This book is a detailed, informal commentary on a vast topic that it would take the lifetimes of many scholars to cover with anything approaching completeness. The author was organist, choirmaster, and composer at the Chapel Royal for thirteen years, and his primary resource, as he tells us, is “a lifetime of working with this music” (404). What music? It is never entirely clear whether A History of English Church Music is meant to cover the Church of England and its predecessors only or all kinds of church music practiced in England. Gant makes occasional forays into Catholicism, nonconformity, agnosticism, domestic sacred music, Scotland, Ireland, and even America. It is, in fact, about the music he knows and loves, and reflects his unlimited curiosity about its background.

It follows that by far the best parts of the book are those dealing with the living repertoire of church music, both choral and congregational. When Gant is discussing actual examples, there is a warmth of tone and a confidence of analytical understanding that will enhance many readers' enjoyment of the music. I wish there was more of this. There are surprisingly few examples in music type: only one by a Victorian composer, while Michael Tippett, Giles Swayne, Peter Maxwell Davies, and James MacMillan have to share a single example to show “four aspects of modern church music” (371). Instead of more commentary on the music, Gant provides, in his chapter on “The Splintering of the Tradition, 1914–2015,” some astute biographical material about the leading composers of the time and their musical careers, often given added sparkle by the author's personal acquaintance. He treats each piece of music very much as a personal product of its composer but hardly tackles the overarching problems of modern church music: how to treat the changing liturgy and declining attendance and how to respond to modernist movements in composition. These have been discussed in depth in Martin Thomas's English Cathedral Music and Liturgy in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2015), which I reviewed in the June 2017 issue of this journal.

In dealing with earlier music, Gant takes the same approach. His comments on the music itself are telling, often original, and sometimes profound. I am stimulated by his remarks on the music of Tallis, Byrd, Purcell, and Handel. He has also looked into the lives of many composers and the histories of each period with some diligence but often with the goal of cherry-picking one or two amusing descriptions or stories that will help his readers get through what he evidently feels is heavy going stuff. Unfortunately, the gaps in his knowledge of musical and church history produce not only some misleading generalities but many embarrassing factual howlers. It is my disagreeable duty to point out the more serious ones.

Psalm-singing was “the only music sung in the ordinary parish church until the eighteenth century,” he tells us (79). Then what about Marbeck's 1550 setting of the liturgy, which he says “has survived in use to this day” (91)? As for cathedrals, he says: “In January of 1645 Parliament deprived composers of the familiar stage direction which had been their comfort and their cue for a hundred years—‘in quires and places where they sing here followeth the anthem’—by abolishing the Book of Common Prayer” (182). In fact, this direction did not appear in the prayer book until 1662. (Anthems had been sung, of course, authorized by the Injunctions of 1559.) Gant says that: “Thankfully” Tye's words to The Actes of the Apostles “have largely not survived” (97). I am sorry to disappoint him, but they have—printed in 1553 with the tunes, which he evidently has not looked at. He says that William Whittingham (whom he consistently deprives of his first “h,” though rebuking Avison for removing Palestrina's “r”) was a musician who published a collection of metrical psalms in Geneva in 1556 (100); in fact he was a literary scholar, and the collection was a revised edition of Sternhold and Hopkins. “By 1563,” Gant says, “[John] Day was ‘including four-part tunes throughout his Sternhold and Hopkins'” (112). Far from it! He printed an edition of tunes in that year, but all 148 Elizabethan editions of the regular psalter remained immovably monophonic. The kind Gant describes, in which “each singer has his own part book with all the words,” does not exist (112). He later quotes and reproduces a page showing Psalm 84 from Ravenscroft's Psalms of 1621, commenting: “The words, like the music, were getting better” (155), but the words quoted are by John Hopkins and came unchanged from Day's 1562 edition.

After all this, I do not know what Gant means by claiming that Orlando Gibbons's tunes in George Wither's Hymns and Songes of the Church (1623) are “perhaps the first genuine congregational music” (168). Or when he says: “There are no Latin Masses and barely a handful of Latin motets in England for the next two-and-a-half centuries” after 1623 (169): a glance at the Grove worklists of Samuel Webbe senior and Samuel Wesley, or even at Gant's own page 277, would soon put paid to that claim (and by the way, Wesley was not introduced to Bach until after he had composed most of his Catholic music). The tune “Bishopthorpe” with its “noticeable Baroque harmonic procedures” (222) was not by Jeremiah Clarke of the Chapel Royal (d. 1707) but by Jeremiah Clark of Worcester (d. 1809). And Thomas Forbes Walmisley's Cathedral Music is not an anthology “completing the triptych” of Greene, Boyce, and Arnold (274) but an edition of his recently deceased son's compositions.

The most astonishing gaffe is about chants. Gant thinks that “chanting the ‘prose’ psalms is an odd hybrid which eventually took hold in the proto-Laudian innovations of late nineteenth-century high-church Anglicanism. Its proponents claimed they were restoring an ancient tradition. They weren't” (177). No—they were just continuing a tradition in which there had been no break (except in 1645–1660) between the chanting of Latin psalms to the ancient Gregorian psalm tones and the slowly evolving Anglican chanting in cathedrals, as recounted in detail by Ruth M. Wilson in her book, Anglican Chants and Chanting in England, Scotland, and America, 1660 to 1820 (Clarendon, 1997). Gant even admonishes a 1636 prayer book for saying that the psalms in it are pointed. “Pointed as it shall be sung in churches,” a phrase first used in 1548 on the title page of The Psalter of Pslames of David, meant starting each verse on a new line and dividing it into two parts with a colon, neither of which had been the case in Coverdale's Great Bible. The fact that “pointed” now means more than that could hardly be predicted in 1636.

There is much to enjoy in this book, and it can tempt you to explore little known parts of the English church music tradition. But for heaven's sake, do not rely on it for historical accuracy.