Martin Thomas's knowledgeable and scholarly study provides us with a history of the music of the cathedrals of the Church of England from the nineteenth century to the present day. After the high period of the late Victorian and Edwardian age and following the work of composers like Sir John Stainer, the narrative becomes a history of entrenched conservatism and a failure of musical development in cathedral churches that at the same time showed relatively little interest in the liturgical changes that came to the Church of England in the second half of the twentieth century.

Thomas's carefully documented history, after a brief review of the Victorian background, is divided into general background surveys of the period up to 1950, and then from 1950 to 2005. Each general review is followed by a chapter that focuses on the work of individual cathedrals. Of particular interest is the attention given to the work of the first Dean of the new Liverpool Cathedral, Frederick William Dwelly, a sadly neglected figure in the church, though his liturgical experiments, largely set apart from the conduct of the services of the Book of Common Prayer, set the pattern for a great deal of cathedral life in England in the middle years of the twentieth century. In his study of the second half of the twentieth century, Thomas makes clear the growing rift between the musical and liturgical life of the English cathedrals and the liturgical movement which pushed away from the Book of Common Prayer towards the revised and “modern” liturgies of the Alternative Service Book (1980) and the later Common Worship (2000). As a study written by a musician which can at times be quite technically demanding for the less musically educated, this book does open up many important questions that might have been further developed. As a source of information it is rich indeed—but the issues that it gives rise to remain, to a large extent, unexplored.

In the debates about the language of the Book of Common Prayer, many feared its centuries' old linguistic beauties would be lost to the modern banalities of the ASB. Surprisingly little has been said about the close correspondence in liturgy between word and music, and the precise effect that the enduring presence of the sixteenth-century English of the BCP has had upon the choral tradition which it sustains. But the liturgical conservatism of the English cathedrals in the later part of the twentieth century, above all in the retention of the sung offices of Matins and Evensong, does not altogether explain why their choral music has, to a very large extent, remained within the musical ethos of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The liturgist to whom Thomas gives the most attention is Dr. Geoffrey Cuming (147), whose open-minded attitude to music for the new services clearly failed to resolve “the failure of communication between scholars engaged in liturgical revision and the clergy [and musicians] who worked with the new material” (149).

One is left with the rather stark picture of a church that was trying to drag itself into the modern age in its forms of worship (as in other respects such as the ordination of women to the priesthood and episcopate), yet with its focus on ancient buildings and organs that were seemingly ill adapted to musical change. It is a pity that almost no attention is given by Thomas to the new cathedrals, above all Coventry and to their experiments with jazz and dance, as spaces better adapted to modern “performance” and experimentation. Certainly there were exceptions to the general musical conservatism, notably in the work of Jonathan Harvey in Winchester Cathedral alongside Martin Neary as Organist and Michael Stancliffe as Dean, but such work failed to be broadly accepted.

Thomas writes from a very decided position on music. He dismisses the enduring work of John Rutter as “popular and saccharine” (109), while developments in the wider musical world seem to be defined by Boulez or Stockhausen. Indeed, his tone is very largely negative, without offering much in the manner of a way forward for the “ongoing development of cathedral worship” (249). The point is rightly made that many of the ancient cathedrals have absorbed works by such contemporary artists as Graham Sutherland, John Piper or Marc Chagall, suggesting that they are quite capable of adapting their spaces to artistic expressions of many ages up to the present. One suspects that the deep underlying issues that this book presents through the sometimes painful efforts of the church to bring its liturgical worship into the present age in word and music, are of a more profound theological and ecclesiological nature than is here addressed. Nevertheless, Martin Thomas has given us a magnificently researched portrait of English cathedral music over the last one hundred and fifty years, though further work is clearly demanded to explore and develop the problems and issues which he documents.