¹ For the composer’s motivations in undertaking this work, see Williams, Ursula Vaughan, R. V. W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 70–72 Google Scholar; and Onderdonk, Julian, ‘Folksong Arrangements, Hymn Tunes and Church Music’, in The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams, ed. by Frogley, Alain and Thomson, Aidan (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 136–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar (pp. 146 and 153–54).

² Dearmer served as words editor on all four projects, while Shaw assisted Vaughan Williams only on SoP and SoPE. The three men jointly edited another important collection, The Oxford Book of Carols (1928), discussed below.

³ I have identified seventy-eight tunes adapted from traditional songs, carols, and dances that Vaughan Williams published as hymn tunes; these can be seen over the course of my three checklists of the composer’s complete arrangements of traditional music in nos. 49–51 of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Journal (RVWSJ), published in October 2010, February 2011, and June 2011, respectively. Footnotes 15 and 16 of issue no. 51 offer some informed guesses about hundreds of other hymn-tune adaptations that Vaughan Williams made from both folk and liturgical sources. Representative spin-off publications from EH, SoP, and SoPE include Hymns Selected from the English Hymnal (1921) and Songs of Praise for Boys and Girls (1929); there are many others. Usually these publications simply duplicated hymn tunes first appearing in the parent volume, though very occasionally they introduced new tunes. This study will sometimes reference these spin-offs, but is principally focused on the major publications only. Readers of this essay are encouraged to have copies of these books to hand. An archived edition of the 1906 EH appears at <https://archive.org/details/theenglishhymnal00milfuoft>; an archived edition of SoP appears at <https://archive.org/details/songsofpraise0000unse_r2d5/> [both accessed 20 October 2024].

⁴ The Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 74 and 85. For an indication of the popularity of the three EH tunes cited within a wide array of Christian denominations, see the entries for these tunes at <https://hymnary.org/> [accessed 20 October 2024].

⁵ Routley, , Twentieth-Century Church Music (Herbert Jenkins, 1964), p. 98 Google Scholar.

⁶ My policy has been to count as a congregational hymn tune every item described as a ‘hymn’ or ‘hymn tune’, unless internal evidence unambiguously indicates otherwise. Thus Four Hymns, which Kennedy’s catalogue entry (A Catalogue of the Works of Ralph Vaughan Williams, 2nd edn (Oxford University Press, 1996)) clearly shows to be a work for tenor soloist and orchestra, can be discounted even though it appears under ‘Hymnals and Hymn Tunes’ in his 1964 index (it was removed from the index in the 1996 revision). The same goes for ‘The Airmen’s Hymn’, also appearing in the same index heading but unambiguously designated a ‘unison song’ in the catalogue. On the other hand, famous men originated as a unison song (as ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’) and is so indicated in Kennedy’s catalogue, yet when it comes to the tune’s reappearance in SoPE, Kennedy drops the earlier designation and calls it a ‘hymn’. Accordingly, it appears in Kennedy’s column in the Table marked as a hymn tune. (I disagree with this designation, incidentally: see the discussion below.) How and where an author lists items can also influence my conclusions. Saylor, for example, follows Kennedy in using the term ‘hymn’ to describe ‘A Hymn of Freedom’, but because he places the work in a larger category titled ‘Works for Choir or Unison Voice with Piano or Organ Accompaniment’, it’s clear that he views this particular hymn as something other than a congregational hymn tune. Kennedy’s description lacks this level of precision, leaving open the possibility that he did view it so. The Kennedy and Saylor columns in the Table reflect these differences of opinion, as I interpret them.

⁷ Temperley, Nicholas, The Music of the English Parish Church, 2 vols (Cambridge University Press, 1979)Google Scholar, i, passim. A useful, if brief, summary of these wide-ranging developments is found on pp. 344–48.

⁸ As defined by Watson, J. R., The English Hymn: A Critical and Historical Study (Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 22–41 Google Scholar, and Westermeyer, Paul, Let the People Sing: Hymn Tunes in Perspective (GIA Publications, 2005), pp. 4–5 Google Scholar. Note that these scholars limit their focus specifically to Christian hymns and not a broader reckoning which might include praise songs to pagan deities and world religious figures, or odes to heroes, political leaders, and country. I do the same. Their conceptions of ‘the worship service’ and of ‘the congregation’, too, hew closely to traditional formulations and avoid the theoretical and ethnographic redefinitions increasingly met with in studies of congregational song. In this, again, I follow their lead. For examples of the new approach, see the recent essays appearing in Studying Congregational Music: Key Issues, Methods, and Theoretical Perspectives, ed. by Andrew Mall, Jeffers Engelhardt, and Monique M. Ingalls (Routledge, 2021).

⁹ Nicholas Temperley, The Hymn Tune Index: A Census of English-Language Hymn Tunes in Printed Sources from 1535 to 1820, 4 vols (Clarendon Press, 1998). See ‘Coverage and Definitions’, i, pp. 71–75.

¹⁰ For an overview of his work with amateur musicians, see my ‘Amateur Music and Musicians’, in Vaughan Williams in Context, ed. by Julian Onderdonk and Ceri Owen (Cambridge University Press, 2024), pp. 78–85.

¹¹ Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘The Music’, in The English Hymnal with Tunes (Oxford University Press, 1906), pp. x–xix (pp. xii–xiii).

¹² On these interrelated movements, see Jeremy Dibble, ‘The Unison Hymn Tune in Britain, 1861–1939’, in The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology, paragraphs 1–9 <https://hymnology.hymnsam.co.uk/u/unison-hymn-tune-in-britain,-1861-1939> [accessed 7 April 2025]. Temperley discusses the musical aims of the Oxford movement in Parish Church, i, pp. 253–62; see also ibid., pp. 303–10, for an overview and critique of the aesthetic reaction to Victorian harmony.

¹³ ‘The Music’, p. x.

¹⁴ The SATB harmonic accompaniment might also be sung by the choir alone, or with both choir and organ. See the Appendix for a full description of the performance practice of Layout A tunes.

¹⁵ B and C resemble Layout A insofar as they, too, are notated on two staves, though C introduces more complex counterpoint and is not limited to four-part harmony. D resembles Layout C in its contrapuntal elaboration except that it is notated on three staves, with the melody presented on the top stave alone. Again, see the Appendix for full descriptions.

¹⁶ Nonetheless, it should be noted that since at least the 1870s, organists had been ‘filling out’ simple SATB (Layout A) harmony with octave doublings and other additions (or subtractions) in their hymn accompaniments in order to provide textural, timbral, and dynamic contrast from verse to verse; see Temperley, Parish Church, i, pp. 310–13. How exactly the ‘idiomatic’ counterpoint of Vaughan Williams’s Layouts C and D was meant to interact with this performance practice is unclear.

¹⁷ The non-metrical text of famous men comes from Ecclesiasticus, one of the books of the Apocrypha; its labelling as a ‘canticle’ in SoPE was probably intended to signal this Biblical provenance.

¹⁸ Quoted in Kennedy, Works, p. 188. Vaughan Williams had felt ecclesiastical pressure in 1906 to include tunes he disliked; see ibid., pp. 65–68.

¹⁹ Dearmer, ‘Preface’, in Songs of Praise with Tunes (Oxford University Press, 1925), pp. iii–ix (p. iii).

²⁰ Scholarship on the unison song is strangely lacking, and there is no comprehensive overview. My account here of its evolution into the unison hymn tune brings together information found — inevitably passim — in the following sources: Gordon Cox, A History of Music Education in England, 1872–1928 (Scolar Press, 1993); Rainbow, Bernarr, Music and the English Public School (Boethius Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Dibble, ‘The Unison Hymn Tune’. See also the many debates about school songs and how to sing them in the music education journal The School Music Review (1892–1930). Each issue of this journal printed one or two school songs as inserts, many of them unison songs, and usually presented in both traditional staff and tonic sol-fa notations.

²¹ The most recent study of tonic sol-fa is McGuire, Charles Edward, Music and Victorian Philanthropy: The Tonic Sol-Fa Movement (Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

²² For the role of Smyth’s and other unison songs in the suffragist movement, see ibid, pp. 186–207. For Parry and ‘Jerusalem’, see Jeremy Dibble, C. Hubert H. Parry: His Life and Music (Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 483–85. A detailed study of ‘community singing’ lying outside our immediate topic is Russell, Dave, ‘Abiding Memories: The Community Singing Movement and English Social Life in the 1920s’, Popular Music, 27.1 (2008), pp. 117–33, doi:10.1017/S0261143008001505 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ Peppin, ‘Public Schools and their Music’ (1927), reprinted in Rainbow, Music and the English Public School, pp. 125–229 (‘congregational practices’, pp. 208–09). For singing classes at public schools generally, see ibid., pp. 3–7, 18–19, 21, 24–26, 32, 36, and 47. Singing as part of dormitory life (called ‘house singing’ and usually involving competitions between houses) is also discussed in ibid., pp. 24–25, 33, 43, 46, 182, and 239–42. House singing typically included unison songs.

²⁴ ‘Preface’, Songs of Praise with Tunes, p. iii.

²⁵ Dearmer, ‘Preface to the Enlarged Edition’, Songs of Praise: Enlarged Edition (Oxford University Press, 1931), pp. iii–iv (p. iii).

²⁶ Watson, The English Hymn, pp. 525–26.

²⁷ One editorial note suggests that the Choir Songs ‘might be sung as Anthems’, while another assumes that they ‘will have to be sung by the choir alone’ (SoP, pp. 717 and viii). Cagily, though, and perhaps with an eye to maximizing sales, the editors hold out the possibility that the songs might also be undertaken by the people ‘in those places where congregational practices are exceptionally frequent’ (p. viii).

²⁸ According to hymnary.org <https://hymnary.org/tune/guildford_williams> [accessed 12 December 2024]. down ampney, by contrast, has been reprinted in eighty-eight other hymnals. famous men has been reprinted once.

²⁹ Dearmer’s and Vaughan Williams’s left-leaning political views are relevant here; see Katie Palmer Heathman, ‘Christian Socialism in The English Hymnal’, in Vaughan Williams in Context, ed. by Onderdonk and Owen, pp. 127–34.

³⁰ <https://hymnary.org/text/and_did_those_feet_in_ancient_time?extended=true#instances> [accessed 12 December 2024].

³¹ Briggs, Songs of Faith (Oxford University Press, 1945), p. vi.

³² The service was cancelled when the Abbey objected that there was no comparable hymn for the Army or Navy; see Vaughan Williams, letter no. 1659 to Norman Peterkin, 1 May 1942 <https://vaughanwilliamsfoundation.org> [accessed 24 July 2024].

³³ Vaughan Williams arranged the work in at least three non-unison formats as well, including for SATB chorus; see Kennedy, Catalogue, pp. 169–70.

³⁴ ‘Notes on the Music’, Songs of Praise, pp. vii–viii (p. vii).

³⁵ Temperley, Parish Church, i, pp. 303–14 and 323.

³⁶ Vaughan Williams, ‘The Music’, p. xiii.

³⁷ Ibid., p. xiv.

³⁸ Arthur Sullivan’s antiphonal setting of st anne, from 1874, complete with ever-contrasting vocal and organ parts, provides a mid-Victorian precedent. See discussion in Temperley, Parish Church, i, p. 312. (A score appears in ibid., ii, pp. 189–95.)

³⁹ Twentieth-Century Church Music, p. 105.

⁴⁰ Waters, Charles F., ‘The “Hymn-Anthem”: A New Choral Form’, The Musical Times, 71.1049 (1930), pp. 632–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴¹ ‘Notes on the Music’, p. vii. Examples from SoP include bangor (no. 192) and university (no. 362), among many others.

⁴² A full study of the hymn-anthem is needed, and not merely because these examples from SoP — hymn tunes all — fit Routley’s description no less ably than the hymn-anthems proper that he discusses. The fact is that the term has been used very loosely, in part because the genre was itself very fluid. Routley even mentions ‘hymn-anthems’ by Stanford and Charles Wood in which the congregation plays no role whatsoever. The term has also been applied to ‘free’ anthems whose only connection to hymns is that the text is drawn from a hymn. See for example Sherwood, Gayle, ‘Charles Ives and the American Choral Tradition’, The Choral Journal, 43.8 (2003), pp. 27–32 Google Scholar.

⁴³ The ‘survey’ in Table 1 is actually incomplete. Ottaway misses this composition entirely, while Saylor files the tune under ‘arrangements’ when in fact the tune is original to Vaughan Williams.

⁴⁴ Twentieth-Century Church Music, p. 105.

⁴⁵ Steve Roud, Folk Song in England (Faber & Faber, 2017), pp. 519–28.

⁴⁶ See my checklist of Vaughan Williams’s English carol arrangements in RVWSJ, 49 (2010), pp. 3–10, for specifics.

⁴⁷ Dearmer, ‘Preface’ to The Oxford Book of Carols (Oxford University Press, 1928), pp. v–xxvi (p. xvii).

⁴⁸ Ibid., pp. xxiv–vi.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. xxvi.

⁵⁰ Kennedy, Catalogue, p. 155.

⁵¹ Twentieth-Century Church Music, p. 102. The two tunes will be reprinted, with commentary added by the author, in an upcoming article to be published in the journal The Hymn.

⁵² ‘The Music’, p. xii.