Hymns

Have you ever paused to ask the question ‘What part of the service gives most meaning to the church’s year and to our lives?’ Whilst there are some clerics who may think that it is the sermon, and others that would say it is the liturgy, I would say that the single most memorable feature of worship probably lies elsewhere.

St Augustine of Hippo said that ‘He who sings prays twice’, and there is a great deal of truth in this aphorism. The words we sing are given a certain meaning by the tone of the musical accompaniment, and often the tunes are so memorable that the words remain with us throughout our lives. Singing was very much part of the worship of the Old Testament temple, and the psalter is evidence of the great range of thought and emotions that human beings can direct towards God. This tradition continued into the early and medieval church: the psalter was memorised through tunes originating in Palestine, which developed into plainsong as we know it, and many of the saints of the church composed hymns to mark the seasons and festivals of the year.

It was with the Reformation that a great change came. Apart from worship in the cathedrals, where polyphony and chant continued, in most parishes the old Latin hymns vanished along with chant, and the only music known was that of metrical psalms to Sternhold and Hopkins, and later Tate and Brady. Whilst many congregations welcomed the ability to join in the new vernacular psalms in English in the 1560s, by the 1750s the gloss had gone, and the hymns of the Methodist movement drew a large number of people away from the Church of England.

It is odd to think that Anglicans lived without hymns for 250 years between 1560 and 1810. Just think of how drab the liturgical year would be without carols for Advent and Christmas, or the joyous Alleluias at Easter, yet that was precisely the situation for most churchgoers at the beginning of the nineteenth century: no liturgical colour, and no differentiation of music (only about twenty hymns were sung in Anglican church before the 1820s). Fortunately that situation was remedied by the Victorians, who composed large numbers of hymns even though they had to overcome a great deal of prejudice against hymns because they were thought by many to be vulgar, effeminate and emotional, and a mark of non-conformity.

Yet somehow hymns suddenly took off in the 1820s. Whilst some of the output of Isaac Watts and the Wesleys was adopted by the church, the main source of hymns was Victorian composers: clerical and lay, men and women, all wanted to write hymns. Evangelical clergy sought to promote hymns that spoke of a relationship with God, high churchmen (such as J.M. Neale) provided translations of ancient hymns to speak of how the Church of England was a Catholic church, and many lay people loved them because of the order and relevance they brought to worship. Indeed, hymns have been described by Ian Bradley as the soap operas of the Victorian period: it was through this medium that the great debates of the age were aired in public.

By the 1860s west end gallery band musicians and their metrical psalms were quickly being replaced by pipe organs and surpliced choirs singing the new Hymns Ancient and Modern. Over the next forty years this hymnal would standardise tunes and words like no other, whilst providing a broad range of high and low church hymns. Anglican worship, as we know it now, was born.