Richard Runciman Terry

Sir Richard Runciman Terry (3 January 1865 – 18 April 1938) was an English organist, choir director and musicologist. He is noted for his pioneering revival of Tudor liturgical music.

Richard Terry was born in 1865 in Ellington, Northumberland. At the age of 11 he started playing the organ at the local church. Educated at various schools in South Shields, St Albans and London, Terry then spent a year at Oxford (1887-88) and two years at Cambridge (1888-90), where he went as a non-collegiate student but became a choral scholar at King's College, Cambridge. There he also became a music critic for The Cambridge Review. At Cambridge, he was much influenced by the Professor of Music, Charles Villiers Stanford and the King's Chapel organist Arthur Henry Mann who taught him the techniques of choral singing and the training of boys' voices.

After leaving Cambridge in 1890, without a degree, he became organist and choirmaster at Elstow School near Bedford, then at St John's Cathedral, Antigua in 1892, and director of music at Highgate School in 1895. After his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1896 he was appointed organist and director of music at the Roman Catholic Benedictine Downside School in Somerset. It was here where he began the massively important work of reviving the Latin music of Tudor English composers such as William Byrd and Thomas Tallis. He was greatly inspired by the revival of Gregorian chant by Dom Prosper Guéranger at Solesmes Abbey in France, which was to be an important part of the Downside musical repertoire.

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