Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

Fire Up that Anglican Chant!

Google books posts two books of Anglican chant:

Vincent (1880)

Ludden (1860)

I find myself amazed and baffled when I look at these books to imagine the missed opportunities that presented themselves at the Second Vatican Council. But instead of availing themselves to the resources accumulated over 500 years within the Anglican tradition, the postconciliar authorities who revised the liturgical books set out to reinvent the wheel – with predictable results that are being revised yet again. We’ve lost so much time but perhaps the availability of these new resources will inspire the refurbishment of this wonderful tradition within the ranks of the Catholics.

5 Replies to “Fire Up that Anglican Chant!”

  1. We regularly use Anglican Chant at Franciscan University, especially when the schola sings a "responsorial psalm" (we usually take the option to omit the response). The use of Anglican Chant, for either English or Latin psalmody, is an excellent option. I wish it were more wide-spread in the Catholic world.

  2. I am surprised at Jeffrey's surprise.

    In the 1960s, the English-speaking Catholic Church was still so dominated by Catholics had heritage from places where they experienced the Anglican Communion as oppressive or alien in some way, that it was very unlikely that there would be overt reliance on the Anglican-Episcopalian liturgical music tradition.

    People are like that: they are not free from historical contexts.

  3. Not sure about that, Liam. If anything, relationships between the Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion improved in the Anglophone world of the seventies onwards, as ideas of ecumenism took root and developed. Yet at the same time Catholic parish musicians largely ignored the Anglicans' long experience with the vernacular, opting instead for their own year zero approach. Odd.

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