Seventeen Voluntaries 11

A prolific composer of Victorian church music, Caleb Simper was a humble musician whose choral works sold in vast quantities, rightly deserving their publisher’s accolade as being ‘sung throughout the civilised world’.

Born in Wiltshire in 1857, Simper was largely self-taught. He attempted a number of professions, including piano tuning, before finding his vocation as an organist. As with his choral music, of which he wrote 162 anthems under his own name and many others under the pseudonym of Edwyn A Clare, his organ voluntaries offer playable and practical music for organists of limited technical ability on two staves.