Newman and Gregorian Chant

A multi-faceted talent like John Henry Newman is, surprisingly, a musician as well; friends and associates testify that he is a brilliant violinist, constantly practicing the instrument and capable of great musical concentration. In fact, when the unexpected news of him being elected a Fellow of Oriel arrived, the young Newman was playing the violin in his room, causing the startled messenger from the College to fear that he might have mistaken the recipient. Many years later, as an educator, he expounded profound views on music from a technical point of view. But the present paper, intended to be a foundation for a broader study, focuses on Newman’s concerns with liturgical music, first as an Anglican minster, then as a Catholic priest: and in accord with “the spirit of the age,” this means especially his relationship with Gregorian chant.

This “spirit of the age” refers to particularly those troubled years during the great crisis of the Church of England from the 1830s onwards when Gregorian chant (“plainchant,” “plainsong,” also known as “Gregorians” in the plural, according to the usage of the day) represents a problematic nucleus of some significance. Cultural movements, such as the one in Oxford with Newman as its point of reference, and other artistic tendencies geared towards changing the English landscape (the “Gothic Revival”), inevitably interact with each other in the area of liturgy and sacred music. The “Choral Revival,” which Rainbow’s classic work assigns to the period from 1839 to 1872, sees in the question of Gregorian chant one of its essential moments. At the intellectual summit of the Oxford Movement, Newman is certainly a thinker, a theologian, and overall a cultured man of distinct quality, compared with other important but for various reasons weaker figures such as Keble or Pusey. Yet Newman occupies a significant place in the history of English sacred music as also in the history of ideas or English prose. A more careful examination of his non-theoretical writings, that is his private correspondence (diaries and letters) and “programmatic” or literary productions, shows that not only was Newman perfectly informed about the polemics of his time, but that he also manifested a number of obvious preferences, expressed, of course, in a very measured and prudent manner. The importance of all these will be identified in relation to the complex horizon of theology and Newman’s own thoughts bearing on human behavior (a “Newmanian anthropology”).

Present-day research on eighteenth- to nineteenth-century English sacred music provides a much fuller picture compared to a few decades ago. Rainbow’s book, despite its shortcomings in illustrations, is a hitherto-unmatched trailblazer on many fronts. Important aspects have been studied by Gatens on cathedrals, by Sally Drage with her thesis on psalmody in country churches, by Susan Cole on the renewed interests in “classical” Anglican music (in the case of Tallis), by Muir in the Catholic scene, and last but not least, by Zon’s fundamental study on the revival of “plain-chant” in England.³ The situation of liturgical music in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century has already been well covered in by recent studies. The picture that has consistently emerged from such research is that of a divide between “Cathedral Services,” which preserved a strong musical tradition, and “parish services,” in which music hardly played any significant role. Such “parish services” would have been simply read and the sermon was the center of attention. Another consideration is the complex situation of Anglican theology, where strictly Protestant influences have in practical terms upset the already fairly compromising and ambiguous equilibrium of the Book of Common Prayer and of the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1563. This led to remarkable architectural as well as liturgical alterations, whereby the centrality of preaching basically rendered the altar irrelevant. The division between the nave and the sanctuary, marked by the use of the traditional rood screen, was also made redundant, and musically these changes also led to the relocating of the singers and instrumentalists to the galleries (usually a West gallery) and to...