One of the books I’ve got on the go at the moment is A People’s Church by Jeremy Morris (Profile Books, 2022), a history of the Church of England. I’ve just finished chapter 14, “Where Choirs Sing: Anglicanism’s Cultural Experiment”. Although it isn’t a detailed treatise, it does provide a useful overview, including a reminder of the former role of gallery musicians and the fact that the robed choir (disappeared in many settings, including my present one) was a relatively recent innovation in historical terms and not part of the worship experience from the year dot (early to mid sixteenth century in the case of the Anglican church).

If there is a similar book to be written in another four or five hundred years, I wonder whether the kind of things I tend to regard as quite standard in present church music will even register for so much as a footnote? History… it’s all about finding perspective across something longer than a lifespan (certainly much longer than an average attention span).