Robert Carver (composer)

Robert Carver (ca.1485 – ca.1570) was a Scottish Renaissance monk and composer of Christian sacred music.

He spent much of his life at Scone Abbey in Perthshire and is regarded as Scotland's greatest sixteenth-century composer. He is best known for his sacred choral music, of which there are five surviving masses and two surviving motets. The works that can definitely be attributed to him can be found in the Carver Choirbook, previously known as the Scone Antiphonary, held in the National Library of Scotland. These include the mass L’homme armé and his motet for 19 voices, O bone Jesu.

His work, noted for the gradual build-up of ideas towards a resolution in the final passages, is still performed and recorded today. Unusually, Carver was influenced by continental Europe, and his surviving music differs greatly from that produced by many of his contemporaries in Scotland or England at the time.

He was the subject of the 1991 BBC radio play Carver by John Purser, which won one of the Giles Cooper Awards for that year.

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