Anglican church music
There are a number of popular choral settings by composers such as William Smith or Bernard Rose; alternatively, they may be sung as plainsong with a congregation.
Part-way through a service of worship, a choir may sing an anthem or motet, a standalone piece of sacred choral music, which is not part of the liturgy but is usually chosen to reflect to the liturgical theme of the day.
[10][11] Prior to the Reformation, music in British churches and cathedrals consisted mainly of Gregorian chant and polyphonic settings of the Latin Mass.
[12] By the time of King Henry V in the fifteenth century, the music in English cathedrals, monasteries and collegiate churches had developed a distinctive and influential style known in Western Europe as the contenance angloise, whose chief proponent was the composer John Dunstable.
During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, musicians of the Chapel Royal such as Thomas Tallis, Robert Parsons and William Byrd were called upon to demonstrate that the new Protestantism was no less splendid than the old Catholic religion.
During the Restoration period, musical practices of the Baroque era found their way into Anglican worship, and stringed or brass instruments sometimes accompanied choirs.
In the late 17th century, the composer Henry Purcell, who served as organist of both the Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey, wrote many choral anthems and service settings.
During the Georgian era, the music of George Frideric Handel was highly significant, with his repertoire of anthems, canticles and hymns, although he never held a church post.
[15] Up until the early 19th century, most Anglican church music in England was centred around the cathedrals, where trained choirs would sing choral pieces in worship.
Composers wrote music to make full use of the traditional cathedral layout of a segregated chancel area and the arrangement of choir stalls into rows of Decani and Cantoris, writing antiphonal anthems.
[15] In parish churches, musical worship was limited to congregational singing of metrical psalms, often led by a largely untrained choir.
A number of grandiose settings of the Anglican morning and evening canticles for choir and organ were composed in the late 19th and early 20th century, including settings by Thomas Attwood Walmisley, Charles Wood, Thomas Tertius Noble, Basil Harwood and George Dyson, works which remain part of the Anglican choral repertoire today.
[24][28] In 1820, the parishioners of a church in Sheffield took their parish priest to court when he tried to introduce hymns into Sunday worship; the judgement was ambiguous, but the matter was settled in the same year by Vernon Harcourt, the Archbishop of York, who sanctioned their use at services.
[31] The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols originated at Truro Cathedral in 1888 as a means of attracting people away from pubs on Christmas Eve; a revised version was adopted at King's College, Cambridge, first broadcast on BBC radio in 1928 and has now become an annual tradition, transmitted around the world.
Following the early music revival of the mid-20th century, the publication of collections such as the Oxford Book of Tudor Anthems encouraged renewed interest in 17th-century composers such as Byrd and Tallis.
