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2. The Victorian Musical Inheritance

Very little is known about music in England prior to the eleventh century, though there is some evidence from the late seventh century that boys, some as young as seven, were recruited to monastic communities to assist in the chanting of the services and to prepare for the day when they would themselves take religious vows. Gregorian chant, once thought to have been imported from Rome by St Augustine and his fellow missionaries, is now believed to be a fusion of Roman and Northern European chants which took place in the late eighth or early ninth century. The Viking invasions of these centuries put paid to the monasteries, but the mission of the church in Saxon England continued in some places from minster churches. There communities of clergy, sometimes led by a bishop, sang Mass, Mattins and Vespers daily and some of their number undertook missionary and pastoral work in the district, often over a fairly wide area.

During the tenth century monasticism was reintroduced from the continent and once more boys were admitted as singers and oblates. But two centuries later this practice ceased, as it came to be regarded as undesirable that they should be drawn into the religious life so early. The collegiate cathedrals, differentiated from those served by religious (mainly Benedictine) communities, recruited boys to share in their worship and made alternative arrangements for their education in what became the first choir schools. The education provided was, however, often poor and sometimes virtually non-existent.

By this time significant developments were taking place in the composition of music. The earliest surviving evidence of this is to be found in the Winchester Troper, dating from 1050, in which the single lines of plainsong, using only about half a dozen notes and about the same number of rhythmic patterns, were augmented by the additional notes to create a richer texture and to provide the basis for harmonious polyphony.

Once this breakthrough, pioneered at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, had been achieved its method spread quickly and led during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to a marvellously rich output of polyphonic settings of the Mass and the divine offices. The Lady Chapels of the major monasteries were opened for public worship – consisting of the offering of a choral ‘Lady Mass’ – and large numbers of laypeople often assembled in naves when choirs sang an evening hymn before a statue of the Virgin.

In the rest of the church, the minster-church pattern of organization did not survive the Norman Conquest, except at the collegiate cathedrals and some collegiate churches. The development of the parochial system, which became and remains a distinctive feature of the Church of England’s life, led to the building of churches, served by one priest, for clearly defined geographical areas. Services – Mass, Mattins and Vespers – were conducted in Latin by the parish priest, assisted by a layman known as the parish clerk. They were mainly spoken but sometimes chanted. The laity, if present, had no vocal part in the worship.

Between 1450 and 1550, however, the larger parish churches incorporated one or more chantry chapels, endowed by wealthy laymen to ensure that Masses for the repose of their souls would be frequently offered. A priest was provided with a small stipend in return for this duty, and in order to augment their stipends some of the musically competent clergy travelled to the best-endowed churches to join the local clergy in the formation of a choir. This enabled some at least of the parish churches to share in the development of polyphonic music in worship, by the recruiting of boys for Lady Chapel choirs and the installation of choir stalls in their chancels. During this relatively brief period there was in fact more music in English parish churches than there would be again until the mid-nineteenth century, though in many village churches there was little or no music and even where volunteer choirs were formed the Latin services permitted no vocal congregational participation.

The sixteenth-century Reformation did not, initially, change this situation fundamentally. King Henry VIII confiscated most of the considerable wealth of the cathedrals but left them with sufficient funds to maintain their regular round of worship and to embark on a new programme of education. Lay clerks and choristers were included in the reformed capitular bodies, and grammar schools took care of the boys’ education. For a time the worship continued to be offered in Latin, but in 1544 Archbishop Thomas Cranmer produced a version of the Litany in English, intended to be sung in procession by trained musicians, without congregational involvement. Five years later came the first Book of Common Prayer which was intended for congregational use, and the English of which did not fit the existing plainchant and polyphony.

John Merbecke, who was both a theologian and a musician, filled the gap with an adaptation of plainsong to the new liturgy (further adaptation was needed for the 1662 Prayer Book), which proved easy for congregations to learn, became popular and continued widely in use until the liturgical reforms of the late twentieth century. Where the Nicene Creed is still sung it remains serviceable. Other composers, principally Thomas Tallis and his pupil William Byrd, also responded to the challenge with settings for Mattins and Evensong of the highest quality which are now regarded as classics of sixteenth-century music. All demanded professional skill but the versicles and responses from one of Tallis’s services went into common use following the nineteenth-century revival of church music and remain his best-known work.

What had become a glorious era of Tudor church music, and included many anthems and settings that found a permanent place in the repertory of the best choirs, came to an end with the rise of Puritanism. The Puritans were themselves divided over an issue which, four centuries later, remains a bone of contention among Anglicans: is music intended to assist the church to offer to God in worship the highest and best of which it is capable or should it be designed to help the individual members of congregations to lift up their hearts in acts of corporate praise and thanksgiving that are both edifying and challenging?

During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, when Calvinism was dominant, the second of these emphases eventually prevailed. The organs in the parish churches were dismantled and where there were choirs these were disbanded. Instead, the services were spoken, except for the Psalms, which, in a metrical version, were often sung, unaccompanied, to simple tunes adapted from folk and theatre songs – a method copied from the continental reformers. In some places the canticles were given similar treatment, all sung slowly. The overall style of worship could hardly have been more different from that which is expressed in parish churches today. There were exceptions however, not least in Westminster where, at the Chapel Royal and the Abbey, the organist Orlando Gibbons composed some of the finest ever service settings and anthems. But during the Commonwealth the cathedral choirs and organs also disappeared and the worship, when offered, was austere in the extreme.

The Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 brought little change initially to the musical content of the worship but gradually significant developments took place in town churches. Organs were recovered or replaced and attracted some gifted organists who also composed new church music. Choirs came back and included children who were carefully rehearsed. Henry Purcell, arguably the greatest of English composers, became organist of Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal in 1680 and composed service settings and anthems which broke new ground in church music and thereafter became high points in the offering of worship everywhere. He died when he was only 36 and the epitaph on his gravestone in Westminster Abbey reads, ‘Here lyes Henry Purcell Esq., who left this life and is gone to that blessed place where only his harmony can be exceeded.’ Another composer who achieved greatness at this time, despite his Puritan background, was John Blow.

In country churches, too, there were signs of new musical life. Voluntary choirs, usually of young men, were formed to improve the quality of the psalm singing. Some of these aspired to sing other music – canticles and anthems by Purcell and later, Bach, Handel and Pergolesi, and this offered scope for the introduction of musical instruments. By the end of the eighteenth century many village churches had bands consisting of bassoons, flutes, serpents and various stringed instruments. The quality of these varied considerably and it must not be supposed that this century featured a feast of glorious church music enhancing inspiring worship. On the contrary, as the century advanced, the quality of both went into serious decline. The clergy and educated laity lost interest in church music, while the embracing of Latitudinarianism and new scientific thinking led to a devaluing of the mysterious, supernatural element in religion in favour of a more rational, moralistic approach. All of which, allied to scandalous misuse of endowments and neglect of some of the basics of church life, resulted in acts of worship, in both parish churches and cathedrals, that were formal, dreary and cold. The services, recited by the priest and the parish clerk, left little opportunity for congregational participation, except perhaps for the singing of metrical psalms.

In some places, however, the High Church tradition, associated with the reforms initiated by Archbishop Laud in the early part of the previous century, survived and retained dignified liturgical worship. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, and as a reaction against the Church of England’s neglectfulness, Methodism also provided a warmer alternative, albeit outside the walls of parish churches. And by the end of the century an evangelical revival within the Church of England was beginning to change its worship for the better in some places, not least by the introduction of hymns. The replacement of the bands by organs or harmoniums proved, however, to be highly controversial in most villages, and in his preface to Under the Greenwood Tree, based on such a controversy, Thomas Hardy alleged that a direct result of this change had been ‘to curtail and extinguish the interest of parishioners in such doings’.

Whether or not this be true, it is indisputable that by 1830, on the eve of the great reform movement that was to galvanize and change virtually every aspect of life in Victorian England, the worship offered in most parish churches and cathedrals remained at a shockingly low ebb.