The Music of the English Parish Church

"The interesting thing about this book is that it deals very deliberately with a side of English church music which is fascinating, and important, and wonderful, and rich, but largely ignored. That’s to say, not music for professional choirs, written by professional trained composers that we’ve all heard of, but music for the ordinary man, and woman, and children in the pew: music for the parish church. Temperley says in his introduction that he got interested in this and started reading about it, and was astonished to discover that nobody had actually studied it systematically, so he decided that’s what he was going to do, and he came up with what is clearly the defining work on that subject. Practicality, I think, more than anything else. This is music that had to be written for use by ordinary people, people who at some periods had some musical knowledge, but not terribly much, so it had to be accessible. It had to be liturgically acceptable, which meant obviously it was in English. But it was music that had to fit with what you had. For example, in music for the ‘musickers’ as they were known—the people who made music in a choir up to the middle of the 18th century—the tune was in the tenor, because you had mostly men and your farm labourers would bellow out the tune and that was all fine. Then when you get into the 19th century you start to get the vicar’s wife training up the children of the Sunday school, and the girls, to sing tunes. Then the tune migrates into the treble. These little details in the score tell you something about society, and the way things were changing. Some of it is, yes. Our English church music tradition has been able to absorb anything and everything. Our hymn tradition comes from all over the place. A hymn like ‘The Spacious Firmament On High’ for example, was originally composed with this treble-type setup. Whereas the hymns that are often in three-time like the tune Rockingham, ‘When I Survey The Wondrous Cross’, was originally written in one of these country songbooks—of which there were a great many at the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century—with the tune in the tenor. A fascinating aspect of parish church music is when the choir started to develop, and a separate group of people would make a piece of music on their own. You get some wonderfully characterful bands of singers and instrumentalists, in particular in the West Gallery tradition at the turn of the 19th century, described tremendously vividly by Thomas Hardy in Under the Greenwood Tree , and elsewhere. There’s a huge amount of it in church cupboards all over the country, particularly in the South and West of England, but it’s only in the last 30 years or so that people have started to dig it up and have a look at it. Hymn singing? Well, there have always been challenges, and people have always risen to them. There are still companies which put a lot of time and effort into producing hymn books. I’ve worked a little bit over the years with Kevin Mayhew who runs a publishing company which is dedicated to providing music for parish church use, so you’ll write a piece and then be asked to arrange it for organ with no pedals, and an organ with one note in the pedals, and then an organ with slightly more elaborate pedals. He has produced a hymn book, Hymns Old and New , which seems to address exactly that; what key should it be in, where should the tune be, how many parts should it be in, all of this kind of thing, so the debate goes on."