The choral works of Hamish MacCunn

Hamish MacCunn, born in Greenock in 1868, began composing at an early age and continued to do so until his premature death in 1916. Although the greater part of his oeuvre was written for voices - solo with piano accompaniment, part-songs, cantatas, choral ballads, and operas - today his fame depends largely on one work, the concert overture The Land of the Mountain and the Flood (1887). Since MacCunn's engagement with choral music spanned his entire compositional life, it is this genre which offers the best opportunity to survey his music and to observe his creative development. The purpose of this study is to examine MacCunn's choral works, and to consider what they reveal about MacCunn as a composer, as a person, and as a Scot. The opening chapter provides a brief biography of MacCunn, much of it constructed from primary sources, followed by an overview of the background to choral music in mid- to late-nineteenth-century England and Scotland. Succeeding chapters deal with MacCunn's choral works using a genre-based approach, and examine the genesis of each work, the choice of text, first performance and reception and give a detailed commentary on the techniques employed by MacCunn to illustrate and elaborate his text. The final chapter addresses the issue of MacCunn's identity as a composer within the context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Appendix 1 gives the full texts of the choral works. Appendix 2 lists all traced performances to date of MacCunn's choral works and thus offers an indication of their uptake and performance. Two versions of a selective worklist are provided in Appendix 3, the first arranged by genre, the second in a chronological listing.