Stanfordian Thoughts
A periodical series of reflections on recorded and unrecorded works by Charles Villiers Stanford
by Christopher Howell
23. Stanford & Chadwick’s Book of Choruses

Vast as Stanford’s catalogue of compositions is, things are still turning up. A few days ago, I chanced upon a title that was new to me: Sweet is Tipperary. This is now on offer at ChoralWiki. It is a piece for unaccompanied SATB choir with a text by Denis Aloysius McCarthy. The ChoralWiki version has been edited and typeset by David Robertson, the “discovering researcher”. His title page has “Old Irish Air” writ large on it. He tells us it was first published in 1923 by Silver, Burdett and Company and that, “commissioned for use by school choirs in the U.S., this Irish folksong setting was never published in the UK and was unknown to scholars for nearly a century”.

Read the full article in pdf format here. A link list for the previous articles in this series is provided here.