Scan 24
A dictionary of old English music & musical instruments 1923, 1923
6 lines. Read by computer on 19 September 2026. Printed page 8. See the scan on archive.org.
1Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries worked, the anthem had risen to a most important place in the church service of this country.
3The anthem served another and highly important function in requiring the assistance of an instrumental accompaniment, especially in the "verses." Thus the flimsy support of a small organ (portative, positive, or regal) was gradually magnified by the addition of other instruments until the result was a very satisfying one musically. Wind music was added, and eventually the new violins, all-conquering, ousted both viols and cornets. Evelyn (Diary, December 21, 1662) says: "One of his Majesty's chaplains preached; after which, instead of the ancient, grave, and solemn wind music accompanying the organ, was introduced a concert of twenty-four violins between every pause, after the French fantastical light way, better suiting a tavern or playhouse, than a church. This was the first time of change, and now we no more heard the cornet which gave life to the organ…" By the time Handel was composing, the instrumentation of the accompaniment to the anthem had been expanded to include wood-wind and brass. This, of course, already foreshadowed the full orchestral support that later anthems were given.
5The word antym, defined as antiphona, already appears in the Promptorium Parvulorum (1440), and is to be derived from the earlier antefn (cf. "biginneth thesne antefne," Ancren Riwle, c. 1230, ed. James Morton, Camden Soc.), its ultimate source being the Latin antiphona. Anthem is thus a doublet of Antiphon (q.v.), and, as we have seen, its earliest form was antiphonal. At the middle of the Sixteenth Century the service was concluded at the third Collect, and when the Anthem came to be adopted as an integral part of English divine worship, it took its place after this. Some of the greatest of native composers have left work in this form, and perhaps one of the best methods of studying the vocal writing of Tudor and Stuart England is in a careful analysis of the anthems of Tallis, Tye, William Byrd, and Orlando Gibbons among the earlier writers; of John Blow, Jeremiah Clarke, Henry Purcell, Pelham Humphreys, Wise, etc., in the middle period; and of Boyce, Attwood, Battishill, and others too recent and too well-known to need naming. The earliest specimens are generally "Full"; choral work was excellent
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