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For as long as people have worshipped together, music has played a key role in church life. Here, Andrew Gant offers a fascinating history of English church music, from the Latin chant of late antiquity to the great proliferation of styles seen in contemporary repertoires.
The ornate complexity of pre-Reformation Catholic liturgies revealed the exclusive nature of this form of worship. By contrast, simple English psalms, set to well-known folk songs, summed up the aims of the Reformation with its music for everyone. The Enlightenment brought hymns, the Methodists and Victorians a new delight in the beauty and emotion of worship. Today, church music mirrors our multifaceted worldview, embracing the sounds of pop and jazz along with the more traditional music of choir and organ. And reflecting its truly global reach, the influence of English church music can be found in everything from masses sung in Korean to American Sacred Harp singing.
From medieval chorales to “Amazing Grace,” West Gallery music to Christmas carols, English church music has broken through the boundaries of time, place, and denomination to remain familiar and cherished everywhere. O Sing unto the Lord is the biography of a tradition, a book that “celebrates the sheer pleasure of raising a joyful sound to the Lord” (The Guardian).
“What, fundamentally, is the function of church music, and why have clerical authorities often been suspicious of how much attention music receives? Gant engages these questions in intelligent, energetic prose.” —Publishers Weekly
“Excellent . . . this authoritative and engaging history brings so much light and warmth to the subject.” —Sunday Times
“The beauty of relating Christian history this way is that it broadens the focus to include the listening laity, not just the clergy or the church establishment.” —Foreword Reviews
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226469768 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2022 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 465 |
| Sales rank: | 483,010 |
| File size: | 20 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
O Sing Unto the Lord
A History of English Church Music With a New Preface
By Andrew Gant
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2017 Andrew GantAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-46976-8
CHAPTER 1
In the Beginning
Hymnum canamus gloriae
Bede
AND DID THOSE FEET, 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. Every generation has, to some extent, used sacred music in this kind of intimate, domestic context.
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'. 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 performance in Christian history'. 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. Ninthand 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 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 antecedents 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 fourth-century 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 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 Gregory'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'. 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.
WHY DO PEOPLE SING in church at all? Liturgy is a form of theatre: speech, delivered according to certain rules in order to heighten 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.
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 was partly an attempt to recreate the lost music of classical antiquity. 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 interpretative 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.
THIS WAS THE MUSICAL 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.
He found fertile ground. The historian Bede wrote up Augustine's peregrinations in the engaging Latin of his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (The Ecclesiastical History of the English People), completed in 731. Bede brought his cast of nobles, natives, clergy and soldiers brilliantly to life. Occasionally they break into song. Book II of the Ecclesiastical History thrills its readers with tales of Picts and storms and drownings and beheadings, then introduces us to a rather calmer character called James, a deacon of York: '... who, because he was such an expert in singing in church, brought peace once again to the province and increased the numbers of the faithful, and also, as a master of the church, many singers after the customs of Rome and Canterbury began to exist'. For James, church music was part of the training and daily practice of the educated, middle-ranking priest.
Bede described an exchange of questions and answers between Augustine and Pope Gregory I, who sent him to England. Bede cast the exchange as an entertaining master–pupil dialogue in the Socratic manner, and we learn about the instructions for the ordering of Christian life in Britain which Gregory has given his envoy. Regular liturgy, with music, was part of it.
By Bede's own time, a century after Augustine arrived, the musical component of monastic life was well established. In around 679–80, Benedict Biscop, abbot of Wearmouth and Jarrow, made his fourth visit to Rome. One of his particular requests to the Pope was for the services of an experienced choirmaster, and he returned with a man called John, formerly chief cantor of St Peter's and abbot of the monastery of St Martin. John set about teaching the monks of Wearmouth how to sing in the Roman manner. Much of his teaching was preserved in the monastery library, where he became known as John the Archchanter.
Bede was born on land belonging to the Wearmouth monastery. In 680, at the age of seven, he was entrusted to the care of Biscop, the abbot. His duties certainly included singing. In 685, plague reduced the musical strength of the monastery to Bede – by now around thirteen years old – and his teacher Ceolfrith. For a week the two of them struggled through the daily psalms, their voices a ragged octave apart, but couldn't manage the antiphons which went with them. After a week, Ceolfrith could 'bear it no longer', and he and his young protégé 'with no little labour' built up the regular cycle of chanted services with a group of new colleagues. The music of Wearmouth, so nearly stilled by the plague, continued on its daily round.
Over the next few centuries, the British churches held a series of meetings at which they regularised their practice in all sorts of areas, including music. The second Council of Clovesho of 747 decreed 'That all the most sacred Festivals of Our Lord ... in the method of chanting, shall be celebrated in one and the same way, namely, according to the sample which we have received in writing from the Roman Church. And also, throughout the course of the whole year, the festivals of the Saints are to be kept on one and the same day, with their proper psalmody and chant, according to the Martyrology of the same Roman Church.' Another canon of this Council described the round of daily services or 'hours', at which the monks 'must not dare to sing or read anything not sanctioned by the general use, but only that which ... the usage of the Roman Church allows'.
Several key pillars of the musical superstructure are in place here: the monastic setting; the liturgy repeating in daily, weekly and annual cycles of greater and lesser elaboration; authority from Rome, brought back to these islands by men like Biscop, on regular trips south. This architecture would continue to support and nurture English church music and echo to some of its most creative glories until Henry VIII brought it petulantly to the ground.
The next stage was the growth and further standardisation of monasticism, albeit with occasionally variable levels of worldliness and standards of devotion and observance. The most numerous, widespread and influential monastics were the Benedictines. Benedictines are not an order with a central authority: each house of men or women is an autonomous community whose members have chosen to live by the 'Rule' of St Benedict.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from O Sing Unto the Lord by Andrew Gant. Copyright © 2017 Andrew Gant. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Preface to the American Edition1 In the Beginning
2 Music for a New Millennium
3 The Fifteenth Century: Possibilities and Promise
4 Keeping Your Head: The Approach of the Reformation, 1509–1547
5 The Children of Henry VIII: Reformation and Counter-Reformation, 1547–1558
6 Church Music and Society in Elizabeth’s England, 1558–1603
7 Plots, Scots, Politics and the Beauty of Holiness, 1603–1645
8 Interregnum, 1644–1660
9 Restoration, 1660–1714
10 The Enlightenment, 1712–1760
11 West Galleries and Wesleys, Methodists and Mendelssohn, 1760–1850
12 Renewal, 1837–1901
13 Composers from S. S. Wesley to Elgar, 1830–1934
14 The Splintering of the Tradition, 1914–2015
Epilogue
Notes
Further investigations
Acknowledgements
Illustration credits
Index
