For those of you who missed A Handmaid’s Tale – Part 1, the handmaid in question is music, which has often been described as the Handmaiden of Liturgy.
In Part 1, we looked at those musical parts of communion services which are pretty much the same day by and week by week – the Ordinary. Here, in Part 2, we are concentrating on the variable parts which are known as the Propers. They are “proper” to any particular day, week, or season in that the text makes some comment about or amplifies the readings of the day.
Before the Reformation these consisted, principally, of a few verses from a psalm or some other freely composed text. They were known as the Introit, Gradual and Alleluia, Offertory, and Communion, and were sung whilst priests and/or deacons were moving from one place to another or to cover moments of inactivity: the Introit – the entry of the clergy; the Gradual and Alleluia – as someone moved closer to the congregation to read the gospel; the Offertory – whilst the altar was prepared for communion and bread and wine were brought forward; and the Communion – during the distribution. Of course, over the centuries and across Europe, local practices varied but the essential function and use remained. One of the big changes was that the music soon abandoned a simplicity that a congregation manage and became the preserve of trained choirs. Come the Reformation, everything changed. For the Anglican church, all these little extra pieces were swept away. I’ve mentioned before that the 1549 Book of Common Prayer was fairly music-friendly but the 1552, 1559, and 1662 versions barely seem to acknowledge its existence.
The Reformation in Germany sought to make music accessible to congregations by offering them versified texts with short, memorable melodies (hymns). The Anglican response was to turn psalms from the bible (which are sort of free-ranging in text) into neat, metrical,
rhyming verses – originally for private domestic use. Although not officially sanctioned, one or two of these psalms were allowed to be sung before an Anglican service, or maybe after the sermon. And that’s where most Anglican music stuck for several centuries – but more of that another time. With the arrival of the Oxford Movement in the 1830s, the Anglican church began (after a period of considerable decline and slothfulness) to look back to its pre-Reformation roots and see whether the Baby could be recovered now that the Bathwater was gone. The close parallels between an Anglican communion service and a Catholic mass were pretty well obvious, so eager Tractarians (originators of the Oxford
Movement) wondered what to do about the Propers. The answer seemed pretty obvious – use hymns instead.
This was also a period when the Anglican church was abandoning its policy of restricting congregational singing pretty well to mostly metrical psalms and now allowing the use of freely composed hymns, something non conformists had been enjoying for a long period. These hymns, of course, weren’t randomly chosen. They, too, like the Propers before them, were expected to reflect closely the seasons of the church’s year.
This illustration from the 1861 edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern (the first “real” Anglican hymn book) shows how thoroughly this was done. Such lists became common place in most hymn books used by the established church and even the most recent editions of Common Praise (2000) and The Revised English Hymnal (2023) have followed this pattern. One of the advantages of this is that a wide range of hymns for any one time are gathered together and it’s easy for users to see that there are other choices rather than just those that most immediately come to mind.
However, there have been a number of hymn books produced in recent years which lump all the hymns together in alphabetical order, with season-suggestions at the back. In some cases, this has led to a diminishing of the repertoire as the most popularitles, being readily memorable, are chosen again and again.
Anyway, getting back to the hymns/propers relationship, the pre-Reformation placing of the Propers is still pretty well reflected in the placing of hymns. Often, we have an Entrance hymn (Introit), a hymn between the readings (Gradual) and an Offertory (Offertory). Thereafter, things become a little more fluid. The Communion Proper has morphed into a selection between a Communion hymn, or a Post-Communion hymn, and/or a Recessional hymn.
Recessional hymns used to be fairly rare after Communion services, but this was at a time when Glory to God in the Highest was sung at the end, so there was a triumphant conclusion to the whole thing. When, as part of the liturgical revisions of the mid-1960s, the Gloria was moved nearer to the beginning (as in a Catholic mass), a need was felt for something uplifting to round things off – so why not have a hymn!!?