This volume contains all five of William Croft's orchestrally accompanied church compositions. Such a collection of pieces, all of which were composed between 1709 and 1720, allows for an assessment of the composition, adaptation and use of church music for important services in England during the second decade of the eighteenth century. Croft's four anthems and his setting of the Anglican ‘morning service’ (the Te Deum, a hymn of praise, and the Jubilate Deo canticle) were written during a period when two seemingly independent traditions converged: the use of the orchestra in sacred music and the use of sacred music in ‘occasional’ royal services. The editor, Donald Burrows, contributes to the understanding of both traditions and offers an insight into the development of ‘occasional’ church music during the early eighteenth century – supported by his contextual and musical assessment in Handel and the English Chapel Royal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

In early eighteenth-century England, two types of royal church service made use of orchestrally accompanied sacred music; both fell outside the normal service patterns prescribed in The Book of Common Prayer. The first was the coronation service: there was a clear precedent for the inclusion of orchestral anthems on these occasions, and Croft composed one anthem, The Lord is a sun and a shield, for the 1714 coronation of King George I. The second was the service of national thanksgiving. During the period there were three fixed annual anniversary celebrations (the current monarch's accession, the Restoration and the deliverance from the Gunpowder Plot), with prescribed prayer-book liturgies, but additional celebrations (for which a special liturgy was printed) were often held in reference to contemporary military successes. It was these additional thanksgivings, for which the royal family attended a special service at either St Paul's Cathedral or the Chapel Royal (from 1703 at St James's Palace), which required the provision of a new anthem and an orchestrally accompanied service setting. Burrows reveals the details of these events using surviving documentary sources, and he shows that the principal musical sources provide evidence of the performance situations. Indeed, this edition offers excellent source descriptions: each is subjected to a critical discussion which reveals new information about the chronology, function and authority of sources.

Around half of this edition is taken up with Croft's setting of the Te Deum and Jubilate. The work was first performed at St James's on 17 February 1709 in a thanksgiving for the ‘Protection from enemies and successes of the campaign’. The tradition of including an orchestrally accompanied setting at the thanksgiving services probably dates from December 1694, when a setting by Henry Purcell was performed at a Whitehall thanksgiving service – highly unusual considering William III's demands for organ-only accompaniment at chapel services. However, Purcell's setting owes its invention to an event outside of royal ecclesiastical practice – it was first performed at a service to mark St Cecilia's Day at St Bride's Church, Fleet Street, on 22 November 1694. The Cecilian celebrations had normally been marked by the performance of a new ode, so, as Martin Adams suggests in Henry Purcell: The Origins and Development of His Musical Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), it is understandable that Purcell's setting shares more stylistic links with the contemporary ode than with his own existing sacred music. Despite the single royal performance of Purcell's setting for William III, it seems that thanksgivings during Queen Anne's reign consistently featured the Purcell setting. Under Anne, newly composed organ-accompanied verse anthems by John Blow, Croft and Jeremiah Clarke were at the heart of several such thanksgiving services. These anthems were clearly at the centre of musical development, as witnessed for example in the increased use of independent movements rather than interlinked sections. Croft's provision of a new setting of the Te Deum and Jubilate for the 1709 thanksgiving may have been encouraged by his heightened status following the deaths of both Clarke and Blow (in 1707 and 1708 respectively). Croft incorporates many of the developing trends from his organ-accompanied verse anthems, but he also, naturally, retains some of the characteristic elements of Purcell's setting.

For reasons attributed to the availability of surviving sources, this edition provides Croft's 1715 revision of the Te Deum and Jubilate. Only the Te Deum of the 1709 original survives in full score (an autograph: London, Royal College of Music MS 840, referred to in the edition as source B), so Burrows uses what he describes as the ‘performing score’ as his copy text (British Library, Add. MS 17845; referred to as source A). The reasons for his designation of this ‘performing’ function are not discussed, and the source is not obviously suited for use at the keyboard – particularly in comparison with contemporary organ books at the Chapel Royal, though the musical text is legible compared to source B. However, source A is the most authoritative source of Croft's revised version: it was copied by James Kent, one of the Chapel Royal children, in 1715, under the supervision of Croft (whose hand provides occasional corrections and one of the completely new movements). That a boy was used for the copying of an important musical source offers an insight into the Chapel's educational processes (indeed, it seems likely that the anonymous scribe of The Lord is a sun and a shield in British Library, Add. MS 31405 had also received his education at the Chapel Royal). Two partbooks containing Croft's service settings were clearly used for performances of both the 1709 and 1715 versions: one for a chorus bass and the other for an alto soloist (source C; Birmingham University, Barber MS 5007).

Both sources B and C enable Burrows to show the implications of Croft's revision process, and the edition's appendices provide the 1709 versions of the Te Deum movements that were revised in 1715. These revisions are used to support Burrows's central thesis that Croft's orchestral compositions were influenced by those of Handel. Burrows has done much to show that some revisions were due to compositional influence but he also indicates how such alterations were the result of changes to the performance situation between 1709 and 1715. The most major alterations relate to the availability of soloists: Elford, a heavily used alto soloist in the 1709 first performance, died in October 1714, and as a consequence much of the alto verse writing (written for his relatively low vocal tessitura) had to be adapted for the alto soloists in the 1715 performance. Burrows suggests that some alterations highlight Handel's compositional influence: for example, the increased provision of strings during verse passages, and the inclusion of a longer alla breve chorus for ‘O go your way’ in the Jubilate. However, some of the revisions deemed as ‘Handel-influenced’ might also be attributed to practical changes. For example, the 1715 replacement of an unaccompanied alto, tenor and bass verse setting of ‘Make them to be numbered with thy saints’ with a string-accompanied alto and bass movement seems to reflect a likely problem in finding reliable tenor voices: John Church, the principal Chapel Royal tenor soloist during the first decade of the eighteenth century, may have found the three consecutive verse movements of the original Te Deum too demanding for the piece's performance at St Paul's in 1715. Such a reduction in the role of the tenor is also seen in the verse sections of anthems of this same period (including all anthems found later within this edition).

Burrows's argument about Handel's influence is better illustrated by Croft's orchestral anthems. Croft does not provide an orchestral anthem until The Lord is a sun and a shield for the 1714 coronation: there had been no performing tradition for orchestral verse anthems in the reign of Anne and it had been almost thirty years since an orchestral anthem had been composed for use in a royal situation outside a coronation (Blow's final orchestral anthem, O sing unto the Lord a new song, sing unto the Lord, was written for a charity concert in 1701). It is therefore feasible that the sudden change to orchestral anthems after 1715 reflects Handel's recent provisions in his ‘occasional’ anthems. The edition includes all three of Croft's remaining orchestral anthems: O give thanks unto the Lord, and call upon his name (for the same 1715 thanksgiving at which the revised canticles were first performed), O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is gracious (1719) and Rejoice in the Lord, O ye righteous (1720).

The edition is mostly of a high standard, but there are some unexplained differences between the sources and the edited text: for example, in both sources A and B the minim trumpet note in bar 2 of the Te Deum's opening symphony is a crotchet; the three notes in bar 3 of the first trumpet should be F♯s. On occasion useful figures have been removed from the continuo; see bar 13 of ‘We praise thee’ at the start of the Te Deum, for example, where a sharpened third is omitted at the change from a root position A major chord to an F sharp major chord. There is also an error in the explanation of the differences between the 1709 and 1715 versions (xxxvi), which lists the 1709 version of ‘We Praise thee’ as lacking violin and viola parts in bars 24–40; in fact, according to source B, this version did have upper string parts in bars 18–44, though they were absent for the first seventeen bars. Such quibbles aside, nonetheless, the volume is a fine addition to the collection of early eighteenth-century sacred music available in modern critical editions; it will be of considerable interest to all scholars and performers of sacred music by Handel and his English contemporaries.