Welcome to Church Music

Receiving notice of the publication of Welcome to Church Music and the Hymnal 1982, part of Morehouse / Church Publishing’s Welcome to... series of introductions to various aspects of the Episcopal Church, I took the opportunity to read the portion viewable online. I am sorry to say that I found it full of statements that cross the line between, on the one hand, simplification for the sake of the novice reader, and on the other, unclarity, if not outright untruth. Though the book is obviously not meant to be a scholarly one, even the novice reader for whom the series is designed deserves to have the facts straight, or misleading statements minimized.

p.3

In 1534, Henry VIII broke away from the Catholic Church via the Act of Supremacy.

From a Roman perspective, Henry did indeed break from the Catholic Church – but from the Anglican one, he did not: and the Episcopal Church, at least in the bcp1979 formularies, claims membership in the Church Catholic, however forlorn a hope visible reunion between Canterbury (or New York) and Rome might be in 2015. This misstatement is perhaps of a piece with the author’s simplistic distinction (put forth in Chapter 2) between ‘high’ and ‘low’ church solely on the basis of how much of the liturgy is sung.

The bcp also offered new translations of the graduals, alleluias, tracts, sequences, antiphons, and responsories.

In fact these forms of liturgical music were all abolished in the Prayer Book tradition. The most one could say is that the proper Introits of the Mass were replaced in bcp1549 by full Psalms (minus their antiphons), and the proper Offertories and Communions of the Mass by the Offertory and Post-communion Sentences; in bcp1552, of these only the Offertory Sentences remained (as they still do). One could also say that certain traditional (fixed) Office material, or revisions of it, did remain for a time in the Primer tradition, though it was not a musical one.

p.4

...the Kyrie was replaced with a recitation of the Decalogue (the Ten Commandments) during the Eucharist.

It is slightly misleading to say that the Kyrie was ‘replaced’ by the Decalogue, which in the Prayer Book tradition maintains ‘Lord, have mercy upon us’ as a litany response; farced or troped Kyries had been popular in the Middle Ages, and the Sarum Missal contained a set of them for different occasions (in fact, English polyphonic Mass settings tended not to include a Kyrie because the tradition of chanting the troped Kyries was so well established). This practice surely lay behind the interpolation of the Decalogue with the Kyrie in bcp1552, both being at some level attempts to restore the function of ‘Kyrie eleison’ as a litany response – as it originally was, and is once again in several forms of prayer in bcp1979.

A new ordinance also required that the entire Psalter be sung at Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer over the course of each month. The psalms were organized into sixty distinct parts: thirty groupings of psalms for Morning Prayer and the other thirty for Evening Prayer. The 1979 edition of the Book of Common Prayer still reflects that organization of the Psalter.

The author makes it sound somewhat as though singing the Psalter was a new ‘requirement’ in the reformed English Church, when in fact it had always been the backbone of the Office and remains so in those traditions and communities that pray the Hours. It is true to say that reorganizing the distribution of the Psalms and Lessons at the Office was one of the major thrusts of the Prayer Book project, as the Preface to the first bcp attests. The bcp1979 Psalter is indeed marked up for the thirty-day cursus, though this is not the Psalm distribution set forth in the Daily Office Lectionary and the monthly round is nowhere explained in that book. One fears that, with the near total disuse of the Daily Office in today’s Episcopal Church, the singing of psalms no longer ‘remains one of the Episcopal Church’s most loved traditions’.

p.5

This prosperous era [the Jacobean] also saw the invention of the anthem...

It is also a stretch to say the ‘anthem’ was a new invention in the Jacobean era. The English anthem of the period did not spring out of thin air; though it may have developed a distinctive musical style, it was heir to both the motet and madrigal traditions and the half-century of English anthems that predated James’s accession.

p.6

Choral music [in Restoration England] was generally written in fewer parts, and the ‘short service’ reduced the canticles for Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer to two for each service... this short service format is still in use today.

The term ‘short’ when referring to a musical setting of an Anglican service refers to a musical style, not a liturgical provision. There were, from the first Prayer Book, two canticles sung at each of the two Offices (though there were two choices in each of the canticle slots at Morning Prayer). A ‘short service’ was a musical setting of these canticles in mostly syllabic style with little or no imitation or text repetition. The ‘short’ style was also established well before the Interregnum, and indeed the term is not so readily applicable to Restoration-era music.

The anthem continued to evolve, and instruments – a signature innovation of the baroque era – found their way into the churches...

As for instruments, there is ample evidence to show that – though they are rarely heard in performances of Tudor and Jacobean choral music today – at least cornetts and trombones, and probably other instruments, were often used with vocal polyphony in large churches from at least the last quarter of the sixteenth century, and perhaps much earlier, just as on the Continent. One might more correctly say that the use of instruments functioning in concert with voices (i.e., with separate but complementary parts), as opposed to doubling or replacing sung lines, was a Baroque development.

p.7

Metrical psalms sung by the congregation [in parish churches] began to be preferred to Anglican chant formulas [in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?].

The establishment of metrical psalm-singing in the Church of England predates the codification of Anglican chant (though harmonized chant was known from the late sixteenth century). Indeed, Anglican chant, rather than being edged out by metrical psalmody, was introduced to parishes along with the surpliced choirs of which the author subsequently speaks, and, along with the hymnody also being introduced, eclipsed the metrical psalms. Perhaps I have misunderstood the author’s chronology, if not his argument.

p.8

Over the next forty years [after 1830?], English church music flourished as it never had before in its history.

Can the author honestly make this claim? It may have reached a high level of activity, but I think it can hardly be said to have surpassed the quality and long tradition represented by (off the top of my head) the Winchester Troper, Dunstaple, Frye, Fayrfax, Taverner, Tye, Tallis, Sheppard, Byrd, Philips, Gibbons, and a whole host of others from the eleventh to the seventeenth centuries. I suppose the question of propriety for liturgical, and especially Eucharistic, use is beyond the scope of a ‘Welcome to...’ book (perhaps the author touches on this in a later chapter), but the paean to composers of the early Anglican revival and beyond rather implies that their work is (more) fit for purpose (than that of the composers of the earlier era), which I think is debatable, to say the least.

p.9

[In the mid-nineteenth century] organists began improvising in services as well.

This is simply false. Improvisation, tailored to the liturgical needs of the moment, has always constituted an important if not overwhelming part of the organist’s output; in fact, organists almost alone among Western ‘classical’ musicians have maintained a tradition of improvisation that stretches back to the beginnings of the instrument’s use.

p.10

Robert Hunt celebrated the first known Eucharist in the New World [in 1607 in Jamestown?].

I strongly suspect that the Eucharist was first celebrated in the ‘New World’ well before 1607, rather further south and/or west, and not by an Englishman.


I could, unfortunately, go on and on. Suffice it to say that it is regrettable that the house publisher of a church especially known for its musical tradition has allowed such a misleading, poorly written, and poorly produced* introduction to that tradition to reach the public.

*  There is, for example, an error repeated in the running head on every spread: ‘Welcome to the Church Music and the Hymnal 1982’, and ‘surplice’ is spelled ‘surplus’ – not to mention the use of titling figures in the text and fake small caps in the headings, the lack of f-ligatures, and poor word-spacing overall.