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Africa, by William Billings, sung by the Oxford Occasionals in St Michael's, Northgate, Oxford, in 2008. Recorded using AKG C391 (x2) and an Olympus LS10. Recorded at 24-bit 96K. Visit http://www.archive.org/details/WestGalleryMusic-OxfordOccasionals for further recordings of the 2008 tour of Oxford churches and college chapels, and from where you can download a number of free media files. You also have the chance to comment on them!! |
Listen also to the following mp3 files, recorded by Gary Sherman:
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Since September 2000, a group of singers and instrumentalists from many different parts of England have spent a day each year, touring churches and chapels in different parts of the County and Diocese of Oxford, to recreate the psalmody and hymnody of more than 150 years ago.
The Oxford Occasionals are all members of the West Gallery Music Association, formed
in 1990 to revive the music of the rural parish churches, so much beloved
of Thomas Hardy and exemplified in his novels and poetry.
Hardy wrote of times past, the days when his father and grandfather were members of the local church ‘band’, playing to accompany the quire in the specially constructed ‘west gallery’ in Stinsford Church. The psalm tunes used during, before and after services in country churches, were often by local, untutored composers, frequently bearing the names of local streets, villages or landmarks. This raw and exciting music was much beloved, and jealously guarded, by its custodians in the west gallery; records exist of quires refusing the vicar’s instruction to sing a particular tune to the psalm of the day, preferring to use another more to their liking. With the passing of the years, all too frequently what was initially a tussle for control of the conduct of services became an issue of conflict with the clergy and the squire as patron.
The
emergence of Tractarianism and the
Oxford Movement, together with the
introduction of Hymns Ancient & Modern in 1861, saw the
wresting back of control by the church establishment, with the introduction
of surpliced choirs, often with small boys taking the tune, previously the
sinecure of adult, male, tenors. The installation of keyboard
instruments, such as harmoniums, barrel or finger organs spelt the end of
the accompanying band of cellos, clarinets,
violins, flutes, bassoons and the (more than) occasional serpent.
These instrumentalists, and their singing companions, first found their way
to the Independent chapels, where they continued to sing and play the old
tunes they loved, but by the beginning of the twentieth century, in all but
a few outposts, the old way of church psalmody was lost and virtually
forgotten in England.
Such a fate
did not attend the descendants of those settlers who took English country
psalmody to America. In New England, from as early as the middle of the
eighteenth century, English psalm tune books were being sold in Boston
within months of their publication in England. This music inspired
native-born composers, just as untutored as their compatriots on the other
side of the Atlantic, and by 1770 a leather tanner,
William Billings
of Boston, had produced the first compilation of psalm tunes by a colonist.
There was a flowering of ethnic composition immediately before and after the
War of Independence, and the fervour for native psalmody spread throughout
the Eastern United States, finding its firmest and what has become a
permanent
foothold to this day, in the southern states, particularly Alabama and
Georgia. Here the music notation has evolved with shaped note heads as
a singing aid, rather than the ordinary round note heads and thus the term
‘shape-note music’ is often used to describe American psalmody.
The Oxford Occasionals sing psalmody from both the English and the American tradition. Our native tunes are usually accompanied, as they were intended to be, but the psalm tunes of our American cousins are sung à capella. These tunes are vibrant and exciting, and are a great joy to sing and play. The group have as their watchword the instruction of a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford - John Wesley - to “sing lustily and with good courage”.
Pictures are taken from the West Gallery
Music Association publication Good Singing Still by
Rollo G Woods, Totton, Hants 1995 ISBN: 1 899947 00 0. Some of
them have previously appeared in an edition of a novel by Washington Irvine.
meet to sing Shapenote music on the "Teenth" Thursday in
every month in our sitting room at
30 Eynsham Road, Botley, Oxford. OX2 9BP
Tel: +44 (0)1865 865773