1852-1918

1852, Wa­ter­ford, Ire­land.

Jan­u­a­ry 29, 1918, Ep­som, Sur­rey, Eng­land.

Caldbeck at­tend­ed the Na­tion­al Mo­del School, Wa­ter­ford, and Is­ling­ton The­o­lo­gic­al Coll­ege. His hopes of be­com­ing a mis­sion­a­ry were frus­trat­ed by poor health, and he in­stead be­came a school­mas­ter and evan­gel­ist in Ire­land. In 1888, he moved to Lon­don as an in­de­pen­dent itin­er­ant preach­er.

Though Cald­beck is ofte­n shown as the sole com­pos­er of the tune Pax Te­cum, the fol­low­ing is of in­ter­est:

A correspondent in our last is­sue asks for some in­for­ma­tion re­spect­ing Mr. J. T. Cald­beck [sic], whose name ap­pears as the com­pos­er of the tune Pax Te­cum, to the pop­u­lar hymn Peace, Per­fect Peace by the Rev. Dr. E. H. Bick­er­steth, for­mer­ly Lord Bi­shop of Ex­e­ter. This tune first ap­peared in the 1877 edi­tion of the Hym­nal Com­pan­ion to the Book of Com­mon Pray­er, ed­it­ed by the late Mr. J.T. Coop­er. Dr. Charles Vin­cent, one of the ed­it­ors of the new edi­tion of the Hym­nal Com­pan­ion gives the foll­ow­ing par­ti­cu­lars re­spect­ing Mr. Cald­beck and the tune in ques­tion: - My con­nect­ion with the tune is as fol­lows—in 1876 Mr. Bic­ker­steth sent me a man­u­script piece of mu­sic writ­ten by Mr. Cald­beck to the hymn in ques­tion with the re­quest that I would put it in­to shape. I un­der­stood that Mr. Cald­beck was a mis­sion­a­ry in Chi­na who was in the ha­bit of sing­ing the hymn to some mu­sic of his own, but not be­ing an ed­u­cat­ed mu­si­cian, was un­a­ble to write his mel­o­dy in or­din­a­ry no­ta­tion, his man­u­script there­fore was more like a chant drawn out with strokes and hier­o­glyph­i­cal signs than a piece of mu­sic! All I could make out of it was the note he com­menced on was con­tin­ued for sev­er­al words, and if my mem­o­ry is cor­rect, he had set the words of the var­i­ous vers­es to dif­fer­ent mu­sic. I did the best I could with it un­der the some­what un­u­su­al cir­cum­stanc­es, and the re­sult is the tune now so un­i­ver­sal­ly known. In the Pre­face to the Hym­nal Com­pan­ion, the har­m­o­ni­za­tion and ar­range­ment of this tune are cred­i­ted to me. No doubt had I been old­er and more ex­per­i­enced, I should have claimed the au­thor­ship, and my name and not Cald­beck’s would have ap­peared at the head of the tune.

The Organist and Choirmaster, January 15, 1903, p. 212

  1. Pax Te­cum