CPMs differ, for instance, over just what concepts these are. Initially inspired by computer science, their development has reflected changes in artificial intelligence (AI), theoretical psychology, and neuroscience. At first, the focus was on symbolic AI – dubbed GOFAI, or “Good Old-Fashioned AI,” by John Haugeland (1985: 112). Later, some CPMs replaced, or complemented, GOFAI concepts with ideas drawn from connectionism and dynamical systems.

AT the time of Langdon Colborne's death in 1889, Charles Lee Williams had been in post at Gloucester for seven years, and William Done at Worcester for forty-five. Both men were, in their different ways, much liked and respected: Done, quietly persuasive and undemonstrative; Williams, clear in his purpose and firm but diplomatic. The new man appointed to Hereford was of a very different personality.

George Robertson Sinclair (1863–1917) was born at 3 Devonshire Villas, Sydenham Road, Croydon, on 28 October 1863. His ancestors were of Scottish descent but had for several generations been settled in Ireland, at Killiney, near Dublin. His father, Dr Robert Sharpe Sinclair, held the appointment of Director of Public Education in Bombay, and it was owing to the temporary residence of his mother in England that Sinclair happened to be born in Croydon. But he was extremely proud to call himself an Irishman, proclaiming his nationality during the Hereford Festival week by hoisting the Irish flag outside his house.

At the age of eight Sinclair entered the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he studied under Sir Robert Stewart, who was an old friend of his father's and of Sir Frederick Gore Ouseley. Thus, in 1873, young Sinclair – aged ten – gained a choral scholarship at St Michael's College, Tenbury, where he was the only boy known to have been taught personally by Ouseley. His parents intended that he should take Holy Orders; but the death of his father when Sinclair was seventeen threw him upon his own resources. When Bishop (afterwards Archbishop) Benson, of Truro, asked Ouseley to recommend him an organist for the proposed Cornish cathedral, he at once nominated Sinclair

IN September 1900, Granville Bantock (1868–1946) was appointed Principal of the Birmingham and Midland Institute School of Music, and for the next thirty years was a regular visitor to Three Choirs. A number of his works received their first performances at the Festivals, many under Bantock's own direction. Some, such as The Time Spirit, a rhapsody for chorus and orchestra, performed at Gloucester in 1904, showed his gift for melodic charm and orchestral colour to pleasing effect; others missed the mark. Bantock's ‘Fantastic Poem for Orchestra, in the form of a Prelude’, The Pierrot of the Minute (1908(W) and 1924(H)) struck one young Festival-goer, Arthur Lloyd-Baker, as ‘light but elaborately shapeless’.

Bantock was well known for his oriental proclivities, of which a setting of Fitzgerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is the most noted example. But such pieces found no place at Three Choirs. In 1909(H) he conducted his Old English Suite, an arrangement for small orchestra of sixteenthcentury airs, which prompted the Musical Times to suggest that ‘its example might be followed. Other suites as distinct from rhapsodies formed of old English airs, and particularly of folk songs, which have yet to be treated in this fashion, might be devised by British composers in search of new fields.’

Ralph Vaughan Williams had already formed the Folk Song Society in 1904, writing in the Morning Post that ‘whatever is done in the way of preserving traditional music must be done quickly; it must be remembered that the tunes, at all events, of true folk songs exist only by oral tradition, so that if they are not soon noted down and preserved they will be lost forever.’

In his Old English Suite, Bantock ‘lengthened lines and deepened shadows’ in his adornment of airs by Orlando Gibbons, John Dowland, John Bull, Giles Farnaby and William Byrd, but ‘all in the colours of the original’. The piece which followed in the programme was as refreshingly in the style of the twentieth century as Bantock's was rooted in that of the sixteenth: the first performance of the Dance Rhapsody No. 1 by Frederick Delius, conducted by the composer in his single Three Choirs appearance.

WITH his cantata Prometheus Unbound, a setting of scenes from Shelley's epic poem, Hubert Parry (1848–1918) strode into the midst of all that was conventional and ‘safe’ in English choral music and unwittingly became, in the words of Herbert Howells, ‘a near revolutionary’. Every conceivable obstacle stood in the way of his success.

In spite of his championship of Three Choirs as a Steward over many years, Parry's father, Thomas Gambier Parry, squire at Highnam Court near Gloucester, would not tolerate music as a profession for his children and forbade his eldest son, Clinton, to pursue it. Following his education at Eton and Oxford, Hubert was obliged against his will to take up a career in insurance and to limit his musical activities to those of an amateur. His first offering to Three Choirs was an Intermezzo religioso (1868(G)) which, in the judgement of the Pall Mall Gazette of 12 September 1868, ‘in no way belied its amateur origin’. In 1877, following seven years at Lloyds Register of Shipping – which ended in financial disaster – he was at last able to take up music as his chosen profession. Meanwhile, in 1873, he had begun regular lessons with the concert pianist Edward Dannreuther, who introduced Parry to the music of Wagner and provided him with free tickets to visit Bayreuth for the first performance of The Ring there in 1876.

Parry returned from Bayreuth aglow with inspiration; but many of the English critics were scathing about the ‘so-called Prophet of the Future, Richard Wagner’. Except for Dannreuther, Parry's friends pilloried him for turning towards ‘the music of the future’ in his own composition. By this time he had also further alienated himself from his father and contemporary society by renouncing Christian doctrine. Even so, uncomfortable isolation was no deterrent from his boldness in choosing a poem by Shelley as the inspiration for his first major choral work.

ALTHOUGH the committees of the Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester Festivals had met together from time to time, usually to discuss financial problems, no satisfactory arrangements had been made for regular meetings and cooperation until 1946. On 14 March in that year, representatives from the three cities met at the deanery in Hereford to discuss a proposition made by the Dean of Gloucester, Dr H. Costley-White. There was, he said, a real need for a central body to advise and assist, financially and otherwise, the diocese holding the Festival. That need became particularly apparent at Hereford in 1946 when a decision had to be made on whether or not to revive the Festival. A new joint advisory body was formed and continued to meet for the next ten years – and financial problems continued to dominate the agenda.

Alarm bells began to ring following Hereford's small deficit in 1952. Then, in 1953, the LSO put the Festival on notice that its charges would be increased by one fifth. Doubts were expressed about the ability of Worcester and Hereford to continue to hold the Festival unless Gloucester was able to provide a subsidy. The Gloucester balance sheet showed a total surplus of L2,870 at the beginning of 1954 (collections for the charity amounted to L1,292 of this) but the total surplus was down L730 on 1950. Worcester had been obliged to make alterations in the programme of the 1954 Festival in the interests of economy, and Hereford was anticipating a loss of as much as L1,000 in 1955.

Under these circumstances the Joint Standing Committee agreed that a reserve fund was essential, and at Gloucester it was recommended that a quarter of the 1953 Festival profits should be placed to a general reserve subject to the other two Festivals agreeing to do the same in their turns.

THE year 1934 robbed English music not only of Sir Edward Elgar but also of Gustav Holst and Frederick Delius. Without Elgar or Holst there was a sense of grievous loss to the musical and social round of Three Choirs, and this was reinforced at the 1934(G) Festival by the additional absence of Vaughan Williams, who had cut his foot while bathing and was suffering from a poisoned abscess.

In 1933(H), Percy Hull, continuing a policy of gradual change, had decided to include Elijah, dropped in 1930(H), but to perform only an abridged version of Messiah. Sumsion, in 1934(G), omitted Elijah but followed Hull's lead by presenting only the abridged Messiah, thus making room on the Friday morning for W. H. Reed's Symphony for Strings, Haydn's Te Deum, and the Brahms Violin Concerto with Jelly d'Aranyi as soloist. In place of Elijah on Tuesday, The Kingdom, conducted by Sumsion, was given ‘In Memoriam Edward Elgar’, followed by Kodály's Psalmus Hungaricus and Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony, conducted by Gordon Jacob in the composer's absence. Other contemporary pieces heard during the week included Summer Music and St Patrick's Breastplate by Arnold Bax; Elegy for strings and Procession by Herbert Howells; Two Ballads for baritone and orchestra by Howard Ferguson, in which Roy Henderson was the soloist; and Cyril B. Rootham's setting of Milton's Ode on the Morning of Christ's Nativity, with Isobel Baillie, Trefor Jones and Roy Henderson joining chorus, semi-chorus and orchestra under the composer's baton.

On Thursday evening, before a performance of Gerontius, G. D. Cunningham, the Organist of Birmingham Town Hall, played Handel's Organ Concerto in F major. When he had finished, ‘an embarrassing gap appeared in the proceedings whilst waiting for the B.B.C. to relay the final part of the programme’. Herbert Sumsion summoned his Assistant Organist, Melville Cook, successor to Arthur Pritchard in 1932:

FOLLOWING the rescue of the Festival by the Duke of Norfolk in 1798, the number of Stewards rose to six, three clerical and three lay, in each city. Even so, rising costs and falling receipts placed an increasingly formidable burden upon these gentlemen. After 1817(G), when receipts exceeded expenditure and the Stewards were able to invest a surplus in consols, the Festival made a loss every year until 1853(G). In 1836 it was rumoured that at a meeting of the Worcester Stewards ‘some good round sums were offered by certain of them to be released from their impending responsibility’. This is hardly surprising: deficits in the previous decade had exceeded L750 per annum, reaching a peak of L1,365 1s. 0d. in 1832(G).

Between 1836 and 1838 three meetings took place at the Episcopal Palace in Worcester of a committee appointed ‘to consider the best means of ensuring a more enlarged and efficient support of the Triennial Musical Festival in Worcester’. The result was the setting up in Worcester of a guarantee fund amounting to L746 in which thirty-two gentlemen and members of the clergy, including the Bishops of Worcester and Rochester and three members of Parliament, agreed to subscribe the whole, or such proportions as necessary, of amounts from L5 to L20 each towards the Worcester Music Meetings. This sum, together with L50 from each of the, by then, eight Stewards was used to defray expenses, the payment from each subscriber being made in proportion to the amount of their subscriptions.

In 1844 a guarantee fund was opened in Gloucester too, but there the preferred method of raising an extra subsidy was to increase the number of Stewards. In 1847 James Henry Brown took over as secretary of the Gloucester Festival. Not only was he a first-class administrator but he also had a gift for attracting men of means and influence to the ranks of the Stewards; in 1853 there were twenty-three, in 1862 fifty-four, and by 1868 there were no fewer than 106.