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O Sing Unto the

Lord A History of English Church Music

andrew gant

PROFILE BOOKS

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First published in Great Britain in 2015 by PROFILE BOOKS LTD 3 Holford Yard Bevin Way London wc1x 9hd www.profilebooks.com Copyright © Andrew Gant 2015 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Typeset in Caslon by MacGuru Ltd [email protected] Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays, St Ives plc The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 78125 247 5 eISBN 978 1 78283 050 4

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Contents



Prefacevii

1 In the Beginning 1 2 Music for a New Millennium 15 3 The Fifteenth Century: Possibilities and Promise 37 4 Keeping your Head: The Approach of the Reformation, 1509–154757 5 The Children of Henry VIII: Reformation and CounterReformation, 1547–1558 77 6 Church Music and Society in Elizabeth’s England, 1558–1603 105 7 Plots, Scots, Politics and the Beauty of Holiness, 1603–1645 151 8 Interregnum, 1644–1660 180 9 Restoration, 1660–1714 188 10 The Enlightenment, 1712–1760 223 11 West Galleries and Wesleys, Methodists and Mendelssohn, 1760–1850249 12 Renewal, 1837–1901 285 13 Composers from S. S. Wesley to Elgar, 1830–1934 311 14 The Splintering of the Tradition, 1914–2015 332 Epilogue 373 Notes378 Further investigations404 Acknowledgements412 Illustration credits413 Index415

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February. A packed football ground in England. The match is tense. The ref gives a free kick. The crowd stamps and jeers and shouts, a song swells and stirs from the stands: A freez ing S at u rday in

… you’re too fat, you’re too fat, You’re too fat to re-fe-reeeeee! You’re too fat to referee!

The tune is a hymn. The words are not. How do these fans know this tune? Are they all church-goers? Do they sing in male-voice choirs? Are they all secretly Welsh? Probably not. But they do know ‘Cwm Rhondda’. Church music turns up in some surprising places. Its tunes, the sound of voices singing together, those familiar words: these things reach deeper into our shared folk memory than any other kind of music. It is an older and more continuous tradition than the symphony, the opera or the pop song. It is more fundamentally English than any of these. It is the music we learned first, around the school piano and at end-of-term concerts. It’s the only kind of music we all do (almost everybody has sung a Christmas carol or a hymn at some time), and we reach for its familiar associations at important shared moments of our lives – weddings, funerals, rugby matches – whether or not we believe · vii ·

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the words, or understand them, or have ever given them a moment’s thought. English church music exists in two different overlapping traditions: art music, for trained professionals; and a species of folk music – tunes, basically – for everyone. And, in its many and various guises, it remains enduringly, perhaps surprisingly, popular. The music of Eric Whitacre and Karl Jenkins tops the classical charts, unheard of for new work. Discs of early choral music sell throughout the world, including in those countries where the indigenous tradition could hardly be more alien. BBC Radio 3’s Choral Evensong is the longest-running continuous radio series ever, and is still going strong. A recording of Thomas Tallis’s Spem in alium achieves huge sales (partly through being used in the film Fifty Shades of Grey to accompany a close encounter of the steamy kind. Nobody knows for certain the kind of event for which Tallis wrote the piece, but presumably it wasn’t that). In one of its other guises, church music charts the contours of English history. Religious movements, which have done so much to shape our national character, are represented in music, from the ornate mysteries of the Latin Mass to the fripperies of the Restoration anthem, from stern Puritan hymns and confident Victorian bombast to the more fractured, complex world-view of the twentieth century. Great political events leave their mark in music: a battle or a plot swaps a couple of monarchs around, and the Almighty is hymned for His wisdom in engaging the right management here on earth. On a dayto-day level, the practice of church music holds a mirror up to society: who heard it, and who didn’t; who was allowed to make it, and who wasn’t; who taught it, and how; who paid for it, and why. And English church music exists in such a variety of forms, ushering into the light the people who knelt to hear it in so many places: the scholar in his college, the nobleman at household prayers, the recu­ sant in her country house and the Digger in the field, the choirboy in his cassock, and the peasant in the parish with his serpent and his viol. Their music allows us to hear them talking to each other and to their God, as no written text can. No art form gets closer to their soul, · viii ·

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because they knew when they made it that their soul depended on the honesty and integrity of this particular form of art. This history makes no attempt to be exhaustive; rather it seeks to identify certain themes and threads and allows one or two careers to represent a theme and one or two works to represent a career. Motifs and ideas recur through the ages like a favourite twist of melody – how ‘art’ music differs from ‘parish’ music and why; the debate between those who think fancy music gets in the way of the words and those who just like singing; the church as employer and patron; how genius works. Central to the story of church music are its people – the choirboy, the parish clerk, the publisher; its texts – the eternal resonance of the book of psalms; its social function – choirs as a way to meet your girlfriend or count your peasants; and its ideas – the Reformation, the Enlightenment, education. Some questions keep on turning up in every generation: should you let secular forms like folk-songs, dance rhythms and instruments into church? Does English music like, or need, foreigners? To what extent has our tradition has been able to embrace those of other creeds and none (even Richard Dawkins, self-appointed high priest of public atheism, finds beauty here1). And a little light theology: who gets to sing to the English God? A priest? A chorister? Or can you do it yourself ? These arguments have rumbled through the centuries – and still do. The phrase ‘English church music’ needs a little unpicking too. Which church? Who counts as ‘English’? And quite a lot of ‘church’ music was never meant to be sung in church at all. So, for the purposes of this history, the phrase is taken to mean the music of Christian denominations in England, occasionally visiting other shores where the tradition has notable antecedents or offshoots. ‘Church music’ means music used in an act of worship, whether that act takes place in a church or not. Thus the Masses of William Byrd (emphatically music for worship but illegal in an actual church) are included, while Handel’s sacred oratorios (created for a paying audience in a theatre) are not. So this is a history not just of the music itself, but of the people who made it. It is an attempt to track public events and official doctrine, and the soundtrack that goes with them. It is the story of the part that · ix ·

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church music has played in ordinary lives, and the way it reflects those lives back to us. It’s the biography of a tradition. A book about people, and a story of England.

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1

In the Beginning

Hymnum canamus gloriae

A nd did those feet,

Bede

in ancient time, walk upon England’s

mountains green? Probably not. But the story that Jesus Christ came to these islands with his uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, in search of a cheap source of tin, proved enduringly popular. Shakespeare and Blake both mention it. It may even hover somewhere behind the versions of the folk-song ‘I saw three ships’, in which the singer sits ‘under a sycamore tree’ watching the Saviour sail up the English Channel. There are no sycamores in Bethlehem. There was plenty of music in early worship. The psalms are full of it. ‘Praise him in the sound of the trumpet: praise him upon the lute and harp’, commands Psalm 150 in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer translation. This is the music Jesus himself, and maybe even Moses, would have known. There was singing too. Liturgy, or formal worship, was chanted. The disciples sang what the King James Bible calls ‘an hymn’ at the Last Supper.1 Every generation has, to some extent, used sacred music in this kind of intimate, domestic context. · 1 ·

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Evidence about the actual music of the earliest churches has to be gleaned from hints and accounts. One such hint lies in the way sacred texts were written down. Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch notes that ‘the contrast between Judaism, the religion of the scroll, and Christianity, the religion of the book, would have been evident in their liturgies when the codex of scripture was used as a performed chanted text’.2 Copies of the Greek gospels from around 200 pick out the sacred name of Jesus in a special kind of abbreviation, which may imply a particular way of singing. What this music sounded like remains a matter of the purest speculation. But having to imagine it surely serves to make it sound richer and more compelling. It’s like the old idea that the pictures are better on the radio. Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter. We can get another hint from working backwards from what has survived. There is a church in Aleppo which, MacCulloch says, ‘is likely to represent a living tradition from the oldest known musical perform­ ance in Christian history’.3 Its musicians are the descendants of a worshipping community from Edessa, now in Turkey, which created a unique repertory of hymns and chant from around the turn of the third century and was forced across the border into Syria in the 1920s. If the tradition does finally fall victim to the latest outbreak of appalling violence in the region, it would not be the first time church music has been the casual, incidental victim of a wider tragedy. Recordings of this music can be heard online. To modern ears, it sounds like nothing so much as the chanting of Eastern Orthodox churches, or even of the muezzins of Islam. This is because it pre-dates the great schism of Christianity into its Western and Eastern branches in 1054. The musical fallout of this divide was that the Western part embraced Latin chant and the pipe organ while the East did not. In its earliest centuries, the music of the Christian world may perhaps have sounded more ‘eastern’ than ‘western’. One of the intriguing results of approaching music from the other end, as it were, is that it can make music which we normally consider early, even primitive, sound amazingly sophisticated and modern. Ninth- and tenth-century plainsong sounds smoothly learned and refined after listening to the music of Edessa, like walking through the airy spaces of a great Gothic cathedral · 2 ·

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after banging your head in a catacomb or on the ceiling of a cell in a Celtic beehive, somewhere off the coast of Ireland. Celtic Christians were a determined breed. One of their saints, Ia, apparently sailed from Ireland to Cornwall on a leaf. They built their characteristic beehive-shaped stone huts in places like Skellig Michael, a rocky island overlooking the Irish Atlantic coast, in around the sixth century, within a couple of hundred years of the Roman Emperor ­Constantine’s conversion and adoption of Christianity as the official religion of his empire in the early fourth century. The music of these men and women – Ninian, Patrick, Columba, Brendan and Bride – was Celtic chant, a body of single-lined songs, with texts in Latin. Nothing survives of this repertoire, but the wealth of religious artefacts and objects from the period makes it clear that this was a sophisticated worshipping community which valued beauty in worship and had the skills to create it. Among their relics are bells, the earliest surviving instruments of church music, used for the swearing of oaths as well as playing. Pioneering, too, was their use of religious communities, for both men and women (separately), their remote outposts the ante­ cedents of the monasteries and nunneries whose walls would later bear witness to so much of the history of English church music. Among the first church musicians in these islands were fourthcentury Irish monks, their names long since lost to us, bellowing bad Latin into the wind with a West Scots accent, clutching a Celtic cross and huddling in their stone Atlantic eyries. These places are among the most evocative in Christianity, closer in spirit to the menhirs and mounds of Brittany than to the smooth, modern comforts brought over by the Normans. During the sixth and seventh centuries, the peoples who became known as the Anglo-Saxons encountered Christianity from two directions: from Celts like Columba and Aidan in Iona and Lindisfarne to the north; and, to the south, from a certain gentleman arrived from Rome, St Augustine. In 664 the Synod of Whitby set out to reconcile the two approaches. It was mostly concerned with working out how to find a date for Easter (and is thus responsible for plumping for one confusing formula rather · 3 ·

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than the other, which has messed up the school holidays once a year from that day to this), but its lasting legacy for music was in establishing the idea that the rules of the liturgy were those laid down in Rome. Music had a superstructure against which it could flourish like the green bay-tree for the next 900 years. The fruit which it brought forth in due season was the continuing growth of plainsong. Plainsong gives us our very first written-down musical notes, which probably date from around the ninth century. Before that, the style and colour of musical worship can best be imagined from other surviving artefacts. Christ is a long poem written in the ninth century by a shadowy figure who signed himself ‘Cynewulf ’ and it deals with key themes and events in the Christian narrative, including Advent, the Nativity and the Ascension, freely mixing already well-established liturgical texts like the great ‘O’ Antiphons with the voices of Mary and Joseph to create a solemn, almost impressionistic, epic drama. Christ has replaced Arthur as the hero-figure of myth and legend. It is good to imagine these words sung around a great fire in a dark hall, perhaps to the accompaniment of some kind of harp. Like the disciples, the Angles and the Saxons didn’t just sing sacred music in church. Among more obviously liturgical texts of the period, The Book of Kells of c.800 and the Lindisfarne Gospels of c.700 are artefacts of lavish beauty. The worshipping communities which took so much care over these works of liturgical art would surely have poured as much skill and devotion into how they were used. The Alfred Jewel of the late ninth century is the gold head of an aestel, or pointer, one of seven sent by King Alfred to each of his bishops, along with a copy of Pope G ­ regory’s book Pastoral Care, telling them ‘I command, in God’s name, that no man take the staff from the book, nor the book from the church’.4 Ceremonial pointers of this kind remain in use in other traditions, for example Judaism. Perhaps we can be forgiven for picturing Alfred’s bishops also using them to sing from another book sent over from Rome by Gregory – the Latin psalms. in church at all? Liturgy is a form of theatre: speech, delivered according to certain rules in order to heighten W hy do people sing

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and enhance the response of the listener. Often this is to substantial crowds in large buildings, or in the open air. The earliest preachers, men of the road like St Paul, would have experimented with finding the particular pitch and resonance of their own voice which worked best, settling on or around a single pitch – singing, in effect. Think of a parade-ground sergeant major, or Martin Luther King in a town square – their voices have a rise and fall which can easily be notated in music. Ralph Vaughan Williams described the phenomenon in a letter to an academic anthropologist with an interest in speech and music, Dr Charles Myers: I am glad you think that song (at all events) came through excited speech. I once heard a Gaelic preacher … and when he got excited he recited on a fixed succession of notes:

Now this … is the starting point for many British Folksongs.5

And the starting point, too, for plainsong, and for the same reasons. Looked at from this perspective, English church music is almost a naturally occurring phenomenon, the melodious flowering of ‘excited speech’. It is built on the rise and fall of the language in the same way that its ancient churches emerge out of the stone and grass and air of its pleasant pastures and mountains green. When Augustine arrived from Rome in 597 (coincidentally, the same year Columba died, 600 miles to the north), a process began of consolidating Christianity in the British archipelago into something disciplined and based on Rome. Musically, this meant Gregorian plainsong, and the process was to take more than half a millennium, culminating in the complex, forbidding glories of the Sarum Rite, or Use of Sarum, in the eleventh century. Plainsong is a codified collection of monodic (that is, single-lined) tunes, each associated with a particular text. The music is based on a series of scales known as modes, which were given Greek names (Phrygian, Dorian, Mixolydian, etc.) in acknowledgement of the fact that this · 5 ·

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was partly an attempt to recreate the lost music of classical antiquity.6 The very earliest musical notation has noteheads known as ‘neumes’ but no stave lines, and thus indicates when the melody moves up or down, but not by how much or the precise pitches or intervals. This form of notation is probably a kind of memory aid, shorthand for a tune which the singer already knew and was singing from memory. When staves did begin to be used, they had four lines. Rhythm is not indicated: the flow of the music comes from the Latin words. Some schools of plainsong have a variety of elaborate squiggles and marks above and below the musical line, which presumably indicate some kind of interpret­ ative instruction, but their exact meaning continues to elude even the most patient modern scholars and performers. Clefs give relative, but not absolute, pitch, telling the singer where the tones and semitones of the particular mode fit on the four lines of the stave, but not the actual starting note, which was given out by a cantor or chorus-leader. Like folk music, the same musical characteristics seem to spring up independently in monodic chant in different places. What differed was the precise liturgical application of music to words, which in turn affected the structure of the music rather than its actual sound: if a particular prayer is repeated in the Celtic rite, this will create a ‘refrain’ in its music which may not be present in another liturgy. There is something elemental about plainsong. It is almost as if it is a naturally occurring phenomenon, which is why its music has been successfully incorporated – uninjured – into later compositions of all possible styles by composers of all possible kinds, and used in all manner of different contexts. Search the web today and you will find recordings of plainsong made by modern monks, marketed as a kind of spiritual sedative in response to New Age ideas or research into the production of alpha-waves in the brain. How different from the home life of St Benedict and his followers. T his was the m u sical world which Augustine inhabited when he picked his way across the sand and shingle of the Isle of Thanet one grey Kentish dawn, no doubt wondering, like Caesar before him, why anyone would leave the Mediterranean sunshine for this.

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