Richard Browne

Richard Browne was an English composer and organist who worked in London at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth. He died in Lambeth, in the London area, and was buried on 21 May 1710. Sources associate him above all with parish and school music in the capital, as well as with the production of catches and glees.

In March 1686 he was engaged as organist of the parish of St Lawrence Jewry, after a one-year probationary period while the organ, built by Renatus Harris, was being constructed. Two years later, in 1688, he was also appointed music master at the nearby Christ's Hospital, a post in which he was required to compose the Easter psalms sung by the pupils. His relationship with the institution was turbulent: the minutes record complaints about his conduct and his treatment of the children, and in 1697 he was dismissed for negligence, although he went on to apply for the post again. Meanwhile, in 1701 he also took on the organ at St Mary, in Lambeth, and he kept both positions until his death, despite complaints from both parishes about his absences and his use of deputies.

His reputation rests chiefly on his catches and songs, many with his own words, published in anthologies such as Playford's The Second Book of the Pleasant Musical Companion and Vinculum societatis. As a composer of psalms for Christ's Hospital, he introduced a style closer to the anthems of the day than to the traditional melodies of his predecessors. Among his most popular catches are Come, boy, light a faggot and I, Thomas of Bedford. His legacy is that of a practical and occasional musician, whose work survived mainly in the English social music repertoire.