Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Yet more crappy choruses, wonky worship-songs and horrible hymns
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Arethosemyfeet
Shipmate
# 17047
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Posted
quote: Originally posted by Bishops Finger: Wow. Your church's records must really be well worth reading - fascinating stuff! What an insight into the past....
IJ
Our local Kirk Session's minutes have been transcribed and published in book form, at least from 1775-1816. I'm not sure I dare look, lest I discover the same arguments (with the same surnames attached) have been raging for 200 years.
Posts: 2933 | From: Hebrides | Registered: Apr 2012
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North East Quine
Curious beastie
# 13049
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Posted
quote: Originally posted by SvitlanaV2: quote: Originally posted by North East Quine: Things were no better in the old days. I found this in my church's records, dated 1754:
...most of the Congregation were ignorant of Church Music and those who attempted to sing in divine service did it in a very disagreeable and inharmonious manner and as Three of the parts in which the Church Tunes were set, were entirely lost, none attempting to sing any but the Tenor part and as the present Tunes usually sung in this Congregation were very few in number and not sufficient to answer the purposes of Devotion....
This sounds like a plea for better musical training for the laity. It doesn't seem to be a criticism of the songs themselves.
The background to this stems from the Scottish Psalter of 1650, which restricted psalm singing to a limited number of tunes. As the decades went on, local congregations started adapting and elaborating the "twelve tunes" with confident singers adding grace notes. It sounds as though in my parish by 1754, the confident singers were making it up as they went along and the less-than-confident singers had simply given up. So in that respect, it was a criticism of the tunes themselves; the official "twelve tunes" were "not sufficient to answer the purposes of Devotion."
New tunes were written, old tunes were stripped back to their original form and the congregation were taught to sing the tune, and not sing anything that wasn't in the tune.
While there doesn't seem to have been much argument against this on musical grounds, there was some political dissent. This was just nine years after Culloden. Many aspects of Scottish life, such as tartan, had been proscribed, and now people were going to be denied the right to invent variations on a theme whilst singing psalms in church.... Outrage!!
Posts: 6414 | From: North East Scotland | Registered: Oct 2007
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Baptist Trainfan
Shipmate
# 15128
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Posted
I've just come across - quite accidentally while looking for something else - a rather lovely quote from J.B. Phillips' "Your God is too small".
"It is natural and right, of course, that the worship we offer to God in public should be of the highest possible quality. But that must not lead us to conceive a musically “Third- Programme” god who prefers the exquisite rendering of a cynical professional choir to the ragged bawling of sincere but untutored hearts".
Note for those who don't know: the "Third Programme" was the BBC's "high culture" classical music and literature radio programme at the time (?1950s) Phillips was writing. [ 25. September 2017, 11:39: Message edited by: Baptist Trainfan ]
Posts: 9750 | From: The other side of the Severn | Registered: Sep 2009
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