This book examines the stylistic development of English cathedral music during a period of liturgical upheaval, looking at the attitudes of cathedral clergy, liturgists, composers, leading church music figures and organisations to music and liturgy. Arguments that were advanced for retaining an archaic style in cathedral music are considered, including the linking of musical style with liturgical language, the recommending of a subservient role for music in the liturgy, and the development of a language of fittingness to describe church music. The roles of the RSCM and other influential bodies are explored. Martin Thomas draws on many sources: the libraries and archives of English cathedrals; contemporary press coverage and the records of church music bodies; publishing practices; secondary literature; and the music itself. Concluding that an arresting of development in English cathedral music has prevented appropriate influences from secular music being felt, Thomas contrasts this with how cathedrals have often successfully and dynamically engaged with the world of the visual arts, particularly in painting and sculpture. Presenting implications for all denominations and for patronage of the arts by churches, and the place of musical aesthetics in the planning of liturgy, this book offers an important resource for music, theology, liturgy students and ministry teams worldwide.

Examining the development of English cathedral music during a period of liturgical upheaval, Martin Thomas demonstrates that stylistic change in cathedral music was impeded by leading church music figures and organisations resulting in its becoming an identifiable, consistent, and archaic genre. Drawing on primary sources from libraries and archives of cathedrals, Thomas explores contemporary press coverage and the records of church music bodies, publishing practices, secondary literature, and the music itself. This book offers an important resource for music, theology, and liturgy students and ministry teams worldwide.

Our contemporary culture is communicating ever-increasingly through the visual, through film, and through music. This makes it ever more urgent for theologians to explore the resources of art for enriching our understanding and experience of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Annunciations: Sacred Music for the twenty-First Century, edited by George Corbett, answers this need, evaluating the relationship between the sacred and the composition, performance, and appreciation of music. Through the theme of ‘annunciations’, this volume interrogates how, when, why, through and to whom God communicates in the Old and New Testaments. In doing so, it tackles the intimate relationship between Scriptural reflection and musical practice in the past, its present condition, and what the future might hold. Annunciations comprises three parts. Part I sets out flexible theological and compositional frameworks for a constructive relationship between the sacred and music. Part II presents the reflections of theologians and composers involved in collaborating on new pieces of sacred choral music, alongside the six new scores and links to the recordings. Part III considers the reality of programming and performing sacred works today. This volume provides an indispensable resource for scholars and artists working at the interface between theology and the arts, and for those involved in sacred music. However, it will also be of interest to anyone concerned with the ways in which the Divine communicates through word and artistry to humanity.

This book is the first full-length treatment of Walter Hussey's work as a patron between 1943 and 1978, first for the Anglican parish church of St Matthew in Northampton, and then at Chichester Cathedral. He was responsible for the most significant sequence of works of art commissioned for the British churches in the twentieth century. They included music by Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein and William Walton, visual art by Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and Marc Chagall, and poetry by W. H. Auden. Placing Hussey in theological context and in a period of rapid cultural change, it explores the making and reception of the commissions, and the longer-term influence of his work, still felt today. As well as contributing to the religious and cultural history of Britain, and of Anglo-Catholicism and the cathedrals in particular, the book will be of interest to all those concerned with the relationship between theology and the arts, and to historians of music and the visual arts.

This book examines the stylistic development of English cathedral music during a period of liturgical upheaval, looking at the attitudes of cathedral clergy, liturgists, composers, leading church music figures and organisations to music and liturgy. Arguments that were advanced for retaining an archaic style in cathedral music are considered, including the linking of musical style with liturgical language, the recommending of a subservient role for music in the liturgy, and the development of a language of fittingness to describe church music. The roles of the RSCM and other influential bodies are explored. Martin Thomas draws on many sources: the libraries and archives of English cathedrals; contemporary press coverage and the records of church music bodies; publishing practices; secondary literature; and the music itself. Concluding that an arresting of development in English cathedral music has prevented appropriate influences from secular music being felt, Thomas contrasts this with how cathedrals have often successfully and dynamically engaged with the world of the visual arts, particularly in painting and sculpture. Presenting implications for all denominations and for patronage of the arts by churches, and the place of musical aesthetics in the planning of liturgy, this book offers an important resource for music, theology, liturgy students and ministry teams worldwide.

The first history of all the English cathedrals, from Birmingham and Bury St Edmunds to Worcester and York Minster England’s sixty-two Anglican and Catholic cathedrals are some of our most iconic buildings, attracting millions of worshippers and visitors every year. Yet although much has been written about their architecture, there is no complete history of their life and activities. This is the first such book to provide one, stretching from Roman times to the present day. The History of England’s Cathedrals explains where and why they were founded, who staffed them, and how their structures evolved. It describes their worship and how this changed over the centuries, their schools and libraries, and their links with the outside world. The history of these astonishing buildings is the history of England. Reading this book will bring you face to face with the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Reformation, Civil War, Victorian England, World War Two, and finally modern democracy.

The sound of the choir of King's College, Cambridge - its voices perfectly blended, its emotions restrained, its impact sublime - has become famous all over the world, and for many, the distillation of a particular kind of Englishness. This is especially so at Christmas time, with the broadcast of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, whose centenary is celebrated this year. How did this small band of men and boys in a famous fenland town in England come to sing in the extraordinary way they did in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? It has been widely assumed that the King's style essentially continues an English choral tradition inherited directly from the Middle Ages. In this original and illuminating book, Timothy Day shows that this could hardly be further from the truth. Until the 1930s, the singing at King's was full of high Victorian emotionalism, like that at many other English choral foundations well into the twentieth century. The choir's modern sound was brought about by two intertwined revolutions, one social and one musical. From 1928, singing with the trebles in place of the old lay clerks, the choir was fully made up of choral scholars - college men, reading for a degree. Under two exceptional directors of music - Boris Ord from 1929 and David Willcocks from 1958 - the style was transformed and the choir broadcast and recorded until it became the epitome of English choral singing, setting the benchmark for all other choral foundations either to imitate or to react against. Its style has now been taken over and adapted by classical performers who sing both sacred and secular music in secular settings all over the world with a precision inspired by the King's tradition. I Saw Eternity the Other Night investigates the timbres of voices, the enunciation of words, the use of vibrato. But the singing of all human beings, in whatever style, always reflects in profound and subtle ways their preoccupations and attitudes to life. These are the underlying themes explored by this book.