Victorian Studies

Victorian Studies 43.1 (2000) 172-174

Book Review

The English Plainchant Revival

The Contribution of Cambridge Ecclesiologists to the Revival of Anglican Choral Worship

The Contribution of Cambridge Ecclesiologists to the Revival of Anglican Choral Worship, 1832-62, by Dale Adelman; pp. xiv + 244. Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1997, £45.00, $67.95.

With Bernarr Rainbow's important monograph The Choral Revival in the Anglican Church (1970) and, even more significantly, Nicholas Temperley's pioneering two-volume The Music of the English Parish Church (1979), it became evident that the whole field of nineteenth- century and, more specifically, Victorian British church music was a rich yet neglected source of scholarly research. Since then, Oxford University Press, under Temperley's editorial leadership, has been particularly enterprising in fostering a series of studies in this area, of which Bennett Zon's The English Plainchant Revival forms a recent part. Zon's book is a major achievement in its own way since it attempts to provide not only an introduction, chronological in design, to the plainchant revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in England, but also insights into notational practices, historical attitudes, the importance of place (in terms, for example, of performance locations), and the role of antiquarians and scholars of the period. One might have anticipated in a study of this subject that much of the discussion would have been devoted to the Anglo-Catholic rediscovery of plainchant and its concomitant controversies; this is not the case. Though the Anglican revival does constitute Part Three of the study, Zon gives a full account in Part One and Part Two of the English Roman Catholic Church's own extensive rediscovery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which predated that of the Anglicans, and it is this dimension which undoubtedly breaks new ground and gives a fresh understanding of the entire plainchant movement.

Zon has built on his 1993 Oxford doctoral thesis, which effectively constitutes the first part of the book. The methodology of his thesis--one of assessing the quality, properties, and historical context of the relevant sources (often in manuscript form), and their attendant complex interrelationships--is extended to cover in Part Two the Roman Catholic revival in (essentially) the first half of the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on Catholic plainchant apologetics in the 1840s and 1850s, and, in Part Three, the Anglican revival, focusing on apologetics between 1820 and 1860. The sources Zon studies in the second and third parts are exclusively printed material (principally owing to the dearth of manuscripts); he uses Vincent Novello's important A Collection of Sacred Music (1811) and Alexander Reinagle's A Collection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes (1839) as points of departure for the Catholic and Anglican traditions respectively, and concludes with the period of the 1850s and 1860s when the revival had reached its apogee.

The reader of Zon's comprehensive study will realise very soon that his research has entailed a vast assimilation of source materials drawn not only from university and national library archives, cathedrals, and parish churches, but also from religious institutions, embassy chapels, and private houses. Throughout the study there are copious tables listing these sources, detailed descriptions of their chronology, publication, and content, and plentiful accompanying music examples illustrating the development and diversity of harmonisations and adaptations. To this extent, the book must function as a vital reference [End Page 172] manual for scholars wishing to pursue further research in this field. Yet Zon has also provided a great deal of historical commentary, which readers desirous of more narrative material will find eminently approachable, and the introductions to each part will be helpful to both the scholar and the novice. In particular, there are fascinating expositions of the roles of Roman Catholic embassy chapels (notably those of Portugal, Spain, Sardinia, Naples, and Bavaria), Catholic aristocratic families, and English secular and religious communities on the...