This view became prevalent in the later part of the eighteenth century under the influence of the competitions sponsored by the Noblemen and Gentlemen's Catch Club.
Though the catches are generally short, one or two take a whole page to print (four parts of 13 bars), and subject matter is varied, including pastoral, descriptive and devotional items, and none that might be described as bawdy.
The contributors were generally church musicians such as Hilton himself, Nelham and Holmes, or court composers such as the Lawes brothers, Henry and William, and Simon Ives.
There is evidence that the catches were sung by the composers and their friends in off-duty hours, especially the taverns and ale houses around Parliament Square.
The subject matter includes more in the way of street cries and conviviality than in the Ravenscroft catches, and 37 (of 138) are devotional hymns and canons, only a few of which are in Latin.
The second part is headed simply The Musical Companion and contains part-songs and may be the first use of "glee" in this sense, and certainly seems to have established a general outline of use for some time.
This accounted for the largest number of catches circulated anonymously in MS (to avoid arrest) though some were openly party propaganda.
New habits were also covered; smoking (Aldrich) and congested water travel (Isaak), though conviviality (wine, women and song) accounted for an even greater share than before.
Less significant figures such as Richard Brown and John Church helped to bridge the gap into the new century, but it was Maurice Greene who dominated this period, despite the presence of opera composers such as Handel and Bononcini.
William Hayes was representative of a larger group of composers born in the early part of the century, many still employed by the church but increasingly in the theatre or pleasure gardens.
This included Arne, Baildon, Boyce, and Nares, and immigrant musicians such as Marella, Lampe, Berg and Festing, who worked entirely outside the church.
He encouraged his neighbours in Salzburg, the Mozarts, to sing and write canons, and several by Wolfgang are extant, including two MS originals in BL.
Likewise Michael's brother Joseph wrote some amusing pieces including Crab Canons that can be sung upside down (and thus back to front) at the same time as forwards.
[14] An event which changed matters substantially in England was the formation of the Noblemen and Gentlemen's Catch Club[15][16] in 1761, and especially its decision to award prizes.
Gladstone writes (p. 41) that "The worst of the literature set to music was either destroyed or suppressed...Catches were still written but not to objectionable words."
In the first volume of the Collection is an epitaph by Giardini (p. 29) which exploits the division of syllables "in a count-ry churchyard" in this way, so perhaps members reading the lyrics, and not the music, did not find them objectionable.
On the whole the glees stimulated by the prizes started with a clearly pastoral or abstract content and developed a style which separates them from the earlier part-songs published in catch collections.
His output was mostly glees, but his song "To Anacreon in Heaven" was written for the Anacreontic Society and sung by the President after supper; it was later supplied with alternative lyrics and became more widely known as "The Star-Spangled Banner".
On the whole the glees stimulated by the prizes started with a clearly pastoral or abstract content and developed a style which separates them from the earlier part-songs published in catch collections.
[20] [more information needed] On the other hand, the extension of musical education and easier methods of dissemination, especially the internet, have revealed an active community of people writing canons and rounds.
Nevertheless, comparison of newer materials with 17th and 18th century catches reveal the difficulty, as in epigrams, of choosing a succinct verse well matched to suitably harmonised and polyphonic music.
Probably the most widely known of these is "Liverpool Street Station", beginning, "The girl that I love has given me the shove \\ She says I am too low for her station".. An alternative approach picks out individual syllables from an unrelated text as illustrated by Donald Sosin’s catch, "We Took Off Our Ugly Clothes," devoted to the University of Michigan Men's Glee Club, in which the words "University of Michigan Men's Glee Club" can be heard at this link.