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Amanda Haste
Aspects of the Role of Music in Twenty-First-Century Anglican Monasticism
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PhD Full-time |
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Supervisor: |
Professor John Irving |
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Abstract
Anglican monastic communities represent a unique social environment in which music plays an integral part. Monastic life in England was suppressed from the Reformation until its revival in the 1840s and, despite their subsequent role in the worldwide spread of the Anglican Communion, the communities remained unrecognised by the Church until 1935. The absence of a hierarchical authority structure gave them the autonomy to create and develop their own musical tradition, and this thesis explores aspects of the role of music in contemporary communities, contextualised within almost two centuries of Anglican monasticism. The early communities were born in the early nineteenth-century climate of liturgical antiquarianism and interest in pre-Reformation ideals, and they embraced plainchant wholeheartedly as the only historically valid music for their devotions. Their development of a sung Office and liturgy was informed by burgeoning chant scholarship and by an organ-dominated church music tradition. The starting point for this thesis is therefore the development – and subsequent loss – of chant-learning skills needed in religious life, and the considerable late-twentieth-century developments in the distribution and use of instruments within community. Creative activity in the form of chant adaptation, and both chant-based and freestyle musical composition, continues to thrive. Examples of recent work in all these fields are discussed with reference to compositional language, the development of musical style within the context of religious life, problems of attribution, and intellectual copyright. Also confronted are issues such as the conflict between musical creativity and the need for silence; the capacity of music to be an agent for both conflict and reparation in terms of community dynamics; the self-identification of communities through their music, and its subsequent commodification. The thesis concludes with a consideration of the constant process of reinvention through which the communities are taking their musical tradition into the coming century.