Gloucester Cathedral

IN THE DETAILS (2)
Glouceser Cathedral is one of our most beautiful buildings, rightly famous for its Norman nave and for its outstanding 14th-century choir. Here is a detail from a part of the building that most visitors overlook. It is part of a window in a tiny chapel off the Lady Chapel – a chapel within a chapel, as it were. The windows in this little space are memorials to the musicians who have worked in the cathedral, men including that most English of composers, Herbet Howells. This window remembers another Herbert, Herbert Sumsion (1899–1995) who was organist and choirmaster at the cathedral for nearly 40 years of his long life. His window, by Fiona Brown, although almost abstract in style, seems to evoke the Gloucestershire scenery that inspired him and his colleagues, with the winding River Severn and the Cotswold Hills beyond. An empty stave follows the line of the hills, waiting to be filled with more music for the cathedral's choir.