AT Hereford in 1897 Sinclair broke with the tradition of an Opening Service and sermon on the Tuesday morning, and followed instead the example set by Worcester in 1881. An ‘immense congregation’ was present to hear the Festival Chorus, orchestra and some of the principal soloists take part in a special Opening Service on Sunday morning, 12 September. The music was magnificent. At Sinclair's request Elgar had composed a Te Deum and Benedictus especially for the occasion, pieces instantly recognised by the critics as masterpieces of their kind. Also performed were Schubert's Symphony No. 8 in B minor (Unfinished); ‘How lovely is Thy dwelling-place’ from Brahms's German Requiem; Elgar's Imperial March; and the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus from Beethoven's Mount of Olives. Here was a blazing fanfare to herald not only a celebration for the Diamond Jubilee of a queen, but also the beginning of a new era for Three Choirs.

For the first time at Hereford, the chorus was drawn entirely from the Three Choirs cities. Sinclair, with customary energy and commitment, arranged combined rehearsals for months in advance. Highlights of the Festival included a new Magnificat by Parry; the Good Friday music and the Finale to the first act of Wagner's Parsifal, with Lloyd Chandos and Harry Plunket Greene; the Symphony No. 6 in B minor (Pathétique) by Tchaikovsky; and Beethoven's Missa solemnis with Emma Albani, Hilda Wilson, Edward Lloyd and Watkin Mills – ‘Rarely has that difficult music been attacked with greater spirit or more signal success.’

Named in the programme for the first time in 1897 were the newly appointed Organists of Gloucester and Worcester: Herbert Brewer and Ivor Atkins. There, too, was Sinclair's eighteen-year-old Assistant Organist, Percy Hull, who had been present at Sinclair's house on 5 June 1897 when Elgar had taken over his manuscript of the Te Deum and Benedictus:

The Navy of the English Commonwealth and Protectorate did as much as the New Model Army to crush the Royalist cause, and a good deal more to establish the international power and prestige of the English Republic. Even after Cromwell's 1653 coup d’état created the quasi-monarchy of the Protectorate, the Navy's officers remained with few exceptions those selected by the Commonwealth for their loyalty to republicanism and religious radicalism. Yet the restored royal government of Charles II embraced the Navy which it had inherited with unfeigned enthusiasm. Forgetting all that it had done to blight their own cause, the Royalists remembered only how it had fulfilled the promise of the Elizabethan seafarers and restored their country's status as a great power after two hundred years of humiliation.

This, however, did not eliminate the practical difficulty faced by Charles II and his brother James Duke of York, the Lord High Admiral, in dealing with the Navy. Precisely because it represented the wealth, safety and strength of the kingdom, it demanded officers of proven loyalty and ability – but the few available Royalist sea officers were mostly former privateer commanders with no experience of handling squadrons, while those who had learned the business of naval command in the hard school of the Dutch and Spanish wars were republicans and sectaries. The choice was summed up by the catch-phrase ‘Gentlemen or Tarpaulins’ – ‘tarpaulins’ meaning professional merchant seamen, named from the oiled canvas from which they made their foul-weather coats. Charles and James handled this dilemma with skill. A large proportion of the former officers were won to the new regime, and trusted with high command. With them were mixed former Royalist sea commanders and new, post-Restoration entries who were themselves of diverse social origins. Charles was well aware from the beginning of the importance of the Navy to the survival of his fragile throne, and in 1661 instituted the new position of ‘volunteer per order’ or ‘king's letter boy’, ‘to give encouragement to such young gentlemen as are willing to apply themselves to the learning of navigation, and fitting themselves for the service of the sea’.

WHEN WRITING Wolokolamsker Chaussee IV: Kentauren in 1986, Muller found himself once again responding to a historical moment in which democracy stood at the top of the political agenda. After Gorbachev's accession to the post of General Secretary of the CPSU in March 1985, there were renewed hopes within certain sections of the East German public for the introduction of democratizing and liberalizing reforms in the GDR, modeled on glasnost and perestroika in the USSR. Yet while by 1986 the SED leadership had raised no clear opposition to Gorbachev's domestic reforms, there was also no clear indication of a willingness on its part to reform the cultural and political machinery of the GDR. As with Der Lohndrücker in 1956–57 and Der Horatier in 1968, Kentauren shows a distinct concern for democracy and public participation in politics. And much like the earlier texts, in Kentauren Muller attempts to make its audience a democratic collective of sorts. Yet its means of doing so and the form this democracy appears to take differs radically from that presented by Der Lohndrücker and Der Horatier.

Muller composed Kentauren as the fourth part of his Wolokolamsker Chaussee cycle, a series of five texts beginning with Russische Eröffnung (Russian Opening, 1983–84) and rounded off by Der Findling (The Foundling, 1987). Although new plays often waited many years before being premiered, Kentauren made it to the stage relatively quickly. On 29 January 1988 it received its world premiere in two theaters simultaneously, both within the GDR. While Muller incorporated it into his production of Der Lohndrücker at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, Christoph Schroth directed a production of Kentauren and the third part of Wolokolamsker Chaussee, Das Duell (The Duel, 1985–86) at the Mecklenburgisches Staatstheater in Schwerin. The text was also published relatively soon after its composition, featuring in the February edition of Theater der Zeit in 1988, and only one month later in the pages of Theater der Zeit's Western counterpart, Theater heute. As a result, within eighteen months of its composition, it received a potentially very large readership and audience both within and outside the theater and the GDR. Although the relative speed by which it was to reach audiences might indicate otherwise, Kentauren presents an open challenge to the SED's brand of socialism.

THE organisational issues that had dogged Three Choirs over the previous decade, and which came to a head in 2005, resulted in increasing pressure, both from inside and out, to find a model on which the Festival could move forwards. Over the course of the 2006–7 cycle, much work had been going on behind the scenes to assess possible solutions, all of which became focused on recruiting some sort of central manager to work across the three cities. A job description was drawn up, and advertisements placed in the music and arts press, as well as the national papers. These attracted a varied field of applicants. The whole process was directly supported by the Arts Council, which, despite lauding many aspects of the 2005 Worcester Festival, was perhaps the loudest voice calling for organisational change. In particular, the Council gave a significant grant to assist the Festival with the appointee's first year's salary. The successful candidate would be the first full-time employee the Festival had ever taken on. The purpose of the role was advertised thus: ‘To establish and operate a central professional management system within the organisation leading to high quality delivery of Festivals.’ It also included a very clear responsibility regarding longerterm strategy and direction, and organisational development.

This was the Festival making a statement of intent about where it both needed and wanted to go in the future, and marked a recognition that the time had come for a professional core to assist local committees, and to provide key consistency and services to the local teams in the three cities. It was a huge shift. To use the words of Bernard Day, chairman of the Three Choirs Festival Association, in the published press release: ‘the new structure enables this historic festival to meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. It will go from strength to strength.’

When we speak of the unspeakable today, it is often with a sense of distance and disbelief: at bombings, mass shootings, torture, war crimes and, in particular, terrorism. Unspeakable acts are those committed by other people, they are what the ‘other’ does. For this reason, Naomi Mandel writes specifically ‘against the unspeakable’, since to call something unspeakable is to take a moral high ground that is ‘not a thoughtful response to atrocity, horror, trauma, and pain’ but instead ‘an exculpatory mechanism’. She argues that it is in the interest of the literary critic to resist the ‘seductive eloquence’ of the unspeakable and recognise that ‘all of us […] are the producers and the products of our cultures and hence always already complicit in the ugliest aspects of our histories’. To cleave to the unspeakable is to endorse a sense of ‘we’ and ‘they’ or ‘now’ and ‘then’. It also risks passing over the ways in which ‘speakable’ or legitimated legal processes, social conventions and institutional powers render the behaviour and testimony of marginalised groups unmentionable or inexpressible. Silence in the face of violence (when it serves a specific set of values), ignored or rewritten testimony, and the persistence of codes and euphemism, still collude to obstruct the voices of women, people identifying as non-heterosexual or non-cisgender, people with disabilities, people of colour. The insistence that something is unspeakable and should not be mentioned reinforces both the non-speaker's power and the target's lack of power and lack of speech. Yet the unspeakable and unsayable also collapse binaries, and make clear the impossibility of their ever having obtained in the first place. To show who the unspeakable works for and who it works on brings the margins to the centre and the silent into the conversation; it also shows how the authority that vocalises what is unspeakable is also stymied by the paradoxes of the unspeakable, that are likewise constituted in language that has no guarantees for its users. Turning inside and outside, within and without in on themselves, the unspeakable challenges the voiceless to overcome silence.

IN September 1900, Granville Bantock (1868–1946) was appointed Principal of the Birmingham and Midland Institute School of Music, and for the next thirty years was a regular visitor to Three Choirs. A number of his works received their first performances at the Festivals, many under Bantock's own direction. Some, such as The Time Spirit, a rhapsody for chorus and orchestra, performed at Gloucester in 1904, showed his gift for melodic charm and orchestral colour to pleasing effect; others missed the mark. Bantock's ‘Fantastic Poem for Orchestra, in the form of a Prelude’, The Pierrot of the Minute (1908(W) and 1924(H)) struck one young Festival-goer, Arthur Lloyd-Baker, as ‘light but elaborately shapeless’.

Bantock was well known for his oriental proclivities, of which a setting of Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is the most noted example. But such pieces found no place at Three Choirs. In 1909(H) he conducted his Old English Suite, an arrangement for small orchestra of sixteenthcentury airs, which prompted the Musical Times to suggest that ‘its example might be followed. Other suites as distinct from rhapsodies formed of old English airs, and particularly of folk songs, which have yet to be treated in this fashion, might be devised by British composers in search of new fields.’

Ralph Vaughan Williams had already formed the Folk Song Society in 1904, writing in the Morning Post that ‘whatever is done in the way of preserving traditional music must be done quickly; it must be remembered that the tunes, at all events, of true folk songs exist only by oral tradition, so that if they are not soon noted down and preserved they will be lost forever.’

In his Old English Suite, Bantock ‘lengthened lines and deepened shadows’ in his adornment of airs by Orlando Gibbons, John Dowland, John Bull, Giles Farnaby and William Byrd, but ‘all in the colours of the original’. The piece which followed in the programme was as refreshingly in the style of the twentieth century as Bantock's was rooted in that of the sixteenth: the first performance of the Dance Rhapsody No. 1 by Frederick Delius, conducted by the composer in his single Three Choirs appearance.

THE musical club which met in the hall belonging to the vicars choral at Hereford was, as Lysons pointed out, ‘an establishment of little expense: the performances were all gratis, except that of Mr Woodcock, their leader, whose nightly pay was five shillings. The members were regaled with ale, cyder and tobacco. ’

The Woodcocks were a musical family. Hawkins, speaking of Robert Woodcock, famous as a flute-player and composer for that instrument, adds:

At some time before mid-century, the Hereford musical club meetings had fallen into abeyance. They were revived in 1749 by William Felton, a vicar choral from 1741 to 1769, who transferred the concerts from the College Hall to the coffee house in St John Street, then owned by Frank Woodcock, which possessed the only room in the city large enough for the purpose. This new arrangement seems to have been quite profitable to Woodcock. The articles of the society, drawn up by Felton, show that Woodcock was to be paid 7s. for his performance (presumably on the violin) and 15s.: ‘for the use of his Room, Fires, Forms & Candles for the two Sconces & Desks and Harpsichord’. In addition, Frank Woodcock's son, Francisco, was also to receive 2s. 6d. as a performer, and the Treasurer of the society was one John Woodcock. In the face of a potential monopoly it was perhaps prudent of Felton to ensure that the articles allowed that: ‘It shall be in the power of the Performers (who are not paid) to remove this meeting to any other place they shall think proper.’ Among the performers who were paid, apart from Woodcock and son, appear the Hereford Cathedral Organist, Henry Swarbrick, who played the harpsichord and was also responsible for ensuring that it was tuned, and a Mr Dyer, both of whom received 7s. 6d., and one Jemmy George, who was paid 10s. 6d.

This chapter examines the extent to which the Eritrean National Service (ENS) functions as a vehicle for national unity and social cohesion. It examines whether national service functions as a ‘sociological mixer’, enabling conscripts hailing from disparate ethno­linguistic, geographical, religious and cultural backgrounds to bond and forge a secular Eritrean national identity at the expense of their sub­national identities and alle­ giances. The chapter also discusses the factors that enhance national unity and greater trans-cultural understanding through enhanced knowledge of different places and communities in the course of performing national service. The chapter also discusses whether trans­ethnic, trans­religious and trans­regional friendships have developed among the conscripts. It also devotes some space to the dissenting opinions of a few respondents concerning whether the ENS promotes national unity and social cohesion.

The assumption that universal national/military service promotes national unity and social cohesion among ethnically and religiously diverse, or divided, societies is an old one.

THE year 1934 robbed English music not only of Sir Edward Elgar but also of Gustav Holst and Frederick Delius. Without Elgar or Holst there was a sense of grievous loss to the musical and social round of Three Choirs, and this was reinforced at the 1934(G) Festival by the additional absence of Vaughan Williams, who had cut his foot while bathing and was suffering from a poisoned abscess.

In 1933(H), Percy Hull, continuing a policy of gradual change, had decided to include Elijah, dropped in 1930(H), but to perform only an abridged version of Messiah. Sumsion, in 1934(G), omitted Elijah but followed Hull's lead by presenting only the abridged Messiah, thus making room on the Friday morning for W. H. Reed's Symphony for Strings, Haydn's Te Deum, and the Brahms Violin Concerto with Jelly d'Aranyi as soloist. In place of Elijah on Tuesday, The Kingdom, conducted by Sumsion, was given ‘In Memoriam Edward Elgar’, followed by Kodály's Psalmus Hungaricus and Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony, conducted by Gordon Jacob in the composer's absence. Other contemporary pieces heard during the week included Summer Music and St Patrick's Breastplate by Arnold Bax; Elegy for strings and Procession by Herbert Howells; Two Ballads for baritone and orchestra by Howard Ferguson, in which Roy Henderson was the soloist; and Cyril B. Rootham's setting of Milton's Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, with Isobel Baillie, Trefor Jones and Roy Henderson joining chorus, semi-chorus and orchestra under the composer's baton.

On Thursday evening, before a performance of Gerontius, G. D. Cunningham, the Organist of Birmingham Town Hall, played Handel's Organ Concerto in F major. When he had finished, ‘an embarrassing gap appeared in the proceedings whilst waiting for the B.B.C. to relay the final part of the programme’. Herbert Sumsion summoned his Assistant Organist, Melville Cook, successor to Arthur Pritchard in 1932: