Every major Christian tradition kept its evening office, and each made it a signature. The Byzantine rite opens the liturgical day at vespers, following the Genesis reckoning in which evening precedes morning, so great feasts begin the night before with festal vespers and the vigil; the service's invariable Psalm 104, recounting creation, sets each new liturgical day at the world's beginning again. The Roman rite kept vespers as the solemn evening hour whose first and second celebrations frame every Sunday and solemnity, and the 1971 reform named it, with Lauds, a hinge of the office that even the busiest are urged to keep.
The most distinctive modern descendant is Anglican. Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer fused vespers and compline into Evening Prayer, and the choral foundations of the English cathedrals turned it into Evensong: psalms in Anglican chant, Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in settings that form one of the largest continuous bodies of church music in existence, all offered daily whether or not a congregation attends. Choral Evensong is now among the most attended regular services in England, drawing many who claim no faith, and broadcasts of it have run weekly on the BBC since 1926, one of the longest unbroken traditions in radio. The evening hour's durability across such different churches rests where Lauds' does, on the fit of prayer to moment: the day's end asks for thanksgiving, reckoning and entrusting, and Vespers has supplied the words for seventeen centuries.