This thesis explores efforts to “reform” the composition of Catholic church music by imitating medieval and Renaissance models, with a focus on francophone Europe from the zenith of this historicism at the turn of the century to its gradual sublimation between the World Wars.

Chapter 1 describes the ideology behind historicist church composition during this period by analysing the debates among musicians, clerics, and critics over the role of old music in creation, and the relationship to be established between new music and old. Most writers disavowed pastiche by adopting an ahistorical attitude towards music of the past. These debates belonged to a wider problem in contemporaneous European musical culture, that of how to write in the shadow of an ever-expanding canon.

Subsequent chapters turn to more technical discourse on historicist composition. Chapter 2 retraces the aspirations of church composers to invent a new style of choral polyphony independent of the academic “Palestrina style”. Chapter 3 pieces together how new conceptions of “modality” emerged out of older ones of tonalité ancienne. Both developments afforded new ways of claiming a creative affiliation with old music.

The conclusion considers the place of historicist church music in the wider context of European and especially French art music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, striving to refine the critical categories available for interpreting this repertoire, and to ponder their implications for historiographical narratives of French musical modernism.

Several concerns run through the whole thesis: to identify changes in the canon of antique sacred music and connect them to their compositional ramifications; to relate church music, usually seen as insular and functionalist, to secular historical and aesthetic thought; and to replace vague or inappropriate categories for interpreting this repertoire, such as pastiche, imitation, and anti-modernism, with fine distinctions grounded in historical context. This last is achieved through closer reading of a wider array of musical examples within a thicker documentary context, and by drawing on the arsenal of critical perspectives developed over the past thirty years for interpreting historicism in more canonical repertoires, adapted here to the particular situation of church music in the early twentieth century.