“Better suiting a tavern or playhouse than a church”

The first part of the seventeenth century saw little of the emerging continental Baroque permeating the English tradition, except the possibility that the Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria imported some elements into her own private chapel along with her foreign church musicians.

For church music, the Baroque really began in England with the restoration of Charles II in 1660. A starry generation of composers and performers stood ready to exploit its new possibilities, many of them members of established musical families, including the Gibbons, Lawes and Purcell clans. Captain Henry Cooke refounded the Chapel Royal choir around this talented group, soon adding talented youngsters like Pelham Humfrey and John Blow to his front row of the choir stalls. Matthew Locke, a Catholic, contributed literally from across the road in the queen’s private chapel. This powerhouse of talent and ambition combined with the new king’s love of display and fun and with the influences which he and his acolytes brought back from exile in France to ignite the explosion of creativity which led quickly to the mighty glories of the Purcellian ode and verse anthem, fizzing with energy and sheer delight in setting the words of the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.

The later Stuart monarchs, William, Mary and Anne, had less interest in expensive musical flamboyance than their immediate forebears: and, together with the slightly more downbeat tone of William’s north European Protestantism, it shows in the attractive but rather workmanlike church music of the transitional generation which followed the death of Henry Purcell: Jeremiah Clarke and William Croft.

In 1712 the fires were lit under English baroque sacred music once again with the arrival of a hugely dominant musical personality from Germany, via Italy: a man with more than one foot in the theatre; George Frederic Handel.

Handel’s sacred music doesn’t form a large part of his output, but it covers a wide range, from the grandeur of the four Coronation Anthems of 1727 to the intimacy of smaller-scale works for private events in the Chapel Royal. As always with this magpie-like musical mind, there is much borrowing and re-using of musical material between works, to thrilling effect.

Home-grown composers slightly lost out under Handel’s substantial shadow, but the music of William Boyce and Maurice Greene adds a distinctive English accent to the repertoire. They also served church music well as editors and compilers of a substantial collection of earlier music.

As always with the history of church music, high-end art music is only ever half the story, at best. Out in the countryside the needs of provincial choirs in market towns met new trends such as non-conformism to produce a repertoire of enormous vitality, if not always of great musical sophistication, including distinctive new things like the fuging tune, and, above all, hymns.