Who Sang Antiphonally?

From "The Pilot", 1969, comes this, an interesting historical ramble.

Some Church Customs Explained
By S.G. Thicknesse

Who Sang Antiphonally?

FROM the first centuries, in choirs and places where  they sang, most of the singing was antiphonal.

This was originally because-since the Hebrew psalms were the basis and type of all that was sung-to divide the singing between two groups, as in the synagogue, allowed dramatic expression to the Cry and Response inherent in so much that was set to music.

People who had been reared on Greek drama would also have been familiar with the voices of the chorus being similarly used.

As well as the psalm cycle, which was to be said or chanted weekly in its entirety by most monastic orders, such songs as the Magnificat and the Benedicite had long been traditionally in use by the early middle ages.

To these had been added by the sixth century the Te Deum Laudamus, which legend described as the song of exaltation improvised by St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, and St. Augustine, later to be Bishop of Hippo, in the fourth century, when St. Ambrose baptized Augustine.

Besides the mainly antiphonally-sung music, including the psalm cycle, which became traditional in the Offices (which the Church, and particularly the monastic orders, kept at every three hours of the day and night) the canon of the Mass began early to be embellished with singing.

To the ancient alleluias, which first belonged to Eastertide, there were added verses of psalms or of scripture, or, later, hymns based on Psalms or on the Epistle or Gospel for the day. These were sung, for example, as graduals before the Gospel, or at the offertory.

By the time of the Reformation the sequence of the Offices and of the Mass had become constantly interrupted by elaborations of such singing. Although originally this had emphasized the lesson of the day and hour, finally it was believed by some to obscure it, and to distract people.

The English Reformers, therefore, who `accumulated' Morning and Evening Prayer from the old Offices, and divided the Psalter for monthly instead of for weekly use, `cut off', as they explained, most of the old musical interpellations from these, and from the Communion Service. They left, however, some of the oldest canticles and hymns (an old Latin one, for example, in the form for consecrating a bishop), place for two daily anthems, and a few of the old interpellations, including some of the versicles and responses.

It was also under the direction of Archbishop Cranmer that Merbecke produced his setting for the Communion Service, in the old Dorian mode, which returned magnificently to the simplicity of early Church music.

For, from the beginning, the basis of all Church music had been the austere plainsong: those eight prime modes, tones or scales, of which the first, third, fifth and seventh had been arranged for Church use by St. Ambrose, and the rest added by St. Gregory two hundred years afterwards. All the music written in these modes was essentially melody of voices in unison. It was, therefore, for variation as well as from tradition that antiphonal singing became general, especially in the very long Offices with their innumerable psalms.

Nor would the whole of either side of a choir be necessarily used at a time, but increasingly choice voices from one, then the other, alternately. Although men of austere temperament always opposed it, forms of harmony like the thirds and sixths of the faux-bourdon were improvised by experienced singers, at least from the fourteenth century; and songs like `Sumer is ycumen in' began increasingly to echo back into sacred music. When such parts came to be written down, people called it `prick music', from the appearance of the notes.

Alongside the constant temptation for homophonic music to develop into polyphonic, was the temptation to support and then accompany either with instrumental music of growing complication. To the early shawm, the precursor of oboe and clarinet, were added primitive forms of violin and of organ.

The east side of Beverley Minster's reredos has a much-pained looking violinist and a boisterous fellow with a bagpipe. Winchester Cathedral, before the twelfth century, had an organ with twenty-six bellows and seventy blowers which required two organists. Some cathedrals, like Exeter, still have the galleries of their mediaeval musicians.

It had always been a full-time job to keep players and choir, even choir alone, awake and behaving suitably. The precentor, often aided, as for example at York, with two choral rulers or rectors, had to march up and down, armed with staves, on the watch for any sleeping monk or canon, who would subsequently have to explain himself in chapter; or for choristers who, catching sight, for example, of anybody in spurs, would dart out of their place then and there to demand `spur money'.

In 1485 even the privy purse of King Henry VII had to be opened to pay 4s. `to the children of the Chapell, for the king's spoures'. As late as 1850, at Peterborough, some Sapper officers with much shorter memories than choir boys were mulcted on this ancient score. The only way of escape that there had ever been was to prove that the boys could not repeat their `gamut', a complicated alphabet of plainsong: