Day: December 17, 2017

The New York Times’ Michael White profiles Britain’s John Rutter, whose seasonal choral pieces, such as “The Shepherd’s Pipe Carol” and “What Sweeter Music,” have made him “the composer who owns Christmas.” Of his melodic style, tailored to the amateur singers who populate most choirs, Rutter says, “[C]omposers tend to be either explorers or magpies, and I’m the latter. I’m not out to break new ground. My gift, if I have one, is to take what’s in the air and use it.”

Raymond F. Glover, the former organist-choirmaster of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond and chairman of the national commission that produced the 1982 Episcopal hymnal, has died at 89.

Glover served at St. Paul’s from 1969 until 1981, after which he became chairman of the Hymnal Commission of the Episcopal Church USA. He was the author of “The Hymnal 1982 Companion,” a four-volume collection of essays on the hymnal’s contents and its relationship to church liturgy, as well as a history of Christian hymnody in Great Britain and the United States.

A native of Buffalo, NY, Glover was a graduate of the University of Toronto and Union Theological Seminary in New York. Before moving to Richmond, he served as organist-choirmaster of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Buffalo and Christ Church Cathedral in Hartford, CT.

His wife, the late Joyce Glover, was longtime curator of Virginia House, a 16th-century English Tudor manor house that was dismantled and reconstructed in Richmond in 1925.