Church Music

Church Music, the music used in Christian churches as a part of their rites of public worship. The range of such music is vast, and this article gives only a summary of the Roman and Protestant traditions of Western Europe. It should be remembered, however, that the Orthodox and Coptic churches of Eastern Europe and the Middle East also have an ancient and continuing musical tradition and, more recently, African and South American churches have developed distinctive musical forms and styles.

From its origin in Jewish and Graeco-Roman religious practices Christian church music in the West achieved its first pinnacle between the 8th and 9th centuries with a definitive form of Roman chant (named “Gregorian” after Pope Gregory I). Gracefully moulded to the Latin texts, this provided for the liturgical needs of the entire Church year. Subsequently, further heights were attained with polyphonic settings of Mass and Motet texts, among them the Messe de Nostre Dame (c. 1365) by Guillaume de Machaut, the motets of John Dunstable, England's first great composer, and, between c. 1450 and 1520, the cyclic Masses (with each section based on a common plainsong or secular cantus firmus) by Dufay, Ockeghem, and Josquin. A climax to this phase was reached in the late 16th century with superb a cappella works by Palestrina, Lassus, Byrd, and Victoria. In northern Europe, Protestant reformers substituted vernacular texts for the ancient Latin ones, and provided for congregational singing with simple chorales and psalm paraphrases. Elaborate church music continued to flourish both in Lutheran Germany, and in Elizabethan England, where vivid settings of English texts were produced by Morley, Gibbons, Weelkes, and others; but in European areas dominated by Calvinism, only metrical psalms and canticles were permitted. From early in the 17th century the growth of secular genres, particularly opera and the instrumental concerto, greatly influenced church music. Solo voices and orchestral accompaniments were included not only in the Restoration anthems of John Blow and Henry Purcell, but also in the motets of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Marc-Antoine Charpentier, in the France of Louis XIV. In Germany, Heinrich Schütz and his contemporaries adopted Italianate styles for the cantata, motet, and Passion, while J. S. Bach, supreme among church composers, enriched every branch of sacred music, especially with his two great Passions (St Matthew and St John) and his large-scale Mass in B minor, a setting of the Latin Ordinary text. During the later 18th century, growing secularization engendered a link between the Roman Mass and the symphony, with notable examples by Michael and Joseph Haydn, Mozart, and Cherubini. The Missa Solemnis (1823) by Beethoven, too large for liturgical use, created a precedent for numerous 19th-century Mass and Requiem settings—by Berlioz, Liszt, Verdi, Dvořák, Bruckner, and others—more suited to the concert hall than the church. Provision for everyday worship became the province mainly of second-rank composers and creativity tended generally to decline. The exception was an outpouring of new work on a smaller scale, hymn tunes, anthems, and psalm settings being produced by composers such as (in Britain) the Wesley family, Charles Stanford, and Hubert Parry. In the 20th century their legacy of music for everyday use has been carried on by composers such as Herbert Howells, Edmund Rubbra, and Harold Darke.

The 20th century saw a marked revival of church music, with strikingly original contributions by such leading composers as Vaughan Williams, Kodály, Stravinsky, Britten, and Tippett, and effective works by a host of lesser figures. Major changes have included the introduction, in 1980, of the Alternative Service Book for Anglicans, and the adoption of vernacular liturgies by Roman Catholics. While these have presented new problems, not least by displacing much of the traditional repertoire, they have also provided exciting new opportunities for composers.