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The Music of the English Parish Church

Nicholas Temperley

** Recently re-issued **


Cover Design

Volume 1
From cover notes:
This book is the most thorough and extensive history of English parish church music ever published, covering the period from the late middle ages to the present day. Through the ages English parish churchcs have resounded to all manner of music, ranging fiom the rich choral polyphony of Henry VIII's or Victoria's reign to the bare unaccompanied psalm tunes of the seventeenth century. Nicholas Temperley has found in this neglected field a wealth of fascinating music, as well as a host of intellectual problems to intrigue thc scholar. A recurrent theme of the book is the conflict between two incompatible goals for Protestant church music: artistic expression and popular expression.

Professor Temperley suggests that the Elizabethan metrical psalm tunes were survivors of a mode of popular music that predated ballad tunes. Centuries of oral transmission turned these once lively tunes into very slow, quavering chants which came to be called the 'old way of singing'. Reforms that followed in the eighteenth century led to a clear split between town and country parishes. Temperley guides the reader through the complex social, theological and aesthetic movements that helped to form 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.

The extensive bibliography includes a chronological list of printed collections of parish church music, comprehensive up to 1880, with summaries of their contents.

The Music of the English Parish Church Vol.1 is available from Cambridge University Press in paperback only ISBN 0 521 27457 5 (ISBN-13:9780521274579), price: £38

For more details including downloads of PDF files of selected pages, click HERE


Cover Design

Volume 2
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.

The Music of the English Parish Church Vol.2 is available from Cambridge University Press in paperback only ISBN 0 521 02337 8 (ISBN-13:9780521023375), price: £18.99

For more details including downloads of PDF files of selected pages, click HERE

 

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