LENT is a good time for making a confession. So, here is mine. Over the years, I have realised that I come close to idolatry when it comes to church music. Not any church music, though: the kind that gets me is very specific.
I first encountered it when I was a teenager, when I went one Sunday to an Anglo-Catholic church as a change from Evangelical Sunday matins. There, I heard something that I had never heard before. The choir sang settings of the Gloria and the Creed, which evoked something so mysterious and defiant in me that I was not quite sure that it belonged in church at all. Was it ancient, was it a kind of dance, did it come from the East? Was it pagan?
I later discovered that it was Martin Shaw’s Anglican Folk Mass, written in 1917, which the then choir of All Saints’, East Finchley, in north London, sang rather fast and with an exaggerated bounce-like rhythm which was not indicated in the score. I was immediately hooked, and went back again and again. Forget scripture, forget sermons, forget vestments and incense: this was it. It was not “home”, because it was so deeply unfamiliar; but it made me yearn for a home that I did not even know I had been seeking. Such is the power of music, and I can’t quite pray in church without remembering it.
Martin Shaw was one of the early 20th-century church musicians who contributed to The English Hymnal. So, while I felt that I was encountering something exotic and strange, I was, in fact, discovering a very English sound. Shaw based his Folk Mass on something older: Merbecke’s 16th-century setting of the Prayer Book’s communion service, which was virtually lost for centuries before being rediscovered in the wake of the Oxford Movement. There is plainsong in the deep background, and, nearer the foreground, an English folk tradition that had been rediscovered for the Church by Vaughan Williams.
So, I came to understand that the kind of music I loved represents a “homecoming” — not so much to God, perhaps, as to history and to England. You will not be surprised to know that I later came to love Harold Darke’s communion setting in F, and Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G minor; and, of course, Merbecke. If I had to choose a modern-language version for Rite A, the New English Folk Mass setting in The New English Hymnal would just about do.
I know that I should be more detached, but I can’t be. Is this a sin? For me, the underlying issue for discernment is whether early-20th-century English church music is a vehicle or an obstacle to the proper worship of God. Views would be welcome, though no suggestions for penance, please.
