New research on John Mason Neale

My first papers on church music were published last month, and one is now online. Both are on John Mason Neale, who — as I mentioned in January — is being honored in this the year of his bicentennial.

Neale’s Hymnal Noted

The main paper is about his most influential hymnal, Hymnal Noted, published with music editor Thomas Helmore. As the second paragraph summarizes:

In Hymnal Noted, Neale (1818-1866) and his colleagues compiled 210 hymns, with 105 unique texts translated from medieval Latin sources; many of these translations were later included in the major English hymnals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. AB this paper will show, the influence of Hymnal Noted also extended to the United States. Of the 105 texts, twenty-six were adopted by one or more of the twenty-four twentieth-century hymnals from the largest American Christian denominations, with hymns such as “All glory, laud and honor,” and “O come, O come, Emmanuel.”

The paper reviews the history of hymnody in the Church of England before the Oxford Movement, Neale’s career, his contribution to hymnody, and then specifically Hymnal Noted and its impact. It was published in The Hymn, the main US journal for scholarship on hymn music. I had presented the original version at the 2017 Society for Christian Scholarship in Music conference — my first appearance at any academic conference for religion, liturgy or music — and got great feedback, a sense of the norms of the field, and met some of today’s established and up-and-coming scholars.

The published paper benefitted greatly from the editorial process. In particular, I greatly appreciate the patience of interim editor Robin Knowles Wallace, an endowed chair at the Methodist seminary near Columbus.

How Cambridge and John Mason Neale Continued the Oxford Movement

Stained glass window in St Swithuns
Source: Forward in Christ, Oct. 2018

In writing the original paper, I felt that the Neale bicentennial should not go unremarked among American Anglo-Catholics; because of my involvement in the Forward in Faith church planting task force, I reached out to the Forward in Faith magazine, Forward in Christ. The editor, Fr. Michael Heidt, graciously agreed to run 1,650 words on Neale in the October issue.

While in my January blog post, I emphasized Neale’s hymns, I felt this audience would also be interested in Neale’s impact in other areas. One part was about how Neale and his Cambridge colleagues created the gothic revival in English church architecture — including in their showpiece Victorian Gothic church, All Saints’ Margaret Street, which I was fortunate to visit in June. The other was how Neale was among those who pushed the envelope of liturgical practice — sometimes at great risk to his career and livelihood – to reinstate medieval practices decried as “Romish” by many English Protestants. While incense and the chasuble remain controversial, it’s hard to remember that choir vestments, candles, and singing the communion service were also controversial 150 years ago.

The article appeared in the printed glossy magazine, and the full text is available for free on the Forward in Christ website. The website includes one of the pictures from the magazine: the stained glass window showing John Mason Neale and two others at St Swithuns, East Grinstead, where he was laid to rest on August 10, 1866. The other picture in the magazine is a recent interior picture of All Saints’ Margaret Street, which is available on their website.

References

• J. M. Neale and Thomas Helmore, Hymnal Noted: Parts I & II (London: Novello, 1851, 1856), available at https://books.google.com/books?id=2E3Dya5ON5oC
• J. West, “Neale’s Hymnal Noted and its Impact on Twentieth-Century American Hymnody,” The Hymn, 69, 3 (Summer 2018): 14-24.
• J. West, “How Cambridge and John Mason Neale Continued the Oxford Movement,” Forward in Christ 11, 4 (October 2018): 18-20, URL: http://bit.ly/FIC-Neale-2018

Thank you to everyone for their help and encouragement. I would be glad to email a scan of the printed copy of either article to anyone who’s interested — please contact me.

Singing to end all wars

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the end of the War to End All Wars, what we now call World War I. With nearly 1 million dead from England and the rest of the United Kingdom, this date has been observed as Remembrance Day for the past century: the Church of England and other churches in the U.K. will be solemnly marking this occasion. Anyone who’s read biographies of Lewis, Tolkien and others of that generation know how much a mark the war made on the British people.

In the U.S., today is unlikely to be a big deal. The deaths were a factor of 10 smaller in absolute terms and 20x smaller in proportion of the overall population. The president (as any president would) is in Europe, not the U.S., to mark the occasion.

There isn’t really anything in the U.S. lectionary for Veteran’s (née Armistice) Day, and today’s readings don’t really lend themselves a sermon on the subject. However, I did find it was possible to gently remember the occasion through a choice of hymns.

The obvious hymn for the occasion is “Joyful, joyful, we adore thee”, which is missing from my favorite hymnal but #376 in Hymnal 1982 and #375 in Book of Common Praise 2017. This hymn was a pleasant surprise when, in our wanderings earlier this century to find a suitable Episcopal church, we found it was a quite popular recession hymn. I was struck how clever the adaptation was: the tune from the final movement of Beethoven’s 9th (“Ode to Joy”), with words that are roughly a paraphrase of Schiller’s 18th century text that was used in Beethoven’s German original.

The fit is that the melody is the EU national anthem, something hard to miss if you watch an EU gathering on TV. (Officially there are no words, but I recall seeing Europeans singing Beethoven’s words on TV). Of course, the EU is an institution created to prevent a repeat of World War II, but given that the 1918 Armistice did such a terrible job of preventing a repeat of World War I, in reality the Marshall Plan, Common Market and European Union were a do-over of what should have been done to provide peace 100 years ago.

Still, this was vaguely unsatisfying. Looking through the various topical indices, none of the first lines had an obvious fit to a more general desire for peace. But then a (sung) phrase kept rattling around in my brain: “Give to us peace in our time, O Lord.”

It turns out this is the end of verses 1-3 of the 19th century hymn, “God the Omnipotent! King, who ordainest.” The verses were fairly stable until the late 1970s, the first two in 1842 by Henry F. Chorley (a London music critic and opera librettist) and the last two in 1870 by Rev. John Ellerton, a graduate of Trinity College Cambridge and a contributor to Hymns Ancient & Modern.

The words I have sung from Hymnal 1940 (#523) since my childhood are:

God, the omnipotent! King who ordainest
Thunder thy clarion, the lightning thy sword;
Show forth thy pity on high where Thou reignest,
Give to us peace in our time, O Lord.

God the all merciful! Earth hath forsaken
Thy ways all holy, and slighted Thy Word;
Bid not thy wrath in its terrors awaken;
Give to us peace in our time, O Lord.

God the all righteous One! Man hath defied Thee;
Yet to eternity standeth thy Word,
Falsehood and wrong shall not tarry beside Thee;
Give to us peace in our time, O Lord.

God the all provident! Earth by thy chastening,
Yet shall to freedom and truth be restored;
Through the thick darkness Thy kingdom is hast’ning;
Thou wilt give peace in thy time, O Lord.

The same words are in BCP2017 (#613). Despite the strong imagery, H82 (#569) only gently updates it, replacing “Man” with “Earth” in verse 3. In all cases, we are singing either to petition God for peace in our time, or to acknowledge our trust that he will do so at the time of his choosing.

What I remember most about the hymn, however, is the march that makes it both memorable in imminently singable. The real irony, however, is that the tune was the Tsar’s national anthem — at least until the Romanov family was executed by the Bolsheviks in July 1918. So singing the tune also marks a link to an earlier era of Europe that (for better or for worse) came to a violent end in 1917-1918.

Websites for Anglican hymnody

Oremus was an invaluable resource for comparing Anglican hymnals around the world, but last year they gave up because they were being hassled to death over supposed copyright concerns. (I have considerable knowledge of copyright and fair use, and they seemed to be very much on the side of being legal).

Over the last decade, Hymnary has gotten much much better, with good funding, a college and paid staff behind it. (It didn’t hurt that the federal government gave them a big grant to scan 2,000 hymnals from a college library.) It lists the hymn titles and tunes for all the American hymnals, as well as key Church of England hymnals of the past 150 years.

It has various layers of complexity: the searching by hymn, by hymnal, by tune and the ability to download CSV files of some of the data. I can't claim to be an expert on it yet, but would like to post a tutorial once I understand it better. However, I have consistently felt that (as in Oremus) when I pull up a hymn text, I have no assurance that the text I'm seeing matches the specific pew hymnal (in terms of verses and wording changes) in front of me.

During my field research for my next church music paper, I heard about some other resources that seem very useful.

The Episcopal Church’s Church Publishing Inc. has a website RiteSeries, which includes RiteBrain for liturgy and RiteSong for hymns.  In many ways, CPH is emulating what Concordia Publishing House (CPH.org) does for the larger (Missouri synod) Lutheran denomination. However, RiteSeries only includes the most recent full hymnal (Hymnal 1982) and its supplements (Wonder Love & Praise), as well as the 1979 prayer book (and supplements such as Lesser Feasts and Fasts), and omits mention of liturgies that have been officially deprecated for the past 35 years. This is unlike CPH, which emphasizes its 2006 worship book (hymnal+prayer book) but still sells its 1982 and 1941 books, and even offers some resources for the older books.

Still, in this era of putting all the music (or at least lyrics) in the service booklet, both Hymnal 1940 and Book of Common Praise 2017 need resources like this. Hymnary has page images for much of Hymnal 1940, so that's a start.

Finally, my research interview yesterday with a long time choir member in Houston — who grew up with the 1928 prayer book and 1940 hymnal and never left — she pointed out SmallChurchMusic.com. It has MP3 files for Hymnal 1940, Hymnal 1982 and The English Hymnal. It also lists the 2006 LCMS hymnal and the 1990 Presbyterian hymnal, and several Methodist hymnals. For each tune, there are multiple MP3 files that list how many verses and what keys they are in. It also provides its own PDF of a score, its own standard lyrics (not specific to a hymnal), and links to pages on TheCyberHymnal and Hymnary for the hymn.

Like so many out there, I appreciate the work these individuals (or not-for-profits) are doing to make these resources available for those of us who still value hymns and hymn-singing in America.

Fr. Robert Taft (1932-2018) on the liturgy

Fr. Robert Francis Taft, S.J., died Friday in Weston, Mass., where he had retired in 2011 after 46 years at the Oriental Institute of Rome. Born in Rhode Island, he was best known as a Roman Catholic scholar of Eastern liturgies and was in fact a priest in Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, an Eastern Rite church in communion with Rome. The Pray Tell blog posted an obituary by John F. Baldovin, S.J., a friend and colleague who stayed in touch with Fr Taft after his retirement.

Fr. Taft was a highly knowledgeable, influential and opinionated contributor to the postwar ecumenical movement that called itself “Liturgical Reform”. While for the Roman church this specifically meant bringing the liturgy into the vernacular, the broader movement sought to bring new evidence, insights and opinions to change the liturgy in the direction the reformers believed best. Over the past 70 year, this movement that impacted almost the entire swath of liturgical Western Christianity.

I knew of Taft’s work from his definitive 1986 book The Liturgy of the Hours in East and West, which is on the future reading list of my ecumenical liturgy reading group. As a student of liturgy — rather than a scholar making original contributions — today I can only scratch the surface of assessing his contribution.

(For those that wonder why I spend so much time on liturgy in a music blog, please bear with me).

Pray Tell also posted the 1985 speech Fr. Taft gave upon receiving an award for his liturgical studies. From this 8,800 word speech, I will (cherry) pick some on how this priest and scholar found that a proper liturgy is important for congregational worship:

…what the Vatican II reforms initiated was a return of the liturgy to the people. … But the only way it can remain popular is if we leave it alone. … What ordinary people in ordinary parishes need is familiarity, sameness, the stability of a ritual tradition that can be achieved only be repetition, and that will not tolerate change every time the pastor reads a new article. The only way people are going to perceive liturgy as their own, and therefore participate in it, is when they know what is going to happen next.
…
So let me enunciate a liturgical principle: ritual – or call it order of worship, if you belong to a tradition that dislikes the word ritual – a certain stability in the déroulement of worship, far from precluding spontaneity and congregational participation, is its condition sine qua non, as is indeed true of any social event. Italian crowds spontaneously shout “brava” to divas at the opera – but not in the middle of an aria – because the conventions of civility dictate that there is a time and place for everything.
…
Like medieval cathedrals, liturgies were created not as monuments to human creativity, but as acts of worship. The object of worship is not self-expression, not even self-fulfillment, but God. “he must increase, I must decrease,” John the Baptist said of Jesus (Jn 3:30) and that is an excellent principle for liturgical ministers. Anyway, experience shows that most spontaneity is spontaneous only the first time around. Thereafter it always sounds the same. Furthermore, most people are not especially creative in any other aspect of the existence, and there is no reason to think that they will be when it comes to liturgy. They can, however, be drawn to participate in a common heritage far nobler and richer than the creation of anyone of us individually. What we need is not further to reinvent the wheel, not to reshape our liturgy every time we read a new article, but just to take what we have and use it very well.
…
In other words, liturgy is a common tradition, and ideal of prayer to which I must rise, and not some private game that I am free to reduce to the level of my own banality. And when the rite has something I do not understand, especially if it is something that Christians in almost every tradition, East and West, have been doing for about a millennium, then perhaps my initial instinct should be to suspect some deficiency in my own understanding, before immediately proceeding to excise whatever it is that has had the affrontery to escape the limits of my intelligence.

Requiescat in pace.

The ACNA's near-final liturgy

Today is the deadline for feedback on the ACNA’s new liturgy. It is bringing to an end a 10-year process that began in November 2008 in Fort Worth. The official Texts for Common Prayer are expected to be approved early in 2019 and made available next summer.

There is a detailed review of the revision, published in the September Living Church and Summer issue of Anglican Way (the newsletter of the Prayer Book Society). The commentary is by Drew Nathaniel Keane, until this year a member of The Episcopal Church Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music.

Keane praised the transparency of the ACNA effort, which seems well-deserved. In the internet era, the ACNA task force provides a model for how to share liturgy updates, rather than the annual photocopied (or printed) books used in the previous 50 years.

Overall, the new liturgy is similar to the 1979 prayer book that it is intended to replace. In some cases, this is unavoidable — since both reflect trends of postwar liturgical reform, there are some updates present in 1979 (such as midday and compline prayer) not present in 1662 or 1928.

To try to summarize the new liturgy, I’ll focus on the three areas of the liturgy that have the greatest day-to-day impact: the lectionary, the daily office and the Eucharist service.

Lectionary

Because it's such a pain to compare 52 weeks of subtly different choices, I am grateful to Keane for explaining the changes of the lectionary.

Unlike Cranmer’s one-year lectionary of his 1549 and 1552 prayer books (retained in the 1559,1662,1789 and both 1928 prayer books), the ANCA follows the 1979 and its 3-year cycle of the 1979 lectionary. Perhaps we can blame the Romans, since this is a post-Vatican II innovation that was also followed by most but not all Protestant liturgical churches (e.g. the LCMS allows a local option between these two). The 1979 prayer book introduced its own lectionary, but today TEC uses the Revised Common Lectionary.

As Keane notes, for the daily office the ACNA reverts to a one-year lectionary (as in 1549 through 1928) rather than the two-year of 1979. However, to my eye it’s more like Cranmer’s 1549 one year lectionary (retained through 1662 in England and 1892 in the US) which kept to the civil calendar. The 1928 U.S. lectionary marked a radical departure, in that it maps to the church year (“Tuesday after the second Sunday in Lent”) and also offers a less comprehensive coverage of Scripture (i.e. is less demanding).

Keane highlights another (healthy) correction to the 1928

Since 1928, the daily office lectionaries of the Episcopal Church have notoriously omitted sections of Scripture that that might not easily square with modern American sensibilities. This proposal abandons this approach; rather than tiptoeing around these passages, … it includes the Scriptures as they are

Keane debates whether the ACNA properly handles the lesser feasts and fasts; that topic is beyond the scope of this summary.

Daily Office: Morning and Evening Prayer 

Daily Office depends both on the lectionary (see above) and the specific prayers. The elements I find most interesting:

• Like 1979, the ACNA removes “miserable offenders” from the General Confession; every time I say Rite I, this is still a jarring omission.
• Like 1979, it allows any canticle to be used in any order. Unlike 1979, cuts down (slightly) on the confusion by segregating the canticles into morning and evening canticles.
• Makes clear the entire Psalm 95 (rather than the Venite) can be used in Morning Prayer — something everyone but the Americans have done since 1549 — but provides the missing four verses only during penitential seasons.
• Restores “O God, make speed to save us” from the 1662, that was omitted from previous American prayer books.

Next to the (shortened) confession, I have found that most powerful part of saying the Daily Office for the past three years has been the “Conditions of Men” prayer:

O GOD, the Creator and Preserver of all mankind, we humbly beseech thee for all sorts and conditions of men; that thou wouldest be pleased to make thy ways known unto them, thy saving health unto all nations. More especially we pray for thy holy Church universal; that it may be so guided and governed by thy good Spirit, that all who profess and call themselves Christians may be led into the way of truth, and hold the faith in unity of spirit, in the bond of peace, and in righteousness of life. Finally, we commend to thy fatherly goodness all those who are any ways afflicted, or distressed, in mind, body, or estate; [*especially those for whom our prayers are desired*] that it may please thee to comfort and relieve them, according to. their several necessities; giving them patience under their sufferings, and a happy issue out of all their afflictions. And this we beg for Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.

The prayer was introduced in the 1662 English prayer book — used globally for 300+ years — and part of the 1789, 1892 and 1928 US prayer books. It was dropped in the 1979 prayer book and remains missing in the 2019. To my ear, this (as with “miserable offenders”) substantially weakens the penitential nature of the service. A booklet (rather than Prayer Book) parish could restore it, since it is prayer #31 on the list of “Occasional Prayers and Thanksgivings”.

Eucharist Service

While the Ordinal was the ACNA’s initial priority, from a practical standpoint, Holy Communion is the only service that the typical parishioner will see most of the year. The changes to Holy Communion are numerous and detailed.

While both 1979 and 2019 have two rites, there the similarity end. In the 1979, the Rite I uses traditional language (if not the sequence) of the 1549-1662-1928, while Rite II has major changes both to the liturgy and language. In 2019, there are two contemporary language liturgies: “Anglican Standard Text” is like a modern language version of Rite I, while “Renewed Ancient Text” is very similar to Rite II.

Keane takes a guess about the reason for the latter similarity.

Although the Renewed Ancient Text is clearly based on 1979 Rite II, the preface “Concerning the Service” seems less than forthcoming regarding the source: “The Renewed Ancient Text is drawn from liturgies of the Early Church [and] reflects the influence of twentieth century ecumenical consensus.” Yes, 1979’s Rite II did draw from some ancient liturgies and reflects the influence of the mid-20th century ecumenical Liturgical Movement, but the particular text — its selection of which ancient liturgies to follow, where, and to what extent — constitutes an original liturgy, a source that this preface obscures.

However, task force member Fr. Jonathan Kanary says the circumstantial similarity is misleading:

…the first version of the "Ancient Canon" wasn't based on 1979 at all, but was an entirely independent liturgy, although it was (like Rite 2 Prayer A) based loosely on Hippolytus. Because of feedback we received (including from some bishops), the revision drew in a fair bit of the familiar language from Prayer A, while retaining the things that had worked well from the first version of the Ancient Canon. The Living Church article seems to assume that the rite is simply an adaptation of the 1979 Prayer A, and I understand how someone glancing over it now might think so, but the history is much more complex.

For my recent liturgy class, I looked at the Prayer of Consecration from 1549 to 2019, including Cranmer’s prayer books, the 20th century American prayer books and the ACNA liturgy.

Although modernized in language, the “Anglican Standard” mainly differs in the order of the prayers:

1549 BCP	1928 BCP/1979 Rite I	2019 Anglican Standard
Words of Institution Invocation Oblation Concluding Doxology	Words of Institution Invocation Oblation Concluding Doxology	Invocation Words of Institution Oblation Concluding Doxology

Meanwhile, the “Renewed Ancient Text” follows closely Rite II, except for changes in the language of the Invocation:

1979 Rite II	2019 Renewed Ancient
Sanctify them by your Holy Spirit to be for your people the Body and Blood of your Son, the holy food and drink of new and unending life in him. Sanctify us also that we may faithfully receive this holy Sacrament, and serve you in unity, constancy, and peace; and at the last day bring us with all your saints into the joy of your eternal kingdom.	Sanctify them by your Word and Holy Spirit to be for your people the Body and Blood of your Son Jesus Christ. Sanctify us also, that we may worthily receive this holy sacrament, and be made one body with him, so that he may dwell in us and we in him. And bring us with all your saints into the fullness of your heavenly kingdom, where we shall see our Lord face to face.

Keane also notes three changes that move the liturgy in a (slightly) more Anglo-Catholic direction:

• The Benedictus qui venit is included in the Sanctus. This is not included in the historic prayer book tradition, but by the late 19th century was commonly inserted in High Church circles; it was provided as an optional addition in 1979’s Rite I.

• The Agnus Dei follows the Prayer of Humble Access rather than the other way round as in 1979. This order was common in American Anglo-Catholic parishes that inserted the Agnus Dei into the 1928 prayer book service.

• Along with the Invitation from 1979, “The gifts of God for the People of God,” a second option is provided in both rites: “Behold the Lamb of God.” Taken from John 1:29 and Revelation 19:9, Anglo-Catholic parishes commonly inserted these scriptural sentences into the old text as an Invitation to Communion, and a version of this invitation is part of the Church of England’s Common Worship.

Conclusions

The liturgy is different enough that faithful (clergy or laity) moving between the ACNA and Rite II or Rite I (let alone earlier prayer books) will have to carefully read every sentence for several months until it becomes familiar. I feel bad for supply priests who are in a diocese with more than one liturgy. However, at least any confusion caused by trial use of interim liturgies will soon be over.

In the 21st century, one of the great resources for learning the liturgy is the Internet — whether via web pages or a cellphone app. Flipping through tables and paper books to find lessons works for printing a Sunday bulletin, but is a bit daunting for laity doing the Daily Office twice daily.

The ACNA is fortunate to have a website, www.legereme.com, that helps solve this problem. It provides

• A complete order of Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, with lessons
• The lessons for the Sunday Eucharist service

An entrepreneurial church planter is currently taking a collection fund iPhone and Android versions of a stand-alone app for the Legerme texts.