Having the music be a meditative space, with micro-narratives and different areas of intensity, feels more intimately communicative than expecting everybody to agree: “Ah, that was the sad bit,” and “That was the climax right there.”

One of the most moving things about this musical tradition is happening upon it: walking through London and ducking into St. Paul’s Cathedral, for instance, and hearing the buttery luxuriousness of one of Herbert Howells’s canticles (a pair of texts sung, in the Anglican tradition, during Evensong), standing up the whole time. You’d be amazed how the body perceives musical detail when standing up: The difference between unison voices and voices in harmony, the length of line, subtle dynamic shifts — all hit you directly in the gut rather than in the sometimes detached concert muscle.

It is important to note, though, that this music is now actively performed and recorded in nonliturgical settings. Some of the more obscure 15th- and 16th-century large-scale choral works that would be awkward to include in modern worship (those of Cornysh, Fayrfax and Browne jump to mind) have been preserved almost entirely by excellent groups like the Tallis Scholars or Stile Antico. “O Sing Unto the Lord” calls attention to these more obscure composers, and in my fantasy world, everybody who reads it will immediately seek out as many recordings as they can find.

One of the small frustrations I had with the book is Mr. Gant’s tendency to offer what can feel like unnecessary superlatives, like “Thomas Tallis is easily the best composer in this story so far, and one of the two or three best of all.” (He then goes on to enumerate all of the ways in which Thomas Tallis is inarguably a fantastic composer.) Of Britten’s choral writing, he claims that the “Missa Brevis” is “the best of [his] commissioned liturgical works” — I found myself whimpering into the pages, “But what about ‘A Hymn to the Virgin,’ with that macaronic text and that Jacob’s ladder up to the lines ‘Of all thou bearest the prize, Lady, queen of paradise’?”