1866–1926 · United Kingdom · 20th century
Charles Wood (1866–1926) was an Irish composer and teacher, born in Armagh, who taught at Cambridge. He is remembered above all for Anglican church music, with over 250 sacred works to his name. He also wrote songs and string quartets. His pupils included Vaughan Williams and Howells. The site carries his song Ethiopia Saluting the Colours.
Charles Wood was born on 15 June 1866 in Armagh, at Vicars' Hill, which lies within the cathedral precincts. He was the third son and fifth child born to Charles Wood Senior and Jemima Wood. As a boy he sang treble in the Church of Ireland cathedral of St. Patrick nearby.
His father was a paid tenor in the same choir, a lay vicar choral, and also served the church as diocesan registrar. An elder brother, William G Wood (1859–1895), was likewise an organist and composer with a Cambridge connection. The Irish composer Ina Boyle was a cousin.
Wood's first schooling was at the cathedral choir school. He studied the organ with two Armagh organists who directed the cathedral's choirboys, Robert Turle and then Turle's successor, Dr Thomas Marks. In 1883 he was one of fifty students in the first intake of the Royal College of Music.
His composition teachers there were chiefly Charles Hubert Hastings Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford, and he took horn and piano as secondary subjects. After four years there he moved on to Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he stayed until 1889.
At Selwyn he began to teach harmony and counterpoint. In 1889 he moved to Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge as organ scholar, becoming a fellow in 1894. He was the college's first director of music as well as its organist.
His contribution to musical life at the college lay more in teaching and in organising musical events than in composing. When Stanford died in 1924, Wood stepped into his mentor's vacant post and became Cambridge University's Professor of Music.
Among those who studied with Wood at Cambridge were W Denis Browne, Cecil Armstrong Gibbs, Arthur Bliss, Nicholas Gatty and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Herbert Howells studied with him at the Royal College of Music. Elizabeth Maconchy is also listed among his students.
Edward J Dent, who followed Wood at Cambridge, observed that Stanford did not live in Cambridge, so for many years the real weight of teaching fell on Wood, before he was himself elected Professor. By then his health was already weakened, and he died in July 1926, only two years into the post.
Wood's wife was Charlotte Georgina Wills-Sandford, whom he married on 17 March 1898; her father was William Robert Wills-Sandford, from Castlerea in County Roscommon, Ireland. The couple had five children, two sons and three daughters. One son, Lieutenant Patrick Bryan Sandford Wood of the R.A.F. (1899–1918), died in a flying accident during the First World War and lies in Taranto, Italy. The family lived at 17 Cranmer Road in Cambridge.
Wood died in Cambridge on 12 July 1926. He is buried beside his wife in Cambridge's Ascension Parish burial ground, and a memorial to him stands in the north aisle of St Patrick's Cathedral, Armagh.
Wood is remembered above all as a composer of Anglican church music: he wrote over 250 pieces of sacred music, along with a great many hymn tunes. His Magnificat and Nunc dimittis settings remain in the repertoire of cathedral and parish choirs, above all the ones in the keys of F, D and G, together with two in E flat. He also wrote a Communion Service in the Phrygian Mode.
His St Mark Passion, composed in 1920 for Eric Milner-White, who was then Dean of King's College, Cambridge, is performed from time to time during Passiontide. It shows the composer's interest in modal writing, set against the late Romantic harmony he normally preferred. Frequent performances and recordings go to two of his organ anthems, O Thou, the Central Orb and Expectans expectavi, and to the unaccompanied Glory and Honour, Tis the day of Resurrection and Hail, gladdening light. The best loved of them is Hail, gladdening light; a less familiar companion piece for male voices is Great Lord of Lords.
Wood worked with the priest and poet George Ratcliffe Woodward to revive Renaissance tunes and popularise them with new English religious words. Together they co-edited three carol books, the best known being The Cowley Carol Book, and also produced Songs of Syon. Jeremy Dibble writes that Wood's a cappella pieces show craftsmanship and command of the genre, and that his accompanied choral works can be warm and rich in expression.
Between 1885 and 1905, in keeping with the fashion of his day, Wood wrote a run of secular choral cantatas. They include On Time (1897–8, to words by Milton), Dirge for Two Veterans (1901, Walt Whitman) and A Ballad of Dundee (1904, W.E. Aytoun). He also wrote many part songs, among them Full Fathom Five, madrigals such as If Love be Dead (Coleridge), and solo songs. One of the solo songs, Ethiopia Saluting the Colours, to words by Whitman, became very popular.
The edition on this site is of that very song: Ethiopia Saluting the Colours, for voice and piano, at the advanced level.
Wood wrote eight string quartets between 1885 and 1917: six numbered ones, a set of variations on a folk melody from Ireland and a fragment of a first movement in G minor. The early ones show Brahms's influence. Starting with the third quartet, in A minor, dated 1911, a more personal voice emerges, in part because Irish folk tunes and dance melodies serve as thematic material. After Wood's death Edward Dent edited the quartets, and Oxford University Press brought them out as a collected edition in 1929.
The Piano Concerto, dating from 1886, and the 1899 work called Patrick Sarsfield Variations were never published, though the Variations were played at the Queen's Hall Beecham Concerts in 1907. The Ulster Orchestra, under Simon Joly, has revived them in modern times. After 1905 Wood seems to have lost confidence and gave up writing for orchestra; three symphonies and an opera were left unfinished.