Recently I attended an ecumenical service which was an unsettling experience in all sorts of ways. It's good to be unsettled, it makes you think. One of the sources of unsettlement was the music. It prompted me to consider the issue of church music, especially as I've had some kind compliments from people at Swanvale Halt since I took on selecting hymns for our services, so as usual I ended up collecting my thoughts by writing them down. Here's the first bit: it'll be no more than obvious to some, but we were never taught it at vicar school (like a lot of other things).
The music of church services has become subject to the underlying relativistic assumptions of our modern mindset, that it is a matter of arbitrary choice and anything is as good as anything else. But this ignores the way Christian music, especially for the Eucharist, has developed over the centuries.
In the old Mass in the Western tradition – by which I mean the Latin mass before the changes of the 1960s – an elaborate system of music had developed to accompany the offering of the Eucharist. As well as the unchanging parts of the service, the ‘Ordinary’ of the Mass, there was the ‘Proper’, sung parts which varied according to the day or season. These were usually an Introit, sung at the start of the service; a Gradual, sung before the Gospel reading, Offertory, and Communion Anthem. There were also ‘Sequences’, hymns specific to days and occasions. Each of these were composed of Scriptural phrases, interlinked by theme and season to provide, for those who understood them, a sort of commentary or meditation on the Mass itself and the readings of the day. The Eastern traditions developed a parallel system of musical commentary on the Eucharist, with a rather freer use of non-Biblical poetic or devotional texts. In the East, in fact, the whole service was sung: the concept ‘said mass’ made no sense.
The Anglican Church dispensed with this whole system at the Reformation, yet very quickly began developing its own repertoire of devotional hymns which, imperceptibly, came to perform exactly the same function as the Proper of the Mass. When they were introduced back into the Communion service in the 19th century, hymns appeared in the same places as the texts of the Proper, and based on expansions and meditations of Biblical texts and phrases as they were, did, or at least had the potential to do, exactly the same thing as the old chants, gradually affecting people's thinking through their poetry and melody. One sign of the inner Catholicism of the Anglican Church is that this happened without anyone deliberately planning it, or even realising it was happening. The ancient structure re-emerged through its own internal dynamic. How many contemporary clergy, even, have any idea that the pre-Gospel hymn is termed the Gradual because it occupies the place of the chant sung from the gradus, the chancel step?
It’s also why it can be maddening to attend Eucharistic services where those responsible for choosing the music seem not to know what it’s there for. This is because they’re working on the Songs of Praise model in which hymns are devotional acts in their own right, rather than fitting into something bigger. This is fine in itself, but unbalances the Eucharist.
Hymns are not just light relief between the wordy bits of a service, nor occasions for the congregation to enjoy themselves singing, even when that means worshipping God. They have a precise function, to comment and meditate on the offering of the holy sacrifice. Hymns are the Anglican Proper of the Mass.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
If what you say is true, then presumably the current mish-mash of "modern" stuff will, over time, assemble itself into the age-old passion.
ReplyDeleteThe word you're looking for is "evolution". I don't think you need invoke the "inner Catholicity" of the C of E to account for it. Rather, like everything else in the universe, the eucharistic service has emergent properties that, as it were, "emerge" out of the random mutations (some of which, of course, may appear to have been deliberately designed) that occur in the course of time. Hence, while superficially different, the various Eastern and Western traditions exhibit features of convergent evolution - just as the eyes of mammals and cephalopods have striking similarities although their common ancestor had, at best, a light-sensitive patch.
Your story is a textbook demonstration, in other words, of the deficiencies of the Argument from Design.
Is a Heresy Corner article coming on? The only caveat I would express is that, while it is quite clear that the features of creatures don't presuppose a designer, a ritual meal rather does suggest that somebody had the idea in the first place. But that's an historian talking, of course.
ReplyDeleteI had not realised this background to church music.
ReplyDeleteWhen I have attended a sung service I come out feeling that my straight hair has been curled and I have stood before the Lord.
The inner-Catholicity of the C of E!!! As someone who struggled as a C of E Vicar to assert this and eventually realised it was futile, I think the whole idea is piffle!
ReplyDeleteGlad you enjoyed it, Father. Well, I carry on struggling, and have never felt more than I do at the moment that I'm right to do so - but perhaps that needs another post some other time.
ReplyDelete