Music and the Reformation in England

"This book deals with a rather distinct and contained historical period. He looks at how the Reformation affected composition for the English Church from the day that it started, effectively, from the day the Henry VIII decided to make himself head of the Church, through the reign of Elizabeth I, and into the Jacobean period. It’s what you might call an old-fashioned work of scholarship. It looks at every source, at every piece, and it puts them into context. Again, he writes with the sort of compassion and understanding of a scholar, a musician, a practitioner, and a human being, if I can put it like that. Yes, absolutely. Le Huray deliberately writes only about music for the Reformed Church. So, for example, he would refer—in the context of Tallis—to the English service music that he composed, and he doesn’t concern himself with the Latin music. But what happened before these texts were produced is absolutely fascinating, and that’s something that this book really opened my eyes to. Before the Book of Common Prayer in 1549, there had already been some moves towards writing music in English, the very earliest settings of the Communion in English, for example, from books like the Wanley Partbooks. You can look at these in facsimile and see the composers trying to find their way. You can see them sitting down with this blank piece of paper and thinking, “Well, how do we do this, this is new, we’ve never done this before.” They’re having a go. Some of it works, and some of it doesn’t. It’s a real window into working people, working musicians trying to provide something for people to use. Well, radically, and fundamentally, and totally, and completely. But, this is now getting on to another of my books, The Stripping of the Altars by Duffy. There are fascinating accounts of how some people are told, “You must stop singing in Latin, and you must now sing in English.” So they say, “OK, yes sir,” and they sing in English, but they sing it to the same tunes, and they sing it with a kind of funny accent so they make it sound as much like the Latin as they possibly can, and it sounds funny now, but there are several accounts of this."