ABSTRACT
The rise of a concert culture in London and then the Continent in the later seventeenth century would eventually lead to masses being performed regularly in secular venues. At the same time, church music declined in many parts of Europe, often because opera was attracting the better performers away from the churches by offering better remuneration packages and greater prestige. A growing interest in music of the past resulted in choral societies in London, and later the Continent, reviving sacred works, including masses, and commissioning new ones. The Industrial Revolution compounded the effect of secularisation on the development of the concert mass by giving rise to consumer societies whose backbone comprised a burgeoning middle class with leisure time and money to spend on concerts. One consequence of the loss of aristocratic patrons was that composers were not constrained by the preferences of a single employer, and so had greater freedom to choose what they composed.
