Alexander Robert Reinagle

Alexander Robert Reinagle was an English organist, teacher, composer, and compiler of church music, born at Brighton in 1799 into a musical family. He studied with his father, the cellist and composer Joseph Reinagle, and with Raynor Taylor. Reinagle spent much of his professional life in Oxford, where he served as organist of St. Peter-in-the-East from the 1820s until 1853 and became known as a music teacher. He also worked in theatre music and wrote instructional material for stringed instruments.

His publications included Psalm Tunes for the Voice and Pianoforte in the 1830s and A Collection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes around 1840. These collections placed him within the expanding nineteenth-century English tradition of metrical psalmody and hymn-tune publication. He married the pianist, composer, and writer Caroline Orger in 1846 and remained active in Oxford musical life before retiring to Kidlington, Oxfordshire, where he died in 1877.

Reinagle's most enduring congregational contribution is the common-meter tune ST. PETER, named for the Oxford church where he served. Published in the 1830s and later carried into influential hymnals, it has been paired with numerous texts, especially How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds. Its continued reuse illustrates how a durable hymn tune can acquire a life far beyond the text for which it was first printed.