Part I : Vanishing orthodoxies
The old men. A formula from Tillich ; Three twentieth-century church pieces ; Romanticism ; Romantic music ; Pedagogy ; Pedagogic music
The new men. A formula from C.P. Snow ; Modern music's cultural background ; Music and the new science ; What Stockhausen said ; Music and the new men
Part II : Problems of authority
Traditions of disobedience : five refutations of classical fundamentalism. Interpretation ; Free ornament and cadenza ; Continuo ; Romantic versus Baroque ; Textual criticism
The defect of fundamentalism. The music-lover's orthodoxy ; The challenge of jazz ; Standards ; Ambiguous moralities ; The organist's guilty secret ; Fundamentalism
Part III : Assault on conformity
The urge to conform. The proud piano ; The unsociable piano ; The antisocial piano ; The lonely piano ; The antivocal piano ; The organ uneasily enthroned ; The pianists
Alien forms of music. The insular music-lover ; More about jazz ; The case for and against jazz ; The cult of pop ; The case again pop ; Folk song
Part IV : The dimension of drama
Worship and the Anglicans. Worship is drama ; Audience participation ; Illustration from coventry ; Domestic or ceremonious? ; Music and this drama ; Evensong as programming
Drama and the protestants. "Nine lessons and carols" ; Drama of the mind ; The drama of rhetoric ; The fading of drama
The theater of faith. "Noye's fludde" ; The drama of the upper room ; Music at the eucharist
Part V : Church music transformed
Drama and church music. Return to the New Testament ; Misconceptions removed ; Impediments to drama ; Application to music ; The recovery of worship ; The disabilities of the artist are largely illusory ; Old music
new drama
New music. The church in secular society ; Farewell to pedagogy ; Let music be music ; "Treason of the clerks" ; New styles ; A man dies
for what? ; "Would that all the Lord's people were artists!"