The music of Everett Titcomb (1884-1968) occupies a unique niche in the catalogue of sacred organ and choral works by 20th-century Anglican composers in the United States. His compositional voice was clearly influenced by the Bostonian giants of his youth (Eugene Thayer, Dudley Buck, George Chadwick, Horatio Parker--who's mother once had Titcomb as a border) as well as his affinity for French music; yet at the same time his work is informed by his vast knowledge and understanding of plainchant and the polyphonic style of the 15th and 16th century Italians. An Anglo-Catholic who spent fifty years nearly to the day (1910-1960) as organist and choirmaster at Boston's Church of St. John the Evangelist in Bowdoin Street, his best organ works are based on plainchant tunes making them of more value to the Roman Catholic organist of the time than to the majority of Episcopalian ones and some of his best polyphony is in the form of Latin motets which while used at St. John's and other Anglo-Catholic parishes were perfectly at home sung at a Roman Mass despite their distinctly Anglican musical sensibility. His Schola Cantorum at St. John's was singing plainchant and Renaissance polyphony while the majority of church choirs (and even Cathedral choirs in this country) were still mired in the kind of late-Victorian preciousness which Titcomb so disdained in choral music. Thus Titcomb tends to be known for a handful of works--some of which are decidedly mediocre--which seem perennially popular with volunteer church choirs while his better work goes largely unplayed, unsung, and unheard mostly due to the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council and the resulting reforms which trickled over into the Episcopal Church in the United States rendering Latin choral music and plainchant-based organ works less relevant to musicians and worshipers alike. In fact, in looking for some examples for this diary, none of his very best works are available as online performances.
If you're still with me so far, let's jump over the orange clef and take a closer look at who Titcomb was, what he composed, and why his legacy is important today.
Let's begin with a piece you may have heard, his motet for Pentecost I Will Not Leave You Comfortless (1934). While I perform this piece a shade faster, the tempo taken in this recording illustrates the broad, unfolding line and emphasizes the Veni, creator chant which forms a cantus firmus in the bass voice in the Alleluia section. This is among his best work, and one which has remained a part of sacred and university choral repertoire into the 21st Century.
This motet is significant for its selection to be in the official program of the 1936 English Church Music Festival in London where it was performed by 4000 voices with Titcomb in attendance. It was the first time an American composer had been featured in the festival. Subsequently, it was made famous in the United States by its inclusion in several coast-to-coast radio broadcasts of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. In many ways, it launched his career as an internationally recognized composer of sacred music.
Now that we've heard some Titcomb, let's look at who he was and what drove his inspiration.

Everett Titcomb, The Boston Post, Jan. 20, 1947. (Author's personal collection, gift of Sally Slade Warner.)
Very little biographical information is available and very little has been written about him which is easily available. Portions of Susan Ouellette Armstrong's 1990 Boston University dissertation The Legacy of Everett Titcomb have been published in The American Organist, the magazine of the American Guild of Organists and the best source, his lifelong companion Chester Bonney's Recollections of Everett Titcomb (1969) exists only as an unpublished manuscript (a copy of which I have in my personal collection). The Shrine on Bowdoin Street, published by the Cowley Fathers in 1958 (also in my collection) provides a good insight into the atmosphere of St. John's in Titcomb's day and some valuable information about the heydey of the Schola Cantorum in the 1930's and 40's.
The seminal moment in Titcomb's life is the beginning of his tenure at St. John the Evangelist in 1910. The church was a mission of the Society of St. John the Evangelist, also known as the "Cowley Fathers" and "Anglican Jesuits", an Anglican monastic order which established a house in Boston in 1870. As an outgrowth of the Oxford Movement, the Cowleys were Anglo-Catholics ("High Church") and deeply devoted to social justice setting up their house on the base of Beacon Hill to serve the tenements of the West End.

St. John's, Bowdoin Street, from an article in the Boston Sunday Post of July 7, 1895: "A West End Monastery: The Lives of the Cowley Brethren in Boston's Slums". (Author's personal collection, gift of Sally Slade Warner.)
Successive superiors of the order gave Titcomb more and more freedom to explore the use of plainchant and polyphony in services, as long as the majority of the singing remained congregational in nature. Given the paltry sum available for the purchase of sheet music, Titcomb spent a great deal of time in the collection of the Boston Public Library copying out chants and motets for use with his Schola Cantorum, as the choir became known by the 1930's. This, combined with a number of trips to Europe and England for study and research between the years of 1916 and the late 1930's, spurred his interest in composing chant-based organ works and motets of his own. The output of the years 1932-1948 comprise the best of his compositions, the years during which he was constantly immersed in early music. (It is worth noting that eventually much music and many chant-books were purchased and remain in the St. John's music library today). Because the Cowleys insisted in congregational participation, the people of St. John's learned several Gregorian masses (in English) to sing together with the choir, a tradition which has endured at the parish.

End paper of Titcomb's personal copy of The English Hymnal (1906). (Author's personal collection, gift of St. John's Bowdoin St. on his installation as Music Director, 2004.)
As I mentioned in the introduction, Titcomb's use of chant and polyphony in weekly worship was somewhat unusual in this country in the 20's and later. As he perfected the Schola Cantorum, the choir began doing concerts of early choral music around New England and most notably a long-standing series at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Looking at those programs, they could very well be a program presented by a fine university chorale specializing in the music of the Renaissance and early Baroque. What Titcomb was doing at that time was quite extraordinary and makes him one of the pioneers--albeit largely unknown--of the rebirth of interest in this kind of music.
Let us turn to some organ works. Here is a Toccata on the chant Salve Regina. Not my favorite of his chant-based works, but representative nonetheless:
The Recessional from his Suite in E Major (1955) shows a marked "throwback" to the Bostonians of his youth, in which a great deal of Parker and Buck seem to peek through. Beginning in this period, much of what he produced was far less interesting than the music of the previous two decades.
Titcomb often wrote pieces for his colleagues, or on commission. His 1942 Scherzo was written for Virgil Fox. Dextrous and delicate (and not a little challenging to play), we hear it now played by Fox:
Titcomb's career was a long one, and distinguished as well. Besides being a lion of the Boston sacred music and organ community, he also taught classes in sacred music and chant at New England Conservatory and Boston University where he briefly held the chair in the 50's. In 1956 he was awarded the D. Mus.(h.c.) from Nashotah House (an Episcopal Seminary in Wisconsin), a fitting cap for a long teaching and performing career from which he retired on All Saint's Day, 1960--not too bad an accomplishment for an autodidact who had only a High School Diploma. He died at Massachusetts General Hospital on December 31, 1968.
Much of Titcomb's output has fallen into obscurity due to liturgical changes in the Church and frankly, the changing tastes of the academy and the church alike. He deserves to be remembered, however, for his enormous contribution to early music scholarship and his voluminous contribution to the music of the Episcopal Church. I was privileged to know his protege, my late friend Sally Slade Warner and to have interviewed a number of people who knew him well--most importantly Nancy Plummer Faxon, from which I gleaned many spicy anecdotes. It also bears saying that it is extraordinary that he lived many years at the Mission House with his lifelong companion, Chester Bonney, and did so in those times. As Douglas Shand-Tucci points out in his book on St. John's music patron and master architect Ralph Adams Cram, Boston Bohemia, the Cowley fathers were known for their extreme tolerance of homosexuality in their quiet way. Titcomb deserves his place among the great Anglican composers of the "American Century".
William Harris, FASC served as Director of Music at St. John the Evangelist from 2003-2005 and is currently Director of Music and Organist at St. Bartholomew Episcopal Church in Yarmouth, Maine.
I would like to thank Dave in Northridge for his support and encouragement to write this diary.