Kenneth Shenton writes:
THE hymn-tune writer Peter Cutts was one of the finest of the many musicians produced by the University of Cambridge in the immediate years after the Second World War.
Born in Birmingham on 4 June 1937, Peter Warwick Cutts was educated at King Edward’s School. After National Service, he was organ scholar at Clare College, Cambridge, from which he moved to Mansfield College, Oxford, to study theology. It was there that he met one of the great influences on his life, the college chaplain, composer, and leading commentator on hymnology Dr Erik Routley. It was Routley whose words first provided the inspiration for one of Cutts’s best-known hymn tunes, Bridegroom. It was also while at Mansfield that Cutts met a fellow student, Brian Wren, with whom he worked on Wren’s first published collection: Faith Looking Forward: The hymns and songs of Brian Wren.
Cutts began his professional career in 1963 as a lecturer at what was then Huddersfield College of Technology. In 1968, he was appointed Director of Music at Bretton Hall College of Higher Education.
After taking early retirement, in 1989, he moved to the United States, where he was appointed Director of Music at Newton Theological College, in Massachusetts. He also played at several churches, including Newton Highlands Congregational Church. He was a fine organist, whose playing was colourful, and an enthusiast of the music for both Bach and Hindemith.
While he was a student, Cutts had joined the Hymn Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and attended the Dunblane Consultations that explored the future of hymnody. In January 1963, he and the Revd Ian Mackenzie were appointed joint musical directors of the Quadrennial Congress of the Student Christian Movement, held in Bristol, which attracted more than 1000 participants. Hymn-singing had long been a feature of these gatherings, and now it became a primary focus at every session. It was for this event that Cutts composed Claritas, his distinctive vision for Charles Wesley’s “Love divine, all loves excelling”.
As a leading contemporary hymn-composer, Cutts undoubtedly displayed both the widest musical vocabulary and the keenest eye for the subtleties of a modern text. He was music editor of New Church Praise, and his works are included in a wide range of publications, from 100 Hymns for Today to English Praise and the Anglo-Chinese Hymns of Universal Praise.
Styles of Cutts’s tunes vary from the bold muscular angularity of Shillingford and Sanbornton to the gentler lyricism of Uppsala. The early Bridegroom has retained a particular popularity, often being paired with a wide variety of texts. Cutts later expanded it into a more extended work for SATB and organ to words by Carl Daw Jnr. No less impressive is a setting of James Quinn’s adaptation of a traditional Irish prayer, “Christ Beside Me”, again for SATB and organ.
In 2005, the year he returned to England, Cutts was given the task of revising and updating Routley’s seminal text, An English-Speaking Hymnal Guide.
Peter Cutts died on 26 January, aged 86.
