The Music of the English Parish Church: Volume 1

Front Cover
Cambridge University Press, 1979 - 492 pages
This book is the most thorough and extensive history of English parish church music ever published, covering the period from the late middle ages to the present day. Through the ages English parish churches have resounded to all manner of music, ranging from the rich choral polyphony of Henry VIII's or Victoria's reigns to the bare unaccompanied psalm tunes of the seventeenth century. Temperley has found in this neglected field a wealth of fascinating music, as well as a host of intellectual problems to intrigue the scholar. A recurring theme of the book is the conflict between two incompatible goals for Protestant parish church music: artistic performance and popular expression. Professor Temperley suggests that the Elizabethan metrical psalm tunes were survivors of a mode of popular music that preceded the familiar corpus of ballad tunes. Passed on by oral transmission through several generations of unregulated singing, these once lively tunes changed gradually into very slow, quavering chants. This later style, which came to be called 'the old way of singing', is fully described and explained here for the first time. Temperley guides the reader through the complex social, theological and aesthetic movements that played their part in the formation of the late Victorian ideal of the surpliced choir in every chancel, and he makes a fresh assessment of that old bugbear, the Victorian hymn tune. His findings show that the radical liturgical experiments of the last few years have not dislodged the Victorian model for the music of the English parish church.

From inside the book

Contents

Tunes found in all musical editions of The whole book of psalms
1
The Reformation era 153459
7
The establishment of Anglicanism 15591644
40
Commonwealth and Restoration 16441700
77
Psalm tunes printed or recommended during
83
Urban parish church music 16601790
100
Incidence of organs in parish churches of selected areas in 1801
112
Country psalmody 16851830
141
Contents of successive editions of Chethams Psalmody
183
Makeup of sample parish church bands
197
Reform movements 17601830
206
Tunes most frequently found on church barrel organs
236
The rediscovery of tradition 180050
244
The Victorian settlement 18501900
268
Characteristics of services in London and suburban parish
279
The twentieth century
315

Evidence of instruments played in church from printed
150

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Common terms and phrases

Bibliographic information