Professor Temperley suggests that the Elizabethan metrical psalm tunes were survivors of a mode of popular music that preceded the familiar corpus of ballad tunes. Passed on by oral transmission through several generations of unregulated singing, these once lively tunes changed gradually into very slow, quavering chants. Temperley guides the reader through the complex social, theological and aesthetic movements that played their part in the formation of the late Victorian ideal of the surpliced choir in every chancel, and he makes a fresh assessment of that old bugbear, the Victorian hymn tune. His findings show that the radical liturgical experiments of the last few years have not dislodged the Victorian model for the music of the English parish church. This volume provides an anthology of parish church music of all kinds from the fifteenth century to the twentieth, newly edited from primary sources for study or for performance.
- ISBN13 9780521023375
- Publish Date 24 November 2005 (first published 6 December 1979)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 8 March 2021
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Cambridge University Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 220
- Language English