David Wulstan
Musical pioneer who arranged Tudor works for modern choirs
DAVID WULSTAN, who has died aged 80, was a pioneer in the performance of Tudor church music, undertaking research into 16th century pitch, reconstructing missing parts and making arrangements for modernday performances.
In 1961 he founded the Clerkes of Oxenford, a vocal group dedicated to presenting these early works.
The Clerkes, mostly past and present choral scholars from Oxford colleges, were particularly successful in music by John Sheppard, Orlando Gibbons and Thomas Tallis. However, Wulstan struggled to find suitable male trebles and recalled how eventually he resorted to recruiting “such young ladies as I can, by fair means or foul”; in 1972 they included Mary Archer, the wife of Jeffrey Archer, then a Conservative MP, and Harold Wilson’s daughterin-law, Joy.
In keeping with Wulstan’s drive for authenticity, much of the Clerkes’ music was sung at “high pitch”, a minor third above the written pitch. This even applied to the top parts, leading to some cruelly high lines that his well-trained singers managed to negotiate with little hint of discomfort, although few other groups have attempted such feats.
Wulstan, a music don at Magdalen College, Oxford, had a dry, acerbic wit. On one occasion he deciphered the musical notation of Hurrian hymns, which had been found on pieces of clay dating from 1300 BC during a French archaeological dig.
Although he could not be entirely sure of the original sound, he was confident that he was heading in the right direction. “At least we know it is musical notation and not just a seed catalogue or laundry list,” he quipped.
The son of the Rev Norman Jones and his wife Margaret, he was born David Wulstan Bevan Jones in Birmingham on January 18 1937 and educated at the Royal Masonic School in Bushey, Hertfordshire, and at Birmingham School of Music. After doing what he vaguely described as “several things”, in 1960 he arrived as David Wulstan at Magdalen, where he was an academical clerk (or choral scholar).
He studied under Bernard Rose and sang alto in the college choir. While an undergraduate he edited for publication the anthems of Orlando Gibbons. He stayed on in Oxford as a lecturer until 1978, and in 1983, after a few years in the United States and Ireland, was appointed Gregynog Professor of Music at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth (now Aberystwyth University), remaining in the west of Wales for the remainder of his life.
Wulstan had a slight anti-establishment edge and on one occasion threatened a BBC interviewer, probably in jest, that if she described him as a musicologist he would put his knowledge of martial arts into action. (He was an expert in Aikido.)
The Clerkes made several well received discs, including a magisterial account of Tallis’s Spem in Alium.
By the end of the 1980s the Clerkes had rather faded away, leaving a void that was filled by the likes of Peter Phillips, a former member, and his Tallis Scholars.
Phillips recalled that his epiphany came in a concert given by the Clerkes in the antechapel of Magdalen College. “They sang a piece by Thomas Tallis, his Gaude Gloriosa, and there was something about the sound that really hit me,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 2013. Wulstan published several books. In his last,
Listen Again: A New History of Music (2015) he demonstrated how music from Bach to Bartók was far less revolutionary than customarily imagined. However, his true legacy lies in ensembles such as the Tallis Scholars, The Sixteen, whose director Harry Christophers also sang in the Clerkes, and more recently Stile Antico.
Wulstan listed among his interests in Who’s Who “being politically incorrect” and “bemoaning the decline of the English language and of British universities”.
In 1965 he married Susan Graham. She survives him with their son.
David Wulstan, born January 18 1937, died May 6 2017