“The Hymnody of Ralph Vaughan Williams”:
Simon Wright with the Choir of St Pancras Parish Church
1:00pm, Saturday 7 May 2022
St Pancras Parish Church, NW1 2BA
2022 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams. In this interactive workshop, Simon Wright, an expert on the hymnody of Vaughan Williams at Oxford University Press, explains how the composer created his iconic hymn tunes from a varied range of sources, transforming them into cornerstones of modern English hymnody. Simon’s presentation is accompanied by musical examples provided by the Choir of St Pancras Parish Church.
Simon Wright
Simon Wright read Music at University College, Cardiff, and was awarded a PhD in 1986 for his work on Heitor Villa-Lobos and the politics of Brazil in the 1930s. He published Villa-Lobos in the “Oxford Studies of Composers” series (OUP, 1992), and was the main speaker and a co-ordinator for the BBC’s “Total Immersion: Villa-Lobos” event at the Barbican in 2014. Simon has worked for Oxford University Press since 1984, serving first as Music Hire Librarian and, since 2000, as Head of Music Rights & Contracts. He has written on the history of Oxford University Press as a music publisher and is a contributor to the four-volume A History of Oxford University Press (OUP, 2013, 2017). He has contributed articles on various aspects of OUP’s publishing to Brio, the Journal of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society, and other publications.
Simon sits on the Classical Publishers Committee of the Music Publishers Association, and is OUP’s representative for the International Association of Music Libraries (UK and Ireland branch).
