Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England

Discourses, Sites and Identities

Jonathan Willis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409400714
• eBook ISBN: 9781317166238
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

'Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England' breaks new ground in the religious history of Elizabethan England, through a closely focused study of the relationship between the practice of religious music and the complex process of Protestant identity formation. Hearing was of vital importance in the early modern period, and music was one of the most prominent, powerful and emotive elements of religious worship. But in large part, traditional historical narratives of the English Reformation have been distinctly tone deaf. Recent scholarship has begun to take increasing notice of some elements of Reformed musical practice, such as the congregational singing of psalms in meter. This book marks a significant advance in that area, combining an understanding of theory as expressed in contemporary religious and musical discourse, with a detailed study of the practice of church music in key sites of religious worship. Divided into three sections - 'Discourses', 'Sites', and 'Identities' - the book begins with an exploration of the classical and religious discourses which underpinned sixteenth-century understandings of music, and its use in religious worship. It then moves on to an investigation of the actual practice of church music in parish and cathedral churches, before shifting its attention to the people of Elizabethan England, and the ways in which music both served and shaped the difficult process of Protestantisation. Through an exploration of these issues, and by reintegrating music back into the Elizabethan church, we gain an expanded and enriched understanding of the complex evolution of religious identities, and of what it actually meant to be Protestant in post-Reformation England.

PART I
Discourses

CHAPTER 1
A ‘lawdable science’: The Cultural Significance of Music in Early Modern England

Introduction

Music was a controversial subject in the Elizabethan period. It was also an extremely complex one. In his 1583 diatribe The anatomie of abuses, the grub-street moralist Philip Stubbes described music as both ‘very il’ and ‘very laudable’, ‘a cup of poyson’ and ‘a good gift of GOD’ which both ‘stireth up filthie lust, womannisheth the minde … enflameth concupisence, and bringeth in uncleannes’ but also ‘reviveth the spirits, comforteth the hart, and maketh it redyer to serve GOD’.1 Stubbes’ intention was to write of how music ‘allureth to vanitie’, but his rhetoric was confused and contradictory, heaping praise upon his subject matter in equal degree to opprobrium. Elizabethan polemicists and pamphleteers like Stubbes did not usually struggle to get their point across successfully. The problem lay in the fact that music in sixteenth-century England was not merely a pleasant artistic diversion: it was a primal force, discussion of which necessitated the use of a complex scientific discourse. Humanists and divines had access to a rich intellectual heritage surrounding music, but they were also bound by it in all their discussions of music, as the same tropes suffused culture at every level.2 The notion of music in early modern England was sociolinguistically conditioned, and in experiencing, thinking of or writing about music, individuals from the entire social spectrum had to operate within the broad but strict conceptual boundaries established by the discourse.

This discursive aspect of music is something which has previously been acknowledged by musicologists and literary scholars, but which has never really been integrated into historical understandings of the subject. Writing in 1951 of ‘The Cultural Functions of Music’, Hans T. David observed that ‘when primitive society developed into higher forms of civilisation the power of music was reinterpreted in cosmological terms’. This was ‘not fancy but an expression in symbolic language of visions of the orderly unity of the world’.3 In 1970, John Hollander, describing this discourse as ‘poetry’, attempted to chart early modern understandings of the ‘eternal, abstract and inaudible music of universal order’.4 But even those historians who have started to become interested in music in more recent years have tended to restrict their attention to specific musical practices – notably metrical psalmody – without attempting to contextualise them as part of a broader musical discourse. Understanding this underlying musical discourse is fundamental to any attempt to understand specific musical practices, especially in the religious context. Religious attitudes to music were not simply conditioned by religious discourses, such as doctrine: they were also conditioned by musical discourse itself. The role of music in formal worship and private devotion was not passively shaped by a set of overriding religious imperatives. Rather, musical discourse helped shape the place of musical practice in the religious life of early modern Englishmen and -women. This chapter will explore the classical basis for the discourse of music, briefly outlining the key concepts expressed in the ancient world. What follows is a fuller exploration of the cultural discourse of music as expressed in Elizabethan England, consisting of four of the most common sets of tropes: heavenly harmonies, the natural world, love and war, and sickness and health. Chapter 2 goes on to examine the religious wellsprings of musical discourse – the Bible and the writings of the Church Fathers – as well as the effect of the Reformation on attitudes to the use and abuse of music in the English Church.

Secular Music Theory to 15585

Western notions of the science of music stemmed largely, in the first instance, from Pythagoras.6 The origin of Pythagoras’ discoveries was accidental: ‘while passing the workshop of blacksmiths, he overheard the beating of hammers somehow emit a single consonance from differing sounds’.7 Inspired by this chance encounter, Pythagoras began to experiment with the tones produced by a vibrating cord. The results of these experiments yielded mathematical and musical notions of harmony, or ‘relative proportion’, with the Greek term harmoniai actually denoting scales rather than chords.8 Harmony was a pleasing and natural relationship between discrete objects, without connotations of simultaneity. The phrase ‘harmony of the spheres’ therefore indicated that the heavens were governed by similar mathematical proportions to those by which certain tonal sequences could be generated. As Hollander observed, ‘in terms of this “harmony” the old myth of the music of the spheres could be reinterpreted as a metaphysical notion characterising not only the order of the universe but the relation of human lives to the cosmological order’.9

In The Republic, Plato linked the celestial orbs to the notes of the harmoniai, making explicit the relationship between the motion of the heavenly spheres and an actual audible music.10 ‘On the top of each circle’, he wrote, ‘stands a siren, which is carried round with it and utters a note of constant pitch, and the eight notes together make up a single scale’.11 Plato held that this heavenly harmony, or musica mundana, was potentially audible, but that man’s sinful ears were incapable of hearing it.12 The link was firmly established between music and the natural proportions governing the universe itself. Plato also wrote with huge significance on the characters and qualities of the harmoniai, the musical scales or modes. In The Republic, he dismissed the ‘Mixed’ and the ‘Extreme Lydian’ as ‘dirges’, useless even to (respectable) women.13 The Ionian and ‘languid’ Lydian modes he deemed ‘relaxing’, mere ‘drinking songs’. Only the Dorian and Phrygian modes were to be permitted, to ‘represent appropriately the voice and accent of a brave man on military service’ and in times of peace respectively.14 Although the Greek Modes themselves had faded into anachronism by the early modern period, the idea that certain forms of music could be of value or harm to man, simply by hearing them, was of critical importance. Man’s relationship with music was therefore something to be carefully controlled and monitored. For, if music was not treated warily and with caution, man’s energy and initiative ‘melts and runs, till the spirit has quite run out of him and his mental sinews (if I may so put it) are cut’.15 The key was balance; a sense of proportion; in other words, harmony. In The Republic and his Laches, Plato made it clear that the true harmonies were not simple musical expressions, but the proper tuning of the musica humana.16

Aristotle took a more liberal view than Plato when it came to the musical modes. ‘It is clear’, he wrote in his Politics, ‘that we should employ all the harmonies, yet not employ them all in the same way, but use the most ethical ones for education, and the active and passionate kinds for listening to when others are performing’.17 These caveats allowed for Aristotle’s doctrine of catharsis or purgation. Catharsis facilitated the restoration of balance to man’s disordered personality, and grew out of the musicomathematical doctrine of the mean: in other words, a right act was the proper balance (or harmony) between two opposing forces, and therefore a matter of context rather than an absolute.18 Aristotle also wrote of the effects of the musical modes: the Mixolydian by which men are ‘stirred up … to sadnesse and weeping’; the Dorian which acts on men ‘moderatly & constantly’; and the Phrygian, which ‘ravisheth’; ‘therefore it followeth of these reasons, that Musicke hath force to dispose the affections of the mind in diuerse sorts [and] many wise men affirme that the soule is an harmony, or that there is harmony in it’.19

The writings of the classical Greek authors on music were repeated and elaborated in the sixth century by the Roman statesman and philosopher Boethius, whose most si...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Discourses
• Part II: Sites
• Part III: Identities
• Bibliography
• Index