HISTORICAL WRITING ABOUT ESSEX

Thaxted: 'The Whitsuntide Singers'

Excerpt from 'Essex Pie', ed. T. M. Hope (1952)

1914 Gustav Holst left London and came to live at Thaxted, in a 300-year-old  cottage on the top of a hill. The valley was planted with young willow trees, and a high wind would turn them to silver. And in the distance the spire of Thaxted Church stood up against the sky.

Thaxted itself was beautiful, and the church was the crowning glory of the place. It was like a cathedral. And inside, instead of being dark and cluttered up, it was spacious and incredibly light.

Standing in those empty aisles, and seeing the shafts of sunlight slanting through the pillars, Holst dreamed of a festival of music that might happen there one day. He would bring down his pupils, past and present, from Morley College and St. Paul's Girls' School, and they would do 'Sleepers Wake' and 'Soul, Array Thyself,' and Palestrina and Vittoria and Purcell.

The dream was realised during the Whitsun week-end of 1916, and when it was over he described it in a letter to his friend, W. G. Whittaker:

'I would have written before, but I was so tied up with our musical festival (or rather feast) at Thaxted last week.

'It was a feast - an orgy. Four whole days of perpetual singing and playing, either properly arranged in the church or impromtu in various houses or still more impromptu in ploughed fields during thunderstorms, or in the train going home.

'In the intervals between the services people drifted into the church and sang motets or played violin or 'cello. And others caught bad colds through going long walks in the pouring rain singing madrigals and folk songs and rounds the whole time.'

He also wrote:

'I realise now why the bible insists on heaven being a place (I should call it a condition) where people sing and go on singing.

'We kept it up at Thaxted about fourteen hours a day. The reason we didn't do more is that we were not capable mentally or physically of realising heaven any further.

'Still, as far as it went it was heaven. Just as the average amateur's way of using music as a sedative or a stimulant is purgatory, and the professional's way of using music as a topic of conversation or as a means of getting money is hell.

'Music, being identical with heaven, isn't a thing of momentary thrills, or even hourly ones. It is a condition of eternity.'

1. HOLST : Gustav Holst, 1938