The accomplished chamber choir, The Adelfos Ensemble, under the direction of Temmo Korisheli, will perform “All Angels Cry Aloud: Music for the English Church,” at 3 p.m. Sunday in the neo-Gothic splendors of Trinity Episcopal Church, 1500 State St. in downtown Santa Barbara.
The continuo will be supplied by Trinity’s dynamic young organist and music minister, Thomas Joyce.
The program acknowledges what any music lover must already know: that the British Isles have a special affinity for choral music, and that their greatest composers have all regularly devoted a significant portion of their creative fire to the massed human voices.
They had to draw the line somewhere, and instead of starting in the 16th century, with Thomas Tallis, they start in the 17th (Henry Purcell).
Each century thereafter is well represented, including Maurice Greene (Master of the King’s Musick to George II), Samuel Sebastian Wesley, Hubert Parry, Charles Villiers Stanford and Charles Wood, plus North American Anglicans Healy Willan and David McK. Williams. Nor are the Moderns slighted, being ably represented by Benjamin Britten, W.H. Harris and Herbert Howells.
When we speak of the “English Church,” we mean, of course, the Church of England, founded 1532-1534 by acts of Parliament that put the King of England at the head of the Church in England, rather than the pope.
To this day, the ultimate authority in the Anglican Church is vested in the monarch. The office of Archbishop of Canterbury is something analogous, in the English religious establishment, to the secular office of prime minister in Parliament. Which goes some way to explain the absence of Sir Edward Elgar and William Byrd — both Roman Catholics — from the Adelfos playlist. (When he heard Elgar’s magnum opus, The Dream of Gerontius, based on Cardinal Newman’s famous poem, Villiers Stanford said to the composer, “My boy, it stinks of incense.”)
At first, there were no theological differences between the Church of England and the Church of Rome, although the Protestant Reformation was raging on the Continent (indeed, early in his reign, Henry VIII had published attacks on Martin Luther that had prompted a grateful pope to name him “Defender of the Faith,” a title that Protestant Queen Elizabeth II still retains).
The mass continued to be sung in Latin, and music continued to play a big part in Anglican services. The church founded by Luther also used a lot of music; Luther was himself a composer and wrote the famous hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is Our Lord (Ein Feste Berg).”
John Calvin, an increasingly powerful voice in the Protestant leadership, believed that nothing in the church should distract from the word of God, and although he considered music one of the greatest gifts of God to man, he kept it out of Calvinist churches.
Throughout the first half of the 17th century, as the English church became more and more Calvinist, English church music languished. Then, after the civil wars, the execution of Charles I, the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, and, finally, the restoration of Charles II to the English throne (and, though secretly a Catholic, supremacy in the English Church), music resumed its rightful place in the Anglican service and has been enriching it ever since.
After the American Revolution, the Episcopal Church broke with the Church of England since, as Americans, their priests could not take the oath of loyalty to the King of England, but the Episcopal and Anglican churches remain identical in their theology, organization and liturgy, and have maintained many other ties with each other as partners in the worldwide Anglican Communion.
Tickets to this choral concert are $15 general admission, $10 for students and seniors (65+), and they will be available at the door. Call 805.455.2413 for more information.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.