William Boyce (1711 â?? 1779) was an English composer and organist. Like Beethoven later on, he became deaf but continued to compose. He knew Handel, Arne, Gluck, Bach, Abel, and a very young Mozart, all of whom respected his work. Boyce was born in London, at Joiners Hall, then in Lower Thames Street, to John Boyce, at the time a joiner and cabinet-maker, and beadle of the Worshipful Company of Joiners and Ceilers, and his wife Elizabeth Cordwell. He was baptised on 11 September 1711 and was admitted by his father as a choirboy at St Paul's Cathedral in 1719. After his voice broke in 1727, he studied music with Maurice Greene.

His work as a composer began in the 1730s, writing songs for Vauxhall Gardens. In 1736 he was named as composer to the Chapel Royal and wrote the oratorio David's Lamentation over Saul and Jonathan. He was engaged as conductor to the Three Choirs Festival in 1737; many of his works, including the Worcester Overture (today known as his Symphony no. 8), will have been premiered at the Festival over the succeeding years. The 1740s saw his opera Peleus and Thetis, the serenata Solomon, and his Secular Masque, to a libretto by John Dryden. In 1749 he wrote an ode and the anthem O be joyful to celebrate the installation of the Duke of Newcastle as Chancellor of Cambridge University, and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Music. In 1747 he had published his first purely instrumental composition, a set of "Twelve Sontas for Two Violins and a Bass" and these proved popular. Charles Burney wrote that they were "not only in constant use, as Chamber music, in private concerts ... but in our theatres, as act-tunes [i.e. intermezzi] and public gardens, as favourite pieces, during many years."

Boyce was largely forgotten after his death and he remains a little-performed composer today, although a number of his pieces were rediscovered in the 1930s and Constant Lambert edited and sometimes conducted his works. Lambert had already launched the early stages of the modern Boyce revival in 1928, when he published the first modern edition of the Eight Symphonies (Bartlett and Bruce 2001). The great exception to this neglect was his church music, which was edited after his death by Philip Hayes and published in two large volumes, Fifteen Anthems by Dr Boyce in 1780 and A Collection of Anthems and a Short Service in 1790 (Bartlett 2003, 54).

Church choral music saw a revival in the 1830s and 1840s, under the influences of the Tractarians, the Cambridge Camden Society, and the financial changes carried out under the "Dean and Chapter Act" (the Ecclesiastical Commissioners Act 1840). A new edition of Boyce's works as Cathedral Music, edited by Joseph Warren, appeared in 1849.

Source: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Boyce_(composer) )

Although originally composed for Chorus (SSATB), I created this arrangement of "O where shall wisdom be found?" for Winds (Flute, Oboe, French Horn & Bassoon) & Strings (2 Violins, Viola & Cello).