777) - O Worship The Lord

William Hayes (1708-1777) - O Worship The Lord

Performers: Choir of New College Oxford; Edward Higginbottom (conductor)

Painting: John Cornish (fl. 1751-1765) - William Hayes

Further info: William Hayes (1708-1777) - Orpheus & Euridice (1735)

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William Hayes

(Gloucester, bap. 26 January 1708 - Oxford, 27 July 1777)

Composer, organist and singer. He showed an early talent for music and in 1717 became a chorister of Gloucester Cathedral under William Hine, to whom he was later articled. In 1729 he was appointed organist of St Mary’s, Shrewsbury, and in 1731 he obtained the post of organist of Worcester Cathedral. Three years later he succeeded Thomas Hecht as organist and informator choristarum of Magdalen College, Oxford. On 8 July 1735 he received the BMus, for which he wrote the ode When the fair consort, and he was unanimously elected to the professorship of music on 14 January 1741, after the death of Richard Goodson, whom he also succeeded as organist of the university church. Burney considered him to have been ‘a very good organ player’ and a ‘studious and active professor’. A notable event of his tenure of the professorship was the opening of the Holywell Music Room in 1748, in which weekly concerts were presented under Hayes’s direction. He received the DMus on 14 April 1749 during the celebrations marking the opening of the Radcliffe Library, which included the first known performance in Oxford of Handel’s Messiah. Hayes was an ardent Handelian, and was one of the most active conductors of the composer’s oratorios and other large-scale works outside London. He was musical director of the meetings of the Gloucester Music Meeting in 1757, 1760 and 1763, and often combined the roles of conductor and tenor soloist. He was one of the first enrolled members of the Fund for the Support of Decay’d Musicians (later the Royal Society of Musicians), and advanced plans for a scheme, funded by the Society, to establish a co-educational music academy for the training of gifted young musicians for a period of 14 years from the age of seven or eight. In 1765 he was elected a ‘priviledged member’ of the Noblemen’s and Gentlemen’s Catch Club, having already won several of the prize medals offered by the club. 

Of his children, three sons and three daughters survived infancy. His wife, Anne, died on 14 January 1786. A portrait by John Cornish is in the Oxford University Faculty of Music. Hayes’s musical style is much indebted to Handel, especially in his large-scale works. Nevertheless, his vocal music shows a typically English preference for non-da capo aria forms, and his contemporary reputation as a composer was founded on genres largely ignored by Handel: English cantatas, organ-accompanied anthems, and convivial vocal music. A firm command of both harmonic and contrapuntal writing characterizes all his music, which is never less than technically assured. A self-consciously learned strand in his music can be observed in his assiduous cultivation of the full anthem, his many ingenious canons, and the strict fugal movements of his concertos and trio sonatas. Although he chose to publish little of his instrumental music, it is generally of high quality. Several of his trio sonatas seem to have been designed for orchestral performance and mix movements in a late Baroque style with others which show a clear awareness of galant idioms (including small-scale sonata forms). The early G major harpsichord concerto is remarkable for the detailed written-out ornamentation and cadenzas of its slow movement, and his concerti grossi depart from usual English practice in their addition of a viola to the usual concertino trio of two violins and cello. His odes, oratorios and masques demonstrate a sure command of large-scale resources, and the ode The Passions, the one-act oratorio The Fall of Jericho, and the Six Cantatas confirm that Hayes deserves to be regarded highly among English composers of the 18th century. His sons Philip Hayes (1738-1797) and William Hayes (1741-1790) were also singers and composers.