William Mathias

He is heard by more people in a year than most twentieth-century British composers because of one short piece: the anthem Let the people praise Thee, O God, written for the royal wedding at St Paul's Cathedral on 29 July 1981 and carried live to a television audience across the world. That single commission made a cathedral composer into a name known outside cathedrals.

Whitland, Aberystwyth and the Royal Academy

Mathias began composing as a small child, before he had any formal training in it, and played the piano in public from an early age. He read music at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and then went to the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he studied composition with Lennox Berkeley and piano with Peter Katin. Berkeley is a useful clue to the sound: a British composer with French training, clear textures, sharp rhythm and no interest in fog.

The work that established him was the Dance Overture of 1961, an early opus and still one of the pieces that best explains him in eight minutes. It is bright, metrically restless, built on short repeated cells that shift accent rather than on long-breathed melody, and scored so that the percussion and the brass punctuate rather than thicken. Almost everything he wrote afterwards, sacred or secular, has that rhythmic signature in it.

Bangor, and the North Wales Music Festival

Mathias taught at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, then moved north to the University College of North Wales at Bangor, where he became professor and head of the music department in 1970 and remained until he resigned in 1988 to compose full time. In 1972 he founded the North Wales Music Festival at St Asaph Cathedral and directed it for the rest of his life.

Founding a festival at a cathedral was not incidental to the composing. It gave him a building with an organ and an acoustic, a choir, an annual deadline and a reason to write for those forces every year. A great deal of his choral catalogue exists because there was a service or a festival concert that needed a new piece, which is how church composers have always worked and why their output is counted in dozens of short works rather than in a handful of long ones.

The 1981 anthem, and what it is

Let the people praise Thee, O God, Op. 87, sets words from Psalm 67 for chorus and organ, with orchestra and an optional fanfare of trumpets in its full version. It was commissioned for the marriage of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer at St Paul's Cathedral and performed there on the day. The occasion was broadcast worldwide, which put a new work by a living Welsh composer in front of an audience no concert hall could assemble.

The piece is characteristic rather than exceptional in his output. It opens with the choir in bright, hammered, unmistakably rhythmic declamation, drops to a quiet central section, and returns to the opening material with the brass reinforcing it. What it demonstrates is the practical skill of a cathedral composer: a work that fills a large echoing building, that a good choir can learn in a few rehearsals, and that reads clearly through a microphone. It has stayed in the repertoire of English and Welsh cathedral choirs since.

The catalogue, choral and orchestral

His output divides cleanly, and it is worth separating the two halves because they are performed by different people in different places. The choral and liturgical music is sung weekly by cathedral and parish choirs; the orchestral music is performed by professional orchestras and appears less often.

Why the church music travelled and the symphonies did not

The disparity has a practical cause. A cathedral choir needs new music constantly and can put an eight-minute anthem into a service the week it arrives; an orchestra puts on a symphony perhaps once and then moves on. Mathias wrote fluently for voices and organ, published widely, and his anthems and canticle settings entered choir libraries in Britain, North America and Australia. His symphonies were performed and recorded but never accumulated the same weight of repetition.

That is the ordinary fate of a composer whose gift matched an institution with a weekly appetite. Mathias was appointed CBE in 1985 and continued composing until shortly before his death in 1992, at 57. The last work he completed, the Third Symphony, dates from the year before. The North Wales Music Festival he founded at St Asaph outlived him, which is the sort of memorial a composer who spent his career building institutions might have chosen.

Also in this programme

• Welsh classical musicThe composers, the choirs and the institutions
• Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau: Land of My FathersThe anthem, its author and its music
• The eisteddfodWhat an eisteddfod is, and how the music competition works
• Wales Millennium CentreWhat is inside it, and who works there