In Tuneful Accord. Trevor Beeson
men and sometimes women – who may sometimes have received a modest honorarium for their services. There were a few professional choirs and, at the other end of the scale, some churches had contingents of charity children who tried to give a lead. Every church had its organ, some of them the work of great builders, such as ‘Father’ Smith and Renatus Harris, and Box had a high opinion of the quality of the organists, whose number included Doctors of Music.
His verdict on the choirs was much less flattering, and their quality was on the whole not very high, though some were outstanding. He also complained about ‘the great variety’ of worship offered in the church, but what he describes appears today to have been remarkably uniform. The psalms and canticles were usually chanted, but professional and other competent choirs used a service setting for the canticles. Every choir, with very few exceptions, attempted an anthem (Handel was popular) with varying degrees of success. Hymns Ancient and Modern was most commonly used and some congregations were said to ‘sing with great gusto’. The prayers tended to be intoned, rather than read, by the priest, and the use of the organ before and after services was regarded as important, requiring congregational attention.
Box also ventured beyond the confines of the City to a number of other, mainly prominent, churches in Westminster, Southwark and the West End. Most of these had large congregations drawn from parishes of 10,000 people and more, and the music of the worship was virtually the same as that to be found in the City. If the result of his research is not, at least in scale, an accurate reflection of what was taking place elsewhere, it indicates a considerable change from the situation almost a century earlier when the Bishop of London, in a charge to his clergy, complained of the low standard of music in their churches, particularly in the singing of the psalms which, in most places, was the only choral music used:
In country parishes this is generally engrossed by a select band of singers, who have been taught by some itinerant master to sing in the worst manner a most wretched set of psalm tunes in three or four parts, so complex, and so totally devoid of true harmony that it is altogether impossible for any of the congregation to take part with them.
In London and Westminster this business is in a great measure confined to charity children, who, though they exert their little abilities to sing their Maker’s praises in the best manner they can, yet for want of right instruction to modulate their voices properly, almost constantly strain them to so high a pitch as to disgust and offend the ear and repel, instead of raising the devout attention of the hearers; and it is generally a contest between them and the organ which shall be the loudest and give most pain to the ear.
Significant improvement in church music generally had to await the wider renaissance in English music that began at the turn of the twentieth century, and even then the pace of progress varied considerably. Since there were upwards of 15,000 churches, most of these in rural areas, this is hardly surprising.
The report of an Archbishops’ Committee, Music in Worship, published in 1922, occupied only 55 pages but was considered valuable enough to merit reprinting, with minor amendments, in 1932, 1938 and 1947. It did not comment directly on the state of the church’s music at any of these times, but it emphasized the importance of high standards and warned against the ‘trivial’, ‘tawdry’, ‘superficial’, ‘inherently poor’, ‘small minded’ and ‘cheaply sentimental’. This suggests enough of these musical vices as to require attention. The report also emphasized the importance of good congregational singing and in order to raise standards generally made a number of proposals, including the setting up of a Central Council on Church Music, diocesan music committees, and diocesan inspectors of choirs. Less ambitious perhaps was its suggestion of choral societies, day conferences, summer schools, music competitions and hymn festivals, though none of these were widely adopted – at least for several years. Interestingly, the report recommended that ‘given the proper balance of harmony’, the old village orchestras should be reinstated to accompany the hymns, the rest of the singing to be unaccompanied. The Committee, on which Sydney Nicholson served, did however prepare the ground for the inauguration of his Royal School of Church Music which achieved most of its aims.
The next official report, the work of another Archbishops’ Committee, Music in Church (1951), indicated however that the notable efforts of Nicholson and the RSCM had borne only limited fruit. It spoke of the ‘listlessness’ of much parish worship and urged that church music should be ‘noble and restrained’ and never ‘mawkish or sentimental or suggestive of secularity’. The ‘noble language’ of the Book of Common Prayer was extolled, as if its continuing use might be under threat. On a positive note, an improvement in taste and performance was recorded, though the Commission was worried about the problems of parish choir recruitment and a marked increase in the number of professional musicians leaving church posts. In spite of the RSCM’s initiatives, lack of training facilities for church musicians remained a problem and the report ended by stressing the importance of maintaining voluntary church choirs, ‘preferably with boys’ voices’.
This proved to be much easier said than done. When the former choirmen returned from war service, few of them resumed their places in the choir stalls, and others, who were rebuilding their careers in the post-war world, found other claims on their time. The recruiting and retaining of boy choristers became even more difficult. Church schools, located in most parishes, had always been a reliable source of supply but, following a major reform of education, children moved at the age of 11 to larger state secondary schools, often several miles away from their homes. Rival attractions offered boys the choice of a range of alternative activities and school work was more demanding. Television offered greater excitement than most choir practices and after the 1950s declining congregations, combined with a wider acceptance of secular values, became a serious threat to recruitment.
In spite of all these problems, however, it was still possible in a significant number of places to retain, and even to build, a strong voluntary choir of men and boys. A local population of sufficient size to provide the requisite number of volunteers was an important factor. But even more important was the presence of a skilled, enthusiastic and imaginative organist and director of music. These could, and in many places still do, work wonders, often with no specially talented singers. The number of them, however, was also in decline and the deteriorating standard of music that resulted from the overall decline proved to be a deterrent to the recruitment of serious organists and choir members. Women and girls came increasingly to fill the vacant places and in many places to restore standards.
Meanwhile the energetic work of the Royal School of Church Music made a noticeable impact in the parishes keen enough to make use of its services. And a change of direction was required as an increasing number of parishes adopted the Eucharist as the chief act of Sunday worship. Choral Mattins disappeared very quickly and, although Evensong remained as an alternative option or a second service, it also went into decline, more slowly, yet inexorably, so that by the end of the century it was sometimes difficult to locate.
Enthusiastic choir members and those who valued tradition (usually the same people) lamented the loss of opportunity to sing the psalms and canticles, though the number of choirs that could chant them well was considerably smaller than the number of those who attempted them week by week. And the music for the Eucharist offered much less scope for a distinctive contribution by the choir, since there was a strong emphasis on simplicity and congregational participation. In some parishes questions were asked about the need for a choir at all, and there were suggestions that the presence of a robed choir might actually discourage congregations from wholehearted singing. More widely, serious questions were being raised, somewhat belatedly it might seem, about the wisdom of the church’s faith in the nineteenth-century cathedral-style of worship as the pattern for the parish churches. Might not a small group of unrobed singers, placed in the middle of the congregation, be more effective?
None of which was encouraging to the musicians, and before long another unforeseen development raised even more difficult questions. The revived Evangelical movement which started in a small way in the 1960s began to grow rapidly, so that during the closing decades of the century it spread widely in the parishes and began to exert significant influence. Its approach to worship favoured the informal and the spontaneous and placed little, if any, value on the disciplined style of the traditional choir. Moreover, its new hymns and songs were designed for accompaniment