A popular carol to a “new” tune
It was no surprise to find the text of one of our earliest Christmas hymns, While Shepherds watched, in our Carol service order of service. Hymns were common in reformed churches elsewhere from the reformation onwards, but not in the Church of England. What did exist, encouraged by the puritans, was the singing of metrical paraphrases of the psalms, and While Shepherds Watched, published by poet laureate Nahum Tate and Nicholas Brady in 1700, is very much in that tradition. Much more of a surprise was the music, sung by the female voices of the choir, and the attribution to Jane Savage, 1752 – 1824. A female composer, at that date? That she was little known was less surprising; female composers tend to be obscure.
This work, I now discover, was unearthed and edited, and published by the Church Music Society just in time for Christmas, by an MA student at the University of York, Rachel Webber, who was looking into the musical life of the eighteenth-century charity institutions for girls and women. She said ‘when I was looking at the one 1785 collection of music for The Asylum, I was shocked and thrilled to see an extended piece with the popular hymn/carol text of While shepherds watch’d their flocks by night by a ‘Miss Savage’.” ( https://www.york.ac.uk/news-and-events/news/2020/research/hymn-student-savage/ ).
The slightly Handelian flavour of Jane Savage’s music perhaps picked up on family tradition. Her father, William Savage, was a soloist for Handel, both as a boy treble and an adult bass, and sang in the first London performances of Messiah, itself associated with a charity institution, the Foundling Hospital. The music of churches and cathedrals was a solely male preserve, but music in the charity institutions could, and did, involve women. According to Rachel Webber, “it’s interesting that whereas cathedral music at the time tended to hark back to the baroque style of composers such as Handel, the music for the hospitals was more progressive, looking forward to the classical style.” Miss Savage was apparently a talented harpsichordist and singer, performing only in private, and her music mostly written for the family home. Alas, she seems to have given up composing after the death of her father in 1789 and her marriage in 1793. The performance by our choir, predating that by the Ely Cathedral girls’ choristers two days later, must, excitingly, have been just about the first for over 200 years. How good that HPC has assisted one female composer, however belatedly, to achieve credit and recognition.
