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.