Abstract
The lead editors of The English Hymnal (1906), Percy Dearmer and Ralph Vaughan Williams, found Victorian hymnody in need of serious revision, and not just aesthetically. This musical book was intended as an expression of the editors' Christian socialist politics involving in the participation of the congregation. This article examines how they achieved this by the encouragement of active citizenship through communal music-making, using folksong tunes alongside texts which affirmed community. This article argues that the editors wedded religion and high-quality music with a focus on citizenship drawn from British Idealism; using a cultural movement to seek social change.
Highlights
This article uses the editorial work of Percy Dearmer and Ralph Vaughan Williams on The English Hymnal (1906) to argue that at the turn of the twentieth century, evocations of the past, of national and of folk culture were not necessarily nostalgic or conservative, but were often used by those on the left to make strongly political statements about the need for community as a foundation for a better, fairer society rooted in an idealist conception of the common good.[1]
Dearmer’s editorship of the English Hymnal places him alongside other Christian socialist priests who attempted to harness an ideological link between their religion and politics and a cultural movement they saw as embodying many of their values, inheriting the interest in common culture of Charles Marson and preparing the ground for the more nationalistic adoption of folk culture by Conrad Noel in the 1910s
The English Hymnal was groundbreaking within its own field, not least for its pioneering use of folk melodies
Summary
This article uses the editorial work of Percy Dearmer and Ralph Vaughan Williams on The English Hymnal (1906) to argue that at the turn of the twentieth century, evocations of the past, of national and of folk culture were not necessarily nostalgic or conservative, but were often used by those on the left to make strongly political statements about the need for community as a foundation for a better, fairer society rooted in an idealist conception of the common good.[1]. As Stephen Yeo contends, “the people” were the special agents and mediators of certain and imminent change’due to their‘long tradition and memory of their role over centuries’, the people’s music was inherently socialist music, carrying the agency of Yeo’s‘hidden hand’because it was formed by such communal memory.[95] Onderdonk sees Vaughan Williams’s use of folksongs as an attempt to ‘establish the conditions by which his compatriots might come into a more profound relation with a common English heritage’ which would ‘forge connections between social classes’.96 This focus on communal bonds again demonstrates a Christian socialist focus on common purpose,[97] as well as an idealist conception of the nation as a community which ‘cut across’ class and religious divisions with shared history and language.[98]. The English Hymnal made both important affirmations and rejections in dealing with the canons it inherited, musically, religiously and politically; and in doing so, made a strong case for Christian socialism at the dawn of the twentieth century, linking that claim to wider concern with community, citizenship and identity current in the period and inspired by the idealists with whom Christian socialists shared significant goals
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