ABSTRACT
Following a proposal by Arthur Coleridge, Charles Villiers Stanford was unanimously elected at an annual salary of 100 guineas. Stanford had been appointed in 1883 as a professor of composition at the newly formed Royal College of Music. He proposed to make good the deficiency by the introduction of students from the Royal College of Music under the rule which permitted the appointment of up to twenty honorary performing members in each season. Stanford consulted Grove about an appropriate text and he suggested Hamish Hamilton's Ode at a Solemn Music, a poem already known to Hubert Parry. The final concert of the season on 12 May 1888 was noteworthy as Stanford's first performance with the choir of the Mass in B minor. On 5 March 1889, Stanford inaugurated a policy, followed for the rest of his period as Musical Director, of devoting one programme in each season entirely to the works of J. S. Bach.
