New history of music at St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne

Ian Burk, author of “Goodbye ’til next time”: A Critical Biography of A.E. Floyd (Lyrebird, 2012) has recently published The Winds of Change: The Music at St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne 1947–1973 (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2021). Floyd, born in Birmingham in 1877, was organist and choirmaster at St Paul’s from 1915 to 1947 and was succeeded by Colin Campbell Ross. Burk has also written about Floyd’s predecessor at the cathedral, Ernest Wood, in Ernest Wood and the Foundation of the Musical Tradition at St Paul’s Cathedral, Melbourne (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2016). Altogether then, he has mapped the history of music at the cathedral from Wood’s appointment in 1888 until the end of Lance Hardy’s in 1973, only four men having been the cathedral organist in almost 100 years.