I  The Rise

You are all aware how richly your Lutheran church music has embodied the ideals of the Lutheran faith. Although it needed a musician of the greatness of Bach to bring that embodiment to its highest fruition, it is certainly true that a background not only of musicianship but also of faith was essential, and that without his abiding faith Bach would have left us a very different literature. My problem today is to show how English church music embodies another Protestant faith. That literature also has a significant musical background. A good many musicians of very high attainment contributed to it. But for reasons that are largely social and political it holds no such place in the affection of the world as the German musical literature; and I must first point briefly at what seem to me the most important facts that bear on this problem. I have a vast field to cover and must rely on your knowledge of the growth of Lutheran church music to provide most of the necessary comparisons.

The background of English Protestantism seems to me to be the background of all Protestantism—an attempt to interpret the teachings of Christ in a manner more in accord with His own utterances, and more attuned to the spiritual needs of the common man, than that offered by the Church of Rome. But that attitude of protest is possible also in other fields of thought. It had already been manifested in Britain before there was any thought of religious dissent. Magna Charta is not a religious document; yet it embodies an emphasis on human rights and an opposition to tyranny which I think may justly be called a protestant attitude. The temporal power of the Church brought political and religious issues into ever sharper focus—for example, in the struggle between Henry II and Thomas à Becket; in the institution of the Parliament and the resistance to papal oppression under Henry III; and in the limitation of ecclesiastical jurisdiction under Edward I. Along with these determinations went certain departures from the conventional liturgical observances on the Continent—for instance, those illustrated in the Salisbury and the Salem “Uses.” These differences, however, must not be overemphasized. The Church of Rome was more tolerant of such departures in those days than it later became—especially after the Council of Trent. Yet there is no doubt that the seeds of Protestantism were early sown, and at first with little opprobrium for the sower. Even so recalcitrant a believer as John Wycliffe, who, like Luther, denied the doctrine of transubstantiation and translated the Bible in order that men might read and interpret the Scriptures for themselves—even John Wycliffe died in his bed; but John Huss, only thirty years later, for doctrines which seem to us no more “heretical” than Wycliffe’s, met the death of a martyr. Huss’ support by Emperor Sigismund seems to have been less effectual than John of Gaunt’s protection of Wycliffe. It is noteworthy that, though the Lollards, Wycliffe’s followers, were persecuted, there was no real crusade against them, as there had been against the Waldensians and the Albigensians a century earlier.

Another important contribution to the protestant attitude came from the great Humanistic movement. Here, of course, the general trend of thought is the same in Germany and England. The German Humanists, from Rudolph Agricola to Erasmus, managed to divest Scholastic theology of its almost necromantic power. But the great English Humanist Sir Thomas More, with his wonderful ideal of a form of government in which wars of aggression were unheard of, and in which no one could be persecuted for his religion so long as he dealt fairly with his neighbor, was the most influential of all, at least in England. I suspect that some of his ideas as well as those expressed in Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity—if in a strangely transmogrified form—underlie the peculiar type of Protestantism that emerged, under Henry VIII, in the concrete form of the Anglican doctrine. I can make but the barest mention of facts like these and must trust your imagination to magnify them to their true importance.

There was indeed no hint of an actual break with Rome until Henry VII, desiring a male heir to the throne, “discovered” that his marriage to Catherine of Aragon (his brother Arthur’s widow) was illegal and that his daughter Mary, therefore, was illegitimate. There is no doubt that Anne Boleyn’s charms intensified Henry’s determination to be rid of Catherine; but he had still no thought of being a protestant against the Roman faith. Indeed, in 1521, he had been awarded by the Pope the title of “Defender of the Faith,” in recognition of his “Assertion of the Seven Sacraments”—directly against Luther. Later he also forbade the circulation of Tyndale’s English Bible as “executed in a protestant spirit.” But in 1534, his private marriage to Anne Boleyn having been of necessity revealed, the Parliament (which now, through the Machiavellian ingenuity of Thomas Cromwell, had become the mere mouthpiece of the Crown), passed the Act of Supremacy, announcing Henry as “the only supreme head on earth of the Church of England.” But there is no pronouncement from the lips of the defender of this new faith that is comparable to the famous words: “Hier stehe ich; ich kann nicht anders; Gott helfe mir!”

The break with Rome was thus far more largely political than religious; but it is of considerable importance to our problem that it was so, for there is no doubt that from its first foundation the English Church considered itself (and still does) a legitimate continuation of the older organization and therefore a sharer in the blessings of the Apostolic Succession. I have no time to describe the manner in which the 39 Articles (originally 42) were established, nor the vicissitudes of the development of Protestantism under Edward VI and Mary. Conformity to its pattern of worship (not necessarily involving complete assent to the formulated doctrine) was demanded under Elizabeth (whose actual religious belief certainly did not conform to the 39 Articles); but while recusant Catholics and Protestant non-conformists were persecuted under her (though with less violence than had been done under Mary), it does not appear that the Established Church represented the majority of religious opinion in England.

In fact, the majority of that opinion was already Calvinistic. I doubt that Henry’s distaste for Luther’s ideas played any great part in determining this Calvinistic trend. In such matters, the example of John Knox—dour as his religious philosophy was—was more inspiring than that of the bishops; and I suspect that sympathy for the Huguenots in France and Holland (against the greatest of England’s enemies, Catholic Spain) was more of a determinant than the actual theology involved. But for our purpose as musicians the great point is the lack of that wide unanimity of feeling which, unless I am mistaken, was deep enough to sustain German Protestantism through the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War.

I have taken a great deal of time for this very imperfect sketch. But it seems to me that English church music has failed to reach the heights of Lutheran music, not so much because of a lack of great composers—we shall find that England was by no means impoverished in this respect; nor indeed because of a lack of earnest belief—of which earnestness many other proofs than the death of Cranmer and Ridley and Latimer might be cited; but because the Established Church, for whose services it would be necessary for the composers to write, did not offer a creed to which the whole, or even the majority, of the nation could unhesitatingly give assent. The theological background of English church music was unpropitious.

The general background of English music, on the other hand, was favorable. Even if, as Manfred Bukofzer has pretty conclusively shown, the famous canon Sumer is icumen in must be dated from forty to seventy years later than has always been supposed, there are many other evidences that England, until the fifteenth century, kept pretty well abreast of the times. In the first half of the fifteenth century, indeed, she was actually in the lead. Every historian recognizes John Dunstable as a pathfinder. His influence was strongest on the Continent, where his works were almost exclusively preserved. But the chapel of the Duke of Bedford (regent during the minority of Henry VI), in which Dunstable apparently served, must have ended with his death in 1435; the Hundred Years’ War, which until the death of Joan of Arc had gone favorably for England, turned to the favor of France; and almost immediately after it was ended—with the virtually complete expulsion of the English from the Continent—came the even more disastrous Wars of the Roses. It is not strange to find Tinctoris regretting the degradation of English music during that period. It is true that the ground of Tinctoris’ objection is the feebleness of the English understanding of the mathematical intricacies that were so astonishingly cultivated from the days of Dufay to those of Josquin; but it is also true that these mathematical feats were less highly regarded by their inventors than has until recently been supposed. And with the pacification that came with the accession of the Tudors, English music began once more to reveal its distinctive character.

While we should properly say that English church music can hardly have begun before the establishment of the English Church, it is evident that the methods of composition are not subject to royal regulation and that we must take account of the earliest of sixteenth-century composers if we are to have any idea of the developments that will ensue. The first composer whom we must recognize in this brief survey is Robert Fayrfax, who began his work during the reign of Henry VII and was regarded, until his death in 1521, as “the prime musician of the nation.” His surviving works are almost all religious in character and are of course Catholic in tone—five or six Masses, two Magnificats, and some half dozen motets. Two secular pieces, however, were printed in Wynkin de Worde’s Songbook of 1530—the first book of music printed in England. An indication of the level from which English church music may be assumed to have risen may be given by describing a few of the technical features of Fayrfax’s music.

The counterpoint is sound and solid, but there is little display of the learned imitative and proportional devices which had been so largely cultivated on the Continent. (This is the result of the hiatus noted by Tinctoris.) Yet the individual voices, which are virtually of equal interest, are smooth and melodious; and despite the rhythmic simplicity of the texture, which is mostly in note-against-note counterpoint, there is a definite feeling for choral effectiveness. His Albanus Mass (in honor of the patron saint of St. Alban’s Abbey) is nominally for five voices; but it is seldom that all five are singing simultaneously. Three, variously selected for contrast, are the prevailing number. There is no Kyrie (it was usual, even beyond Fayrfax’s time, to present this portion of the service in plain song, troped). Also, the words from et in spiritum sanctum to et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum are omitted from the Credo. The source of the principal thematic material is probably a phrase of plain song, but this is turned into a kind of “motto” (somewhat as in the fourteenth-century Mass of Machaut), and a kind of musical unity is preserved by these means. The device of isorhythmic structure, well known to both Machaut and Dunstable, appears to have been completely abandoned. Most of the music is in triple time; but that this represents a continuation (far beyond its abandonment on the Continent) of the thirteenth-century convention is quite unthinkable.

In the form of the motet (which is later to become the English anthem) Fayrfax’s technique is essentially the same as in the Mass. The word “anthem,” however, appears in a record which mentions the payment to Fayrfax, in 1502, of “20 s. for setting an anthem of oure Ladye and Saint Elizabeth.” This term was, then, probably a current corruption of the older term “antiphon.” It is to gain a different meaning when the form of the service changes. (In the opening section of Fayrfax’s piece the name Elizabeth—not the later Virgin Queen, but Elizabeth of York, Henry VII’s consort—is made to stand out with singular emphasis, even though it is the mother of John the Baptist, and not the English Queen, who is being addressed.)

Another composer, contemporary with Fayrfax, who wrote chiefly to Latin texts, was Nicholas Ludford, who shows more acquaintance than Fayrfax with the learned process of the Continental musicians but is his inferior in imagination. The younger men show a more sympathetic acquaintance with continental methods. In a collection dated 1516 there is a motet, Quam pulchra es, by Sampson which shows much of this style, and even the lesser composers of the following generation are well schooled in the Continental technique, though few of them can be regarded, by comparison with the greatest, as masters. Taverner abandons all effort toward massiveness, such as was Fayrfax’s greatest strength; and Henry VIII, who dabbled in composition as in everything else, can be regarded only as a bungler. Neither did the establishment of the English Church attract all the composers to the setting of English religious texts. Many continued to write, not only to Latin words, but obviously in sympathy with the older faith. Such, for instance, was Robert Johnson, a Scottish priest, who nevertheless is reported as a heretic who fled to England long before the Reformation. He appears to have served as chaplain to Anne Boleyn and in 1560 contributed three anthems to Day’s music for The Book of Common Prayer. His greatest works, however, are to Latin texts—a motet, Ave, Dei patris filia, and a setting of Psalm 20. His skill, however, is by no means that of his Continental contemporaries, Clemens non Papa, Philippe de Monte, or Orlando Lasso. A few English composers continued to favor Latin texts even to the time of Queen Elizabeth. Robert Parsons, a member of the Queen’s Chapel, and Alfonso Ferrabosco, an Italian by birth who lived most of his life in England, are the most conspicuous. Their methods show the same increasing devotion to Continental models that we noted a moment ago with Ludford. Considering the vacillations of religious opinion—or of repressive force—in England under Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth, this adherence to older tradition is not remarkable. We shall find that the greatest of all the English composers of the sixteenth century, William Byrd, remains throughout his troubled life an adherent of the older faith.

But we must turn now to the rise of that style which is more truly representative of English Protestantism. It will be needful, in my relatively brief time, to deal with forms rather than with men. The simplest and in some aspects the most important of religious forms is the hymn, and I will first deal with it. I have said that Calvinism rather than the doctrine of Luther was the prevalent type of Protestantism in England. As a result a considerable amount of English hymnody is derived from the Genevan and other Psalters. It differs from the Lutheran not only in the matter of the texts, but also in the manner in which the music was set to those texts.

Calvin actually was fond of music; but he had no mind to allow a sensuous delight, even under the guise of an appeal to the Almighty, to imperil the souls of his followers. His first ritual, that of 1533, made no provision whatever for music; for that of 1537 he suggested the introduction of music. Having seen the value of Lutheran hymn singing at Strasbourg, whither he was banished in 1538, he composed the Psalter of 1539, from which, Dr. Terry says, “the whole literature of vernacular psalmody derives.” The terms “Hymn” and “Psalm” are by no means synonymous. In the Catholic practice the two were clearly distinguished. But the shift from the Latin to the vernacular made possible a kind of assimilation of the two forms. This came about, of course, through the metrical translation of the Psalms. The seven Penitential Psalms seem to have been turned into French verse before the end of the fifteenth century; but the first significant effort of this sort was that of the witty, elegant, yet often sincere poet Clément Marot, a favorite at the court of Francis I (Henry VIII’s great antagonist). Marot’s first collection contained thirty Psalms. Emperor Charles V, no friend of Luther’s, rewarded the poet with 200 gold doubloons, and the metrical Psalms immediately became popular among the Catholics, whether of high or low degree. They were also approved by a committee of the Sorbonne, which found in them “nothing contrary to the faith, Holy Scripture, or the ordinance of the Church.” But when they were published, in 1542, they were also taken up by the Huguenots, the Albigensians, and the Waldensians, and even by many communities of Lutherans in Germany. The Sorbonne repented its decision. Marot’s arrest was ordered; but he escaped into Switzerland and found that 12 of his Psalms had already appeared in the Strasbourg Psalter of 1539. In 1543 he added twenty to the original collection of thirty Psalms, together with several canticles and the Ten Commandments. But death cut short his effort, and the remaining Psalms were versified by Théodore de Bèze, who finished his work in 1562. Observe that there is here no interpolation of ideas other than those contained in the original texts. The intimacy of many of the Lutheran hymn texts stands in conspicuous contrast.

The music to which these poems were set was sometimes popular melody and sometimes an adaptation of older tunes originally set to Latin words. The most conspicuous composer or arranger of these melodies was Louis Bourgeois, many of whose tunes or adaptations still find a place in the English hymnals. His melodies, again, were admirably harmonized by Claude Goudimel. About half of the tunes are in the older or severer church modes; the others are in the Lydian or Ionian—the nearest approach to our major mode. In the harmonizations, the melody, according to the fashion of the day, was kept in the tenor; but many modern arrangements transplant it to the soprano—sometimes with awkward results. Douen counted 837 editions, either of the Genevan Psalter or of works based immediately upon it; and it is evident that here was begun a movement as fair in apparent promise as that which blossomed so profusely in the German chorales. But while the Lutherans were at first much taken with these pieces and kept not a few of them for their own use, the Calvinists in other lands were hindered, even from the first, in their free development. The translations, especially into English, were inferior and in pedestrian rhythms. Two thirds of the Psalms in the Scottish Psalter are either in “Common Measure” (8, 6, 8, 6 syllables) or in “Long Meter” (8, 8, 8, 8). The French versions, on the other hand, show as many as 120 different meters. This variety, which is reflected in the music of Bourgeois and Goudimel. is quite lost in the “monotonous droning” (as Dr. Frere describes it) of the English Psalms. Thus the English service offered no basis for such expansions of musical expression as were gradually introduced into the Lutheran services in the shape of cantatas, Choralvorspiele, and the like. The Hymn, or Psalm (I may here again loosely combine these utterances into a single type), was not, indeed, the immediate origin of the cantata, which is a seventeenth century invention and drew considerably from the opera. But Calvin favored neither instrumental music nor any kind of part singing. While his taste was not allowed to rule that of all the adherents to his doctrine, I cannot but feel that his attitude was an important factor in stunting the growth of a deep musical consciousness which, among the Lutherans, made possible the work of Bach.

Of course the metrical stanzas to which the Psalms were shaped made possible the simple, strophic musical form of the Hymn. But that form was by no means obligatory. Succeeding stanzas, or even succeeding phrases, might each have their own appropriate music. For these, as in the older settings of the Mass, various methods of entrance and variable numbers and registers of voices might be devised. This, indeed, is the general technique of the older motet, in which each phrase of words had its own musical strain, usually imitatively begun and extended as far as the taste of the composer dictated. Out of this motet form, by simple transplantation rather than by any novelty of technique, came the most highly elaborated form of English church music and the one most similar in significance—but not in form—to the German cantata. As we have seen, it was called the anthem, from the older word “antiphon.” Indeed, in certain types, it preserves something of that kind of musical dialog which is characteristic of the antiphonal and responsorial psalmody of the Catholic Church. But the text of the English anthem was not necessarily taken from the Psalms. Although it was basically Scriptural, the rendering into English made possible some measure of free paraphrase. It is obviously in the form of the anthem that the musical ingenuity as well as the religious imagination of a composer could find its fullest outlet.

Also the monodic chant still had its place; but since the congregation was still expected to take part in this type of utterance, there was no maintenance of the high floridity to which the Gregorian chant had risen. Instead, only the few inflections that correspond to the Initium, the Mediatio, and the Punctum in the simpler type of Gregorian chanting were retained. The main part of the text was recited on the monotone, as it still is. It seems to me important to remember that from its beginning the English Church had possessed—as of course the Catholic Church had not—the musical resource of harmony, and that this harmony (which had evolved in the Catholic service as a kind of decoration of the chant) considerably obviated the need for cultivating the difficult unisonous choral art which the older Church had brought to such extraordinary heights.

Something of the process of evolution in the English type of chanting may be seen in John Merbecke’s Book of Common Prayer Noted, which was issued under Edward VI. Merbecke assigns three precise time values to the different notes—those corresponding to the breve, the semibreve, and the minim; and his method is therefore not in accord either with the Solesmes fashion of treating all the neumes, of whatever shape, as of equal time value, or with the idea of the “mensuralists,” who recognize two different note lengths. Merbecke set to this kind of chant not only the Matins (which became the present-day Morning Prayer and loosely approximates to the Catholic Mass rather than to the ancient Office of Matins); and the Evensong (which is the modern Evening Prayer and relates also to the Office of Vespers), but also the Communion and the service “At the Buriall of the Dead.” His Matins and Evensong are much shorter than their present-day equivalents—a fact which suggests that there was in those days but a meager space for such a form as the anthem.

How Edward VI's Prayer Book, founded on what were originally 42 Articles, was modified in Elizabeth’s reign to correspond to the 39 Articles of the present English Church is a question obviously beyond our present consideration. Our concern, in the remaining minutes, will be with the anthem. Again I must go back to the beginning of the 16th century to take account of its growth. The history is difficult to trace, for a great deal of the pre-Reformation music, out of which its method must have originated, was destroyed during Henry VIII’s spoliation of the monasteries.

The first composers of whom we must take note, Christopher Tye and Thomas Tallis, were born early in the 16th century and were thus in their first artistic maturity when the spolianion took place. Tye still writes Masses—one called by himself Euge bone, though no antiphon can be found from which the thematic material is derived, and one on a popular English song “Westron Wynde.” This latter, of course, follows the Continental fashion of using tunes like l’Homme armé for the same purpose. But though Shepherd and Taverner also need this tune as a theme for the Mass, this practice had little currency in England. (Whether the English singers, as is recorded of the Continentals, sang the words of the song instead of the words of the service is a question upon which I have no comment.) But Tye’s Masses, and his other Latin works (five-part motets to the words Miserere mei, Deus, or Omnes gentes, plaudite manibus), while skillfully and solidly constructed, compare somewhat unfavorably with his settings of English texts. Of subtlety of expression he had less than his great followers, though this not to say that he was indifferent to the sense of words. Even the motet Omnes gentes is quite literal in its bell-like exordium, “All nations”; in the more rapid and incisive “Clap your hands”; and in the long melismatic phrases for “Praise God in a voice of exaltation.” But his English works—presumably written after the Reformation—show sturdier sense of meaning and a more definitely English melodic character, even though his work is only a beginning in the new style. Of his lesser contemporaries, John Redford, Robert Parsons, John Thorne, and Richard Farrant must at least be mentioned. Their work is less angular than Tye’s, but in all the music of this period there are numerous false relations of a kind most unwelcome to any but the ultramodern ear. I have not time to describe these but can only say that they arise, not through ignorance of harmony, but through the logical pursuit of singable melody for each of the voices involved.

Thomas Tallis, who after 1540 became a member of the Royal Chapel, retained that post until his death in 1585—serving that is, almost throughout the time during which the English Reformation was accomplished. Up to his time he is certainly the greatest English composer after Dunstable, and some of his works are fearlessly compared by the English historians with those of Palestrina. Like Tye, he wrote to both Latin and English texts, and his contrapuntal skill was prodigious. There is 40-voice motet (eight five-part choirs) and the text Spem in alium non habui, which is as elaborate in structure as anything of Continental origin. But he could also write without any display of learning, as in his Prayer, Litany, Morning Prayer, Communion, and Evening Prayer in the Dorian mode—a work which is still much performed in larger English churches. But his motets and anthems most fully display his imaginative stature. A setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah, the five-part Absterge Domine, the Salvator mundi, and the Derelinquit impius will substantiate almost any laudatory criticism; and his English anthems are no whit behind the motets. Even in gentler themes he finds the musical mot juste.

In 1575 Tallis and William Byrd were granted a monopoly of music printing by Queen Elizabeth. The first work they issued was a collection of Cantiones sacrae—34 pieces in five and six parts, of which 16 were by Tallis. It is here that our present taste, at least, finds the fullest evidences of Tallis’ genius. The pieces are motets or anthems—the anthem now being made out of the motet by the simple process of translating the Latin text, or supplying other English words, as in the case of O sacrum convivum, to which the English text, “I Call and Cry” has been provided.

Robert Whyte, a pupil of Tye, occupies a kind of middle place between his master and Tallis. He seems to have preferred contemplative, rather than vigorous subjects and to have found for these a quiet musical phraseology singularly well attuned to his text. I cannot cease to marvel at the variety that sixteenth-century composers could devise, in an idiom which, analyzed harmonically, presents only triads and their first inversions, with all discords strictly prepared and resolved.

The uncertainty that hung over England until the destruction of the Armada in 1588 was probably not greatly reflected in the liturgical services; but the release from that uncertainty marks the beginning of what is possibly the most ebullient period in the history of art. Quite naturally the most conspicuous works, whatever the medium, are secular in nature, and the richest musical efflorescence is, of course, in the secular form of the madrigal. But the release is evidenced also in a certain freer command of technique; and since that command is independent of its subject matter, it is applicable also to religious composition, and the summit of English church music may well be said to have been reached at the same time as the summit of its secular art. I am frankly doubtful as to whether the peak lies here or with Purcell, a century later; but that question is after all of no great moment, and your opinion will be as good as mine. A very great height, at least, was reached at the turn of the 16th century.

The fact that will be adduced by those who argue for the pre-eminence of the 16th century is the extraordinary number of first-rate composers living at that time. In would serve little purpose here merely to read a long list of these names. That twenty-four composers are represented in the great madrigal collection The Triumphs of Oriana—among whom two of the greatest figures of the time, William Byrd and Orlando Gibbons, are not included—will sufficiently illustrate the condition. The richest contribution to English church music was made by these two men; and I shall have time for no more than a brief account of their work.

William Byrd, who was born in 1542—53 and died in 1623, was all his life a Catholic and suffered many indignities on that account. Yet the fact that he shared in the monopoly of music printing with the conformist Tallis is a sign both of his artistic eminence and of that kind of tolerance which underlay the policy of the great sovereign.

Byrd’s works include three Masses—for three, four, and five voices respectively—which were quite useless as service music for the English Church but may have been used for private celebrations and are exquisitely expressive of his own inflexible convictions. Ernest Walker notes—I think, justly—that these Masses compare favorably with any of Palestrina’s, and yet differ from them in possessing a certain individuality of feeling which, from the very nature of his effort, Palestrina would endeavor to suppress. I suspect that this individuality is a reflection—even in Byrd’s Catholic mind—of that independence of thought which, in general, I have called Protestantism in the form of the motet, even in Latin, there was more scope for this feeling; and Byrd’s pieces in this form exhibit it, sometimes in passages that are quite frankly illustrative. This literalness was much pursued in those days. It is a feature for which the “pure” musicians of our own time seem inclined to apologize. I do not belong to that school and therefore find these “illustrations”—for example, a long, languid, descent set to the word dormientes in the Cantio sacra, Vigilate—natural and appropriate; especially since there is never, for the sake of mere illustration, the least abatement of sound musical technique.

Many of Byrd’s Latin motets have been turned into anthems by the processes of translation or textual adaptation already mentioned. His “Songs of Sadness and Pietie” and “Songs of Sundry Natures,” likewise, include many pieces which a sane Protestantism will readily recognize as suitable for devotion, whether or not they are appropriate for liturgical use. The distinction between sacred and secular is, in any case, one which depends primarily on the nature of the text—as is amply proved by the frequent adaptation to hymns or Psalms of melodies originally set to secular words. There is no reason why a fervent melody, made originally to reflect a certain longing, for example, may not sufficiently express religious longing also—as in the well-known Lutheran hymn based on “Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen,” which can honestly become religious merely by the substitution of the words “O Welt” for “Innsbruck.”

In that loftiness of mind which devotional music—to my mind, more than any other human utterance—can embody, I think it would be generally agreed that Byrd’s music is above all the rest. That he is to be regarded as the greatest of the English church composers of his time is a proposition that may be debated; for there must enter into that problem how far his Catholic faith is expressed, in his work, in contrast to that belief which constitutes the Anglican a Protestant Church. But I am convinced—and think you will agree—that the religious attitude of mind is less a question of creed than of devotion to the ideals embodied in the creed; and I am herefore disposed—especially in view of the individuality of Byrd’s utterance—to ignore the question of his Catholicism and include him with the others as an English church musician. Someday, when we have learned to understand the subtleties of the language we use, we musicians may be able to disentangle the Protestant from the Catholic in terms of these essential emotions; but as yet our thought is too cluttered up with the mere niceties of verbal distinction to attempt such a feat.

If membership in the Anglican communion is a prime criterion by which to determine the Anglicanism of a church composer, we shall be compelled to award the palm to Orlando Gibbons. His life embraced but 42 years (1583–1625), but in that time he became what Ernest Walker calls “virtually the father of pure Anglican music.” He lacks the mysticism that imbues the work not only of Byrd, but of all his predecessors, who were sensitive to the charm of the ancient Latin liturgy; but he is able, probably because of this lack, to interpret the words of the service, or the texts of his anthems, with a more immediate humanity. His “progressiveness” is apparent in his almost complete abandonment of composition in the old church modes. He also uses, more than any predecessor, the solo voice, and thus establishes the two types of anthem structure that will presently be fully crystallized—the “full anthem,” choral throughout, with no more for a single part (and that not a solo voice) than what we should now call the entrance of a fugue subject; and the “verse anthem,” in which considerable passages are given to a solo voice, with other portions set polyphonically for the whole choir. Both the abandonment of the old modes and the extended employment of the accompanied solo voice exemplify the new homophonic style which the Italians began, at the opening of the seventeenth century, to use for the dramma per musica. The vast change in the complexion of musical art which thus arose affects, of course, the whole body of religious as well as of secular music during that century. England, as we shall see, was reluctant to adopt the opera, and it was again so distracted by civil war that it lagged behind the Continent perceptibly. Yet in spite of the conflict of creeds, and the authorized supremacy of a form of worship to which by no means the whole nation gave assent, the achievements of the English church musicians, up to the end of the reign of Charles I, are of high, and sometimes of the very highest, order.

II  The Decline

The advent of the Stuarts in 1603 proved an event of evil omen for England. Although it established the union of the hitherto often warring kingdoms of Scotland and England, it threatened the existence of what had become the most democratic system of government in Europe. James believed fanatically in his divine right to rule and would stoop to any duplicity to maintain his absolutism. The conflicts of religious and political interest that had been smoothed under Elizabeth were by no means reconciled, and James’ behavior soon reawakened them. Although its adherents were in the minority, the English Church had achieved a kind of operative technique—a mutual adjustment of Humanism and dogma—than bade fair to allay at last the strife. But, under the Stuarts, Hooker’s hope that reason might find large place in the operation of the divine Law was to prove vain.

James had no mind to submit to an ecclesiastico-political organization, such as Knox and Melville had set up in Scotland. The bishops, the ecclesiastical princes of the English Church, were needful for the conduct of his rule, and he would on no account relinquish them. Catholicism, tolerated under Elizabeth until the latter years of her reign, began with high hopes under James, but the Gunpowder Plot revealed a mutual distrust implying little hope for peace. For however tolerant the Anglicans might be, the Calvinists believed Catholicism to be the rule of Antichrist, and they were likewise fundamentally opposed to the organization and the doctrine of the Anglican Church. And there was arising a new sect, the “Brownists,” the founders of Congregationalism, who dissented from Catholic and Calvinistic, or Anglican, doctrine alike.

The sympathy of the English people for the Protestant cause at the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War was deep; but it was ineffective. For James, at the outbreak of the conflict, had refused desperately needed help, even to King Frederick of Bohemia, his son-in-law. Alarming sympathy with Spain was seen in Charles’ unsuccessful suit for the hand of the Spanish Infanta, and his actual marriage with Henrietta Maria of France proved even more dangerous for English liberty than the Spanish marriage would have been. If liberty and Protestantism are allied, as I have contended, it is evident that a decline in English church music is imminent.

The usual swing of the pendulum of creative energy would suffice, perhaps, to explain the decline. The great composers of the Elizabethan era died in the 1620’s, and there were none to take their place. The lowering and the bursting of the clouds of civil war under Charles were fatal to creative effort in their time. The attitude of the Puritans was less unfriendly than has often been painted. Their destruction of organs and libraries is a matter of record; but the fondness for music of many an individual Puritan is largely unchronicled. Cromwell apparently was a genuine music lover and intervened to save more than one musical establishment from the heedless destruction that was rampant. (He seems, however, to have been a pretty niggardly paymaster for musicians.) But if the older current of musical thought had still been running when the Restoration came, it is possible that a swift efflorescence, comparable to that under Elizabeth, might have occurred.

That current, however, was profoundly changed. The Monodic Revolution in Italy coincided with the advent of the Stuarts in England. While that innovation by no means spread immediately abroad, it had had its effect by the time England was ready again to undertake new musical creation. The technique of the anthem, with Orlando Gibbons, had been essentially the technique of the madrigal, or at any rate, the technique of polyphony, which England had borrowed from the Continent. Slow in that acquisition, she was still slower in absorbing the new technique of the dramma per musica. Some influence of that style may be found in the masques, but it was by no means fully assimilated.

The masque, indeed, was the most admired form of composition during the second quarter of the century. Henry Cooke, Christopher Gibbons (Orlando’s son), William and Henry Lawes, and Matthew Locke, all composed conspicuous examples of this form. Henry Lawes’ setting of Milton’s Comus—since that is the most famous English poem in that style—is the best-known example; but there is, of course, nothing to compare with the work of Monteverdi in the opera, and it contributed little to the later operatic efforts of English composers. These same composers, however, did produce anthems; but while these works are often solid and musicianly efforts, it is evident that they are really a kind of by-product. Henry Lawes published in 1637 A Paraphrase vpon the Psalmes of David . . . Set to new Tunes for private Devotion. He and his brother published another collection of Choice Psalmes put into Musik for Three voices. After the Restoration, Henry also composed an anthem, “Zadok the Priest,” for the coronation of Charles II. Matthew Locke, also after the Restoration, composed thirteen anthems “for the use of some vertuoso ladyes in the city,” and there are a few others, along with Latin and English hymns; but his chief interest was in dramatic music. He was the teacher of Pelham Humphrey. Christopher Gibbons left a few anthems, but his work is apparently of little significance.

I need hardly dwell on the looseness characteristic of almost all the literature of the Restoration. And it will be evident that church music in that period can hardly be expected to show the intensity of devotion apparent in the work of contemporary German composers, such as Heinrich Schütz, or the Danish-German master Buxtehude. Yet the work of John Blow (condemned as “crude” by the often prejudiced Burney) was voluminous and probably important. Husk asserted that fourteen services and more than a hundred anthems of Blow’s existed; but little of this work has been published. Arkwright and Parry have sufficiently defended him against Burney’s censures. He was the teacher of Henry Purcell and both his predecessor and successor, at Westminster Abbey; but it is likely that Purcell’s greater genius obscured the lesser light.

Pelham Humphrey is doubtless the great figure of the period. His talent being unmistakable, he was sent by Charles II to France “to learn from Lully, the great master of French dramatic composition, how to compose English church music.” He came back, Pepys relates, “an absolute Monsieur, as full of form, and confidence, and vanity, and disparages everything and everybody’s skill but his own.” Although he died at twenty-seven, he left a large body of composition, of which a considerable part is sacred. As we should expect, his style is harmonic rather than contrapuntal and perhaps more dramatic than religious. “Why art thou so full of heaviness, O my soul?” is given an intensity and directness of emphasis unthinkable in older polyphonic music. There is a similar heightening of natural force in one of the verse anthems. The bass has “Wash ye”; the tenor, “Make you clean”; the alto, “Put away the evil of your doings from before Mine eyes,” and so on. The Monodic Revolution has arrived in England.

Michael Wise, although he began chiefly with theatrical music, was appointed organist at Westminster Abbey in 1669, and thereafter poured out a remarkable quantity of anthems and other religious pieces. They are perhaps less genial, as the Germans say, than those of Humphrey, but more truly earnest.

None of these men, however, exhibits that absolute and commanding genius which was possessed by Henry Purcell. He, too, was of course chiefly a dramatist; but his sacred works are as true to the spirit of their texts as are his dramatic pieces—and that statement is justifiably in the superlative. I will not attempt to summarize his life or work, but rather try to show you, by describing a single work, something of his artistry. This is a Te Deum (but it has no Latin text). The distribution of the voices is constantly and skillfully varied, and yet the whole impression is one of unity and force.

The whole choir begins: “We praise Thee, O Lord, we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord. All the earth doth worship Thee, the Father everlasting.” Three solo voices, alto, tenor, bass: “To Thee all angels cry aloud, the heav’ns and all the pow’rs therein.” Two sopranos and altos, soli: “To Thee cherubim and seraphim continually do cry.” Tutti: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth.” Semichorus I: “Heaven and earth are full of the majesty of Thy glory.” Semichorus II: “The glorious companies of the Apostles praise Thee,” Semichorus I: “The goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise Thee.” Semichorus II: “The noble army of martyrs praise Thee.” Tutti: “The holy Church throughout all the world doth acknowledge Thee.” This will sufficiently illustrate the method of distributing the text. There presently appears a firmly knit fugue on three subjects, and the device of double canon is also effectively used. The tonality is remarkably stable throughout, the traces of modality being rare. The words are not much repeated, and even where of necessity they overlap, it is evident that to make sense of the text has been the composer’s guiding principle. The same technique is evident in a Magnificat and a Nunc Dimittis.

Here, once more, is a musical method representative of its own time, used to express a belief whose earnestness no one will dispute. How it came about that England all but ignored the genius of Purcell is a question to which I think no one has given an adequate answer. French influence, increasingly throughout the seventeenth century, altered the surface and to a lesser extent the body of English literature. Rationalism, also from France, suggesting contradictions between natural law and the laws of faith, brought the hitherto unquestionable within the scope of question. Under the guise of social and intellectual progress, a subtle indifference to the problems of religion was brewing that has posed questions with which—as my lamentably nontheological mind sees them—theology has had to deal ever since the Reformation. For while liberty and Protestantism are akin, they are both subject to the subtle degenerative diseases induced by our inveterate mental indolence.

Into this condition of uncertainty came the commanding personality of Handel—a German by birth and training; an Italian (in dramatic technique) by adoption; an eclectic by disposition—exactly the man, I think, to provide the surface of an apparently sound musical activity. His chief interest was certainly not in music for the service of the Church; but that is not to cast any doubt on the sincerity of his belief. His disdain of mere artistry seems to me well illustrated in his impatient rejoinder to someone who praised him for the pleasure his Messiah had given to the audience: “I hoped to make them better!” But his church music, if we mean by that music designed for the service, is slight in volume in comparison with his other works. If, on the other hand, we include the oratorios—but many of these are only incidentally religious, the dramatic purpose being nearly as dominant as if they were operas—the volume is much greater. The Chandos Anthems, at any rate, are commanding pieces, sufficient—if such works had been a rule with Handel rather an exception—to have established a new tradition of Anglican church music. The oratorios did indeed establish a tradition—not of service music, adapted to the specific creed of the Anglican Church, but of a kind of extraliturgical religious celebration, Protestant in tone and of a more universal appeal than any existent creed could offer. How far the Oratorios may have contributed to religious toleration in England is a question beyond my grasp as a historian; but in appears to me a question of some importance.

On English musical activity, at any rate, the influence of the Handelian oratorio was immense. The huge choirs, and the many great choral festivals held every year in England, are in no small measure representative of a tradition founded by Handel; and their very existence shaped the major effort of British composers until the end of the nineteenth century. But from their very nature these institutions could hardly stimulate the more intimate and often more exalted style of composition devoted to the immediate act of divine worship. A vast deal of service music was indeed composed; but “Bennett in F,” worthy as it may have appeared to its mid-nineteenth-century contemporaries, is a sample of service music hardly destined to awaken the religious consciousness as do the Bach cantatas. Handel was an importation into England, and he succeeded because of that fact. He failed when he had been so long a resident of London that his work had lost the glamour of the imported product; and although he rose again to favor with the oratorios, in was not because his style had become more English, but because the English had at last so far absorbed his style as to suppose it their own. And the taste for imported music did not wane. Remember the immense vogue of Haydn in London in the 1890’s. His Creation is a noble musical monument in any language, and his Seasons—perhaps more English because of its text—is a comparable artistic achievement; but the purpose of both works is essentially that of Handel’s oratorios. Beethoven’s Ninth—a Protestant declaration of spiritual independence, but only in the broadest sense religious music—was originally commissioned by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and was performed in London in March, 1825, less than a year after its first performance in Vienna. No British composer was expected to compete with that work. Then, in the 1830’s, came Mendelssohn, whose St. Paul and Hymn of Praise, if not precisely intended for English consumption, were executed conformably to English taste. His Elijah was first performed an Birmingham in 1846; and these works—which compare with Bach’s or with Purcell’s, as the concerted Masses of the seventeenth century compare with those of Palestrina—represent the taste that ruled until the end of the century.

It appeared for a time that Elgar’s three deeply religious oratorios, The Dream of Gerontius, The Apostles, and The Kingdom—even though they were essentially Catholic in tone—had inaugurated a new style in English composition. How far they actually went in this direction I am unable to say. Modernism was awakening in England as elsewhere; but its progress (or perhaps I should say its speed) was far less rapid than in Germany. And the two World Wars, which bid fair to be as destructive of ideals as they were of life and material substance, have brought no notable regeneration either of religion or of religious music. The problem of the present state of English church music is one about which I find myself too ill informed—and too lacking in the time required to become informed—to speak. In would be easy to compile a list of names and a catalog of modern works; but to speak of these in a critical way at all appropriate to the audience I have before me is a greater task than I have been able to accomplish.

I will therefore summarize briefly some statements—not altogether fortunate, I think—which I made on the subject of the modern idiom as suited to devotional music. I am not, I think, a hopeless reactionary in this problem. I have little patience with the smug stories of harmony contained in the nineteenth-century texts. I have no complaint to make of those who break those rules. They ought to be broken—except in so far as they represent what no theorist has yet been able to formulate, the actual laws of musical thought. Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis, Ovid sang; and those changes have been the despair of the aged, and at the same time the hope of the world’s regeneration, ever since his day. The nineteenth century devised for itself a new musical idiom—a fact which nobody now regrets, but to which many a Philistine of the 1830’s brought a profound pessimism. The twentieth century has boldly asserted its right to a new musical idiom, and only the most hidebound conservative would deny that right.

A valid musical idiom, however, is harder to establish than is the need for it. In those new and often terrible regions of the soul which modern psychology has revealed, there is much human matter which no artist could ever have dealt with until our day. But this matter, once its existence is acknowledged, adds still another to those problems of the soul with which religion has to deal, and still another to those manifestations of religious feeling which it is the proper business of church music to express. Whether or not the idiom which the musicians of the twentieth century have devised is a valid idiom even for the expression of the worldly aspect of the new time is a question to which the majority of music lovers have given a dubious answer. I can find but a handful of musical compositions, written in the last thirty years, that have been accepted by any large portion of the musical public as real contributions to musical literature. Even when they are not found repellent, they seem to lack that which has always been desired—a kind of nourishment for the spirit. I have examined too few of the extant examples of modern church music to be able to speak with any certainty as to their religious content. I am also one to whom familiarity with the new language comes with some difficulty, and I am aware that my opinions are affected by that fact. But I think that the new psychology is less new than it seems and that its revelations, instead of offering a new understanding of man, offer merely a certain rectification of our hard-won understanding of what turns out to be, after all, the old Adam.

With him all religions wrestle. With that wrestling all religious music has been concerned and will be concerned until he is overcome. The sign of overcoming—which man sometimes achieves—is a certain exaltation of spirit which even the unregenerate often recognize and sometimes emulate. I find—whether rightly or wrongly—little of that exaltation in contemporary music; and it is on that ground alone that I am doubtful of its appropriateness to the expression of religious feeling.

From The Musical Heritage of the Church, Volume IV (St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia Publishing House, 1954). Copyright Concordia Publishing House. Printed by permission. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Concordia Publishing House.