The village choirs do very well as long as their organist or vicar is not too ambitious in his choice of music.  There is a fatal tendency in many places to do away with the old hymns, which every one has known from a boy, and substitute the very inferior modern ones now to be found in our books.  This is the greatest mistake, if I may say so.  A man is far more likely to sing, and feel deeply when he is singing, those simple words and notes he learnt long ago in the nursery at home.  And there is nothing finer in the world than some of our old English hymns.

I appeal to any readers who have known what it is to feel deeply; and few there are to whom this does not apply, if some of those moments of their lives, when the thoughts have soared into the higher regions of emotion, have not been those which followed the opening strain of the organ as it quietly ushered in the old evening hymn, “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide,” or any other hymn of the same kind.  It is the same in the vast cathedral as in the little Norman village church.  There are fifty hymns in our book which would be sufficient to provide the best possible music for our country churches.  The best organists realise this.  Joseph Barnby always chose the old hymns; and you will hear them at Westminster and St. Paul’s.  The country organist, however, imagines that it is his duty to be always teaching his choir some new and difficult tune; the result in nine cases out of ten being “murder” and a rapid falling off in the congregation.

The Cotswold folk on the whole are fond of music, though they have not a large amount of talent for it.  The Chedworth band still goes the round of the villages once or twice a year.  These men are the descendants of the “old village musicians,” who, to quote from the Strand Musical Magazine for September 1897, “led the Psalmody in the village church sixty years ago with stringed and wind instruments.  Mr. Charles Smith, of Chedworth, remembers playing the clarionet in Handel’s Zadok the Priest, performed there in 1838 in honour of the Queen’s accession.”  He talks of a band of twelve, made up of strings and wood-wind.

I am bound to say that the music produced by the Chedworth band at the present day, though decidedly creditable in such an old-world village, is rather like the Roman remains for which the district is so famous; it savours somewhat of the prehistoric.  But when the band comes round and plays in the hall of our old house on Christmas Eve, I have many a pleasant chat with the Chedworth musicians; they are so delightfully enthusiastic, and so grateful for being allowed to play.  When I gave them a cup of tea they kept repeating, “A thousand thanks for all your kindness, sir.”