By Nicholas Temperley

Presented by Tami Hockers

THE OLD WAY OF SINGING: ITS ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT

What is the Old Way of Singing?

• Originated in the Church of England

• Also known as the “common” or “usual” way

• Considered indigenous, primitive and unacceptable as a means to sing

• Sung in congregations where there is no musical direction

http://thechristianpundit.org/category/church-architecture/

Characteristics of the Old Way of Singing

•Slow tempo

•Rhythm is weakened

•Extraneous pitches appear

•Pitches coinciding with those of the hymn tune

•Pitches inserted between the original hymn melody

•Unexplained dissonances

Church Reformation

• A big contributing factor to the Old Way of singing

• Late medieval Church - people did not sing in worship, priests and professional musicians were hired

• Reform lead by Bohemian Brethren, Lutherans, Zwinglians, Calvanists, Anabaptists, Angelicans and Presbyterians

• Reformists used folk tunes already known and set melody to religious text (secular to sacred)

http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/LAN/Denton/ChristChurch.shtml

Calvanists had good intentions…

• Were not concerned with musical effects of congregational singing

• Cared that each person sing the songs of the Bible with understanding and from the heart

This 17th century engraving includes Reformed theologians. Can you find Calvin? Hint: he has a beard

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Calvinism

A quote from Henrich Bullinger, and influential leader in the German Reformed church - 1569

• “Let no man think, that prayers sung with man’s voice are more acceptable to God, than if they were plainly spoken or uttered; for God is neither allured with the sweetness of man’s voice, neither is he offended, though prayer be uttered in a hoarse or base sound. Prayer is commended for faith and godliness of mind, and not for any outward show.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Bullinger#mediaviewer/File:Heinrich_Bullinger.jpg

The Reformed sects were suspicious

• They banned choirs, organs, instruments and counterpoint

• Zwingli ordered organs to destroyed and choirs disbanded (1527)

• Holland banned organs for worship but were still used in concerts

However…

• Constantin Huygens urged to improve congregational singing in which he stated, “[singing was] more like howling and screaming than like human singing.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantijn_Huygens#mediaviewer/File:Constantijn_Huygens01a.jpg

Split of Reformed Musical Practices

• Continental Reformed church’s (such as Lutherans) used the art-music tradition – using organs, choirs, music books, and the leadership of professional musicians

• This regulated hymnody or psalmody

• Kept up on the developments in art music

Art-Music Tradition

Old Way of Singing

• Unaccompanied congregational singing• Made use of known folk melodies• First psalms were sung in a lively style similar to that of folk

ballads• Sung by all without professional/trained music leaders

Ballad texts were written in broadside form

• For example: very little melodic structure, no clear rhythm, can’t fit into a meter

Same tune – in a book published six years earlier

• Notice the tune is no longer undefined. It has a solid meter and the rests between the lines are filled with accompaniment.

Compare 1565 Sternhold and Hopkins psalm 59 to the 1599 Allison psalm 59

1565 Sternhold and Hopkins

1599 Allison

Comparing Psalm 59

• Ward suggests that both the psalm tune and ballad represent a “popular style hitherto unnoted” that did not long survive the sixteenth century as far as secular music is concerned, and that could be transformed by accompaniment into something approximating art music.

Sternhold and Hopkins

• Sternhold and Hopkins editions were dropped out of use and had so many misprints, they could not be used for an actual performance

• Only four of their tunes were ever published in other psalm books

Oxford Tune • Simplest of all psalm tunes

• Appears in every psalmody collection from England, Scotland or America between 1590 and 1720

*note time signature changeand still the same beat base

Change in Time OVER Time

• There have been continuous devaluation of note values almost throughout the history of music notation, and it is more likely that the speed of singing secular folksongs had remained much the same, while the notation appropriate to represent that speed had changed. By contrast the psalm tunes were still shown in the same notation, but the notes now indicate a slower speed than they had fifty years before.

• Psalm tunes and folksongs, originally the same in style and character, had diverged in the course of fifty or a hundred years to a point where they no longer resembled each other!

WHY?

• Folksongs were often accompanied by dancing, fiddles, lutes, clapping, stamping or other bodily movements. None of these could be done in church

• People sang unaccompanied which lead to less confident singers who waited for the leaders to move to the next note

• Natural “drag” developed

• Drag meant the tunes lost distinctive rhythms of the early days

Thomas Mathew, compiler of a psalmody collection had noted:

…Singers in most Country Churches go quite out of rule, by drawing out the Sound of some Notes twice or thrice longer than they ought to do… they seem to think it makes the very finest Harmony: So have I observ’d them in some Places to strain themselves in forcing out some, and especially the last Note in a Line, that they have hardly had Strength to begin again.

Old Way characteristic: adding notes

• Singers were ignorant of the melody and most tunes were unrecognizable

• Thomas Walter complained that no two churches sound alike

*On the next slide you will see the tune“Southwell” written as if in a song book and then underneath a comparible “Broken or divided” notation of what was truly sung in churches. This is known to be the first attempt at writing the Old Way in comparison.

Now back to the Oxford tune (slide 13) . The first two examples were from East, 1592, and Ravenscroft, 1621. here is a later example fo the same psalm 4 but from Chetham in 1718.

This version shows yet another progression within Old Way that the tunes are still sung stepwise but how ornamentation was added to the later portion of each beat as in comparison with the baroque style which is conducive in the 17th

and 18th centuries.

Process of English Psalmody

Organum (parallel 4ths and 5ths)

Faburden (parallel 6/3 chords)

Cantus Firmus (6th below the chant tone)

Improvised Harmonies (professional choirs)

Printing of models of Faburden in psalm books

This process lead to the characteristics of the Old Way of Signing

Another Oxford Tune Comparison

• Tunes became a harmony for one another. The upper voice is the tune Oxford and the lower voice is the tune Litchfield, but printed together in the Playford, 1694.

“Lining Out”• Another characteristic was added to the Old Way be

Presbyterianism – reading psalm line by line

• A Directory for the Publique Worship of God Throughout the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland (London,1644) included a section “Of Singing of Psalms” and it read:

That the whole Congregation may joyne herein, every one that can reade is to have a Psalme book, and all others not disabled by age, or othersie, are to be exhorted to elarn to reade. But for the present, where many in the Congregation cannot read, it is convenient that the Minister, or some other fit person appointed by him and the other Ruling Officers, do reade the Psalme, line by line, before the singing thereof.

• Before the end of the 17th century, lining out had turned into a monotone chant

SINGING SERMON• It is what it is… I have seen two priests do a singing sermon in the

Catholic tradition about 18 years ago!

• Usually lead into lining out of a psalm

• Attributed to the Great Awakening (1730 – 50)

- With the rise of the Commonwealth, the High-Church prevailed more then the Church of England

- The Old Way became unacceptable to the middle class which were more familiar with art music

Getting rid of Old Way

• Installed Organs

• Establishment of religious societies of young men who were taught and dispersed to improve singing in smaller churches

• Parish choirs

• More artistic music – A New Version of the Psalms by Tate and Brady and other composers like Jeremiah Clarke and William Croft

• Bass viols were introduced to help pitch

• Shapenote hymn books for easier reading

Old Way still the same way for some

• Mennonites still use the old way of singing framework but with the use of higher techniques like appropriate harmonies and concern for correct pitch

• Temperly, Nicholas. Fall 1981. “The Old Way of Singing: Its Origin and Development.” Journal of the American Musicological Society34.

• Pictures:

• http://thechristianpundit.org/category/church-architecture/

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantijn_Huygens#mediaviewer/File:Constantijn_Huygens01a.jpg

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Bullinger#mediaviewer/File:Heinrich_Bullinger.jpg

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Calvinism

• http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/LAN/Denton/ChristChurch.shtml