The story of Westminster Abbey's world-renowned musical tradition dates back over one thousand years to its original foundation as a Benedictine monastery in about 959. During the Abbey's five and a half centuries as a monastery, three different and increasingly magnificent churches existed on the site, but one crucial factor remained constant; the opus Dei; the daily Offices and Masses sung by the monks to the glory of God. In the mid thirteenth century King Henry III pulled down King Edward's church and built the present Abbey church in the Gothic style, incorporating a new shrine for the remains of King Edward, who had been canonised and whose tomb had become a significant site of pilgrimage. The Lady Chapel had its own pattern of Offices (or services) which took place in parallel with those in the main Abbey church and began to include more complicated polyphonic music, sung by boys from the Abbey's school together with professional adult singers under the direction of a professional choir master. In this way the seeds of today’s Abbey Choir were sown.

By the time the monastery was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1540 the daily Offices sung by the boys and men of the Lady Chapel choir had been established for many decades. The Abbey’s present choral foundation is provided for in Elizabeth I’s charter of 1560, which established the Collegiate Church of St Peter in Westminster in place of the former monastic structure and granted it the status of a ‘royal peculiar’ (that is, under the immediate authority of the Crown and independent of episcopal control).

Over the centuries since the founding charter, some immensely distinguished musicians have been associated with the Abbey, including Orlando Gibbons (Organist 1623-5), Henry Purcell (1679-95), and John Blow (1669-70 and 1695-1708), and it has been the setting for the first performances of countless works, not least those composed specially for coronations and other great occasions by such figures as Handel, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Howells, Walton and many others.