Page:Pratt - The history of music (1907).djvu/621

 enforce a high standard of technical correctness in both composition and performance. Contact with Continental music was steadily increased through the English students who now began to frequent Leipsic for training. The Mendelssohnian influence inevitably produced a general tendency merely to imitate his style, accepting it as representing all that was good in musical art. Not until the next period did English musicians really shake themselves free from the bondage of this tradition and begin to bring to light original powers of their own, so as to take their place among the constructive forces of the large musical world. It is only fair to say, however, that amid this dormancy of creative power of a high order, there were worthy efforts to diffuse sound musical notions in popular thought, so that when the new life manifested itself there had been provided a basis of popular interest and knowledge for it to rest upon.

The three styles of music most cultivated were the same that had been favorites in previous epochs, namely, a sober and reverent type of cathedral music, now broadened by the efforts of a large number of competent workers, wholesome and graceful songs and part-songs, and operettas that usually approached the style of the ballad-opera or the singspiel rather than that of the Continental opera. Instrumental music was freshly handled only by a few writers, most of them late in the period. London absorbed most of the best musical life of the Kingdom, but here and there, especially in connection with the great choral festivals, provincial centres of importance were being established.

In the field of cathedral music, of course wholly designed to meet the needs of the Anglican service, the more productive workers were John Goss (d. 1880), trained in the Chapel Royal and known as an organist from 1821, who in 1838-72 was Attwood's successor at St. Paul's, being also composer to the Chapel; James Turle (d. 1882), in 1831-75 the successor of Greatorex at Westminster Abbey; Henry John Gauntlett (d. 1876), specially useful for his interest in the improvement of the organ; Samuel Sebastian Wesley (d. 1876), like his father a great organist, located from 1835 at Exeter, from 1842 at Leeds, from 1849 at Winchester, and from 1865 at Gloucester; Henry Smart (d. 1879), another excellent player and a skillful writer not only of church music, but of an opera (1855) and several graceful cantatas (from 1864); G. A. Macfarren (see below); George Job Elvey (d. 1893), in 1835-82 organist at Windsor Castle; Edward John Hopkins (d. 1901), whose activity began in 1834 and who from 1843 for 55 years was the honored