Music In Traditional Churches During The Modern Era

Through much of the nineteenth century, worship in liturgical churches followed largely low-church convictions. In the mid-nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, many of these churches began recovering ancient patterns of worship. In music, this meant the recovery of Gregorian chant in the Catholic church, the return of Lutherans to sixteenth-century liturgy forms, a movement in some Anglican churches away from a Puritan-influenced worship to the recovery of catholic forms, and the trend in some free churches from revival-style worship to quasi-liturgical practices. Worship Forms and Music in Diverse Churches It has already been noted that, in its frontier culture, early American worship practices were exceedingly primitive. Concurrent with advance in education and in the arts, there was pressure in the older churches for the development and the standardization of worship forms. Following the War for Independence, all Protestant bodies severed their Old World connecti…