Conclusions

The Victorian period showed that cathedrals were slow to follow developments in musical practice in the wider church. When, in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth, cathedrals caught up with the surge in enthusiasm for church music, they also found this to be a source of controversy and disagreement. The Church struggled to accommodate the appetite for the inclusion of popular and often lengthy musical items in church services while maintaining liturgical integrity. The latter problem came particularly to the fore when arguments began to be advanced that the language of the Prayer Book required a particular style of music to be used in church. This argument, though lacking in coherence, was maintained throughout the whole study period in one form or another to justify retaining derivative compositional styles in cathedral music. For some, such as Duncan-Jones and the leaders of the plainsong revival movement, this link with the Prayer Book argued for the use of an unemotional music worthy of playing a subservient role in the liturgical action. Similarly, the first two Archbishops’ Reports, and papers published by the CMS, recommended stylistic archaism as appropriate and normative for church music. The arbitrariness of this justification by liturgical language for the discarding of more modern musical styles is apparent when this argument is used to defend such differing styles as plainsong and the quasi-symphonic service settings of Stanford and others. The present study has shown that, as the century progressed, the RSCM and other church music bodies successfully impeded stylistic development in cathedral music leading, over time, to the alienation from the Church as a patron of musical art of most leading composers of international standing. The failure of the RSCM to respond to the gradual decline in both the quality and contemporary relevance of church composition had the widespread effect of masking the seriousness of the situation. There are many exceptions to this general picture, but they appear the more surprising when viewed against the backdrop of the thousands of pieces created for cathedrals in a consistent and outmoded style. This ossification of a tradition occurred during a period of significant liturgical change and, as the Church emerges on the far shore of this sea of change, she finds her liturgy accompanied by music that often carries only the slightest indications of individuality, and with an art form that has become all but cut off from contemporary practice. The Church has failed to respond to the opportunities afforded by liturgical reform for initiating a renaissance in liturgical music and, frequently, the only criteria used for evaluating church music have been ease of performance and enduring popularity. The 1992 Archbishops’ Report, while alert to some of the problems that had developed, lacked coherence and was still dependent on the outlook of the RSCM whose defence of amateurishness as the quintessential English approach to composing encouraged the production of huge amounts of music of poor quality. A lack of awareness of contemporary classical music resulted in pop music being identified as the only alternative to cathedral music; this was used as an Aunt Sally against which the defences of the cathedral music genre were erected. As mentioned in Chapter 5 above, as early as 1961, a commentator was able to observe of this type of music:

It is not meant to be listened to but is a vehicle for corporate worship that is not subject to any of the criteria of criticism. A great many church people hold this opinion and encourage its application and development by taking part in music of a standard so low that one wonders how they reconcile it with the rest of their activities. ¹