motet notes - Wood

Irish by birth, Charles Wood’s (1866-1926) influence on music was mostly felt through his most successful students such as Ralph Vaughan Williams and Sir Michael Tippett. However, Wood appears not to have been a very ambitious composer, as most of his works have been published posthumously.  He spent much of his life in the shadow of his teacher Sir Charles Villiers Stanford and many of Wood’s compositions have their origins in Stanford’s style and harmonic vocabulary. Most of Wood’s music was written with the Cambridge college choirs in mind, with their ability to sing double-choir music with relative ease. By way of contrast, Oculi omnium is the second of two simple, short, four-part introits published in 1927.

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