The first principal part of this chapter explores sacred music in Wales from the Roman period to the English conquest. Christian observance in Wales may have been unbroken from the time of the Roman invasion onwards, and the four medieval cathedrals existed as sacred sites before Augustine’s mission of 578. Wales was part of the western Latin Church within the province of Canterbury. From the thirteenth century it was strongly influenced by the liturgical Use of Salisbury. However, only two substantial notated musical sources survive, both from the earlier fourteenth century: the Anian of Bangor Pontifical (with stronger provenance in East Anglia than Wales) and the Penpont antiphonal from the diocese of St Davids. This chapter considers their implications for our understanding of the repertoire and practice of sacred music in medieval Wales and also explores the role of the organ in the liturgy, drawing on the evidence of the pre-Reformation organ case at Old Radnor in Powys. The latter part of the chapter considers the effects of the Reformation on worship in Wales up to 1650. It examines compositions by John Lloyd, Philip ap Rhys and Elway Bevin, all of likely Welsh descent, and explains the significance of sources associated with Chirk Castle Chapel for understanding liturgical music in this period. After the Reformation, the English Book of Common Prayer was as alien as the Latin books it replaced in much of Wales. The Welsh translations of the Book of Common Prayer and the Bible were therefore crucial; the chapter concludes with an examination of Edmwnd Prys’ Welsh metrical psalter, Llyfr y Psalmau (1621).

This essay looks at the Christian context in which Britten lived and its impact on his work. When in 1940 he wrote that he was a member of a Christian nation, he could not have meant that Britain was a churchgoing nation, for most people were not active churchgoers. In fact, it would be necessary to go back to the seventeenth century to find a time when nearly everyone went to church. Britain was a Christian nation in the sense that its political, legal, ethical, and cultural life had been shaped by Protestant Christianity. By the 1920s this was a specifically English, rather than British, identity, for the disestablishment of the Welsh (1920) and Scottish (1921) churches, and the secession of the Irish Free State (1922) meant all three were intent on establishing their own distinctive identities and cultures. In mid-twentieth-century England, the Established Anglican Church, historically regarded as a ruling-class institution, remained closely associated with the monarchy and the state; thus, Anglican ritual governed public occasions and it was still regarded as part of an elitist and conservative Establishment.

Seven Last Words from the Cross is a landmark work in MacMillan’s career. Contextualized within MacMillan’s own oeuvre and the historical genre, this chapter analyses Seven Last Words both musically and theologically, demonstrating that rather than merely being a setting of the traditional text, MacMillan has provided a sophisticated exegesis of the seven last words uttered by Jesus. This is achieved through textual and musical means that demonstrate MacMillan’s modernist approach to tradition. Although the work is powerful and effective as an occasion-specific Christian work, MacMillan has managed to transcend time and place, and make the historicized narrative into a psychological melodrama. MacMillan’s exposition speaks to a traditional understanding of the seven last words representing respectively forgiveness, salvation, relationship, abandonment, distress, triumph and reunion. Through a series of connected musical episodes MacMillan has utilized an array of musical techniques that serve to underscore the dramatic narrative. By analysing key structural moments and deconstructing the sophisticated and multi-layered theology, this chapter demonstrates that MacMillan has, in the words of George Mackay Brown, found ‘an old wisdom out of the cluster of gathering shadows’. Ultimately, MacMillan leaves his listeners with a legend that is ultimately human and unfailingly optimistic.

It may seem slightly incongruous to look specifically at the liturgical music of James MacMillan, a composer for whom the liturgy has had such bearing on his entire compositional ethos and personal philosophy. For the liturgy has provided the impulse for both MacMillan’s large corpus of sacred choral pieces, and the bulk of his instrumental works. However, this over-riding influence of the liturgy makes an in-depth look at the purely liturgical works all the more relevant: here we find the composer stripped of the myriad of allusions that characterise other works and find him working in a specifically explicit manner. The chapter looks at MacMillan’s extant Mass settings, though will focus mainly on the setting from 2000 as the most succinct appraisal of his assimilating of the vernacular. It will also look at his Magnificat (1999), Nunc Dimittis (2000), Jubilate Deo (2009) and Te Deum settings, showing some of the composer’s current pre-occupations with the borrowing and recycling of material and ideas relating to form and through-composition.