NEW BOOK BY STANHOPE RETIRED BISHOP
Retired Bishop, David Stancliffe, has published a book, which is available on Amazon.
It was in the late-1950s when David Stancliffe – a future bishop of Salisbury, but then still a
schoolboy – was caught breaking into the organ loft in St Martin’s, Ludgate Hill to play the organ by
the organ-builder himself, Noel Mander. But Mander wasn’t cross. He approved his means of entry –
which left no traces – and put David and his bike in the back of his Volvo and drove him straight off to
look around his organ works in Bethnal Green.
So began a lifetime’s involvement with historic organs and period instruments and, above all, with
the music of Johann Sebastian Bach – and the furious debate, which has raged now for half a
century, about what that music sounded like to him and his eighteenth-century contemporaries.
Since leaving Salisbury in 2010, David has devoted his energies to conducting every one of those
Bach vocal works he never had the chance to perform before. That makes this book not just an
inspirational guide to the debate, it is also a comprehensive companion to Bach’s sacred vocal works
and how to perform them, by an enthusiast and expert who has himself wrestled with practical
issues like where performers should stand and how many there should be.”
Praise for this book:
“David Stancliffe peels Bach with an almost unrivalled combination of musical and theological
experience. He looks forward to Bach from the practices of his predecessors as well as backwards,
from our own assumptions. And he mines his own developing practice throughout the last fifty
years, together with many of the major new discoveries in Bach scholarship and performance..” John
Butt, director of the Dunedin Consort, and Gardiner Professor of Music at Glasgow.
“How we perform Bach has changed radically in the last half century, and continues to change as we
better understand the musical world he took for granted. David Stancliffe‘s fresh and challenging
study opens all kinds of new possibilities for recovering what Bach was aiming to do. Combining the
best of musicological scholarship with the experience of a seasoned practitioner, it will be a vital and
welcome addition to the bookshelf of any musician or musical enthusiast…”Rowan Williams, former
Archbishop of Canterbury and then Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.
“This book is a treasure trove of information about Bach, brilliantly illuminated throughout by the
author’s long experience and special insight interpreting his music and his religious beliefs. The
combination makes this work an invaluable resource for all those who love Bach and his genius…”
Nic McGegan,flautist, harpsichordist and renowned conductor of the baroque.
David Stancliffe, formerly Provost of Portsmouth and then Bishop of Salisbury, is now rather more
of a practising musician. Living in Upper Weardale, he is a Fellow of St Chad’s College, Durham, and
directs small groups of singers and period instruments not only in the Durham area but abroad
under the name od The Bishop’s Consort.
He has a passion for historically informed performance practice and in Bristol in the early 1970s
he founded The Westron Wynd, a small singing group working with the first generation of period
instrument players, with whom he gave what was probably the first performance of the B minor
Mass by an English group on period instruments.
That group performed Bach’s St John Passion, the Christmas Oratorio and the Magnificat together
with a number of cantatas and his own edition of the Monteverdi Vespers in the early 1970s. Over
the years, he has now conducted all of the Bach church cantatas, performing a Bach Passion each
Passiontide since the early 1980s, and the ten-year project to play the yet unperformed (by them)
Bach cantatas is now complete. Research into pitch, scoring and instrumentation, plus live
performances, continues.
Unpeeling Bach: What have we learned over the past 50 years, and how has our performance
practice changed?
by David Stancliffe , The Real Press, April 2025.
