Anglican Chant

Before the Reformation, English churches sang the psalms to Gregorian plainsong tones in Latin, a system built for unmetered prose text rather than rhymed verse. When the Church of England moved to English language worship, composers needed a way to keep singing prose psalms, now in English translation, without switching to rhymed metrical paraphrase, which many church musicians considered a lesser vehicle for scripture's own words.

Early efforts, including John Merbecke's mid sixteenth century adaptation of plainsong to the new English Book of Common Prayer, worked directly from the older Latin chant tradition, adjusting its melodic formulas to fit English prose rather than discarding the plainsong inheritance outright. Anglican chant as it later developed kept this basic principle, a short recurring melodic formula sung to prose text, but reworked it for four part harmony in the newer Western tonal idiom and added the technique of pointing, marking the printed text to show exactly how its syllables divide across the notes of the chant. A single Anglican chant, often only a few bars of music, can therefore be reused across an entire psalm, its pointing adjusted line by line so the fixed tune fits prose of varying length and rhythm, a solution that let English cathedral and parish worship keep singing the psalter in full without either abandoning chant or forcing scripture into rhymed verse.

An Anglican chant comes in two common forms. A single chant is one short musical strain, generally corresponding to one verse of a psalm, repeated for every verse in turn. A double chant pairs two such strains together, corresponding to two verses at a time, giving slightly more melodic variety across a long psalm before the pattern repeats, and quadruple chants, pairing four strains, exist as a rarer extension of the same principle for especially long or structurally distinct psalms. Cathedral and collegiate choral traditions in particular developed an extensive repertoire of both forms, many attributed to named composers and associated with specific institutions, sung daily as part of choral evensong and matins in a continuous tradition running from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into the present.

Compiled chant books and pointed psalters gathered this repertoire for practical use, pairing specific chants with specific psalms as a matter of established local custom passed down within a given cathedral or college choir. Because the same short chant can be paired with any psalm of suitable length, choir directors select and combine chants with particular psalms much as a hymn tune is paired with a text, and familiarity with a working repertoire of chants, together with fluent pointing, remains a core skill taught to choristers and organists within this tradition today.