Since the 1970s, interest in what has come to be known as West Gallery music (implying both a period and a style) has developed significantly.[2] This music can be defined simply as the vernacular church music of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England – mostly metrical psalms and occasional hymns set as plain tunes, fuguing tunes, and anthems.[3] I use the term ‘vernacular’ to imply popular usage and appropriation – art music can become vernacular music if performed according to popular stylistic norms.[4] I take the view that it is not the origin of music that is important, it is its usage that is of crucial interest.

1

Since the 1980s, the UK has boasted a national organization, the West Gallery Music Association (WGMA), which encourages performance and publication of this material.[5] A number of amateur groups exist for the performance of this music in many parts of England.[6] A significant number of recordings of popular church music from this period have become available, and some academic work on the subject has been undertaken and published.[7] A kindly view of all this activity would see it as a good thing in that it has stimulated a considerable number of amateur performers to revive a highly suitable and sometimes exhilarating amateur music from the past.

2

All revivals run the risk of misrepresenting what they are seeking to revive, and this is especially true when music has come down to us almost entirely in manuscript and print – that is, without a living performance tradition from which to learn. A trained violinist presented with a collection of Irish dance music and asked to play a reel may well be able to make a good job of it as far as an interpretation of the notes on the page is concerned, but the performance will not sound much like that of an Irish fiddler brought up in the traditional way of playing. Give a concert band a set of parts from a New Orleans marching band, and the result will not sound much like New Orleans music. The difficulties of interpreting historical music are practical, philosophical and ideological. Musical notation is a very imperfect way of communicating musical practice, and in performing music from the past, we inevitably mediate that music through our own views and assumptions about what it was and/or what it ought to have been.[8]  The justification for work on historically informed performance practices is that there is something to be gained from learning what we can about the ways in which different styles of music were performed in the past. The area is, however, fraught with difficulties.

3

Two volumes of conference papers, respectively titled The Gallery Tradition: Aspects of Georgian Psalmody, and Georgian Psalmody 2: The Interaction Between Urban and Rural Practice, give a good indication of recent research interest in west gallery music – or, more simply, gallery music.[9] The conference that gave rise to the papers published in the first volume was an interesting, if rather tense, affair, with real differences of approach demonstrated by people coming from different musical and philosophical backgrounds.[10] We can broadly describe the participants as folk revivalists on the one hand and early music specialists on the other, but such descriptions inevitably run the risk of creating stereotypes. Different perspectives can not only provide insights but also impart an inevitable focus of vision, which may marginalize certain aspects of the field being studied.

4

Vernacular church music challenges our systems of musical classification. Is it a sort of folk music,[11] or a lesser part of the great tradition (in Redfield’s sense) of Baroque and Classical music?[12] In truth, it partakes of both of these, and therefore presents us with something of an anomaly[13]. It poses a challenge: either to dismiss and exclude it, which has been the position adopted in much writing about church music until quite recently, with a few notable exceptions;[14] or else somehow to position and incorporate it.[15]

5

In this essay, I want to look critically at the work of two colleagues who have interested themselves in the church music of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Peter Holman is a distinguished musicologist and performer (and a colleague in the department in which I formerly worked), and Christopher Turner was a musician, music educator and editor of the first volume of essays mentioned above.[16] For many people, the views of Holman and Turner on the performance and history of popular church music have had a significant influence, and they are therefore worthy subjects for scrutiny.

6

Holman and Turner often worked together in different ways as performers and academics. What united them, I hope to show, was a sort of thinking about popular church music that does not take account of all the available evidence concerning the genre, and this, I believe, is coupled with misinterpretations of the material they considered. In offering this critique I feel I can contribute to a debate that has hardly yet begun.

7

Peter Holman and the performance of popular church music

Peter Holman has combined the roles of researcher and performer of music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He has made a considerable contribution to our understanding of court and élite musical traditions, and his group, The Parley of Instruments, has made many recordings of music from the early modern period, bringing to light a great deal of previously unknown music. In this first section of my essay, I will consider two albums of music ‘from English Parish Churches’ directed by Holman. These CDs present performances by Psalmody and The Parley of Instruments, which are musically very accurate in terms of the notation from which they are working, sometimes very fast in tempo. The pieces are performed in a manner that would generally be considered by modern audiences as appropriate for performances of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century art music.[17]

8

Modest claims and historical interpretation

Holman is careful about indicating what he is not claiming to do. It is totally reasonable that he should state clearly that these performances are not ‘an exact reconstruction’, although perhaps more is known about popular styles of performance than he is happy to admit.

9

The performances on this recording are not meant to be an exact reconstruction of the way these pieces might have been performed by particular church or chapel choirs at the time. There is much that is still unclear to us about the performance practice of psalmody, and it would be futile to try to reproduce the low standards of ensemble and intonation reported in many contemporary descriptions of country choirs. We also decided not to use regional accents partly because we do not know exactly how people spoke or sang in particular localities in the eighteenth century, and partly because we felt that the use of a generalised Mummerset or Loamshire would strike a false note of quaintness. In general, we have tried to find a performing style that draws on the best practice of the time and matches the directness and vigour of much of the music. The local group Psalmody was formed especially for this recording and consists of professional singers, teachers and students drawn mainly from the Colchester area.[18]

10

There is what would seem to be an admirable honesty to this statement. It could also be interpreted as designed to pre-empt the very sort of critique that I am attempting here. We must also note that the recordings advertise themselves as being music ‘from English Parish Churches and Chapels’ and ‘from English Parish Churches’. This would seem to imply that they represent in some reasonable way what went on in such places of worship of the period, even if the performances ‘are not meant to be an exact reconstruction’. In this part of my essay, I will consider some of the elements that make up Holman’s statement.

11

Holman states correctly that there is ‘much that is still unclear to us about the performance practice of psalmody’. We could quibble over the singular word ‘practice’. In a society characterized by localism, social hierarchy and a poor transport system, it is probable that performance styles, like accents and farming methods, varied widely from place to place. However, I do not think Holman is really much interested in popular styles of performance, as I hope I will show, and I think more is known about performance style than he will readily acknowledge.

12

It is very telling that Holman adds ‘it would be futile to try to reproduce the low standards of ensemble and intonation reported in many contemporary descriptions of country choirs’ – as if this is the end of the story. Low standards of ensemble and intonation are certainly reported in contemporary descriptions, but although some distancing occurs with the use of the word ‘reported’, the implication is that these accounts are to be generally accepted. Holman makes no attempt at historical source criticism on this point. For a historian, or someone interested in historically informed performance, not to engage in serious source criticism is a significant omission. The problem with Holman’s perspective is that it is one-dimensional and seems to lack nuance and insight. I want to propose a more complex view that encompasses notions of competence, style and the ways access to different forms of practical knowledge and understanding are conditioned by social and cultural processes. My earliest published work on popular church music dealt with these issues and I have returned to this theme on a number of occasions.[19]

13

All kinds of music have practitioners of different levels of competence. Competence can be defined as the ability to manage voice or instrument to execute the particular stylistic norms of a particular kind of music. Judgements about performances, casual or focussed, are made from dynamic aesthetic notions, ideas and responses.  This may seem straightforward enough but there are two substantial and common problems in this area which stand in need of some elaboration.[20]

14

First, humans tend to judge the unknown in terms of internalised criteria related to the known. In musical terms this manifests itself as the judgement of one kind of music by the stylistic norms of another. To do this is to condemn that which is being judged as a failure. Intellectually invalid though this may be, historically this has been an important mode of criticism. A symphony orchestra may give an enthralling performance of a composition but as a piece of improvisational jazz it is a non-starter. We should not condemn the orchestra or composer for this ‘failure’ – yet historically this is the way countless writers have responded to the experience of vernacular and exotic musics. The hysterical reactions to the emergence of jazz in the first decades of the twentieth century were not caused by the fact that people were listening to poor and incompetently performed jazz; rather, it was that jazz offended people’s ideas of how music was constituted, how it ought to be. Judged this way, jazz could be relegated to the realms of non-music, as noise, trash and as morally polluting.[21] Jazz won through but other musics have not been so fortunate. When such condemnatory ideas are held by the socially powerful, and when they are mixed with other social antagonisms such as those related to class or race, they can quickly become ideologically highly charged and have outcomes which shape musical opportunities, activities and possibilities.

15

The second common problem is to mistake competence for style (or vice versa). A style is a set of elements which cohere into a way of doing things musically (we could call it a musical habitus, to borrow an idea from Bourdieu [22]).  It exists as a set of inter-subjective notions and a related set of musical practices belonging to a social or cultural group. (Style has elements in common with such things as craft methods or accent and dialect in language.) Competence, as I have argued, relates to the degree of skill with which the stylistic elements are managed. The difference between style and competence is crucial; it is the difference between the way you do something and how well you do it. Any kind of music can suffer from incompetent execution. Any kind of music can be performed in what might be considered by the performers of that kind of music as an inappropriate style (although it will be altered in the process).  Parochial church musicians no doubt varied greatly in their competence. Informed modern scholars should not make the mistake of confusing competence and style, difficult as they are to disentangle from the historical source materials.

16

The direct evidence concerning country psalmody performance style can be divided roughly into two kinds: the first is incidental evidence that crops up in a variety of different kinds of historical source materials; and the second comes from the oral survivals and descendants of country psalmody in both Britain and the USA. It is my view that elements of style can only be established through consistencies and patterns in the evidence, by a critical and sympathetic reading of the evidence. It is in the nature of historical enquiry that we are dealing with probabilities and reasonable interpretations, not certainties.

17

I have dealt at length elsewhere with the question of the performance style of popular church music,[23] so I will concentrate mainly on one aspect of performance here – namely, the question of volume and voice production. Although what we now describe as gallery music and the eighteenth century development of church choir bands were the products of a church music reform movement – an attempt to bring to order the old style of heterophonic psalm singing – at the local level, there is plenty of evidence that there was a consistency of vocal style and voice production between the performances of newer styles of musical composition and the old heterophonic styles of ‘lining out’ psalm singing. This was despite the efforts of music reformers to make the music of parish churches more ‘artistic’ and despite the work of itinerant singing teachers (some of whom simply catered for popular taste).

18

A burial register from Buxton, East Sussex informs us that a seventeenth-century parish clerk ‘warbled forth as if he had been thumped on the back by a stone’.[24]  There is considerable further seventeenth- and eighteenth-century evidence that church singers liked to sing in a loud and full-voiced way. In a poem that accompanies an eighteenth-century satirical print of ‘The Church Choristers’ we read that ‘Snap strikes up first with open throat’, that Hodge ‘. . . bellows loud with thundering bass’ and that all ‘Strive who shall make the greatest noise’.[25]

19

Dr John Burton gives us an insight into the local musical value system in his 1752 account of the singing (most probably of a fuguing tune) at Shermanbury church in Sussex, when he says: ‘The more shrill toned they may be, the more valued they are.’ Yet his educated ear evidently found this music excessive: ‘they bellow to excess, and bleat out some goatish noise with all their might’.[26] Holman’s own CD notes tell us about the composer of the piece titled ‘Vital Spark of Heavenly Flame’: ‘Harwood was a weaver from Hoddleston near Darwen in Lancashire [...] He supposedly went to sing in Liverpool and “sang until he burst a blood vessel there”.’[27] An anonymous writer of 1843 praised the decline of choirs that ‘sit in a loft with a few instruments of music, bawling out tunes and words’.[28]

20

This emphasis on projection and volume recurs in many sources. At Wadhurst, Mr Thomas Cooper and Mr Luard, active church band members in the mid-nineteenth century, are described as ‘two of the best and most powerful voices in England’.[29] The Hailsham shoemaker, Thomas Geering, in his parish history, recalled a mid-nineteenth-century Hailsham church singer who ‘was gifted with a powerful voice and his greatest pride was to be heard at church [...] His voice more than filled the church [...]’[30] The vicar of Lodsworth recalled to K. H. MacDermott in 1917 that at Willingdon in the 1870s, ‘they had a choir of young men who sang (or bawled) unaccompanied’.[31]

21

What clinches this argument for me is the degree of consistency in the source materials. Critical accounts from churchmen or lay people who would have church music reformed repeatedly pick on the same ‘errors’ in performance – but ‘errors’ may simply represent a way of describing elements of style that do not accord with one’s own aesthetics. Such criticisms date from both before and during the period of west gallery music, suggesting some significant continuities between the old-style ‘lining out’ of plain tunes and the development of a more ornate contrapuntal style in the eighteenth century. Again, I will take the example of volume and voice production.

22

In the late seventeenth century, Thomas Mace, an early reformer, had complained of ‘the whining, toting, yelling or skreeking there is in many country congregations, as if the people were affrighted or destracted’.[32] ‘R.W’, writing in 1734, thought much performance of psalmody was ‘very indecent and shocking’, and that things would improve if ‘the people of every parish, and especially the youth, were trained up and accustomed to an orderly way of singing’. [33] Arthur Bedford, writing a few years later, felt it was necessary that singers ‘understand how to sing, I mean according to the rules of Art’.[34] William Figg, in his 1811 manuscript, Psalms and Hymns, thought that the grossest impropriety in church was ‘straining the voice to drown the rest’.[35] The men at Rusper sang in ‘very harsh and unmelodious tones’ when the future folk song collector Lucy Broadwood was young.[36]

J. A. La Trobe implicitly linked secular and sacred performance styles when he wrote that ‘we cannot imagine, that there will echo throughout the courts of Zion any sound that resembles the mean and licentious ditties of the tavern’. [37] La Trobe was correct to suggest that there was a consistency of style between music in the church and secular music-making. We find other observers making similar comments about secular singing. A newspaper account of 1850 tells of ‘rude and uncouth singing’ at an apple-tree wassailing ceremony (the custom itself was seen by many writers as pagan in origin).[38] James Hurdis, in his poem ‘The Village Curate’, writes of the villagers’ ‘loud song with stentorophonic voices/Lustily brayed’.[39]

23

La Trobe’s generalised view of country choirs was that they had ‘no idea of instrumental music beyond noise, or of vocal beyond vociferation’.[40] He wrote of singers performing ‘with their whole breath of lungs, each striving to surpass his neighbour in vociferation’;[41] and ‘as though it were a contest of physical strength’.[42] A writer in the Musical Times of 1849 writes of the lower-class dissenting preacher selecting ‘a number of metrical effusions for his followers to bawl as a prelude or wind-up to his “holding forth”’.[43] And a writer in the Parish Choir in 1847 drew attention to the want of a ‘pure tone’, and urged the managing of the voice in a way that avoided ‘the producing of guttural, nasal or dental sounds’.[44]

24

Later that year, the Parish Choir celebrated the progress of musical reform, the demise of ‘Refractory Village Choirs’ and of ‘the staunch admirers of the Babylonian performances with which they had made the walls of the church resound for many a long year’.[45] This compares with William Figg’s notion, expressed about half a century earlier, that the music in country churches ‘frequently consists of a jargon of sounds, destitute of harmony, melody or any other laudable recommendation’.[46] Figg complained of singers ‘straining the voice’.[47] A few years before Figg, William Vincent had found the ears of congregations in country churches ‘wounded with dissonance’.[48]

25

Early modern travellers coming across alien styles of music would often describe them in ways similar to those in which members of the educated élite described parochial music.[49] The music of seventeenth-century New England puritans and nineteenth-century African Americans was described in similar ways.[50] The emergence of jazz and rock and roll were greeted similarly in the twentieth century.[51] Travellers and folk song collectors in the nineteenth century sometimes wondered at the strangeness of what they encountered.[52] It is as if we have lighted upon a basic type of reaction to the musically unknown from those educated within the Western tradition. Music that is experienced as strange and different – outside the range of what is normally considered acceptable as music – is denoted as the aural equivalent of dirt (‘matter out of place’), described by terms such as ‘noise’, ‘inharmonious’, ‘bellows’, ‘vociferation’.

26

From these historical accounts, I believe it is possible to build up an impression of what a great deal of popular church music sounded like; and this we can relate to the oral survivals of these traditions. Peter Burke has suggested that the popular culture of the past is an ‘elusive quarry’ that requires ‘oblique approaches’ if we are to progress in our understanding. Regressive and comparative methods can be helpful in the study of popular culture – and, by extension, of popular musical forms – if they are used in a critical and reflective way.[53]

27

Turning, then, to the second kind of evidence for the performance style of country psalmody, a marked consistency is apparent between these historical accounts of vernacular church music and the experience of its oral survivals and descendants in Britain and the USA. The voice production of leaders of ‘the old way of singing’ recorded in Scotland and the USA, with their hard, nasal, highly projected voices, could well be described as ‘bleating out some goatish noise’. Those who would argue that such evidence has no relevance to the way eighteenth- and nineteenth-century church music was performed need to account for the fact that essentially the same sound world is created in the present day by singers in the ‘old way’ in the Scottish islands and in rural Tennessee.[54] The evidence suggests that this type of music must have survived in different places, without any direct contact, for over two hundred years. The Glen Rock Carolers from Pennsylvania maintain recognizably ‘Pennine’ style of carol singing even though their ancestors left Yorkshire and Lancashire in 1848.[55]  Recently recorded carol-singing survivals in Cornwall and Yorkshire display much more consistency with the literary and critical accounts quoted above than do Holman’s recordings.[56]

28

To make historically informed modern performances of popular church music from the gallery period, it is important  to start from an understanding of the performance style of what folk song collectors describe as ‘traditional performers’ – people actively involved in music making. In the case of church choirs and bands, it was artisans of village society who comprised the majority of active performers of popular church music. This traditional style is not all one thing – it is rather a collection of characteristics, some of which are stressed by one performer, some by another. It does, however, have a consistency over a long period of time and (taking in the emigrant diaspora) a vast geographical area. I can understand why Leech-Wilkinson has argued: ‘Ways of singing and ways of playing change too fast for us to be able to guess backwards’, in the context of late medieval music.[57] But as I have tried to illustrate above, I think we can say some positive things about popular performance style over the past 250 years in connection with vernacular church music, particularly when there is a strong consistency between different types of evidence.

29

I have discussed the elements of this overarching ‘plebeian’ style at length elsewhere.[58] Briefly, I would point to such elements as full, chest voice production, idiomatic forms of decoration, aural-recreative processes of performance, and certain characteristic rhythmic approaches to the music. This is highly consistent with the overarching style of performance adopted by numerous ‘traditional’ singers recorded over the last century by folk song collectors. Practitioners of ‘traditional singing’ would include such people as the Copper family (whose oral style of harmony singing is partly derived from popular church music), Joseph Taylor, Harry Cox, Walter Pardon, Phoebe Smith and the carol singers of Padstow, Ingbirchworth, and Dungworth.[59] With some differences of emphasis, it is the singing style of many traditional singers from the USA, be they ballad singers such as Almeda Riddle and Texas Gladden, or various church groups and religious singers.[60] There is variation within this overarching style, but there is significant commonality. There is more common ground between ‘traditional’ styles across vast geographical distances than there is between ‘traditional’ singing and ‘classical’ singing, and teachers of the latter would consider many elements of traditional singing as ‘faults’.

30

The Norwegian folk music scholar Ingrid Gjertsen has tried to define the key differences between the use of the voice in classical and folk musics. I am concerned that there is a danger of overgeneralisation in such an attempt, and there is a risk of reification in a notion like ‘the folk music voice’.[61] The best that such an account can achieve is a description of a considered body of performance; and viewed in that light it can be useful. (The variations in the use of the human voice across the world still manage to amaze me even after years of listening.) Nevertheless, Gjertsen’s findings come very close to my own views. For her, classical singing is typified by ‘a full voice with a great deal of scope and volume’; the use of prescribed resonances and a wide open mouth; and location of the voice in the head rather than the body of the singer. In contrast, ‘folk singing’ exhibits different notions of scope and volume, and resonates differently. ‘The voice is further forward [than in classical singing], at the front of the singer’s mouth, and is more nasal. It resonates in a more concentrated fashion.’ She also notes that the ‘melodic lines develop more freely’ and that the voice seldom goes directly to a defined pitch but rather ‘takes a circuitous route, using either glissandos or small embellishments’.[62] We are reminded of the nasal tone and the frivolous ornaments that church music reformers complained of. (Interestingly, church barrel organs from the period bear witness to ‘the amazing degree of musical ornamentation in the way of trills, grace notes, passing notes and gathering notes which are to be found in profusion growing round even the most austere tunes [...]’.[63])

31

It is not that elements of the Baroque and Classical styles were not present in vernacular church music (or other aspects of popular music-making), it is that popular culture is inherently eclectic, appropriating and making use of different elements according to the internal dynamic of the culture. There is no purity in popular culture – contrary to the ideas of the early folk song collectors – rather a promiscuous bricolage of elements, sometimes achieving relative stability, but nevertheless continually in process. Popular culture is an ongoing synthesis of elements available within the culture – but within that process it is its own thing.

32

To give some specificity to these general comments let me focus on two performances of the same piece. It is the last track of Holman’s While Shepherds Watched album. The CD notes inform us that

33

One of the most richly scored pieces in the repertory is by John Foster, gentleman, coroner, humorist and amateur composer of High Green near Sheffield. His setting of Psalm 47 became yet another version of ‘While Shepherds Watched’, and is still sung in a cut-down version as part of the pub carolling tradition around Sheffield. The original, published around 1820, has remarkably Haydnesque instrumental passages, scored for a full classical orchestra. It was probably written for one of the choral festivals that were a feature of musical life in northern England in the early nineteenth century.[64]

It is possible that ‘Old Foster’ was written for a music festival but it is in the vernacular tradition of carol singing around Sheffield that it has had approaching two centuries of vigorous life. I have chosen to compare the performance directed by Holman with a recording of the piece made by Dr Ian Russell at the Royal Hotel, Dungworth on 3 December 1995.[65]

34

Like its near contemporary, ‘Cranbrook’, by the Kent musician, Thomas Clark (a tune which has come down to us in oral tradition as ‘On Ilkley Moor baht ‘at’), ‘Old Foster’ is what is termed a fuguing tune. In fuguing tunes the last line, lines or phrase of the verse are repeated a number of times with staggered and interlocking parts. In addition ‘Old Foster’ has a ‘symphony’ – a passage of instrumental music that may be used as an introduction, interlude and coda.

35

We can compare some salient features of these two performances of ‘Old Foster’:

36

The analysis could be taken further but this is sufficient to show that these are radically divergent interpretations of what is, on the page, the same musical material. The performances have so little in common that I have sometimes played them alongside each other and had some difficulty in convincing listeners they were essentially the same piece. The ‘transposition’ (if that is what it is)  of the carol down a minor third from its original key of  C major, places the piece within the comfortable chest voice ranges of the Dungworth singers.[70] Where the range of the original might have proved problematic in A major (e.g. verse bars 8 –12), musical phrases have been either put down an octave or swapped to the other part.[71]

The editors of The New Oxford Book of Carols remark that ‘Old Foster’ ‘features in most local carol-books in a variety of forms, some debased, some richly transformed through the process of oral transmission’.[72] Both creation and attenuation are features of oral/aural processes. The ‘reduction’ of the piece from four parts written to two parts sung and the subsequent moving around of musical material is characteristic of the processes of appropriation and assimilation that is fundamental to many popular musical traditions. A number of manuscript books of the period simply represent pieces as tune and bass although they originally had other parts. The Mount-Dawson Manuscripts give a version of this piece in which four parts are retained but the inner parts are lightly written in whilst the important bass and tune are boldly written.[73] The Dungworth performance in some ways seems to return the piece to the older tradition of having the ‘tune’ carried by the tenors. Finally, the rubato of the Dungworth singers seems much more a characteristic of many performed examples of popular church music than Holman’s strict tempo. 

37

What cannot be doubted is the hold of ‘Old Foster’ within the Yorkshire pub carol singing tradition. Holman denies ‘Old Foster’ is a congregational hymn tune, that is, something which would be sung by the whole congregation as opposed to a select group of singers.[74] However, performances by pub carol singers give the lie to the idea that these elaborate fuguing tunes necessarily excluded the congregation, as the greater part of two centuries of popular use of this tune testifies. If anything, it is the self-consciously virtuosic speed of the Holman performance that would exclude people from joining in.

38

The key question is which performance is closer to ‘Music from English Parish Churches’ in the west gallery period? I am not claiming that the Dungworth performance of ‘Old Foster’ is a pure reproduction of nineteenth century popular performance practice (there were no electronic organs then, although there were harmoniums) but rather that it works within the same set of parameters, and exhibits similar properties and characteristics. This conclusion is supported by both historical evidence, evidence of continuity in the carol singing tradition and survivals in oral tradition from both sides of the Atlantic. Even the Dungworth practice of singing four verses of the six of ‘While Shepherds Watched’ accords with the common nineteenth century practice of singing only four verses whatever the number in a piece as written.

39

John Foster no doubt had good reason to score his piece for classical orchestra but we must be very sceptical about the number of times it was performed and the numbers of people who heard it presented in this way. Most church bands which had instruments had fewer than five. Only very rarely does one come across a band with instruments in double figures. There are English and US examples of highly rhythmic interpretations of fuguing music. However, performing ‘Old Foster’ at 240 beats per minute renders the role of the piece as a congregational song impossible. The Foster score is marked ‘allegro’ and the time signature is cut common time, an indication that allows for a variety of interpretation. Setting the tempo at 240 bpm flies in the face of the evidence of later popular performance practice.[75] The version in the Mount-Dawson Manuscripts show the piece in common time and has no tempo indication. Finally (and conveniently for a CD of Christmas material)  Holman has followed popular practice in uniting ‘Old Foster’ to the words of ‘While Shepherds Watched’ and not singing the metrical ‘old version’ of Psalm 47 (‘Ye people all one accord/Clap hands, shout and rejoice’) which is the text Foster actually set. This would seem to be the only point in which he has clearly followed popular performance practice.

40

In general, what Holman has done to parochial music is akin to what the Edwardian folk song collectors did when they arranged traditional songs for concert performance. As the ‘source singer’, John England, put it, Cecil Sharp put the pieces into ‘evening dress’.[76] If you play recordings of Joseph Taylor alongside recordings of the arrangements that Percy Grainger made of his traditional songs, it is easy to see what I mean. What is true both of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics of popular church music and of Holman is what Kathy Ogren has written about critics of early jazz. ‘They did not conceive of it as an alternative aesthetic.’[77]

41

Thankfully, Holman resists the temptation of assuming ‘bumpkin’ accents. This may in fact be a reaction to the welter of critical disdain that greeted earlier attempts to recreate vernacular church music that did make use of such mummery. But his statement conceals an assumption that, I think, sheds light on the structure of his thought. In choosing ‘not to use regional accents’, the decision has been made to use the regional accent that is now hegemonic, the Midlands and London form of English that became ‘Standard English’ – an obvious point to historians of English.[78] Holman’s Essex singers would seem to eschew the regional accent of that county; no doubt Standard English is what they customarily use.

42

This artistic decision, essentially passive and requiring no particular work on the part of the singers, can be seen to contrast with the active work involved in constructing a ‘historically informed’ interpretation of this music.  These two seemingly contrasting aspects might be seen to relate, however, to Holman’s belief that there exists, and that they can reconstruct, a musical ‘best practice’ for the period. His group has ‘tried to find a performing style that draws on the best practice of the time, and matches the directness and vigour of much of the music’.[79] A single language is matched by a single ‘best practice’.

43

The aim is laudable but what does it mean? Whose best practice? Is it the practice of that tiny, tiny minority of the musically educated, who saw themselves as beacons in a dark night of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ignorance? Or is it the best practice of those rather larger groups of people who did what they liked and liked what they did, those singers who were ‘vastly proud of themselves’, as a nineteenth-century vicar of Berwick put it.[80] What Holman’s performances fail to capture, or even approach, is the gritty excitement of much vernacular music-making or that ecstatic element in committed and enthusiastic performance that can be heard in gospel singing and Sacred Harp music – that which Charles Ives described as ‘power and exaltation in these great conclaves of sound from humanity’.[81]

44

Relativism, reappraisal, and the absent element

Elsewhere, Holman has set himself firmly against relativistic notions of musical understanding. He asserts the primacy of authorial authority over popular use. In this regard, I am much closer to Dave Townsend, when he writes:

45

The concerns of art music, the search for a composer’s unique and original creation, are not appropriate here; in order to understand it [popular church music], it is necessary to integrate information from the complete record, printed, manuscript, oral and to accept each as equally valid and valuable.[82]

Holman cannot accept this.[83] The edifice of understanding built up exploring manuscripts and printed works and relating them to an idea of the composer’s intentions must be maintained. Authorial intention is held above popular appropriation and use. It is as if Roland Barthes had never lived and no significant discussion had arisen from the type of thinking he represented.[84] It is as if the recent developments in cultural studies, social history, ethnomusicology and postmodernism have not troubled Holman’s world.

Holman’s associate, Sally Drage, whose work shows real signs of deepening and developing our understanding of the field, is nevertheless still tied to a similar and conventional style of thinking. In a recent essay, she ‘attempts to re-examine the evidence and to consider whether derogatory comments about the repertoire and its performance are justified’.[85] I have no problem in saying that, given the attitudes, values, and aesthetic and social assumptions of such commentators, their observations were totally ‘justified’ – they were to be expected. Their vehement and sometimes vicious condemnations are a matter of historical record. There is no universal position of truth from which to make judgements or justifications: all appraisal is historically, culturally and socially situated.

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Drage’s ‘reappraisal’, therefore, is really part of the same project as Holman’s ‘best practice’, and in the final analysis is an attempt to maintain a unified and inclusive notion of ‘music’. Thus she can write: ‘When examining music written by amateurs it is not surprising to find some fairly incompetent compositions. Nevertheless much of this repertoire is worthy of performance as well as serious academic consideration’.[86] I have no problem with the serious academic consideration, and Drage shows herself quite capable of this. The notion of ‘incompetence’, however, suggests an eternal norm against which it is possible to judge, a norm of which the practitioners of vernacular church music may have been totally unaware; in short, they inhabited a state of ignorance, of not knowing any better. I do not want to dispense with notions of competence; but such notions must be located within the practitioners’ own aesthetic, social and cultural context, and within the larger and contested aesthetic field of which their activity comprises a part.

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Holman is absolutely right when he asserts, ‘One of the fascinating features of psalmody is that it combines features of art and folk music.’[87] However, I cannot hear much ‘folk music’ in Holman’s performances of pieces of parochial music. Instead, currently fashionable ways of performing eighteenth-century music have been applied to items that were widely performed within the vernacular tradition. In a sense, he has subsumed or incorporated English parish church music into the mainstream of Baroque and Classical art music. He has applied a musical habitus derived from educated and elite musical traditions to what was, of its nature, for the greater part, a popular or vernacular form of music-making. He has ignored a mass of evidence on the ways in which the music was performed. I suspect this is because of an unconsidered belief that there is a ‘right’ way of doing these things, or at least a currently acceptable way which accords with his notion of ‘the best practice of the time’ – a notion that might itself prove to be problematic. As Temperley wrote some years ago, ‘Many features of the currently fashionable early music style (or styles) have little or no basis in historical fact.’[88] In proposing that his performance practice ‘matches the directness and vigour of much of the music’, one can only assume that by ‘music’ Holman means the representation of the pieces on the manuscript or printed page. I think there is much more to ‘music’ than that, and one is forced to suspect that Holman’s parochial music performances, superficially attractive and pleasing as they are, are really doing no more than creating ‘a novel but historically-sounding style’.[89]

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Holman also seems to have ignored a mass of comparative evidence on performance from both the historical record and the surviving performance practices of the English and transatlantic branches of the vernacular church music tradition. He has directed and published performances of parochial music that, on the balance of evidence, must be considered to sound unlike the vast majority of music that came ‘from English Parish Churches’ in the century before 1840. Ironically, all this seems to have been done in the name of a notion of historically informed performance. It is as if ‘historically informed’ means picking up on what one likes, what one is comfortable with and ignoring everything else. I cannot get away from feelings of misdirected talent and lost opportunities.

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In an excellent recent piece, Henry Stobart has redrawn our attention to the significance of fashion in the performance of early music: ‘In this move towards more accurate or “historically informed” performance, certain earlier experiments, conventions, tastes or performance fashions fall by the wayside; some of which seem untenable or even laughable from the safe vantage point of the present.’[90] He goes on to draw attention to what I think is the inevitable selectivity of this sort of performance, ‘where performers and audience alike are immensely vigilant about certain historical details but have complete blind spots about many far more significant aspects of the performance’. That statement would seem to fit our case very well indeed: where the exact pitch of an organ is a matter of special comment, but parochial music at large probably only rarely sounded anything like it does on Holman’s recordings. It is definitely not reinterpretation that I object to – music is constantly being reinterpreted and recontextualised; rather, it is reinterpretation which does not openly and honestly proclaim what it is that I find a problem. Nor is it high standards that I object to; it is inappropriate standards that are my concern. By default, such music pretends to be what it is not.

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The Decline of the Gallery Tradition

I will turn now to Christopher Turner’s paper on ‘The Decline of the Gallery Tradition’,[91] which raises a number of vital and related issues. Historical change is a difficult subject; there are no simple or easy answers, and our own relationships to the past as both investigators and revivalists are difficult to negotiate. But although easy answers to difficult questions are not always forthcoming, there are nonetheless more or less likely answers – and it is the more likely ones that we should try to pursue.

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I want to limit my comments to three areas raised by the essay: the social composition of church bands and questions concerning the rural population; the social history of popular culture in the eighteenth and the first two thirds of the nineteenth century; and the notion of ‘decline from within’ of the popular church music tradition.

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Social Composition and Population

Who were the members of west gallery bands? From what we know, although the social composition ranged from labourers to ‘middle-class’ occupations such as schoolteachers and clergymen, it was that middling group of village society, the artisans, which overwhelmingly peopled the church bands. The term ‘artisan’ itself covers a range from employed journeymen to self-employed master craftsmen, and there was obviously geographical variation too.

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Artisans were generally respectable people who enjoyed a somewhat higher social status, and usually a higher income, than the labouring poor of village society. The independent-mindedness displayed by church bands is inextricably bound up with their artisan character. Artisans were sometimes less dependent for employment on pleasing their social ‘betters’ than were labourers. (One of the reasons why church attendance was generally higher in rural areas was that some landowners and farmers would dismiss labourers if they were not seen in church.) Artisans had to make their way in village society, but they were also, as a number of historians have pointed out, carriers of more radical social attitudes than other groups.[92]

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The impact of the Industrial Revolution on these groups varied over time. Handloom weavers were early victims of industrialisation, but many artisan occupations flourished until the second half of the nineteenth century and the advent of mass-produced and cheaply transported goods. The initial impact of industrialisation was to increase the demand for certain artisan work, and even in the second half of the century some of those artisans whose labour-intensive work could not be replaced by industrial methods of manufacture continued to flourish so long as demand for their services remained buoyant.[93]

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This brings us to a central plank of Christopher Turner’s argument: ‘the membership of rural gallery bands in the Anglican Church was bound to decline as village populations (and therefore the congregations) dwindled’.[94] To support this argument we are given percentage figures for the rural population at different census dates:

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The census of 1901, it is claimed, saw ‘an almost exact reversal of the situation of a hundred years before’.[95] Superficially, this looks convincing – population is draining from the countryside – but there is an element of illusion here. Let us add some more rows to the table:[96]

The percentage of people living in the countryside was certainly declining in the nineteenth century, but there were more people in the countryside in 1851 than in 1801, and the rural population of 1901 was of the same order of magnitude as that of 1801. It seems the demise of the rural population has been greatly exaggerated! There is no general decline in the number of people in the countryside until the last third of the nineteenth century. In fact the years 1820 to 1850 saw a 28 per cent increase in the rural population – slow compared to the rapid increase in the towns, but still a significant rate of growth. What actually happened in the nineteenth century is a quite staggering increase in population; for every one person alive in 1801 there were almost four living in 1901. Simultaneously, there was a rapid increase in the proportion of the population living in urban areas.