Thomas Tudway () - Te Deum (1721)

★ Follow music ► Composer: Thomas Tudway () Work: Te Deum ... for ye Solemnity and Consecration of ye Right Honourable Edward Lord Harley’s Chappell at Wimpole (1721) Performers: Ferdinand’s Consort; Stephen Bullаmοre (conductor) Painting: Attributed to Giovanni Camillo Sagrestani (1660-1731) - Allegory of Time HD image: Painting: Thomas Hill (1661-1734) - Thomas Tudway HD image: Further info: Listen free: --- Thomas Tudway ( - Cambridge, 23 November 1726) English composer, organist and teacher. He probably was the son of Thomas Tudway, a lay clerk of St George’s Chapel, Windsor. He was a Chapel Royal chorister whose voice broke shortly before 1668 so it’s deduced he was born circa 1650. In 1670 he succeeded Henry Loosemore as organist of King’s College, Cambridge, and acted as instructor of the choristers from Christmas 1679 to midsummer 1680. He also became organist at Pembroke College and Great St. Mary’s. In 1681 he graduated Music Bachiller. After the death in 1700 of Nicholas Staggins, the first professor of music at Cambridge, he was chosen as his successor on 30 January 1705. His career was thus broadly based in Cambridge; he was not, however, cut off from musical life in London. Noted for punning, on 28 July 1706, for an offensive comment of this nature slighting the Queen, he was sentenced to be “degraded from all degrees, taken and to be taken“, and was deprived of his professorship and his three organists’ posts. On 10 March 1707 he publicly made submission and a retraction in the Regent House. He was then formally absolved and reinstated in all his appointments. Had he not offended the monarch, it seems likely that he would have become a Composer to the Chapel Royal. As a composer he focused almost wholly on church music, the greater part of it occasional in character. There is no instrumental music by him, and the secular part of his work consists only of a few songs printed in the collections of his day, and a birthday ode addressed to Queen Anne. Tudway died on 23 November 1726, and was succeeded as professor by Maurice Greene in July 1730.