This mode is not older than 1549, for until the Reformation the Plain Chant was used in parish churches. The singing of metrical psalms dates from the reign of Elizabeth.
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The mixed mode is less simple than the parochial; parts of the service are sung by a choir, but the prayers, creeds, litany, and responses are recited in speaking voice. It may be said, however, that the parochial and the mixed modes are optional and permitted as matters of convenience. There is no law that forbids any congregation to adopt any portion or even the whole of the choral mode. In these variations, to which we find nothing similar in the Catholic Church, may be seen the readiness of the fathers of the Anglican Church to compromise with Puritan tendencies and guard against those reactions which, as later history shows, are constantly urging sections of the English Church back to extreme ritualistic practices.
The music of the Anglican Church follows the three divisions into which church music in general may be separated, viz., the chant, the figured music of the choir, and the congregational hymn.
The history of the Anglican chant may also be taken to symbolize the submerging of the ancient priestly idea in the representative conception of the clerical office, for the chant has proved itself a very flexible form of expression, both in structure and usage, endeavoring to connect itself sometimes with the anthem-like choir song and again with the congregational hymn. In the beginning, however, the method of chanting exactly followed the Catholic form. Two kinds of chant were employed,—the simple unaccompanied Plain Song of the minister, which is almost monotone; and the accompanied chant, more melodious and florid, employed in the singing of the psalms, canticles, litany, etc., by the choir or by the minister and choir.
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The substitution of English for Latin and the sweeping modification of the liturgy did not in the least alter the system and principle of musical rendering which had existed in the Catholic Church. The litany, the oldest portion of the Book of Common Prayer, compiled by Cranmer and published in 1544, was set for singing note for note from the ancient Plain Song. In 1550 a musical setting was given to all parts of the Prayer Book by John Marbecke, a well-known musician of that period. He, like Cranmer, adapted portions of the old Gregorian chant, using only the plainer forms. In Marbecke’s book we find the simplest style, consisting of monotone, employed for the prayers and the Apostles’ Creed, a larger use of modulation in the recitation of the psalms, and a still more song-like manner in the canticles and those portions, such as the Kyrie and Gloria, taken from the mass. To how great an extent this music of Marbecke was employed in the Anglican Church in the sixteenth century is not certainly known. Certain parts of it gave way to the growing fondness for harmonized and figured music in all parts of the service, but so far as Plain Chant has been retained in the cathedral service the setting of Marbecke has established the essential form down to the present day.[78]
The most marked distinction between the choral mode of performing the service, and those divergent usages which have often been conceived as a protest against it, consists in the practice of singing or monotoning the prayers by the minister. The notion of impersonality which underlies the liturgic conception of worship everywhere, the merging of the individual [338] in an abstract, idealized, comprehensive entity—the Church—is symbolized in this custom. Notwithstanding the fact that the large majority of congregational hymns are really prayers, and that in this case the offering of prayer in metrical form and in musical strains has always been admitted by all ranks of Christians as perfectly appropriate, yet there has always seemed to a large number of English Protestants something artificial and even irreverent in the delivery of prayer in an unchanging musical note, in which expression is lost in the abandonment of the natural inflections of speech. Here is probably the cause of the repugnant impression,—not because the utterance is musical in tone, but because it is monotonous and unexpressive.
It is of interest to note the reasons for this practice as given by representative English churchmen, since the motive for the usage touches the very spirit and significance of a ritualistic form of worship.
Dr. Bisse, in his Rationale on Cathedral Worship, justifies the practice on the ground (1) of necessity, since the great size of the cathedral churches obliges the minister to use a kind of tone that can be heard throughout the building; (2) of uniformity, in order that the voices of the congregation may not jostle and confuse each other; and (3) of the advantage in preventing imperfections and inequalities of pronunciation on the part of both minister and people. Other reasons which are more mystical, and probably on that account still more cogent to the mind of the ritualist, are also given by this writer. “It is emblematic,” he says, “of [339] the delight which Christians have in the law of God. It bespeaks the cheerfulness of our Christian profession, as contrasted with that of the Gentiles. It gives to divine worship a greater dignity by separating it more from all actions and interlocutions that are common and familiar. It is more efficacious to awaken the attention, to stir up the affections, and to edify the understanding than plain reading.” And Dr. Jebb puts the case still more definitely when he says: “In the Church of England the lessons are not chanted, but read. The instinctive good taste of the revisers of the liturgy taught them that the lessons, being narratives, orations, records of appeals to men, or writings of an epistolary character, require that method of reading which should be, within due bounds, imitative. But with the prayers the case is far different. These are uttered by the minister of God, not as an individual, but as the instrument and channel of petitions which are of perpetual obligation, supplications for all those gifts of God’s grace which are needful for all mankind while this frame of things shall last. The prayers are not, like the psalms and canticles, the expression, the imitation, or the record of the hopes and fears, of the varying sentiments, of the impassioned thanksgivings, of the meditative musings of inspired individuals, or of holy companies of men or angels; they are the unchangeable voice of the Church of God, seeking through one eternal Redeemer gifts that shall be for everlasting. And hence the uniformity of tone in which she seeks them is significant of the unity of spirit which teaches the Church universal so to pray, of the unity of means by which her prayers are made available, of the perfect unity with God her Father which shall be her destiny in the world to come.”