This is the first comprehensive treatment of a difficult and complicated subject. Martin Thomas is exceptionally well qualified to tackle it, holding first class degrees in both music and theology, as well as practical experience as precentor of St. Edmundsbury Cathedral. He begins by summarizing the establishment of the late Victorian tradition, culminating in the work of Charles Stanford. He then relates how liturgical experiments gradually expanded during the century, culminating in the Alternative Service Book in 1980, authorizing new liturgical texts for singing that provided an obvious opportunity for new music. The principal aim of the book is to characterize and evaluate the use of new music in cathedrals: for the traditional texts of the Book of Common Prayer, for anthems and other occasional pieces chosen to insert in the services, and for the newly authorized forms of the liturgy. The author is as much concerned with the attitudes of church authorities as with the practices of composers.

Thomas's survey of the music performed in cathedrals is enormously thorough, taking into account a variety of sources, including musical publications, journal articles, and weekly service lists of several individual cathedrals. I have to confess that having lived out of the country for the last fifty years, I have only a superficial knowledge of recent developments, so I have learned much from Thomas's voluminous information. But when he gives lists of composers or of individual works to demonstrate that a choir's program is progressive, middle-of-the-road, or reactionary, I lack the degree of familiarity with the repertoire needed to appreciate his argument. I suspect that many readers will be in the same situation. The few music examples he provides and discusses certainly illustrate extremes of musical style. No one could miss the contrast between four bars of Richard Shephard's O for a Thousand Tongues and seven bars of Diana Burrell's Ave verum corpus.

Nevertheless, it is abundantly clear from Thomas's evidence that the Church of England has seen the development of a prevailing “church music” style that retains many late Victorian characteristics, rather than following the movements of modernism and post-modernism taking place in classical secular music. He questions the validity of this position, and blames the conservatism of church authorities and such organizations as the Royal School of Church Music. In his words: “The Church has failed to respond to the opportunities afforded by liturgical reform for initiating a renaissance in liturgical music and, frequently, the only criteria used for evaluating music have been ease of performance and enduring popularity” (247–248). He has found isolated exceptions, where individual cathedrals have, for a time, commissioned avant-garde composers, or where composers of international reputation have modified their style enough to make it acceptable to cathedral choirs and their ecclesiastical masters, without sacrificing the quality and originality of their work. But the great bulk of cathedral music composed in the twentieth century, he says, suffered a “gradual decline in both . . . quality and contemporary relevance” (247). He is honest enough to quote a number of respected writers who disagree with this opinion, such as Anthony Milner, Arthur Wills, Horton Davies, and Erik Routley. I suspect that Thomas would tend to judge any music lacking modern characteristics from this period to be of poor quality.

It is not obvious that cathedral authorities have a duty to support developments that would make it more difficult for them to maintain high standards of performance, or to attract large congregations. That would certainly have been the case had they based their musical repertoire on, say, the Second Viennese School. To whom do they owe this “duty”? In the past what happened was that cathedral music, by nature conservative, would come round to innovations some two or three generations after they took place in the secular world—not because of any “duty,” but because the style change had become part of the normal language of music. This was true, for instance, of the early baroque style, which was initiated in Italy around 1600 but scarcely affected English cathedral music until the 1660s. Similarly with the Romantic movement. But the radical innovations of Schoenberg and Webern and their imitators and rivals have never become part of the normal language. In theatre, concert, and domestic circles alike, they remain on the fringe of what most people want to play, sing, or hear, and there is little sign that they will ever get any closer to the heart of classical music. One does not expect to hear someone singing or whistling Schoenberg from a shower stall. For some uses, such as marching or communal dancing, the destruction of predictable harmony and rhythm excludes such music altogether. Much the same may be true for cathedral choirs, faced not only by conservative clergy, but by declining income, limited practice time, frequently changing texts, and the need to maintain the traditional liturgy and musical repertoire as well. Some church composers looking for novelty have turned instead to a more successful revolution in twentieth-century classical music: the recovery of past periods that had been neglected or forgotten, in this case the sixteenth century in particular. Thomas admits that this influence has led some modern composers, such as Howells, Leighton, and Aston, to achieve originality in ways that have produced music not too difficult for cathedral choirs to learn and adopt as part of their regular repertoire. There is always room for milder innovation that does not exceed practical limits.

In the end music, like any art, is a free market. Some is commissioned, for a variety of motives, but most is created freely in the hope that it will find favor. Art that does not satisfy the needs or preferences of its customers will have a short life. Thomas points out in his conclusion that several English cathedrals have commissioned significant new works in stonemasonry, painting, and sculpture. Some of these are indeed exciting products, and no doubt uplift the hearts of countless people who see them. “The lack of a corresponding body of contemporary church music has damaged the reputation of the Church as a patron of the musical arts,” he says (249). But the parallel is misleading. Whereas a statue is already complete, and can be gazed at or avoided at will by each visitor, a service setting first has to be mastered by a choir and organist and then heard in full by clergy and congregation, who may be obliged to attend the service or have chosen to do so for reasons that have nothing to do with music.