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CHARLES WESLEY, METHODISM AND NEW ART MUSIC IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2021

MARTIN V. CLARKE
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Abstract

This article considers eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Methodism's relationship with art music through the original settings of poetry by Charles Wesley by five notable musicians: John Frederick Lampe, George Frideric Handel, Jonathan Battishill, Charles Wesley junior and Samuel Wesley. It argues that the strong emphasis on congregational singing in popular and scholarly perceptions of Methodism, including within the movement itself, masks a more varied engagement with musical culture. The personal musical preferences of John and Charles Wesley brought them into contact with several leading musical figures in eighteenth-century London and initiated a small corpus of original musical settings of some of the latter's hymns. The article examines the textual and musical characteristics of these the better to understand their relationship with both eighteenth-century Methodism and fashionable musical culture of the period. It argues that Methodism was not, contrary to popular perception, uniformly opposed to or detached from the aesthetic considerations of artistic culture, that eighteenth-century Methodism and John and Charles Wesley cannot be regarded as synonymous and that, in this period, sacred music encompasses rather more than church music and cannot be narrowly defined in opposition to secular music.

Type
Article
Information
Eighteenth-Century Music , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , September 2021 , pp. 271 - 293
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 More than 4,400 of Charles Wesley's hymns or poems were published during his lifetime, while a similar number remained in manuscript at his death. The preface to The Methodist Hymn Book (London: Methodist Church, 1933) opens with the bold claim that ‘Methodism was born in song’ (iii).

2 On Charles Wesley see, for example, Rattenbury, John Ernest, The Evangelical Doctrines of Charles Wesley's Hymns (London: Epworth, 1941)Google Scholar; Kimbrough, S. T. Jr, The Lyrical Theology of Charles Wesley: A Reader (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2013)Google Scholar; and Lunn, Julie A., The Theology of Sanctification and Resignation in Charles Wesley's Hymns (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019)Google Scholar. On other Methodist hymn-writers see Chilcote, Paul Wesley, Singing the Faith: Soundings of Lyrical Theology in the Methodist Tradition (Nashville: United Methodist Church, 2020)Google Scholar. On music, the Wesley family and Methodism see Temperley, Nicholas and Banfield, Stephen, eds, Music and the Wesleys (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010)Google Scholar and Young, Carlton R., Music of the Heart: John & Charles Wesley on Music and Musicians: An Anthology (Carol Stream, IL: Hope, 1995)Google Scholar.

3 See Sally Drage, ‘Methodist Anthems: The Set Piece in English Psalmody (1750–1850)’, in Music and the Wesleys, ed. Temperley and Banfield, 63–76.

4 Jonathan Rodell, The Rise of Methodism: A Study of Bedfordshire, 1736–1851 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2014), 76.

5 Rodell, Rise of Methodism, 47. Similarly, Robert Spence, a York bookseller with links to Methodism, produced an unauthorized abridgment of Wesley's A Collection of Hymns for the use of the People Called Methodists (London, 1780) under the title Pocket Hymn Book (York, 1784). In adding popular evangelical hymns to a reduced selection of Wesley's material, he produced a collection that sold widely, thanks in part to its low price. See https://divinity.duke.edu/sites/divinity.duke.edu/files/documents/cswt/32_Pocket_Hymn_Book_%281785%29.pdf.

6 See Young, Music of the Heart, 72–73, 92–101. ‘Directions of Singing’ was published in Select Hymns, with Tunes Annext (London, 1761; second edition, entitled Sacred Melody, or A Choice Collection of Psalm and Hymn Tunes, London, c1765).

7 Cited in Young, Music of the Heart, 96.

8 See Young, Music of the Heart, 172–175.

9 [Charles Wesley,] Funeral Hymns (London: Strahan, 1759), 30.

10 Frank Baker, ed., Representative Verse of Charles Wesley (London: Epworth, 1962), 312.

11 Nicholas Temperley, ‘Methodist Church Music’, in Grove Music Online www.oxfordmusiconline.com (30 August 2019).

12 Nicholas Temperley, ‘John Wesley, Music, and the People Called Methodists’, in Music and the Wesleys, ed. Temperley and Banfield, 25.

13 Erik Routley, The Musical Wesleys (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1968), 41.

14 Dennis R. Martin, The Operas and Operatic Style of John Frederick Lampe (Detroit: Information Coordinators, 1985), 87–98.

15 Berta Joncus, ‘Private Music in Public Spheres: Chamber Cantata and Song’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music, ed. Simon P. Keefe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 529.

16 Christopher Hogwood, ‘The London Pleasure Gardens: General Introduction’, in Johann Christian Bach, Favourite Songs Sung at Vauxhall Gardens (originally published in London 1766–1779), ed. Hogwood (Tunbridge Wells: Richard Macnutt, 1985), xii.

17 For further discussion of the significance of Lampe's tunes in the context of eighteenth-century Methodism see Martin V. Clarke, ‘John Frederick Lampe's Hymns on the Great Festivals and Other Occasions’, in Music and the Wesleys, ed. Temperley and Banfield, 52–62.

18 Donald Burrows, ed., George Frideric Handel: The Complete Hymns and Chorales, Including Complete Source Materials for the Handel–Wesley Hymns (London: Novello, 1988), 2–3.

19 Burrows notes that, as a consequence of subsequent damage to the manuscript, Samuel Wesley's 1826 edition is the only source for the final six notes of the postlude to the second setting. Burrows, Hymns and Chorales, 5.

20 The practice of playing interludes between stanzas and even between lines of hymn or psalm tunes was common in the early part of the eighteenth century. However, unlike Handel's settings, in which both singer and accompanist are given opportunity to display their musical skill, this practice confined such opportunities to the organist only, as the tunes elaborated and extended in this way were of a rather plainer character and designed for congregational singing. See Nicholas Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church, two volumes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), volume 1, 129–130.

21 An example is Amaryllis: consisting of such songs as are most esteemed for Composition and Delicacy, and sung at the Publick Theatres or Gardens; all chosen from the works of the Best Masters, and rightly adapted for the Voice, Violin, Hauboy, Flute and German Flute. With a Figured Base for the Harpsicord (London: T[homas] J[effreys], c1750).

22 While no publication date is printed, the cover advertises the composer's opera Almena, which premiered in 1764 and was published in 1765. Nicholas Temperley, The Hymn Tune Index www.hymntune.library.uiuc.edu/ (7 August 2020), Source BattJTH.

23 Alyson McLamore, ‘“By the Will and Order of Providence”: The Wesley Family Concerts, 1779–1787’, Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle 37 (2004), 217.

24 Cited in James Higgs, ‘Samuel Wesley: His Life, Times, and Influence on Music’, Proceedings of the Musical Association 20 (1893), 134.

25 Dr Busby, Memoirs of the Late Mr Jonathan Battishill, Communicated by Dr Busby, ed. Christopher Maxim www.christophermaxim.co.uk (7 August 2020), 3–4.

26 J. B. Trend, ‘Jonathan Battishill: From the Unpublished Recollections of R. J. S. Stevens’, Music & Letters 13/3 (1932), 267. The source for this anecdote is likely to have been Samuel Wesley himself.

27 Peter Ward Jones, ‘Battishill, Jonathan’, in Grove Music Online www.oxfordmusiconline.com (25 June 2020).

28 Temperley, The Hymn Tune Index, source BattJTH. Of these five texts, only one, ‘Jesus, Lord, we look to thee’, achieved any degree of widespread publication, appearing in a further nine collections; the other four appeared in only one or two other collections.

29 John Wesley, ed., A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (London: J. Paramore, 1780), iv.

30 Stanley Sadie, ‘Music in the Home II’, in Music in Britain: The Eighteenth Century, ed. H. Diack Johnstone and Roger Fiske (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 352–353.

31 See Drage, ‘Methodist Anthems’.

32 Kevin Watson, ‘The Price of Respectability: Methodism in Britain and the United States, 1791–1865’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to World Methodism, ed. William Gibson, Peter Forsaith and Martin Wellings (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 39.

33 Jonathan Barry, ‘Charles Wesley's Family and the Musical Life of Bristol’, in Music and the Wesleys, ed. Temperley and Banfield, 151.

34 Stephen Banfield, ‘Style, Will, and the Environment: Three Composers at Odds with History’, in Music and the Wesleys, ed. Temperley and Banfield, 124.

35 Alyson McLamore, ‘Harmony and Discord in the Wesley Family Concerts’, in Music and the Wesleys, ed. Temperley and Banfield, 170.

36 McLamore, ‘Harmony and Discord’, 169.

37 Banfield, ‘Style, Will, and the Environment’, 124.

38 Banfield, ‘Style, Will, and the Environment’, 127.

39 Sacred Harmony: A set of tunes collected by John Wesley for the use of the congregations in his connexion. An edition carefully revised and corrected by his nephew, Charles Wesley Esqr. (London: T. Blanshard, 1822), ii.

40 Temperley, ‘Methodist Church Music’.

41 For further detail see Sally Drage, ‘John Fawcett of Bolton: The Changing Face of Psalmody’, in Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies, volume 2, ed. Jeremy Dibble and Bennett Zon (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 61.

42 Philip Olleson, Samuel Wesley: The Man and His Music (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 26.

43 Olleson, Samuel Wesley, 229–230.

44 See Olleson, Samuel Wesley, 239.

45 See Banfield, ‘Style, Will, and the Environment’, 133–134, on hybridity in the piano works, and Peter Holman, ‘Samuel Wesley as Antiquarian Composer’, in Music and the Wesleys, ed. Temperley and Banfield, 191, on choral and instrumental works.

46 Samuel Wesley, Two Sacred Songs, ed. Robin Langley and Geoffrey Webber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), [2].

47 Cited in ‘Select List of Books Recently Published, Chiefly Religious’, in The Wesleyan Methodist Magazine 7 (1828), 688.

48 Kenton M. Stiles, ‘In the Beauty of Holiness: Wesleyan Theology, Worship, and the Aesthetic’, Wesleyan Theological Journal 32/2 (1997), 195.

49 Stiles, ‘In the Beauty of Holiness’, 196–198.

50 Stiles, ‘In the Beauty of Holiness’, 199.

51 Peter Forsaith, ‘Methodism and Its Images’, in T&T Clark Companion to Methodism, ed. Charles Yrigoyen, Jr (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 366.

52 Chapman, David M., Born in Song: Methodist Worship in Britain (Warrington: Church in the Market Place Publications, 2006), 2–3Google Scholar.

53 Karen B. Westerfield Tucker, ‘Methodist Liturgy and Worship’, in Ashgate Research Companion to World Methodism, ed. Gibson, Forsaith and Wellings, 269.

54 This foreshadows the prominent place of music in nineteenth-century domestic religion. See Cowgill, Rachel, ‘The Papers of C. I. Latrobe: New Light on Musicians, Music and the Christian Family in Late Eighteenth-Century England’, in Music in Eighteenth-Century Britain, ed. Jones, David Wyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 234–258Google Scholar.