English Church Music

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 812, 18 February 1955, Page 22

English Church Music

VERY year, especially in the summer, hundreds of visitors in increasing numbers pour through the great churches of Britain. The magnet that draws them, the Dean of Chichester wrote recently, is not only the grand architectural setting: it is the knowledge that they are spiritually and musically alive. "The Cathedrals," he said, "are not relics or museums, but embodiments of spiritual power." The Dean, who is also President of the Church Musical Society in Britain, was introducing the series of religious services especially recorded by the BBC Transcription Service, which are now being heard from YC stations at 9.15 p.m. on Mondays. Commending the series to all lovers of English church music, he said that they é¢ontained the

greatest possible variety of ancient and modern, but were given unity by the underlying liturgical structure, Listeners who are following the series, which began this week, will be interested in the background which the Dean sketches in. When the cathedrals of England and Wales were built by William the Congueror’s inspiration, he points out, castles were also built by his Barons. Though the castles are now ruins, the cathedrals remain, because they served a permanent religious purpose which the English people have cherished. The character of the worship that went on in the great churches -- a corporate sung service -has continued essentially from the time of the conquest. "It is an astonishing fact, and perhaps the 1ongest continuous element in English life," says the Dean. "Before

the 16th Century the seryices were sung in Latin. Since the 16th Century they have been sung in English. But their substance has beén the same-psalms and canticles, hymns and prayers, and readings from Scripture. For a_ brief period, during the Commonwealth, the Choral Foundations were dispersed. But great efforts were quickly made at the Restoration to revive the sung service, and every century since has seen a fresh enrichment of the music, till today a wealth of compositions exists, of great variety. It is the greatest English musical tradition, and has no parallel in any other..country,"

Each of the BBC series of religious services from famous places of worship in the British Isles is a complete service in the great tradition spoken of by the Dean of Chichester. The second to be broadcast is from Ely Cathedral, Cambridgeshire, described by Richard Dimbleby in his introduction as riding at. night "like a vast ship in the sky, dwarfing the city that lies around it, standing out with its clear massive silhouette above the miles of land that surround it." Actually, though Ely Cathedral is an impressive piece of architecture, it wouldn’t take much to dwarf the city around it, for Ely is, in fact. hardly more than a village. Inter-

esting points about the service from Ely is that the service is sung by the Dean — not by a minor canon or priest vicar as at most cathedral and collegiate churches--and there is some specially good improvisation in the organ voluntary by Dr. Sydney S, Campbell. This service will be heard. from YC stations on February a3: Other services in the series are from St. Bartholomew’'s, the Benedictine Abbey at Buckfast, Christ’s Hogpital, Hereford and Worcester Cathedrals (which, with Gloucester Cathedral] are the home of the Three Choirs’ Festival), Southward Cathedral, St. Martin -in-the-Fields, Durham Cathedral, Westminster Cathedral, New College, Oxford, Salisbury Cathedral, Paisley Abbey and Chichester Cathedral.