Herbert Brewer (1865-1928)

“Orchestral miniatures from a cathedral organist”

Sir Alfred Herbert Brewer’s name belongs at the heart of Gloucester’s musical history. Born in the city in 1865, he was a cathedral chorister before studying at Oxford and the Royal College of Music. He became organist and choirmaster at Gloucester Cathedral in 1896, remaining as such until his death in 1928.

Recognised as a leading church musician of his day, Brewer was knighted in 1926, an honour which came about partly through his close friendship with Elgar. This association with Elgar, the leading English composer of the time, is explainedby the privileged and strategic position he occupied in the music profession by being based at Gloucester Cathedral.

This brought with it the co-directorship of the Three Choirs Festival, one of very few major classical music festivals at that time. Brewer directed eight of these festivals over the course of over thirty years (there was abreak during the First World War) which involved him every third year scheduling a week’s concerts bringing together leading orchestras and soloists, commissioning new works from composers and introducing the audiences to new works and composers.

It was therefore Brewer who introduced the world to the now iconicVaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis in 1910, conducted by the composer. It was also Brewer who arranged the first performances of works by other major composers including Parry, Holst, Bliss, Howells, Saint-Saëns and Sibelius, performances often conducted by the composers themselves. In addition, he also was responsible for the invitation of the radical feminist composer DameEthel Smyth to conduct her own music, and the mixed race composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor to conduct his Ballade in A minor, having commissioned it from him for the Festival.

He thus demonstrated a lack of prejudice that his era was not otherwise notable for. Importantly, he was also the director when the BBC first broadcast concerts from the Festival in 1925, introducing it to a whole new audience, and he was alternately conducting and playing the organ when it was first commercially recorded in 1927.

Orchestral worklist (Selected works; bold indicates a confirmed surviving orchestral score)

Date	Work
1901	Emmaus – cantata for soloists, chorus and orchestra
1903 (publication)	Spring-time – idyll for small orchestra
1904	The Holy Innocents – cantata
1906	Three Elizabethan Pastorals for voice and orchestra
c.1910 (publication)	Age and Youth – orchestral work
1910	Summer Sports – suite for chorus and orchestra

Choral and solo-vocal works with orchestra are included. Unbolded entries do not imply that the music is lost. The Library of Congress catalogue records full scores of Spring-time and Age and Youth; Gloucestershire Archives holds the Emmaus score. Elegy, originally for organ, is discussed separately below.

Elegy (published 1916)

Brewer’s Elegy was published by Augener in 1916 as an organ piece. The surviving first-edition score is available from the Sibley Music Library and through IMSLP. It is important to distinguish that original from the string-orchestra version heard here.

Martin Walsh’s digital realisation presents the work for string orchestra. The sustained tone of strings offers a different way of hearing music conceived for the organ: a modern orchestral perspective on Brewer’s original, rather than evidence of an orchestration by the composer.

LISTEN: Elegy — digital realisation for string orchestra by Martin Walsh