Whilst Contemporary Worship Music arose largely out of a desire to relate the music of the church to the music of everyday life, this function has been called increasingly into question by the diversity of musical lives present in contemporary society. Whilst Contemporary Worship Music is often a relatively homogenous genre the broader musical landscape rarely coheres any longer into a single universal mainstream. In this thesis I examine the relationship between individuals' musical lives away from a Contemporary Worship Music environment and their experience of the music within it. Through extended interviews with worshippers at St Aldates Church, Oxford I interrogate the ways in which they frame and articulate their experiences within and outside of a worship context and examine the connections and disjunctures between their experience and evaluation of these different environments. Whilst assimilation and multiculturalism are often deployed as models for handling diversity within church congregations, I find these models of musical diversity to be misleading and prefer instead to describe the congregational environment in terms of recent understandings of cosmopolitanism. Likewise, I find ontologies of neutrality that have arisen within Contemporary Worship Music discourse which relegate musical tastes and preferences to a level which is both private and lacking in significance to be problematic and suggest instead that a focus on ethics leads to important but neglected areas of concern.

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Fifteenth-century English music had a profound impact on mainland Europe, with several important innovations (e.g. the cyclic cantus firmus Mass) credited as English in origin. However, the turbulent history of the Church in England has left few English sources for this deeply influential repertory. The developing narrative surrounding apparently English technical innovations has therefore often focussed on the recognition of English works in continental manuscripts, with these efforts most recently crystallised in Curtis and Wathey's 'Fifteenth-Century English Liturgical Music: A List of the Surviving Repertory'. The focus of discussion until now has generally been on a dichotomy between English and continental origin. However, as more details emerge of the opportunities for cultural cross-fertilisation, it becomes increasingly clear that this may be a false dichotomy. This thesis re-evaluates the complex issues of provenance and diffusion affecting the mid-fifteenth-century cyclic Mass. By breaking down the polarization between English and continental origins, it offers a new understanding of the provenance and subsequent use of many Mass cycles. Contact between England and the continent was frequent, multifarious and quite possibly reciprocal and, despite strong national trends, there exists a body of work that can best be understood in relation to international cultural exchange. This thesis helps to clarify the provenance of a number of Mass cycles, but also suggests that, for Masses such as the anonymous Thomas cesus and Du cuer je souspier, Le Rouge's So ys emprentid, and even perhaps Bedyngham's Sine nomine, cultural exchange is key to our understanding. This thesis also offers a more detailed overview of the chronology of fifteenth-century English Mass cycles and defines their various structural norms, as well as those Masses which depart from these.