Parry: Songs of Farewell

As a schoolboy at Eton in the 1860s, Parry was very much alive to the traditions of part-singing—the glee, madrigal and part-song — that had become increasingly popular in Britain since the middle of the eighteenth centuries. Though the popular entertainment genre of the glee had, by his time, run its course as a subject of composition, it was still a style of music that was widely sung by many vocal societies and choral unions. It was, however, the ‘madrigal’ and the ‘part-song’ that were emerging as more important foci.