Caleb Simper

Caleb Simper (12 September 1856 – 28 August 1942) was an English composer and church organist. He gained fame for his prolific output of choral cantatas, anthems and organ works, which were widely performed and sold in their millions. His straightforward, sometimes simplistic and over sentimental style was written with amateur performance in mind, and can be compared to that of his close contemporary, John Henry Maunder. Career Simper was born in the village of Barford St Martin, Wiltshire, the son of a shoemaker. After a period in Worcester, where he worked in a music shop that was owned by the Elgar family. He moved in the 1890s to Barnstaple where he spent the remainder of his active life working as a composer, and as choirmaster and organist at St Mary Magdalene's Church. He produced a prodigious amount of Anglican church music and organ pieces, written in an unsophisticated, popular style and aimed at small parish choirs and unskilled organists. Although ignored if not derided by critics, his anthems in particular became widely popular and were sold by his publisher under the slogan "Sung throughout the civilized world". He composed over 160 anthems under his own name and many others under the pseudonym of Edwyn A Clare. Over five million copies had been sold by the 1920s and a few works remain in print today, though Simper's musical style has long since fallen from fashion. Amongst Simper's larger works are the cantatas, The Rolling Seasons (1897) and The Nativity of Christ (1898). He also wrote somewhere in the region of 200 pieces of organ music and several miscellaneous works such as The Silver Clarion, a march which exists in a version for organ and a version for pianoforte. His publisher was A. Weekes and Co. Ltd, whose catalogue was eventually acquired by Stainer & Bell. Some works were published in tonic sol-fa notation.