JOHN RUTTER CBE

JOHN RUTTER CBE- ACADEMY FELLOWSHIP

For half a century, John Rutter’s music has been the sound of celebration in Great Britain. From baptisms to weddings, from school nativities to Royal occasions, it has been an essential presence at the important moments of countless lives.

Rutter’s career began while he was still an undergraduate at Clare College, University of Cambridge. (He was later the college’s director of music.) It was here that he met David Willcocks, who took him to one side after a weekly harmony class: ‘Mr Rutter, I understand you have been composing. Please bring some of your music to my rooms next Monday morning at nine, I would like to look at it.’ On the basis of these student manuscripts – among them the Shepherd’s Pipe Carol, one of Rutter’s most enduring works – Willcocks facilitated an offer of publication with Oxford University Press. Rutter has remained with OUP ever since, becoming possibly the firm’s most popular living composer. Today there can barely be a chorister in Great Britain, amateur or professional, who has not sung at least some of his music.

In 2018 a New York Times profile described Rutter as ‘The composer who owns Christmas’, and in churches and schools in England his work – in the form of original carols, arrangements and his co-editing, with Willcocks, of the popular Carols for Choirs anthologies – is certainly synonymous with the festive season. But his large body of choral music (not just for Christmas) includes numerous repertory fixtures for choirs on both sides of the Atlantic, among them an extended Gloria (1974), Requiem (1985), Magnificat (1990) and Mass of the Children (2003), all first performed in the United States. And in the 21 st century his place in the illustrious tradition of British choral music has been cemented by the featuring of his music at Royal Jubilees and weddings, and the Coronation of King Charles III, where a total of six of his arrangements, from Purcell to Walton, were heard.