The Life and Music of Charles Wood

Reassesses the life, music and enduring influence of Charles Wood, a central figure in British and Irish music and one of the foremost teachers of his generation.

Charles Wood (1866-1926), Armagh chorister and student of Charles Villiers Stanford, was one of the most significant figures in British and Irish music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and one of Britain's most important teachers.

This study not only evaluates the substance of Wood's ecclesiastical music, in which, together with Stanford, his contribution was pre-eminent, but also his work in other genres, such as secular vocal music, arrangements of Irish folksong and the Irish cultural revival, orchestral music, opera and, in particular, the string quartet. Wood also found himself at the heart of a new antiquarian revival of early music, plainsong, psalmody and hymnody where his knowledge was uniquely encyclopaedic.

The Life and Music of Charles Wood offers a reassessment of his lasting legacy, the admiration he drew from figures such as Vaughan Williams, Dent and Tippett, and also discusses a considerable series of posthumous publications.