A splendid article by Arnold Hunt in this week's Church Times on the fiftieth anniversary of a BBC TV broadcast of this piece. It is very revealing about both the planning of and the reaction to the broadcast, using sources in the BBC Archives.
I am bound to add that there is more material on the background to reactions to the Mass, and its ongoing notoriety amongst sections of the musical and church-musical press, in Ian's and my article in Studies in Church History 42 (2006) pp.429-41, and also in our piece in Redefining Christian Britain (particularly pp.52-54).
Anglican women: Mollie Batten
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In recent months I’ve had occasion to look at the lives of several Anglican
women of the last century or so, for possible inclusion in a biographical
dicti...
5 months ago
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Further to Arnold Hunt's discussion of the Folk Mass in the Church Times, there has been a subsequent letters page discussion:
Lance Haward writes as a participant in the first televised performance in 1957, and argues that rather than being rendered obsolete by the imminent advent of pop, the folk mass was recognised as music from a passing age by some of its contemporaries. If Mr. Haward is right, it suggests an interesting gap in understanding about what the folk mass was intended to do: whilst many critics branded it as dangerous and revolutionary, Beaumont and its advocates believed it simply to be following in a recent tradition of church music writing which sought to offer music for worship in a vernacular style familiar and comfortable to most of the population (in this sense, an evolutionary rather than revolutionary change).
I suspect that Arnold Hunt and Lance Haward can both be right at once: the folk mass was not, by any standards, cutting edge music for its time. In that sense, the folk mass did not suddenly cease to be cutting edge when pop arrived. On the other hand, newness was fundamental to the underlying discourse of pop, and because the folk mass came to be seen as an attempt to be new (whatever Beaumont's original intentions) it suddenly began to look much older as a result.
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