wow this is a real chicken or the egg came first question isn't it.
I reckon it's the heresies cause the change. The second we stop singing about hell, sin and forgiveness the second the music tends to becomes hideous! I've looked at some of the hymns I used to sing as a kid (the more modern part of my life) and I noticed that it was about being automatically saved and a lot of that musically low quality too. I should add this was not the idea of the parish priest but rather a rogue musician put those in one day. I can't be of any help but I like the first question better than the second.

Let me see if I can give some more background.

When I taught U.S. History, I did a presentation on Early American music (Puritans, and such). There was not much to choose from because the Puritans distrusted music, dance, poetry and such, but metrical psalms were clearly present. This nudged me in the direction of asking, "Is there really a difference between 'Protestant' and 'Catholic' music?" The poster child for the affirmative position is Thomas Tallis. The same man who wrote Spem in Alium later wrote If ye love me. If I read IYLM carefully, I see a composer trying to use his consummate skill in the building of an intentionally inferior work of art.... and, since it is Tallis, the result is beautiful anyway. English Protestants despised ceremony, show, beautiful vestments, Gregorian chant, melismas, and all sorts of other good things, and so Tallis manages to write for his new overlords.

What I am hoping to find is a scholarly treatment of the topic.

English Protestants despised ...

No doubt many did, but Elizabeth I did not, and she employed Tallis and ensured that he had a good income. She also used ceremony, show, and beautiful vesture, to appropriate to her own image more than a little that had previously been accorded to the BVM. [The Virgin Queen of heaven] One aspect of liturgical music in which she was reformist was the emphasis on clarity of the words, but then she shared that with the Fathers of Trent.

Well, Elizabeth I left her own coronation service when Owen Oglethorpe, Bishop of Carlisle and the only Marian bishop would would preside over the service, elevated the host contrary to her express instructions (which instructions were prompted by his doing so a few weeks earlier at Christmas Mass in her presence). For this, he was deprived from his see within the year.

She was a combination of her parents. Just like her immediate predecessor.

A superb question, Chris!

I cannot speak magisterially to Chris' enquiry. I will, though, offer a few thoughts that may be pertinent, and may or may not have been formative of the reformation's several musical praxes.

The reformers wrote voluminously, expounding their various theologies in literary form and communicating them to learned society of their time. For the populace these writings include, principally in Lutheran lands, hymnody, for the most part very well written, as a means of transmitting and bonding basic beliefs to ordinary people. I think that the answer to Chris' query is definitely that 'reformed' thought preceded 'reformed' hymnody. Hymnody was at hand as a time-honoured means of catechising the people, of spreading ideas in memorable form and action.

The association of hymnody with the populace does have a historical reference in Catholic worship and intellectual life in the west - not to mention its paramount place in the east, from whence it was brought westward by Ambrose of Milan. We know that the hymns of St Ambrose were widely and wildly popular. They were purposefully disseminated amongst the faithful for the assimilation of orthodox belief during the precarious times of the Arian threat. The same is true of the hymns of Hilary of Poitiers and others which were both educational and aedifying means of evangelising Truth. Further, such examples as M.A. Prudentius' prolix Cathemerinon, from which the cento, Corde natus ex parentis is extracted, retain their didactic purpose today and have become beloved ornaments of seasonal liturgy. So, the use of popular hymnody by the reformers, who were keen to convert the minds of their respective flocks to their particular confessional tenets, merely parallels historical antecedents.

There is much evidence, some hundreds of years down the time line from Ambrose, that the laity did, in fact, sing a variety of vernacular, macaronic, Germanic leisen, and Latin hymns, carols, and such at mystery plays, processions, para-liturgical events, in daily life, and at mass. This latter, I suspect, would have been more common in village churches than at cathedrals and major monastic establishments. As Protasius has noted on another recent thread ('Music for the EF'), the Christ ist erstanden hymn (see W-IV, no. 520) is an example (surely not unique!) of lay song at mass in the centuries before the reformation era. Both the tune and the text of Christ ist erstanden are derived from the Victimae Paschali sequence, and it was sung by the folk in alternation with lines of the sequence. This is repeated to this day in Lutheran circles. The popular Quem pastores-Den die lobten Hirten sehre is another example of vernacular vs. Latin in stanza by stanza alternation.

The point is that the use of hymnody as a means of catechesis reaches far back in time, so it isn't as if the reformers (whatever their other faults) were fashioning a new thing out of whole cloth. They weren't. They merely put an old phenomenon to new use on a grand scale for purposes of which Ambrose would have been familiar (though he likely turned over in his grave [or stamped his foot in heaven] at the particular confessional ends and doctrinal heresies to which it was put). I am not suggesting that the reformers were consciously borrowing from Ambrose and Hilary, et al.: though it is possible, probably, they weren't. Certainly, along side the venerable maxim, lex orandi lex credendi est, one could assert with an even greater certitude that quam cantamus credemus. There is no more powerful guage or expression of one's being, his emotions, his state of mind, his beliefs, and his character, than the songs he sings and the fervour (or lack thereof) with which he sings them. This, in itself, is why the execrable state of singing in many Catholic churches in our time is such a lamentably piteous thing to behold - or (not) to hear.

It should not go unmentioned that the common folk of the mediaeval and following eras were not totally ignorant of Latin. There were macaronic songs whose Latin they understood quite well. There were numerous antiphons which were common knowledge. They did know the words of the mass and were hardly ignorant of their import. This, it seems to me, complicated the reformers' designs and made the appropriation of doctrinal, didactic, hymnody essential in their 'reforming' work.

Hymnody in Lutheran lands, unlike that of elsewhere, reached a high degree of sophistication as doctrinal cathechesis. Lutheran hymnody characteristically underlines and inculcates Lutheran dogma, particularly as it concerns such things as 'works righteousness', Luther's peculiar sacramental doctrine, the nature of grace, and other tenets of Luther's small and large catechisms. Also common were translations of office hymns and mensural adaptations of their melodies. There is little incidence of this systematic use of hymnody as doctrinal communicator in other Protestant or Anglican lands until later times. The Calvinist world, on the other hand, limited itself to scripture and allowed no other form of song than metrical psalmody. In this, curiously, it was of one mind with the third and fourth century fathers of the western Church with respect to what was sung at mass. Hence, the metrical psalmody, largely of Huguenot provenance, which evolved almost entirely from the Calvinist camp. In England, where the intellectual elites were heavily Calvinist and Lutheran, there also arose metrical psalmody and psalm or scriptural paraphrase. In liturgy, though, such hymn and psalm singing had no place in the Church of England's formal worship - not until into the XVIIIth century. This is not to say that England is absent any metrical psalmody. It isn't. Our hymnals of today are chock full of examples from historic English psalters. One of the most excruciatingly lovely vernacular metrical psalters to be found anywhere is that of the Elizabethans, Sir Philip Sydney and his sister, Mary.

I have spoken solely of reformation chorales and psalmody which were the subject of Chris' entreaty. This leaves untouched upon hymnody's flowering in later eras, on the continent and in Britain, often (but not by any means always) of a subjective and even mystical nature, yielding a many faceted variety of literary gems, often in superb verse and containing, especially with regard to the Pietists, an astounding degree of mystical imagery. Too, particularly as the XIXth century aged, there appeared much subjective literary dross and musical detritus in all spheres, Catholic, Anglican, and Protestant alike.

These are just some thoughts off the top of my head.

I'll add this parting shot - it is an irony, and a bitterly biting one, that most of the original (as opposed to psalm-based) hymnody of the reformation reinforced the reformers' doctrines, and did so assiduously with, on the whole, a high degree of literary merit. Musically, we have inherited from their repertories hundreds of tunes of genuine worth, often featuring an isorhythmic structure. By glaring and piteous contrast, most (as in 'nearly all') of the 'hymnody' and religious songs which arose in the Catholic world in the post-Vatican II era are doctrinally weak or ambiguous (if not error ridden), often studiedly so, and, with few exceptions, are literary drivel set to music that could with but a generous exercise of charity even be called mediocre, and which almost entirely references the entertainment sector - all marketed skillfully by a mendacious publishing industry and winked at by clerical orders who don't seem to care.

Chris has raised a question rich in its ramifications and about which much more could be said - but I shall stop for the nonce.

Jackson,

Thank you for your specific references. I shall have to see if I can find them.