In tune with the times – Paul Clements on composer Charles Wood and Armagh

Vicars’ Hill is an elegant curving terrace in the shadow of St Patrick’s Church of Ireland Cathedral in Armagh. The Georgian houses, with roughcast walls and stone sills, retain original features such as sash windows, doorcases, recessed foot-scrapers and ornate streetlamps dating from the early 1700s.

The terrace includes a museum, music hall, café and peaceful gardens sloping downhill with views stretching to Navan Fort (Emain Macha). Four of the houses were built for clergymen’s widows and in one, Charles Wood was born on June 15th, 1866, into a large musical family. The boys sang in the cathedral choir with their father and today the houses sing with an ecclesiastical pride.

In 1883 Wood began studying at the Royal College of Music in London where he was a star pupil, later becoming an undergraduate at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He married Charlotte Georgina Wills-Sandford, whose Anglo-Irish ancestral home was Castlerea House, Co Roscommon. Wood went on to become a prolific composer and major figure in British and Irish music. He succeeded Dublin-born Charles Villiers Stanford as professor of music at Cambridge, where one of his pupils was Ralph Vaughan Williams. While Wood is best known as a church music composer, pouring out a stream of anthems and cantatas, he was also co-founder in 1904 of the Irish Folk Song Society.

In later decades, however, Wood’s name was forgotten in Armagh. The travel writer Robin Bryans complained in 1964 that the city’s official handbook had neglected one of its most famous sons who, he said, had a long-lasting and civilising effect. He wrote in Ulster: A Journey Through the Six Counties: “Wood built on the tradition of simple melodic line whose tunefulness and emotion might well have derived from the same potent characteristics in Irish folk-songs.”

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In his book, Bryans noted that Wood had rescued many beautiful songs from obscurity, but although he lived and worked in England, he never forgot his homeland. He called one of his finest hymn tunes simply Armagh, and distilled into his expressive church works the essence of Ireland. He loved poetry and in 1898 set lines to music from Whitman’s Ethiopia Saluting the Colors from Leaves of Grass.

Bryans was a cheerleader for Wood, stating there could be no doubt about his supremacy in the English choral tradition: “Whenever tuning forks are struck in Welsh valleys, whenever grammar schools compete, whenever music-sheets are set out in Oxford chapels and whenever cathedrals open their organ manuals, there, somewhere will be the music of Charles Wood.”

The composer’s name has become better known since the establishment of an annual summer choral festival held in Wood’s honour in Armagh. Singers from Ireland and Britain converge on the city for a week-long series of events where his music resonates across cathedrals, churches and halls. This year’s festival, a landmark pearl anniversary, opens on August 20th and features celebrated names such as the choral composer John Rutter and the leading Canadian organist Prof Isabelle Demers. The programme includes concerts, vocal masterclasses and the first Charles Wood Composers’ Competition.

The tree-lined Mall will showcase Wood’s music in an open-air concert of folk songs. Another nearby venue is Armagh First Presbyterian Church which celebrated its 350th anniversary in May. It was founded in 1673 by the Rev Archibald Hamilton in a stone building with a thatched roof. However, the conflict that developed between King James II and King William III caused Hamilton to take flight to Scotland fearing for his safety. The church moved to Abbey Street in the early 1700s and finally to the prominent Gothic revival building on the Mall in 1879.

Catch the right day and for a typical Armachian architectural experience, a walk around the streets, mews or lanes will light up the glorious sandstone buildings. You may stumble across arched doorways where once horses and carriages made their way through. The original guard stones are still in place, although these days the narrow entrances present a challenge for vehicles to negotiate.

While the Georgian splendour of Armagh is not in question, some of the 20th-century commercial buildings are dilapidated and there is a proliferation of shuttered shops. Armagh’s tourist information office closed five years ago and there is a view amongst business owners that not enough is being done to cash in on its historic past in a place of national significance.

There has been sympathetic renovation with a heritage townscape project creating much-needed remedial conservation work bringing two derelict properties in Upper English Street back to life. In recent months a giant zinc 153-year-old Golden Teapot was restored. It was originally used as a Victorian sign to advertise James Irwin’s family grocery shop. Schoolchildren helped gild the teapot with 23 carat gold leaf and it now hangs outside the Charlemont Arms Hotel.

There remains, though, a crying need for more revitalisation. While the rehabilitation of Charles Wood has taken place, there is local feeling that the city should adopt and adapt the Trumpian MAGA slogan: Make Armagh Great Again.

www.charleswoodsummerschool.org