Author: Laura Conrad

This
post is so wrongheaded that I initially had no idea how to
start, so I thought about it until I did. I’m going to start with
the misstatements of fact, and then procede to the wrongheaded
opinions.

• Mr. White states that The Oxford Movement “booted this old
  nonsense out of [Church of England] liturgical practice”, which
  is true and “cleared the way for the ‘high’ choral evensong that
  remains Anglicanism’s greatest gift to the world.” It was not
  the Oxford movement that invented choral evensong, but the great
  16th
  century polyphonists (Byrd, Morley, Gibbons…) who are also the
  people who wrote the first psalm settings from which the West
  Gallery tradition arose. And the Melstock Band in “Under the
  Greenwood Tree” was not succeeded by organs and surpliced
  choirboys but by a harmonium, with a music-box like mechanism
  allowing anybody who can turn the crank to play an “approved”
  version of an “approved” hymn.
• He quotes a Hardy poem in which the Vicar refuses to bury
  the old choirmaster as he had requested because the viols
  wouldn’t be able to play in bad weather. Mr. White claims to
  see the vicar’s point and claims that Hardy did not. Of course,
  the vicar is a character written by Hardy, so he would not have
  been able to make a point had Hardy not been able to see
  it. He may well have disagreed after he saw it, but I’m sure he
  had more experience listening to viols played in the rain than
  Mr. White does.
• Mr. White isn’t responsible for this, but a commenter with
  the clearly pseudonymous name of Esmeralda Weatherwax, who may never have
  heard West Gallery music, equates it with the “worship band”
  with guitar, keyboard, and drums and banal choruses. The
  guitar, keyboard and drums may well be in the West Gallery
  tradition of using the musical talent available in the
  congregation, but West Gallery music for generations used only
  the Old and New versions of the metrical psalms, which are
  anything but banal. I know Francis Roads, one of the founders
  of the London West Gallery Quire whose performance prompted this post, and
  he is explicitly trying to use West Gallery music in
  contemporary liturgical settings to drive the “happy, clappy
  stuff” out.
• When welcoming the demise of West Gallery music, Mr. White
  says, “I can’t be in a minority there because viols and their
  like are indeed long gone from Anglican worship.” This is a
  total non-sequitur — nobody ever claimed that the 19th century
  Church of England was a democracy, so the disappearance of
  choirs accompanied by bands of instruments may well have been
  imposed by a numerical minority.

And now to the matters of opinion:

• Mr. White’s brief review of the performance he heard was,
  “They turned up with a batch of 18th-century-style wind and
  brass (serpent included), and a lot of lusty voices; and I can’t
  deny that it was fun, sort of. But spiritual, no.” I can’t
  dispute this view of this particular performance, since
  Mr. White was there and I wasn’t. But I challenge anyone to
  listen to “Egypt” or “Poole” and not have a spiritual experience
  overlaying the dread of death, and the joy embodied in Gibralter
  surely transcends “fun”.
• I see no point in arguing with Mr. White about whether the
  West Gallery tradition is better or worse than the high choral
  evensong tradition. If a church has a congregation that wants
  to praise God with music, the church may well be better off using the
  musical talents actually available to it than trying to ape a
  church with a larger budget, a better organ, and a different
  population of singers. Mr. White and Ms Weatherwax want to
  dismiss the musical and liturgical value of what the rural
  churches came up with and I don’t.
• Mr. White says, “Let’s face it, the 18th and early 19th
  centuries were not the church’s finest moment in this country,
  and the West Gallery tradition sums up everything that was
  wrong.” I agree that the Church of England, even prodded by the
  best of the Dissenting tradition, performed badly in a lot of
  the crises of that time. But I doubt that more little boys in
  surplices who could sing unaccompanied would have helped.