Walmisley was born in London but spent most of his working life in Cambridge where he was Organist of both St John’s and Trinity Colleges and became Professor of Music in 1836. Stanford (his successor at Trinity) wrote that Walmisley:

… was a victim of four o’clock dinners in Hall, and long symposiums in the Combination Room after; and being a somewhat lonely bachelor, the excellent port of the College cellars was, at times, more his master than his servant (Pages from an Unwritten Diary, London, 1914, p12).

He wrote twenty-two anthems and nine settings of service music of which the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis in D minor (1855) is his most famous. Watkins Shaw noted (in ‘Thomas Attwood Walmisley’, English Church Music, February 1957, xxxvii, 1: 5) that this was the first to have a fully independent organ part where it does more than simply support the harmonies of the singers (although he ignores the fact that Wesley’s Evening Service was published in 1845). In fact Walmisley does both, using the organ to great dramatic effect in the tenor and bass sections and as a simple support for the trebles and altos. These contrasting sections are reminiscent of the style adopted by Henry Purcell and his contem­poraries where verses for upper and then lower voices are set against full-choir writing. Walmisley shows his interest in music of the past by incorporating two themes by the organist-composer Henri Dumont (1610–1684): a melody from an Agnus Dei in the Gloria of the Magnificat and an Amen in the Gloria to the Nunc dimittis, both referred to in a footnote. Rather curiously the Nunc dimittis ends in A major rather than D minor, something which allegedly upset the musicians at King’s College, Cambridge, sufficiently for them to reverse the Glorias, thus ending in the tonic (Bumpus, John S, A History of English Cathedral Music, London, 1908, p471).

from notes by Andrew Carwood © 2014