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Chapel Music in the 18^th & Early 19^th Centuries

By Derek Watson

[Note - the MIDI files on this page are designed to remind you of the tune. They carry no claim to historical accuracy.]

Tunes For Watts’ Hymns

Today, Isaac Watts’ hymns are sung by every Christian denomination, but in the early 18^th century they were issued for the Independents (Congregationalists) and sung almost entirely by dissenters. Almost all Watts’ hymns were written in the accepted metres of his day. So, his lines were readily married to any of a dozen familiar melodies. Some were popular old folk tunes, some ingenious ‘pop’ tunes, i.e. what was ‘in’ at the time. Many tunes came from Geneva, headquarters of Calvinism, to where English and Scottish theologians had fled to escape persecution in their day. Often the tunes were in free rhythm, not accentual or barred, as we know them. Moreover, a tune to which words were attached was in all probability a variant of an earlier melody; and later this tune continued to change, if only slightly, from one printing to the next.

Because the worship service in a Separatist church offered only one, or at most two opportunities for singing, the eight or so tunes known to many in a congregation would have been more than adequate for accommodating any new texts. The tune ST MICHAEL beginning

:- s₁ | d : m | r : r | m :-

known to be a variant by William Croft of one of Louis Bourgeois’ Genevan tunes, was sung around 1720 to Watts’ new hymn Jesus invites his saints (PH 36; BPW 438; R&S 434). The universally known OLD HUNDREDTH from the 1551 French Genevan Psalter (L. Bourgeois) would have fitted any of four texts in Long Metre (four lines of eight syllables each) in Peculiar Honours, Nos 27, 32, 54, 64.

Even more popular was the Ballad metre or Common Metre (CM) with four lines of 8 6 8 6 syllables. Among these were WINCHESTER OLD and AULD LANG SYNE. Either could have been used for the new hymn Long as I live, I’ll bless Thy name (PH 83; CP 10). Equally it might have been matched to the tune YORK, taken from Andor Hart’s Fifty Psalms of David (1615), beginning:

- d :Ð| m : s | f : l | m : s | r :-

While not so familiar today, YORK was a very popular 18^th century tune. It is said that half the nurses in England sang it as a lullaby to get their babies off to sleep!

Another tune, doubtless familiar to Isaac and his brother Enoch, was COLESHILL, a modalised form of WINDSOR (DUNDEE, north of the border), set for Psalm 116 in the Seconde Booke of the Musicke of M.W. Damon, 1591, and incorporated in the numerous editions of William Barton’s The Psalms of David in Metre. Perhaps Watts tried out this tune for his own hymns. It is even possible Enoch had it in his mind when he wrote his famous letter to encourage Isaac to revise the whole of Christian worship. Sung to metrical psalm 103, verses 1-5, COLESHILL was revived in the 20^th century (see CH 96; CP 729, 739; 3CH 351).

Watts was fortunate in having two established composers around. Jeremiah Clarke (1673-1707) and William Croft (1678-1727) were co-organists at The Chapel Royal. Both wrote memorable and enduring tunes that fitted his words well, seemingly better than those to which in 1696-97 his pre-publication hymns were sung in Mark Lane Chapel, London. Tunes like Croft’s ST ANNE and Clarke’s BROCKHAM have a simplicity and strength, much like the old psalm tunes, impressive without harmonic support and Watts wanted everyone to sing better than they had been singing. It was in Mark Lane Chapel that he shook the eminent members of his congregation by declaring that all who were capable of singing should stand up to do so. Records suggest that a hundred years were to pass before it became the generally accepted practice to stand in chapel for singing.

As a result of all Watt’s publications, a regular lecture course was set up in the King’s Weigh House Chapel, Eastcheap, London, on the subject ‘how to sing’. But the major advance in popularity and vigour of singing had to await the arrival, in the mid-century, of the evangelical movement and the publications of the Wesley brothers, whose movement was indeed ‘born in song’.

Throughout most of Watt’s life (1674-1747) singing in dissenting, as in parish, churches necessitated the practise of ‘lining-out’. This was a slow and laborious process. The first line of the text was recited by the minister and immediately sung by the seated congregation, which tried to follow a leading voice or perhaps two or three self-appointed ‘singers’. The next line was similarly treated and the saying and singing repeated until all the psalm or hymn verses were completed. Only slowly was this lining-out ritual dropped as the words became more familiar. Those who could read might have had a written text, which was sung heartily, if not raucously to a well-known tenor air or melody. Early 18^th century unaccompanied singing was either in unison or in two parts. Men formed the majority of a congregation, and their voices were doubled at the octave by the women and children. Some men sang a bass part and from the few records we have, apparently produced a good sound, far richer than we might suppose. Even in the home, the bass part of a psalm was ‘catch’d’.[i] Chapel congregations initially relied on a good and willing singer to guide them, and old records name the ‘leader of the singers’ as well as the pastor or preacher. Gradually singing groups developed, often sufficiently keen to receive and pay for a rudimentary musical training from a peripatetic singing teacher. The earliest such groups came into being within a wide corridor across England taking in southern Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire and the northern parts of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire.

From about 1740 the tradition of gallery choirs and later of bands also sprung up in Lincolnshire and East Anglia and in the Southwest region especially Dorset and Somerset.

The Gallery Choir

Singing groups aimed to offer a new way of singing the psalm and hymn; to get beyond the disjointed and dragged-out rendering that had for so long been the custom. Sometimes a village group of singers helped out at both parish and near-by Nonconformist chapel, but each church usually had its own choir, which only rarely numbered more than three men and two women. They could not be expected to regulate the singing of the rest of the congregation unless they were together in a body, so room was usually found for them in an alcove or gallery. The second half of the 18^th century saw a flood of new chapels being erected and these usually had purpose-built galleries.

There was much variation in the quality of the music made in these buildings and sometimes a resistance to the music and manner of the gallery choirs (though the relatively few well-to-do chapels in towns and cities had different aims and standards). Early choir items were anthems and fuguing tunesÐthe final stage in the elaboration of psalm (hymn) tunes. These contributions to worship by choir alone were most acceptable to the minister and people. For a time, the introduction of choir anthems even led to the entire congregation singing them. One simple anthem by Richard Cecil (1748-1810), I will arise, an expression of personal repentance, became a congregational piece and had a long run in dissenting and evangelical churches. Gallery choir-led singing continued into the nineteenth century.

The ‘class meeting’ of the Methodist movement that was soon to become a separate denomination took on much of the form of worship being used by the non-hierarchical churches, Baptist and Congregational. Galleries were enlarged to accommodate more singers. Lively and remarkable singing from the entire congregation helped dissenting churches grow, sometimes at the expense of the parish church.

Many ministers wanted to ‘improve the psalmody’ which really meant increase the people’s participation in hymn singing. A Baptist minister in 1820, in reminding his congregation that a select body of singers was no more useful than that they assisted the rest of the congregation, continued ‘Singing cannot, anymore than praying, be done by proxy; every man must discharge his duty’.[ii]

The Gallery Band

Sometime between 1740 and 1770 country church choirs began to add to their company a player of the ’cello (or bass viol) or of the bassoon. There were a number of reasons for this: the availability of players of moderate ability who enjoyed performing with others; support for men who sang the bass part and, most importantly, to keep the choir in tune. By 1770, one or occasionally two bass instruments had been augmented by othersÐperhaps a flute or fiddle for the alto/contra-tenor line, and an hautbois (oboe) or clarinet to play the descant on the top line. These players were most likely invited to help an individual choir member hold his or her line against the other parts; they would certainly have re-enforced the rhythm. A leader or conductor armed with a pitch-pipe, a wooden whistle with a sliding insert that could be moved in and out to vary the pitch, completed the gallery band.

The most famous description of a gallery band is to be found in Thomas Hardy’s novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, which tells how they were later usurped by the introduction of barrel-organs and the like. It has to be said that both the music and the manner of its performance would not have satisfied an educated musician of the time. Outside of the few towns, church and chapel congregations heard almost no art music, with which to make comparisons, so the style presented by the gallery choirs and bands became very acceptable: the music had inventiveness and originality, and the country folk gave it unquestioning respect. It did not matter that the verbal accents were musically mishandled, that there were unnecessary dissonances and no end of parallel octaves and fifths in the harmony due to the amateur composer’s ignorance of accepted rules. For many of the musicians, what they achieved on a Sunday was often the highest accomplishment of their everyday lives. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that some rudely and irreverently displayed their skills. In 1826, a Congregational church in Buckinghamshire opened a singing gallery and appointed a deacon to issue tickets for the gallery, declining to admit persons of ‘light and unsteady character’. Except for a few ‘repeating tunes’ (see later) gallery music did not survive. It is regarded now as a form of folk music.[iii]

Vocal Scores

A long struggle for predominance between the tenor and treble voices took place during the 18^th century. Men were reluctant to let women play a prominent singing role in chapel. In the early century, editions of Barton’s, Patrick’s and Watts’ psalms and hymns were scored with just two lines of single notes. The top line carried the leading melody (the cantus firmus) for men. The bottom line showed the bass (continuo style). When the first gallery choirs appeared, they sang in two, sometimes in three parts. Their music was usually scored on three or four staves, the top two or three being G (treble) clefs. Voice parts from the top downwards were: Descant (first treble), Alto (with the notes printed an octave higher than sung, and ‘the tune’ for men’s voices. The bottom stave was an F (bass) clef, holding notes intended for an instrument. From about 1730, composers like William Tans’ur, or Tanzer, (1706-1783) scored in this way but with a C (alto) clef for the alto/contra-tenor voice.

To appreciate the sound of congregational singing before the Methodist impact, in the mid-century, it is necessary to realise that the treble and alto parts, although desirable, were dispensable! An instructive exercise in 18^th century re-creation would be to sing Tanzer’s hymn-tune COLCHESTER of 1734 with the women taking the tenor (and alto) lines while the men sing treble (and bass) lines. In the last two bars the treble voice is prominent, but otherwise is quite subordinate to the tenor (PH 65; CP 50; ChH 20).

A generation later the sound of singing in chapel had changed. Both tenor and treble voices were now singing ‘the tune’. The New Universal Psalmodist of Aeron Williams comprised new and old hymns together with a few psalms and anthems, and were still scored in the same way with the leading melody on the third stave down. Towards the end of the century there were changes. For dissenting churches the vocal score reading downwards was Tenor, Alto, Soprano, Bass; for town parish and cathedral churches it was Alto, Tenor, Soprano, Bass. In 1775, the 4^th edition of A Collection of Tunes, ed. Caleb Ashworth was welcomed. Three staves made up the vocal score; the top one was for Altos (or Seconds), the middle stave for the bulk of the congregation and the lower one for the basses. Books like this were popular among Baptists and Independents and contained many tunes that are widely used today. Not until the 19^th century, however, was music printed for hymns and anthems in the familiar block SATB format.

Repeating Tunes

A number of bright rhythmic tunes were written during the early years of the nineteenth century, mostly to fit Common and Long Metre, occasionally 6.8s and Short Metre sacred texts (Figure 1). They were of an elaborate and more flowing style than was customary, but their main distinguishing feature was a prolongation of the music, which necessitated the repetition of words at the end of each stanza. The words in such repeating tunes were not obscured by the polyphony as they often were in the fuguing tunes, an exclusively Anglican creation which raged in their countryside chapels in the 1760s and 1770s.

Repeating tunes have also been called, sometimes derogatively, evangelical or Old Methodist tunes, which is misleading for many country Baptists and Independent churches enjoyed singing and trying to write them. Perhaps the isolation of certain churches encouraged the more musical to write their own music. So it was that Nahum Tate’s famous paraphrase of Luke 2:8-15 While shepherds watched their flocks, came to be sung to LYNGHAM, the work of Thomas Jarman, a Baptist choir conductor in the Midlands. In fact, the identity of the composer of some of these repeating tunes is by no means certain. Recent research indicates that ANTIOCH is not the work of Handel, nor of the American, Lovell Mason, to whom it is sometimes ascribed. Early sources are in Congregational Harmony vol. 3 by Thomas Clark c1832 and, in a tune collection Voice di Melodia by William Holford c.1834 where it is altered slightly to echo more of Handel’s The Messiah.

An early example of a repeating tune is BROOMSGROVE or BROMSGROVE as it was later written (H&P 577; PH 28). This was published in two versions, each anonymously. One appears in Psalmodia Evangelica, part 2 edited by Thomas Williams, 1789. The other is in a Collection of Anthems and Psalms, also c.1789, by Thomas Collins; it has the melody in the tenor with an anacrusis to the third phrase, and an accompaniment set for instruments. 

A feature of repeating tunes is the rhythmic similarity of their opening bar or bars, projecting the melody onwards. This is the same rhythmic motif as used in the tune TRURO, associated with Watts’ Jesus shall reignÉ or that of SIMEON which appeared a few years later in S. Stanley’s Twenty-Four Tunes in four parts composed chiefly for Dr Watts Psalms and Hymns (Figure 1). The simplest repeating tune has just last line repetition, as in BROOMSGROVE, JUSTIFICATION, or LYDIA. With SAGINA the last two lines are repeated. More interesting interplay of the voices is found in CRANBROOK and in ANTIOCH. In the latter, the women (soprano and alto) begin the last line before the men (tenor and bass), and this is followed by a staggered repeat before all join in a further repeat leading to a cumulative ending. The popular LYNGHAM (BPW 6 (ii); MP 496) is an example of an even more complex pattern of repeating.

Outside this category of ‘gallery’ repeating tunes, other durable (i.e. traditional) tunes demand some repetition of words to fit the music. Poems in the ‘irritating’ metre 87 87 47 are often set to 87 87 87 tunes e.g. HELMSLEY (MP 431; H&P 314), REGENT SQUARE (R&S 319; BPW 671), or ST HELEN (H&P 616; MP 431). HELMSLEY for ‘Lo! He comes with clouds descending’, thought to have been shaped from a tune heard whistled on the streets of London in 1765, requires Wesley’s fifth line (‘Alleluia’, in v.1) to be sung three times. A good alternative tune for this hymn, Betty Pulkingham’s SOUTH COLLEGE (Cry Hosanna, 1980), calls for fourfold repetition of its short line, with men and trebles singing alternately.

Finally, the Christmas hymn ADESTE FIDELES must be mentioned. This is a forerunner and sole survivor of the class of fuguing tunes. The refrain ‘O come, let us adore him’, has two repeats, but at only the first (a tenor entry) is there imitation in the fuguing style.

Early Organs

Organs Replace Bands

Though never essential for the singing of the hymns, gallery bands provided music for weddings and funerals, and social events such as village ‘hops’ (an 18^th century term). They were colourful additions to the people’s tradition, too. For example, the serpent was an 8ft-long snake-like instrument; its player inserted scale passages between the lines of the hymn. The viol de gamba or ‘bass viol’ produced a unique and beautiful sound; some players attracted Continental musicians to England for instruction.

The demise of the bands was the result of at least two factors. Improved and more readily available travel facilitated access to town churches and encouraged greater conformity between urban and rural people. Many more hymn texts were being written in which all could join, such that their use squeezed out the more elaborate band-led items. Most bands survived until the 1860’s, though the tendency came to be to limit them to the festivals, Anniversary, Whitsun, Harvest and Christmas. Some churches, especially the more isolated, only lost their band players when the harmonium arrived from France (1840-80). Most rural churches had, in the earlier years of the century, purchased a mechanical ‘organ’ to lead their singing.

This was the barrel-organ. It came with a supply of 2 or 3 cylindrical wooden barrels. Each held 10 or 11 hymn tunes, potentially in the form of projecting metal pins. It was rotated by turning a handle. This caused the pins to trip levers actuating the different pipes and simultaneously worked the bellows beneath supplying air to the pipes. The operator had to choose the appropriate speed for the hymns, most of which had ‘shakes’ (cadential decorations) at the end of each line. Barrel-organs do not seem to have been particularly popular with separatist churches, but records of their displacing bands or ‘orchestras’ have been obtained from several widely scattered Nonconformist churches (Table 1). According to Boston and Langwill[iv] the highest number was present in England in the 1830’s.

During the middle Victorian period the harmonium (seraphine or ‘orgue melodium’) was popular as a domestic instrument. It soon rivalled the barrel organ for chapel use, so that by 1880 it had replaced them. The harmonium was the first keyboard instrument regularly to support singing in common places of worship. The harmonium contained several ranks of brass reeds of different tonal qualities that could be selected by drawing stops located close to its keyboard of five octaves. By means of foot bellows, air was forced up through the reeds, and the player could thus produce an adequate volume of sound with good ‘expression’, albeit reticent and non-rhythmic. The harmonium and its rather less expressive, though more ornate companion, the ‘American Organ’ (in which air is sucked down through the reeds) did sterling service for over a century in our churches. For example, the latter, in the Congregational church at Mobberley, Cheshire, was still in use in 1995.

The Pipe Organ

Near the end of the 18^th-century, pipe organs began to be acquired by Anglican churches in the larger English towns, especially in London and in the more musical North. Of the English Nonconformist churches, the larger (and wealthier) Congregational churches were among the first to install pipe organs. These were without pedal keys, or had but a single octave of foot pedals, which pulled down the corresponding manual keys.

Their introduction to Methodism was delayed because many Methodist congregations had become capable of singing in full harmony and saw no real need for any instrumental accompaniment. It was not until 1820, that Methodist Conference, meeting in Liverpool agreed that ‘in order to guide the congregational singing, organs may be allowed’[v]. Even then, although subsequent annual Conferences met in a sizeable church equipped with a small organ, a precentor started the singing and led the people without any help from an organist.

Baptist and English Presbyterians were later still in employing an organist. Among the first village Baptist churches to possess an organ, were those of Cloughfield and Lumb, in Lancashire[vi] and, as elsewhere, there was considerable resistance to what some saw as an unnecessary expense.

But a new age for music in chapel was dawning. From the mid-19^th century until near the end of the second millennium was to be the era of the organist-cum-choirmaster. Initially, two men were to replace a ‘band’ of uncertain composition, an event very acceptable to the minister and to most, though not all, church members. The other man was, of course, one with stamina and strength enough to pump the wooden handle and maintain the organ bellows full of air.

For Non-Conformity and Anglicanism alike, the appointment of church organist-cum-choirmaster was a step which not only resulted in improving the singing on Sunday, but which did a lot to improve the popular culture of music much wider afield. Some mid-20^th century appointees to Congregational, Unitarian and other Separatist Churches described themselves as professors of music, singing, etc.

Table 1