How was large-scale music directed or conducted in Britain before baton conducting took hold in the 1830s?

The eight verse anthems in this edition constitute the only full scores of works in Blow's hand that survive in this abundant genre. The scores are located in two manuscripts that are now parts of the collections at Christ Church, Oxford, and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. The Oxford manuscript includes five anthems from the 1670s, and each displays a variety of structural and musical-rhetoric procedures, making them ideal representatives of Blow's multifaceted early style. The Cambridge manuscript dates from ca. 1704 and contains three late works on a much larger scale. As a group, the later anthems require considerably greater virtuosity from the solo singers, and individual verse sections grow both longer and more numerous. As representative examples within a much larger repertoire, the works selected for this edition help to reveal important facets in the career of the first person to hold the title, Composer of the Chapel Royal.