Lets talk about traditional liturgical Church Music

All4Christ

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Indeed, I could not find an ebook. :( I will have to get a print copy, which is okay, but I try to get ebooks of everything these days, as I find i just prefer reading on the backlit screen of my tablet, and there’s no danger of dust or papercuts.

Interestingly, there is a recording of an Anglican adaptation of the Rachmaninoff services, beautifully performed by the Choir of All Saints Margaret Street, a particularly famous, ultra high church Anglo Catholic parish near Oxford Street in the City of Westminster, the most important borough in Greater London*, which is available on iTunes and Apple Music, and through other means I am sure, The English Rachmaninoff. Orthodox music adapts well for Anglican use, because when you think about it, the two major events in both churches are the Eucharistic Liturgy, prefaced by Morning Prayer and a Litany, and a vesperal service, Choral Evensong in the Anglican tradition, and All Night Vigils in the Russian/Ukrainian/Belarussian tradition is . Now, the Anglican adaptation does not sound as good as a good performance of the Rachmaninoff vigils and liturgy in Church Slavonic, but it is still an excellent performance, one which also shows that it is possible to translate those services into English.

All Saints, Margaret Street - Wikipedia
All Saints Margaret Street | CD Shop

I would note that among ordinary Anglican parish churches and chapels, All Saints Margaret Street is one of the best in Greater London in terms of its music program (it had a boys school, and a boys choir, until 1968, and maintains professional standards for its adult choristers on a par with cathedrals; also it has a massive organ the size of a typical cathedral organ, built by the legendary British organ builder Harrison & Harrison in 1910 and restored in 2003). The other really good ones are the Christopher Wren designed St. Martin in the Fields (which has probably the best musical program of any parish church in London, on a par with the musical programs of St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey), with a boys choir, an extensive program of concerts, and other things; it is a particularly prominent parish as it is on Trafalgar Square and is the parish church of Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street, and St. Sepulchre in the City of London*, which is the National Musician’s Church and has a fantastic choir, although sadly their organ is in need of restoration and the funds are lacking.** That said, they do a splendid job singing a capella, and thus their music evokes that of an Orthodox parish.

Lastly, although not technically Anglican parishes in the ordinary sense, there are several royal peculiars in London, such as the Savoy Chapel, which has a superb music program albeit hampered by an annoying rector who likes to hear himself talk, the Chapel Royal at the Tower of London, which function like regular parishes, but are under the jurisdiction of the Queen, and Westminster Abbey is presently of this status, a Royal Peculiar the proper name of which is the Collegiate Church of St. Peter, although before Henry VIII and the dreadful Dissolution of the Monasteries it was a Benedictine monastery, as the name implies, and under Queen Elizabeth I it was elevated to be the Cathedral of St. Peter for a short lived Anglican Diocese of Westminster; these were dissolved I believe during the reign of King James I leaving it in its present status.


*Interestingly, the City of London itself, the Square Mile containing St. Paul’s Cathedral and the major financial hub, is not actually a part of Greater London but instead has its own Lord Mayor, government and a police force distinct from the Metropolitan Police (better known as Scotland Yard), a result of its ancient privileges which were preserved in the Norman Invasion as William the Conqueror did not relish attacking the ancient Roman city, which at the time had well preserved Roman walls and fortifications; these ancient rights were codified in the Magna Carta and persist ever since. Most of the famous tourist attractions in London are in the neighboring City of Westminster, such as Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, and Trafalgar Square, and many people live in Westminster, whereas as a result of the City becoming host to most of London’s skyscrapers and its vast financial sector on a par with Wall Street, Zurich and Singapore, the resdiential population of the “Square Mile” has dwindled to around 9,500, but, even more strangely, businesses in the City are able to vote in elections for the Court of Aldermen, which is like a city council and are granted votes proportionate to their revenues, in an extremely bizarre, ancient and complicated system of government; also, the Queen must request permission to enter the City from the Lord Mayor which she does annually in an elaborate ceremony known as the Lord Mayor’s Show. There js a lot more weirdness, and several interesting videos on YouTube explain it. A friend of mine who is a Londoner, presently living in the Burough of Greenwich, which also has a number of tourist attractions, has, not entirely inaccurately, described the Square Mile as being almost like a separate country from the rest of the UK.

Because the City is the oldest part of London, being the historic Roman provincial capital of Londinium, it has the oldest parishes in addition to the Cathedral of St. Paul’s, but most of these parishes were rebuilt following the notorious fire which devastated London in the 17th century. A great many were designed by Sir Christopher Wren, the masterful architect who also designed St. Paul’s Cathedral, the dome of which, together with that of St. Peter’s Basillica in the Vatican, inspired the design of the domes of the US Capitol and many of our state Capitols, and also St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg (Russia). The collection of churches in the City is one of the most historically important and beautiful in the world, in my opinion, on a par with the Coptic quarter in Old Cairo, the station churches in Rome, the surviving churches in the Kremlin, and the monasteries in the Meteora valley and on Mount Athos in Greece (I also love the historic churches in Boston and the surrounding portions of New England, and my avatar is a photo of Park Street Church, a traditional Congregationalist church in Boston, but these are historic primarily in an American sense, although still important, rivaled by the California Missions and the fine collections of Eastern Orthodox churches in Pennsylvania, Oregon and Alaska).

** I would note with some sadness that these ancient parish churches in the City of London have for the most part struggled to survive due to the mass displacement of residents from the City in favor of office buildings. However, they have managed to hold on by providing, for the most part, short services in the morning, at noon and in the evening for the benefit of the numerous lawyers, office workers, financiers, bankers and others who work in the City, in several cases with multiple parishes sharing a single priest and being open on a single day of the week. Only a few, such as the famed highly traditionalist Anglo Catholic parish St. Magnus the Martyr, and the evangelical low church St. Helen’s Bishopsgate, still draw people into the City for Sunday service; one church, St. Dunstan’s, is shared with the Romanian Orthodox Church which uses it on Sunday, the Anglicans still using it for weekday services; this church is octagonal in shape and features an Orthodox altar behind an iconostasis in addition to two Anglican altars: File:St Dunstan-in-the-West Interior, London, UK - Diliff.jpg - Wikipedia
That’s a beautiful rendition of his liturgy. Thank you for sharing!
 
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Radagast

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Also, if we consider the Psalms and Canticles in Scripture, which are important parts of the hymnography of every liturgical rite in Christendom and every Christian culture, those are literally Sacred Scripture.

No, one should not forget the Canticles.


And then there is Scripture set to music that wasn't originally intended to be sung, like the forms of music that draw on the tradition of the Easter Vigil.

 
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The Liturgist

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No, one should not forget the Canticles.


And then there is Scripture set to music that wasn't originally intended to be sung, like the forms of music that draw on the tradition of the Easter Vigil.


Actually its my belief the entirety of Scripture was meant to be sung, or at least intoned, in addition to being read, because of these reasons:

  • The Jews since antiquity have chanted the Torah and other books of the Tanakh, and the system used since the time of the Masoretic text involves cantillation marks, which are interpreted differently by Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Yemeni, Romaniote, Karaite and other Jews using that text (I particularly like the way the Karaites chant the book of Esther on Purim).
  • The liturgical Christian churches likewise have since antiquity chanted the Gospels, and also other books of the Bible.
  • The Lord’s Prayer is more often than not sung in Eastern churches, except in the diaspora, and in parishes with lots of converts.
  • Some Anglo Catholics (specifically Prayer Book Catholics, who use the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer) at Choral Evensong and other services historically chanted all the lessons, with the reader intoning the Old Testament or Epistle and the priest or deacon, the New Testament. I have recordings of Choral Evensong where everything is sung.
  • The earliest edition of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the 1549 edition, much loved by Anglo Catholics, was followed by the Prayer Book Noted, in which all services were entirely set to music. One can find PDFs of this edition on line, but I really wish someone would record it.
  • In the Orthodox church, in many Orthodox traditions, virtually every part of the liturgy except the homily is chanted or sung.
  • The ancient liturgies of the Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican, and Assyrian churches are all composed primarily of Scriptural verses arranged in a specific manner, like Handel’s Messiah; the standard form of the Eucharist amounts to an arrangement of scriptural verses in such a way as to express in condensed form the history of salvation and the institution of the Lord’s Supper as an eternal anamnesis of the Passion of our Savior, so in a sense, Handel’s Messiah, which I love, by the way, can be looked at as a reflection of the ancient liturgy, since Handel constructed it the same way. The Deutsches Requiem of Brahms also falls into this category.
  • Further to the last point, an analysis of the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, which is quite a long liturgical text if one includes the silent prayers said by the priest, indicated that 93% of the text was comprised of scriptural verses, and I have seen similiar percentages in studies of the traditional liturgies of other churches.
The reverse is also true; sacred scripture is so beautiful that it sounds exquisite when read aloud, and is a pleasure to read silently. The Anglicans have a wonderful tradition of said services, in which everything is read from the Book of Common Prayer, without music, this being particularly the earlier service of Holy Communion on a Sunday; CS Lewis used to attend with his brother such a service at 7 AM on Sundays at a church in rural Oxfordshire, and in the distant past when I was a member of the Episcopal Church, before getting involved in Congregationalism, I would always go to the said service at 8 AM for Holy Communion, and then sometimes linger around for the choral service at 10:30 (however, this choral service I was not a massive fan of, largely because our parish did not have a very good music program).

As an example of silent services, the Western example par excellence is the traditional Tridentine and Dominican (pre Novus Ordo) Low Mass in the Roman Rite of the Catholic church (setting aside silent devotional prayers Catholics do, like the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament), where almost the whole service is done silently or in a hushed voice by the priest and a single altar server. In France, it is customary for an organ to be played during the low mass. However, in the distant past, prior to the 10th century if memory serves, Roman Rite priests would chant the low mass in monotone. There is also some reason to believe that all music of the Roman church was in the form of monotony or at least some kind of monody prior to the famous sit-in orchestrated by St. Ambrose to keep the Arians from seizing one of the churches in Milan, in which he had the congregation sing antiphonally “in the manner of the Greeks” to keep their spirits up, “lest they perish in soulless monotony”, a moment of a legendary quality traditionally regarded as both the origin of the antiphonal music which had prevailed in the East since St. Ignatius the Martyr introduced the practice in Antioch, where he was the Bishop, following a dream in which two choirs of angels alternated in singing, and also as the birth of the Ambrosian liturgical rite specific to Milan, which has always been different from the Roman Rite.

So, given the Low Mass was once chanted, in monotone, the oldest form of silence or near silence in the liturgical recitiation of scripture is the unique way that Coptic Orthodox churches do the Psalms: aside from singing some of them in the Psalmody, which is basically their Vespers, Nocturns and Matins service, the majority of the Psalms are divided into the ancient liturgical hours in the Coptic Agpeya, a book equivalent to the Greek Horologion or a monastic diurnal. The Agpeya consists of the prayers of the first, third, sixth, ninth, eleventh and twelfth hours, along with an additional prayer for clergy and monastics at the end of the day. Each hour has, in addition to a litany, a fixed Gospel lesson and additional prayers, a division of the Psalter, and most of the Psalms are in the Agpeya. Coptic monks will memorize and recite all of them, but in a church, a deacon will go through the congregation and give each person present a variable number of psalms to read silently, usually three, which are different from those given to other congregants, so that all of the appointed psalms are read and these sercices are extremely common in Coptic parishes, with the first, third and sixth hours read before the Divine Liturgy, and the ninth, eleventh and twelfth hours read before Vespers on Saturday night.

This unique practice of the congregation working together to silently read all of the Psalms is quite special, as it imparts on the congregation a sense of duty, and is one of many things about Coptic Christianity I greatly love ( @dzheremi can no doubt go into greater detail on this, and also on the singing of certain Psalms in the services known as the Psalmody, which consists not just of certain Psalms but also of beautiful hymns; the Khiak Psalmody used in the month of Khiak in the Coptic calendar, which is contemporaneous with the liturgical season of Advent, is particularly popular ).
 
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Radagast

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Actually its my belief the entirety of Scripture was meant to be sung

It's certainly possible to sing all of Scripture, with a bit of musical imagination.

I won't quote examples here, since they're off-topic for the thread.
 
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The Liturgist

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It's certainly possible to sing all of Scripture, with a bit of musical imagination.

I won't quote examples here, since they're off-topic for the thread.

I am pretty sure that the entirety of canonical scripture has been chanted, when we consider the ancient cantillation practiced by the Jews, and the ancient liturgical traditions in Christianity.

I have read and also been taught in seminary that chanting or intonation is an aid to memorization; it is for this reason that other religions also intone their respective scriptures; for example, Muslims always intone the Quran when formally reciting it in Classical Arabic, and the Quran was not originally written down, as Mohammed was illiterate; conversely, the Sikh scriptures, the Guru Granth Sahab, are entirely intoned (much of it consists of hymns, but even those portions which are not, are intoned). Likewise, the holiest text in Zoroastrianism is their liturgy known as the Yasna, written in the ancient Avesta language, and this is entirely intoned.

These monotheistic religions are all related to Judaism and Christianity, directly or indirectly (Sikhism for example was a reaction to Islam by the “warrior saints” of the Punjab), and so to the extent they intone or chant their scriptures, I believe we can reasonably assert that they are imitating our religion (the ancient Hebrew and Judaic religion which then developed into the Christian faith).
 
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All4Christ

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Awesome!

I have a vast collection of playlists which I might be able to share with you if you wish on Apple Music, and on YouTube.
That’d be great - not sure how to do that with Apple Music though.
 
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hedrick

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This is all fine music. But for the Reformed, traditional liturgical music is pretty much restricted to unaccompanied Psalm singing. Calvinist Psalms were at one point a potent tool for evangelism. I admit that the modern PCUSA now has songs based on uninspired (i.e. non-Biblical) words, but our hymnal still has settings for most of the Psalms.

I actually like unaccompanied unison singing, though I wouldn't use it exclusively.

This is a consequence of the "regulative principle," which says that worship should only include elements that are explicitly Biblical. The PCUSA, of course, isn't strict about that in the way our ancestors were. Our communion service, e.g., is based on a model from the 3rd or 4th Cent. That's a result of the ecumenical liturgical renewal of the mid 20th Cent.
 
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The Liturgist

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That’d be great - not sure how to do that with Apple Music though.

I believe I can share playlists I have created. I can certainly share playlists on YouTube.
 
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The Liturgist

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This is all fine music. But for the Reformed, traditional liturgical music is pretty much restricted to unaccompanied Psalm singing. Calvinist Psalms were at one point a potent tool for evangelism. I admit that the modern PCUSA now has songs based on uninspired (i.e. non-Biblical) words, but our hymnal still has settings for most of the Psalms.

I actually like unaccompanied unison singing, though I wouldn't use it exclusively.

This is a consequence of the "regulative principle," which says that worship should only include elements that are explicitly Biblical. The PCUSA, of course, isn't strict about that in the way our ancestors were. Our communion service, e.g., is based on a model from the 3rd or 4th Cent. That's a result of the ecumenical liturgical renewal of the mid 20th Cent.

The singing of psalms plays a major role in the music of all the traditional liturgical churches. I myself particularly like Anglican Chant, with the exquisite settings of the Psalms, Evangelical Canticles and certain ancient hymns like Te Deum Laudamus, using in the case of the Psalms the Coverdale Psalter, which lends itself well to chanting.

Now, I have tried repeatedly and to no avail to find recordings of traditional Reformed and Presbyterian psalm singing. I would love to hear what the unaccompanied unison singing sounds like, I would loce to hear an example of “lining out”, and I can’t find any on YouTube, on Apple Music, or anywhere else. If you could hook me up with a recording of such music or a video of a church service with that kind of traditional music, I would be greatly in your debt.
 
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All4Christ

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hedrick

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I recently read a biography of Calvin. I was a bit surprised by what they said about music. Apparently the churches in Geneva didn't have any congregational singing when he started. He introduced it. The fact that it was unison only was at least in part, and maybe even totally, because they weren't ready for part singing or fancy accompaniment.
 
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hedrick

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The singing of psalms plays a major role in the music of all the traditional liturgical churches. I myself particularly like Anglican Chant, with the exquisite settings of the Psalms, Evangelical Canticles and certain ancient hymns like Te Deum Laudamus, using in the case of the Psalms the Coverdale Psalter, which lends itself well to chanting.

Now, I have tried repeatedly and to no avail to find recordings of traditional Reformed and Presbyterian psalm singing. I would love to hear what the unaccompanied unison singing sounds like, I would loce to hear an example of “lining out”, and I can’t find any on YouTube, on Apple Music, or anywhere else. If you could hook me up with a recording of such music or a video of a church service with that kind of traditional music, I would be greatly in your debt.
Take a look at Singing the Reformation 2016 | churchservicesociety.org. That's probably the most authentic you're going to get. It's from a Scottish Psalter, recreating the style of the late 16th Cent. The Scottish church used part singing. If you explore the site you'll see some other early music, with recordings for some items.

While they're tried to recreate the original style, I'm quite sure that it doesn't sound much like it did in the 16th Cent. Until recently, performances didn't tune carefully the way we expect modern performers to. Nor were many 16th Cent congregations made of professional singers. But still, I believe they're done their best to get the original style right.

There are a set of recordings of the Geneva Psalter here, Geneefs psalter - YouTube, but it's sung with parts by a good modern chamber group, so it wouldn't sound much like the original church service.

This is closer: https://www.newgenevanpsalter.com/. It's unaccompanied singing by a modern church group.

I just looked in iTunes. I found a few recordings of the Genevan Psalter. A complete series played on the guitar, apparently without words (sort of ironic). The first volume of one with a soloist, but the style is modern.

The only recordings I have of authentic early sacred music are American: Southern Harmony, from the Word of Mouth Chorus, and a pair of recordings by Paul Hillier, Early American Music. Both those are from different traditions than the Reformed Psalms. Only the first is performed as it would have been originally. (It's shaped-note music, if you're familiar with that tradition.)
 
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The Liturgist

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I recently read a biography of Calvin. I was a bit surprised by what they said about music. Apparently the churches in Geneva didn't have any congregational singing when he started. He introduced it. The fact that it was unison only was at least in part, and maybe even totally, because they weren't ready for part singing or fancy accompaniment.

That said, congregational singing does predate Calvin. For example, the Russian Old Rite and Znamenny Chant (Patriarch Nikon and the Czar’s suppression of the Old Rite that not only did it cause the predictable schisms - the Old Believers, some of whom have priests and some of whom are priestless, with many priestless Old Believers having settled in Woodburn, Oregon), but it also produced apocalyptic doomsday cults like the Mutilators and the Immolators, as well as an SDA like religion called the Molokans, and a Unitarian Universalist like sect which was later patronized by Leo Tolstoy, the Doukhobors, who migrated wholesale to Canada, and then became notorious for parading in the nude and setting buildings on fire over objections to the compulsory public schooling laws.
 
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The Liturgist

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Take a look at Singing the Reformation 2016 | churchservicesociety.org. That's probably the most authentic you're going to get. It's from a Scottish Psalter, recreating the style of the late 16th Cent. The Scottish church used part singing. If you explore the site you'll see some other early music, with recordings for some items.

While they're tried to recreate the original style, I'm quite sure that it doesn't sound much like it did in the 16th Cent. Until recently, performances didn't tune carefully the way we expect modern performers to. Nor were many 16th Cent congregations made of professional singers. But still, I believe they're done their best to get the original style right.

There are a set of recordings of the Geneva Psalter here, Geneefs psalter - YouTube, but it's sung with parts by a good modern chamber group, so it wouldn't sound much like the original church service.

This is closer: https://www.newgenevanpsalter.com/. It's unaccompanied singing by a modern church group.

I just looked in iTunes. I found a few recordings of the Genevan Psalter. A complete series played on the guitar, apparently without words (sort of ironic). The first volume of one with a soloist, but the style is modern.

The only recordings I have of authentic early sacred music are American: Southern Harmony, from the Word of Mouth Chorus, and a pair of recordings by Paul Hillier, Early American Music. Both those are from different traditions than the Reformed Psalms. Only the first is performed as it would have been originally. (It's shaped-note music, if you're familiar with that tradition.)

This is AWESOME! The YT playlist is splendid, and the Church Service Society material is clearly the real deal.

I havent found any recordings of any appreciable amount of the Genevan Psalter on Apple Music, but Southern Harmony I have found; that said I do have to confess to finding it moderately grating.

The incomplete recordings of the Genevan Psalter you found on Apple Music, were those choral? I really really do not want to hear it on the gi’tar.

By the way, I would love to hear the Bay Psalter and other early Psalters, as well as a recording of a choir from the RPCNA. I own a copy of their Psalter.

This all being said, when it comes to singing the Psalms in English, I think the Anglicans do it best with their beautiful tonal Anglican Chant composed by the likes of Dyson and Howells, using the Coverdale Psalter. Nothing else strikes me as coming even close, in English. In Latin of course, Gregorian, Dominican, Norbertine, Carthusian, Lyonaise, Bacarense, and surviving forms of Gallican-based music, chiefly Ambrosian and Mozarabic chant are ideal for this sort of thing, Greece gives us Byzantine Chant, Syriac Christianity gives us the Beth Gazo, the Dawud and other Assyrian hymnbooks, the Maronite hymns, and various regional variations, and also influenced Ethiopic chant, which has the world’s oldest surviving musical notation system in the Ge’ez script, Coptic Christianity gives us Agpeya, Ethiopian Armenian polyphonic and Georgian triphonic chant is exquisite, and Slavonic Christianity gives us a vast array of exquisite forms of chant
 
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The Liturgist

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I wasn’t suggesting that Calvin invented it. Just that it may explain why he did unison, unaccompanied singing.

Indeed and I liked your post Hedrick. You are one of the members whose posts I love reading because you transect my Calvinist-UCC background and my ancient-future liturgical traditionalism. :)
 
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