Manuscript music written by a young seminarian at St Mary’s Oscott in Birmingham from the years when Saint John Henry Newman was living in the College.
Small folio bound in half black roan over textured cloth covered boards. Cloth reinforcement to inner hinges, probably original given the weight of the manuscript paper. Written on the flyleaf ‘H Strickland S.M. Coll:. 1844’. Around a dozen lines of spiritual reflection appear on the following blank leaf: ‘This shall be the covenant I have appeared unto thee break forth into joy I will magnify thee...' 86 unnumbered pages of manuscript music are followed by blank leaves. The writer begins with a pair of contrapuntal motets on Biblical texts (perhaps original compositions?), the second of which is a setting of Acts 26:16 - 'I have appeared unto thee for this purpose to make thee a minister’. There follow Palestrina’s I will Magnify Thee, motets by William Byrd, Gibbons, Thomas Dupius, Tallis (including If Ye Love Me), Johannes Lupi and a ‘Sacred Round’. The final 3 compositions were written around 50 years later and include a Vesper Hymn by Walter Gardner.
Newman was received into the Catholic Church nearby and lived in the College from 1846-1848, no doubt overlapping with Strickland. Oscott had a male choir which sang regularly in the Pugin-designed chapel on site. Newman’s proficiency as a musician and approval of church music is well established. Of it he wrote: ‘Music, I suppose … has an object of its own … it is the expression of ideas greater and more profound than any in the visible world, ideas, which center indeed in Him whom Catholicism manifests, who is the seat of all beauty, order, and perfection whatever, still ideas after all which are not those on which Revelation directly and principally fixes our gaze.’
