The Church Music of Pelham Humfrey

Writing in the second half of the eighteenth century, William Boyce described Pelham Humfrey's church music as ‘peculiarly expressive and affecting, the evident Productions of a masterly Genius’. It was this emotional immediacy, the desire ‘to move the affections or excite passion’, as Roger North put it, that was fundamental to the spirit of the Baroque. This spirit represents an exaggeration of the Renaissance humanists' desire for directness of expression; there are ways in which it can be said to have literally vulgarised the aristocratic humanism of the Renaissance. The contrast is aptly illustrated by comparing Tallis's most familiar ‘Salvator mundi’, a setting of lofty beauty, with Blow's more immediately passionate setting of the same text. The English Baroque cannot really be said to come of age in music until the generation immediately after the Restoration in 1660, but from that time composition in the new style flourished in all mediums. Spanning the years 1663 to 1674 Humfrey's output represents, perhaps more influentially than that of any other member of his generation, the consolidation of a distinctively English Baroque style.