Church music in English towns 1450–1550: an interim report

In the towns of late medieval England (where perhaps 10 per cent of the population may have lived) the parish churches were being continuously expanded, adapted and decorated. Chantry and fraternity chapels were added between the nave pillars, or at the eastern ends of the aisles and here, as well as at the high altar, masses were celebrated and prayers recited with incessant devotion by the living for the repose of the souls of those who had died. These intercessory services, together with those of the usual liturgical round which took place in the choir and in the nave, were increasingly accompanied by complex polyphonic music involving several singers, both men and boys, and the playing of organs which were becoming ubiquitous in medieval parish churches. The development of this dynamic parish music has been detected, but not much studied. In part this is the result of the failure of urban historians and musicologists to talk to each other. Historians of late medieval religion have recently been exploring the diversity and sophistication of parochial devotional practices and have reaffirmed the importance of religious guilds and chantry foundations in enriching the liturgical practices of the parish, but they have paid little attention to music, and none to the impact of church music on civic ceremonial and the legitimating processes of urban rulers. Musicologists who have worked on the music of the English church have been, until very recently, comparatively uninterested in what happened beyond the interior of the church and, in any case, more interested in the great royal and collegiate foundations from which some music has survived. The surprising conclusion is that, for both urban historians and musicologists, the connected argument that links religious ritual, broadly defined, with the spatial and social dimensions of life and work in towns barely yet exists.