>I did notice one thing, comparing Eng. with Germ. choral music; the
>Germans never lost touch with the folk tradition; it seems to me that the
>Eng. anthem DID. Thus I find Germ. church music overwhelmingly moving,
>where the Eng. kind is just admirable. I don't find any traces of say the
>madrigal tradition in church music before Holst or Vaughan-Wms. But the
>Germans never lost it, & I wonder why.
Entirely a matter, I feel, of taste.
To me the masses of Byrd and, under a different church, the verse anthems
of Purcell are to me an intense experience and represent a peak of religous
music; by that I mean music to frame and underline the textual experience.
The folk tradition perhaps made church music more accessible to ordinary
people (if I use the word peasants I am not being sneering or attempting to
be abusive). They could relate to tune snatches they knew, perhaps as
children in the same way that they could relate to the wall paintings of
the time.
In England, we have a choral tradition in the great cathedrals which still
encompasses music from Tallis down to the dissonances of today's composers.
As someone who has lived alongside this tradition, these sounds, I find it
difficult to accept the folk tradition as a core of church music.
But then, as Patrick Collinson notes *, in a perceptive review of a
masterly biography, which has unsettled me since I read it, if Edward Vl
had lived, or had been succeeded by Queen Jane, Cranmer would not have
stood still, and Anglicanism would not have been the Anglicanism we have
known. Indeed, he 'would not have known what Anglicanism meant'. The Prayer
Book might well have been revised yet again. Cathedrals, with their musical
life, which for Cranmer meant very little, would probably not have
survived. The Anglicanism which is Choral Evensong, Cranmer would have
deplored.
*TLS, May 24, 1996, reviewing Thomas Cranmer, A Life, by Diarmid
MacCulloch, Yale, £29.95.
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