The use of music to support acts of devotion and expressions of faith has been the subject of a number of inquiries, the relationship between theology and music somewhat fewer. To what extent can music and the setting of religious texts to music be seen as complementary to particular interpretations of Christian faith? How, in nineteenth-century Britain, did music and its performance support such interpretations and the denominations that gave expression to them? The contributors to this book, which is part of Ashgate's invaluable Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain series, examine a range of topics related to these questions, and in so doing provide some very different perspectives from which they can be addressed. Given that the topics are so varied, the coherence of the book is impressive.

The title is carefully chosen, because it advertises the intention to examine the utilization of music in the service of theological ideas and practices. Thus, it is not simply a book about religious or sacred music, but something significantly more: it is a consideration of issues relevant to the utilization of music in the service of different strands of religious thought and ritual. The term ritual here encompasses not only the practices formed by the liturgies of the older established churches, but also a wider range (especially congregational singing) that grew in the nineteenth century as part of modern movements and denominations. Hymn singing is addressed in several chapters, and this is a reflection of the increasing importance of the genre in the nineteenth century: it is worth recalling that most of the hymns that have endured into modern times are products of the period to which this book is devoted.

A central presumption is that music was not a sideshow to theological thought in the nineteenth century, but an element integral to and often emblematic of its most important meanings. As such, the book makes an important contribution to our understanding of British cultural history as well as music history, especially as each contributor implicitly or explicitly deals with his or her topic in the context of continuity and change. This is especially apt because the collision of change and continuity was particularly severe in Britain in the nineteenth century: tradition met modernity in all its manifestations and ignited not just a single theological challenge, but a chain of them. Thus, religious tradition and the challenges it encountered are seldom absent, and much of what is written here is about the complexities that accompanied those challenges. Editor Martin V. Clarke says as much in his preface, when he makes the point that ‘understandings of tradition played an important role in the relationship between music and theology in nineteenth-century Britain’ (p. 3). The most obvious manifestations of change within religion might be seen in the emergence of the Oxford Movement, the Catholic emancipation, the various revivalist movements and the appearance of entirely new denominations, but all this was in the context of unprecedented demographic and intellectual transformations. Such matters acted on theological thinking and practice with considerable potency.

The eleven chapters provide thought-provoking and educating perspectives. The best of them are those that address key questions directly: the extent to which music was perceived as a necessary ingredient in the service of theological purpose; the manner in which music was used to enhance the intended religious experience; and the way that theological debates (and sometimes their interaction with other intellectual and artistic preoccupations) affected the use of music in support of Christian faith.

Ian Bradley, addressing the theme ‘The Theology of the Victorian Hymn Tune’, asks whether the Victorian hymn tune, which musicologists and others have recognized as a defined genre, did in fact ‘express or embody a distinctive theology or, rather … encompass theologies reflective of its time?’ (p. 6). He points out that few hymn tune composers were of a high church persuasion, and most were ‘musicians rather than theologians’ (p. 16): while several of those whose tunes made such a mark on the period may have been immersed in religion, they cared little about theology. He does, however, make a strong case for seeing the relationship between tunes and texts in Anglican worship as an expression of theological identity – ‘evangelistic, if not narrowly evangelical’ (p. 20), liberal and reassuring of faith.

Martin V. Clarke's own chapter, ‘ “Meet and Right it is to Sing”: Nineteenth-Century Hymnals and the Reasons for Singing’, takes a somewhat different approach, by looking at actual practice and especially the idea that references to religious tradition were summoned at the time to establish the place of hymn singing. He concludes (p. 33) that the importance of hymns and hymn singing eventually rested on three clear theological foundations: that hymns as text and hymn singing as practice embodied ‘spiritual truths’; that communal hymn singing confirmed theological identity; and that the very act of congregational singing manifesting itself as a participatory practice was essentially a confirmation of allegiance to a particular theological tradition.

While each contributor addresses his or her topic with impressive deftness, there are some surprising asides. One of the more contentious comes in one of the most enlightening chapters. T.E. Muir's ‘Sacred Sound for a Holy Space: Dogma, Worship and Music at Solemn Mass during the Victorian Era, 1829–1903’ considers the place of music in Catholic ritual and does so with admirable clarity. Indeed, it provides one of the most lucid and succinct explanations of the meaning and origin of Catholic ritual I have encountered, and as such casts much light on how and why music functions in it. But while the comment ‘Music is an abstract medium’ may be true in the most ordinary and literal sense, the idea that ‘it only acquires meaning from the use to which it is put’ (p. 38) is more puzzling, even in the context of the author's argument about the ‘general relationship between dogma, liturgy and music’. Muir may well claim that stripped of its full context this remark is unfair. Perhaps so, but the idea that music gains meaning only in a state of dependency on something else sits somewhat oddly in a book which makes a good job, in several different ways, of exemplifying how music carries meaning in its own right and as such was regarded as an element in Christian worship that could not be handled lightly.

C. Michael Hawn and June Hadden Hobbs’ ‘ “Thy Love…Hath Broken Every Barrier Down”: The Rhetoric of Intimacy in Nineteenth-Century British and American Women's Hymns’ is one of two chapters that examine transatlantic topics. Here the authors offer a sophisticated and wide-ranging appraisal of the work of British and American women hymnists. They are seen not just as writers of texts, but also initiators of practice. The chapter reveals how personal and intimate devotion reached out to inspire and provide for communal worship.

An example of the way the themes of the book apply to aspects of imperialism is given in Charles McGuire's ‘Christianity, Civilization and Music: Nineteenth-Century British Missionaries and the Control of Malagasy Hymnology’. This essay provides a well-researched story of how hymn singing was used as a device for implanting wider aspects of British culture. McGuire avoids the more clichéd ‘Christianity and civilization’ approach, in favour of a much more specific, evidenced and nuanced argument that traces how the London Missionary Society summoned hymn singing and tonic sol-fa systems in the cause of Western religious faith in Madagascar in the three decades leading up to it becoming a French dependency.

Mel R. Wilhoit's ‘ “Sing a Sankey”: The Rise of Gospel Hymnody in Great Britain’ focuses on Dwight L. Moody's charismatic singing accomplice Ira David Sankey. The Sankey phenomenon provides the book's most concentrated focus on the way musical performance imposed effect for theological purpose. This was the birth of the ‘gospel song’,Footnote ¹ and it is hard to think of a parallel outside American revivalism to the Sankey phenomenon. In an epilogue to his chapter, Wilhoit quotes Robert Stevenson's characterization of Sankey's songs as a ‘folk music of the people’Footnote ² – a sacred equivalent of what Stephen Foster had fashioned in secular music. The point is well made: neither Sankey nor Moody had their hands burned by excursions into popular culture in the way William Booth did in the Salvation Army.Footnote ³ Sankey sang, as Wilhoit's first quotation puts it, ‘with the conviction that souls are receiving Jesus between one note and the next’ (p. 97).

The power of personal charisma in the cause of religious persuasion manifested itself more frequently in the performance of preachers, and nowhere with greater impact than in the many nonconformist chapels that sprang up in Wales in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Welsh word hwyl, used widely in Wales in modern times (sometimes inaccurately) to summon transformation from dilatoriness to euphoric energy, actually has no accurate English translation, because it derives precisely from the word used to describe the state of ecstatic rhetoric into which Welsh-language non-conformist preachers slipped so effortlessly during their lengthy sermonizings. ‘ “Singin’ in the Reign”: Voice, Faith and the Welsh Revival of 1904–1905’, by James Deaville and Katharine Stopa, examines the choralizing that went alongside such performances, and which was undoubtedly inspired by it. There is no doubting the strength of the relationship between choral singing in Wales at this time and its role in the theology of revivalism: this is evidenced in the way hymns functioned in both secular life and in quasi-sacred festivals such as the cymanfa ganu.Footnote ⁴ The authors focus on the first two months of the 1904 revival and draw liberally on the commentaries of T. Awstin Davies, a journalist working for the unashamedly Tory newspaper the Western Mail. This provides a new perspective, but whether Davies's testimony of revivalist meetings justifies the faith the authors invest in him is a moot point – Welsh historians have seldom prioritised him as a source for anything.

Peter Horton's ‘Beyond the Psalms: The Metamorphosis of the Anthem Text during the Nineteenth Century’ will be a key source for future researchers of the subject, not least because of the richness of the data it contains. Horton's close analysis of the anthem is concentrated on a key aspect of the theology/music relationship. He observes a move in the second half of the century away from psalms toward other biblical passages as the sources for anthem texts. He asks how and why the change occurred and to what extent it reflected theological as well as other concerns. Perhaps more than any other contributor, Horton grasps the nettle of giving both texts and their musical settings close analysis to highlight the nature of change.

Two chapters follow the trail of theology and music into Victorian sacred works: David Brown's ‘From Elijah (1846) to The Kingdom (1906): Music and Scripture Interacting in the Nineteenth-Century English Oratorio’, and Jeremy S. Begbie's ‘Confidence and Anxiety in Elgar's Dream of Gerontius’. David Brown's ambitious chapter traces theological meaning from Mendelssohn's Elijah, commissioned for an English audience to hear at the Birmingham Festival in 1846, to the oratorios of Parry, Stainer and Sullivan, before looking at all four of Elgar's large-scale sacred works. Jeremy Begbie's chapter is more focused: he examines Newman's narrative and Elgar's music as both a specific case and as a model for wider theological deliberations, especially concerning the concept of purgatory. Much of the comment about the musical nature of the work is drawn from earlier writings by Harper Scott and to a lesser extent Matthew Riley, but the author's lengthy analysis of the theological meaning that might be extracted from a work that meant so much to its composer is absorbing.

The final chapter is Bennett Zon's ‘ “Spiritual” Selection: Joseph Goddard and the Music Theology of Evolution’, in which the ‘influence of evolution within the science and religion of Victorian Britain’ (p. 216) is examined using the writings of the music philosopher Joseph Goddard. Goddard's writings on music, which began mid-century and continued to his death in 1911, have been the subject of little study other than by Zon himself, but he is clearly important, and Zon is right to introduce his work into these debates. The focus is the so-called Darwin ‘muddle’. The phrase was applied by the great man himself to describe the apparent contradiction in his failure to reconcile what was rapidly being seen as sound scientific knowledge with his personal religious belief. It is a fascinating chapter, one of the best in the book, and reminds us why the juxtaposition of tradition and modernity was causal in musical and theological changes in the late Victorian period.

The publisher's advertising blurb carries an endorsement for the book from Nicholas Temperley: it is, he says, ‘something of a milestone in our understanding of Victorian religious music’.Footnote ⁵ I am sure this is right: the quality is high and the variety is genuinely revealing of the breadth of meaning that can be drawn from the topic of the book. Several of the contributors include a cautionary rider of the ‘though there is more work to be done’ type, but here it has substance. I felt that some of the most pressing questions needed greater exposition than the authors had space for, and that they felt the same. This is a field that needs further development, and having prised the lid of the tin partly open, it will be difficult to close.