In a tradition dating back almost three centuries, the cities of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester continue to play host in turn, every summer, to the oldest surviving non-competitive music festival in the world. The earliest printed evidence for the origins of this triennial ‘music meeting’ appears in a 1719 edition of the Worcester Postman, wherea notice advertises arrangements for ‘the yearly Musical Assembly’, thus indicating that an annual event must already have been established before 1719. Since 1920 the numbering of the festival has been counted from 1715, excluding two unavoidable interruptions caused by World Wars I and II. Even so, it is probable that the origins of music meetings pre-date 1715 by a few years.

Henry Hall junior and William Hine, young organists of Hereford and Gloucester respectively from 1707, were friends and, unusually, collaborated on the composition of a morning service, ‘Hall and Hine in E flat’: the Te Deum is by Hall, the Jubilate by Hine. The earliest music meetings were of two days’ duration, beginning with matins in the cathedral, and it is probable that the service by Hall and Hine was composed with the participation of two or more cathedral choirs in mind. Interestingly, the Gloucester Cathedral treasurer’s accounts for 1709 do actually record a payment in that year of £2 to Hall. So, if a first embryonic music meeting was held at Gloucester in 1709, followed by a second gathering at Worcester in the following year, the timing would fit in perfectly with the three-year cycle of known and documented 1719 Worcester, 1720 Hereford and 1721 Gloucester meetings. What is certain, is that the regular annual music meetings began in music clubs:

‘The meetings of the Three Choirs of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester, originated in a compact entered into by members of certain music clubs or societies in those cities, to make an annual visit to each other in rotation, and continue together two days, for improving themselves in harmony, by the performance of several concerts of music. These clubs consisted chiefly of members of the several [cathedral] choirs, with the addition of a few amateurs of music, in the several cities and their immediate neighbourhood’ 1.

Music clubs provided venues for the performance and enjoyment of secular music, which was banned from the cathedrals at that time. The hall of the college of vicars choral at Hereford, for instance, had become the focus for a college music club soon after its completion in 1676, and the activities there are believed to have formed the nucleus of the triennial music meetings. The club was described as ‘an establishment of little expense; the performances were all gratis, except that of Mr Woodcock, their leader, whose nightly pay was five shillings. The members were regaled with ale, cyder and tobacco 2. The music meetings and their attendant attractions — dinners, balls and horse-races — timed to follow the annual harvest, provided an interlude of civic hospitality in late August or September, before the more serious business of winter hunting began. They had been inaugurated with purely social rather than charitable ends in mind, but change was soon to come.

Thomas Bisse, chancellor of Hereford Cathedral from 1716, was an eloquent preacher with a genuine concern for the wretched condition of so many of his clerical brethren and their families. He soon pressed forward the idea that the annual music meetings should embrace a charitable purpose similar to that of the annual service held in London by the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy: to raise money for the relief of poor clergymen, their widows and orphans. In his sermon at the 1724 Gloucester meeting, Bisse proposed, for the first time, that a collection be taken up after morning service: ‘for placing out, or assisting the education and maintenance of the orphans of the poorer clergy belonging to the dioceses of Gloucester, Worcester, and Hereford, or of members of the three respective choirs’.

In the following years, first at Worcester and then at Hereford, Bisse persisted in his purpose, and it eventually became the custom to take up a collection after every concert. The music meetings were gradually extended in length, and in the year following the coronation of Queen Victoria, 1838, the title ‘Three Choirs Festival’ was adopted. The Festival is now a registered charity, and since 1986 the collections have been reduced to those following services, the distribution of which is now decided by the deans and chapters of the three cathedrals.

Details of music performed at Three Choirs in the first half of the eighteenth century are scanty. Two settings of the Te Deum, one by Henry Purcell and the other by William Croft, are known to have been sung at Gloucester in 1721. Ten years later, the Gloucester Journal makes its first mention of specific musical items at the meetings — and Purcell was still supreme. By 1736 the name Handel had taken its place alongside that of Purcell, and it was the music of Handel which rapidly rose into a position of absolute command at the music meetings.

While Handel’s Te Deums and anthems were included in the morning services, popular oratorios such as Alexander’s Feast and Samson were not permitted to be performed in the cathedrals. A clear distinction was drawn between sacred and secular music. Even Handel’s Messiah was regarded as secular entertainment and relegated to public halls. A breakthrough was at last made at Hereford in 1759, the year of Handel’s death, when the Guildhall there was in a ruinous state and could not be used. The prestige of the city, a considerable boost to local business and a high potential income to the festival charity were at stake. The mayor and aldermen recognised that urgent action was necessary. In a documented agreement between them and the citizens of Hereford, they agreed that the Guidhall should be rebuilt, ‘upon a more extensive plan…so as to have a room proper for the reception of the company at the meetings of the Choirs of Hereford, Gloucester and Worcester as well as for the general convenience and use of the said city…and agree to and with the Lord Bishop of Hereford and his successors that the said room when built…shall at all times be free for the use of the said meetings’ 3. Three weeks later, notices were placed in the papers advertising that Messiah would be performed in the cathedral.

Messiah remained an indispensable favourite at the festival for two hundred years, being performed whole or in part every year until 1963 — and several times since then. No other work rivalled its popularity until Mendelssohn’s Elijah entered the Three Choirs programme in 1847; it remained as an annual feature until 1929. Edward Elgar’s Te Deum and Benedictus were first heard at the 1897 opening service, and within eight years his compositions had established themselves as unassailable festival favourites. British composers had begun to take centre stage at Three Choirs, and works by Vaughan Williams, Holst, Howells, Finzi, Bliss, Britten, Delius, Walton and others were soon to feature regularly alongside both traditional masterpieces and festival commissions.

Today’s programmes are more innovative than ever before, the success of the modern festival reflected in a demand for tickets, which regularly outstrips supply. As Thomas Bisse said in 1729, ‘we are now become a great band; and a greater we may yet grow’.

© 2007 Anthony Boden . Anthony Boden's History of the festival is available from Amazon here

References:
Lysons, Revd Daniel, History of the Origins and Progress of the Meeting of the Three Choirs (Gloucester, 1812), p.159.
Ibid, p.161.

Herefordshire Record Office, AE 75.