What is West Gallery music?

West Gallery music came to be so described (sometime after it had died out) because it was often performed by a band of singers and instrumentalists from a raised Gallery at the west (back) end of the church. A few country churches still have their west gallery, often occupied now by the organ, which replaced the West Gallery bands from the middle of the 19th century. West Gallery music emerged firstly in nonconformist circles and later within the Anglican Church to take advantage of the desire for more congregational singing, and for more interesting settings of the Psalms, and later of the freedom to sing non-biblical material such as hymns, which arrived relatively late in the Anglican Church in particular.

It was in very marked contrast to cathedral music, where professional choirs would continue to perform complex anthems and psalm settings, with the congregation largely passive listeners. Town & Country parish churches needed material that amateur musicians and congregations could deal with, and the result was a wonderful body of work with its own particular character. There is a particularly rich repertoire available for Christmas, of carols and Christmas hymns that should never have been allowed to drop into obscurity, including many tunes for “While shepherds watched their flocks by night”, which offer a much livelier alternative to the somewhat staid traditional tune.

West Gallery music is mentioned by a number of 19th-century writers, none more so than Thomas Hardy, who came from a family of church musicians in Dorset.

It flourished through to the mid-19th century, when both the Oxford Movement and the Anglican Evangelical Movement wanted to bring in a higher standard of music making, as they saw it, and what they considered to be a higher standard of hymnody. As a result, hymn books such as Hymns Ancient & Modern became widely used, and organs replaced the Gallery bands. It was much easier for a zealous reforming vicar to control an organist (who may be his wife or daughter) than to control the rather stubborn and independently minded village musicians making up the Gallery Quire.

Much West Gallery music is lively and joyful, and very expressive, and something was lost when it was replaced with the more staid, solemn, and “respectable” repertoire such as that found in Hymns Ancient and Modern. We regard it as our mission to bring some of this life and joy back.