John Stainer: A Life in Music.(Book review)

John Stainer: A Life in Music. By Jeremy Dibble. (Music in Britain, 1600-1900.) Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007. [xiv, 362 p. ISBN-10: 1843-832976; ISBN-13: 9781843832973. $55.] Illustrations, music examples, work-list, bibliography, index.

Aside from his other scholarly activities, Jeremy Dibble is a gifted biographer, having produced the excellent studies C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), and Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). His new exploration of the life and music of John Stainer (1840-1901) is finer still, and all the more impressive because of the neglected terrain that he covers. Although some of Stainer's works have found their way into studies of English church music, his life has received much less attention. With the resurgence of interest in nineteenth-century British music in recent scholarship, Dibble's book is a timely reminder of Stainer's significance as a public musician of a stature comparable to his contemporary and friend Arthur Sullivan, despite their very different careers.

Stainer started his musical life as a chorister at St. Paul's Cathedral in London; his training there led to a position as organist at St. Michael's College, Tenbury when he was only seventeen. There followed prestigious appointments at Magdelen College, Oxford, and St. Paul's. Failing eyesight forced him to retire to Oxford in 1888, although he continued his service as government Inspector of Music in Schools and Training Colleges. The following year he was appointed Professor of Music at Oxford, and he became increasingly involved in scholarly endeavors until his death. Each of these varied capacities draws from Dibble a rich contextual discussion, the breadth and depth of which sometimes threaten the progress of a single biographical narrative. He frames Stainer's boyhood at St. Paul's in the late 1840s and early 1850s with a history of the choir since the end of the eighteenth century. His discussions of the intrigues at Oxford and national reforms in music education (including the Tonic Sol-fa controversies) have a similarly ambitious scope. Dibble's archival research is considerable, and the copious information here is tangential in the best sense, underscoring Stainer's connections with the wider cultural milieu.

Dibble's portrait presents an impressive figure indeed: "polymath and reformer, conservative and liberal, practical musician and scholar" (p. 312). The tensions between some of these characteristics provoke some of Dibble's most convincing readings. Stainer spent the preponderance of his career as a church musician implementing conservative Tractarian reforms to a tradition that had, to some extent, decayed. Stainer's conservatism is thus almost a radical orthodoxy that appears conservative mainly in hindsight. Particularly fascinating are the glimpses of Stainer's convictions about professional standards: Dibble discusses very public confrontations over the right to claim credentials (pp. 172-74) and the copyright status of ostensibly "folk" carols (p. 120ff.); and we see Stainer in private challenging unreasonable examination questions (p. 271) and looking out for those colleagues who lacked the professional advantages that he had enjoyed (pp. 272, 301-03).

Dibble's contextual approach leaves less room for a thorough examination of the music itself. The scattered brief analyses tend to emphasize tonal motion at the expense of motivic development and even word setting. This is most convincing in the perceptive discussion of the 1877 Evening Service in B-flat (p. 191ff.) so much so that it seems Dibble has developed his analytical method around the mature Stainer and has then projected it back onto earlier works. There is a sense of teleology as the things hinted at in earlier pages come to fruition at last. Even so, Dibble grounds the focus in shifting tonal spheres in his lengthy discussion (p. 129ff.) of Stainer's A Theory of Harmony Founded on the Tempered Scale (London: Rivingtons, 1871); moreover, the chromatic shifts in Stainer's works are remarkable, and were recognized as such by his contemporaries (p. 240). Most interestingly, Dibble's tonal analyses enable him to posit musical "genuflections" in Stainer's text-setting ...