Revealing the Complexities that Surrounded Sacred Music Practices, Preferences, and Prejudices in Early Seventeenth-Century England

During past investigations into early seventeenth-century sacred music practices, scholars have often presumed that due to their differing theological beliefs, the musical preferences of the Puritans and Laudians dramatically diverged. The Puritans are viewed as the enemies of all music except simple congregationally sung metrical psalms. The Laudians are the great innovators, promoting elaborate choral music practices that aligned with their ceremonial ideals. However, through ignoring historical evidence, focussing on the most extensive surviving music collections, not analysing all the available compositional evidence, and listening to figures who ‘shouted the loudest’, this period’s sacred music practices and voiced preferences and prejudices have been habitually exaggerated and over-generalised.
This thesis will present three case studies to address how prevalent certain musical practices, prejudices, and preferences actually were and whether they were solely theologically motivated. In the first chapter, compositional evidence from the Chapel Royal’s early seventeenth-century surviving musical sources will be used to re-examine the motivations behind the Chapel’s musical practices and anthem repertoire choices. It will be revealed that specific religious, practical, political, and economic aims influenced these. The second chapter will address the disputes between the conservative Peter Smart and ceremonial John Cosin at Durham Cathedral. Anthems and eucharistic music from the surviving partbooks will be investigated alongside personal accounts, contextual historical information, and theological beliefs. These investigations will challenge previous assumptions about Durham Cathedral’s practices and to what extent they reflected religious factions and countrywide preferences and prejudices. The third chapter will focus on the fate of musical artefacts during the Civil War and Interregnum. Destruction accounts will be examined alongside legal injunctions, voiced theological beliefs, and records of musical practices before and during the Interregnum. The collated evidence will be used to re-examine Interregnum musical practices and explore what this evidence implies about the Laudians’ and Puritans’ theological musical beliefs.