Arthur Bliss thought Bliss's music competent but unremarkable. In 1961, Bliss and Hassall collaborated on a cantata, "The Beatitudes", commissioned for the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral. Reviews were friendly, but the work has rarely been performed since, and has been eclipsed by another choral work written for Coventry at the same time, Britten's "War Requiem". Bliss followed this with two further large-scale choral works, "Mary of Magdala" (1962) and "The Golden Cantata" (1963). Throughout his life, Bliss was vigilant on the state of music in Britain, about which he had written extensively since the 1920s. In 1969 he publicly censured
Russian Christmas Music and "Cathedral Chorus" for a younger, less experienced band. The song is also the official corps song of the Crossmen Drum and Bugle Corps. Russian Christmas Music Russian Christmas Music is a musical piece for symphonic band, written by Alfred Reed in 1944. It is one of the most frequently performed pieces of concert band literature. Reed was commissioned to write a piece of "Russian music" for a concert in Denver, Colorado. The concert's aim was to improve Soviet-American relations; as such, it was to include premieres of new Soviet and American works. Prokofiev's "March, Op. 99" was supposed to