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As
the Occasional Singers get started this term, a group of ladies voices
singing independently and in conjunction with the Men's choir, giving our
talented and hardworking trebles a Sunday off each month, I consider what
they have to learn. Psalm singing is central to our worship at St. Mary's, a
tradition which they will soon become an important part!
Anglican Chant is the bedrock of English Church Music, an acid test of any
Choir! It is essentially the harmonisation of plainchant, took up at the
restoration in the seventeenth century and the tradition of devotion to God,
that the Psalter provides to Christian and Jew alike is hundreds of years
old. The first Psalter was compiled in 520BC at the building of the new
Temple in Jerusalem.
It
was a group of High Church enthusiasts who were named the Oxford Movement
that popularized the essentially Collegiate and Cathedral style of Psalm
singing to the Parishes in the 19th century, bringing drama back into
worship with incense and elaborate processions and Psalm singing won back a
congregation to the Church of England.
We
are so lucky here at St. Mary's as we closely guard this useful worship
tradition, as it is on the decline making the worship of cathedrals and
parishes further apart. This is a worry to all Church musicians who have to
find a balance between maintaining an excellent tradition on the one hand,
yet remaining in musical communication with the congregations who they
serve.
So
next time you sing a Psalm at Evensong, reflect on the words, let them have
their say and remember you are preserving hundreds of years of traditional
and devotional worship!
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