‘In
music, there seems to be an umbilical link with the sacred. Through
the centuries, musicians have proved themselves to be the midwives of
faith, bringing their gifts to the historic challenge of inspiring
the faithful in worship’ (James Macmillan, Sandford Lecture, 2008)
Music and singing has long been
associated with religion, and no more so than in the Judeo, Christian
tradition. If we consider the bible, it is full of musical references
and songs: In the O.T. we have of course, the psalms, song of songs,
trumpets, hymns, words of praise and emotion that speak of humanity’s
relationship with God, and the story of theirs and our journey on
life’s pilgrimage.
In the New Testament we have images
of angels singing endless praises to God in the book of Revelation
and the simple liturgical use of a hymn sung at the Last supper with
Jesus and his disciples.
Tonight, I want to suggest that
music is and always has been an intrinsic expression of faith. That
through our belief in God the creator, and as created human beings,
we have a natural drive to praise that creator and to express
ourselves, both highs and lows, through music, which can express more
powerfully than mere words, what it means to pray and praise, and can
help us to come closer to an inexpressible God.
It’s going to be something of a
historical journey, from ancient to modern, and I will be playing
short clips of music to demonstrate my points as I go along. My main
argument goes to the heart of doctrinal theology: Christianity is not
merely a set of dogmatic facts to be adhered to, but is a life-force.
It’s not just about the head, but is also about the heart. It is,
to use a long word: existential, we have to live it.
Music is the natural expression of
life in all its fullness, both great occasions and dreadful ones. One
of the oldest forms of song, the psalms, offer us great insight into
what it is to be human and there have been many musical settings of
psalms that try to capture their full sense of life’s rich
experience. Before my talk we heard a little of the plainchant style.
Here’s the familiar Anglican chant that let’s the words speak for
themselves. Other composers seek to express the real drama of the
psalms.
Whatever the setting is like, it is
hard for us to join together in music in the context of worship and
treat that music objectively. When we think of music liturgically, we
become involved, and all music becomes subjective. To give an extreme
example, if we are at a funeral and singing a hymn, or listening to a
piece, it cannot be objective for the listener, because the context
tells us that this death points to our own human frailty and
weakness. Likewise for the performer, there can be no objectivity in
worship music. Mark Kilfoyle puts it like this: ‘When sacred music
is performed, who is listening?'
Depending
on your perspective, the answer can range from an accidental few –
those passing along the street, perhaps, as a church choir rehearses
for an evening service, lending their ears briefly, pleasurably, to
fragments of song – to a paying audience in a concert hall, to
the mightiest listener of all, the very One to whom so much sacred
music is addressed. God is certainly, at the very least, the imagined
listener of so many of these moving petitions and prayers in music.’
(Mark
Kilfoyle, taken from programme notes for The Sixteen Choral
Pilgrimage, 2009)
LITURGY
In
liturgy, in worship, music has the purpose of offering our creator
our time and gifts, minds, bodies and souls, seeking to be closer to
him, and to commune with the divine. Just as great churches and
cathedrals were designed to symbolise this act, so music expresses
the same desire to be attentive to God. The performer can be
disciplined and practised or informal and spontaneous, as long as
sincerity exists, it is facilitate worship. As listeners, music can
aid our wordless search for God and mediate, transport our feeble
prayers and ourselves closer to God. Thus, the performer and
listener’s relationship reflects that of creator and created.
HISTORY
If
I am considering western music, then the plainchant we heard at the
beginning is about as simple and as early as we get. But when this
single strand of music was combined with another tune and another
one, dating from the 12th and 13th centuries in
Europe, then we have polyphony, literally, many sounds. Moreover, in
the middle ages, theology was often imbedded in the music itself, for
example, if a piece was in triple time, ¾ as we now call it,
or three beats in a bar, this was indicted with a circle at the start
of the manuscript, because the holy trinity is also 3, and as the
trinity is perfect in union, so is a circle perfectly joined with no
beginning or end. Likewise many composers chose to include number
games in their music to indicate some theological concept, known as
numerology.
Throughout
history, composers have devoted their art to God. Bach used to write
Deo Gratias, thanks be to God, at the end of his pieces, to show
where the gift of music had originally come from. I like the circle
metaphor in terms of musical response to our Christian faith. We
start with the gift of music or a musical talent, which leads to a
potential in a person to respond to the gift, to nuture the gift and
to use it. Once used it leads to the experience of the music itself,
as performer, listener and participant. Combined with the worship
context, this becomes a faith experience and a creative response to
God the creator. Thus the circle of music and faith is completed by
the acknowledgement that the creative musical instinct is a gift, to
which others can respond.
Many
composer’s sacred music has been shaped by the challenging
religious and cultural times in which they have lived. For instance
in this country, we have the medieval, which we have heard, to the
Reformation, a country rising out of a puritan
Commonwealth in the 1660s, rebuilidng culture, art, music and
sacramental religion, to an unsteady and uncertain eighteenth century
with its many monarchs with varying degrees of denominational
alleigences. From huge Church growth in the nineteenth century to
what is popularly believed to be a slow decline in twentieth, we now
live in a new era of a so-called ‘secular society’ where ‘much
debate about religion in recent times has become polarised and
fractious’ (Macmillan, Sandford St. Martins Lecture, 2008).
For
instance, when Henry Purcell was born, the Commonwealth was
coming to an end. Since 1649 and the execution of Charles I, the
Puritans had sought to bring strong government, social justice and
pure religion. The reality however, for a country where virtually
everyone had a Christian faith, was a time of religious and
liturgical famine. The episcopacy had been abolished, as had the Book
of Common Prayer, the use of organs in Church and the Eucharist were
banned; the Lord’s Prayer had been abandoned by the Puritans as
potentially popish. Even Christmas was cancelled! The diarist John
Evelyn could find nowhere to celebrate Christmas in 1652, 1652 or
1654. In 1655 he managed to find a service with a sermon and, in 1656
and 1657, risked imprisonment when he attended a service of the
Eucharist and received the sacrament.
However, 1662 Act of Uniformity
under the restored King Charles II gave the Prayer Book have a new
lease of life, and it would have been the main form of service
familiar to Henry Purcell as he grew up, all other forms of service
being suppressed. Purcell used well the eloquence of the Prayer Book
words to great effect in pieces such as his Funeral Sentences
(with words adapted from Job 14,1) that reflect the poignancy of the
liturgical moment at which they were to be sung in the funeral:
When they come to the Grave, while
the Corpse is made ready to be laid into the earth, the Priest shall
say, or the Priest and Clerks shall sing: Man that is born of a woman
hath but a short time to live …
The
power of the words would surely not be lost on Purcell, who lived
through the great plague of 1665/6, the great fire of London, and who
had six children, only two of which survived him.
CAN
WE LISTEN TO SACRED MUSIC IN A SECULAR SETTING?
At
least one person would argue that you can perform sacred music in a
secular setting, but you cannot take the sacred out of the music.
The
Scottish composer, James MacMillan has said that music gives us ‘a
glimpse of something beyond the horizons of our materialism or our
contemporary values’. Whether we imagine such music reaching the
divine ear or not, we can take MacMillan’s point that all music is
already religious, not necessarily for its literal content, as for
the way we listen to it. A Christian faith, has been the starting
point for much of James’ Macmillan’s music, especially for choir:
Religion … is often discussed as
an extra-musical starting point for my work. Religion causes one to
take positions and can be a confrontational issue at the best of
times, even within the supposedly theologically neutral space of the
concert hall. (“Raising Sparks”, Tempo, 1997)
The
centrality of Macmillan’s faith, however, need not make the music
exclusive to the non-believer, but the listener should recognise the
conceptual origins of the compositional art:
So for those people who initially do
not want to engage with theology, they should not need to. But to
ignore where it’s come from is to ignore something of the substance
and essence of the music.
Just
as Purcell made the most of the artistic benefits of living in a
post-puritanical age, and Handel capitalised on the days of
Hanovarian grandeur, Macmillan eschews the ‘Puritanism’ of the
modernist rejection of Western music’s tradition. His music
embraces ‘the technical gains of the post-war modernists while
relinquishing that set’s purist avoidance of Western music’s
tradition.’ (Daniel
Jaffé).
This too is linked with the notion of faith:
Macmillan readily accepts that his
love of that tradition reflects his own world-view as a Roman
Catholic: ‘There wouldn’t even be Catholicism if there had been
an attempt to try and dam up the past in the same, puritanical way.
Catholicism needs to have its past as well as its potential future;
and therefore I suppose that conditions the way I look at the
past.’(Interview with Daniel
Jaffé,
1999)
Macmillan
is very much part of that potential future warning that a liberal
elite with an ‘ignorance-fuelled hostility to religion’ are
trying to drive out religion from public life and culture.’(Sandford
St. Martin Lecture) Thus, Macmillan argues, ‘Embracing
spirituality is now one of the most radical and counter-cultural
moves a musician can make.’
The main battle is no longer, as in
1659, that between Puritan, Roman Catholic and Anglican religion in
Britain, nor, as in 1710 betweeen Whig and Tory, but between religion
and aggressive non-believers:
A smug ignorance, a gross
oversimplification and caricature that serves as an analytical
understanding of religion, is the common intellectual currency. The
bridge has to be built by Christians and others being firm in
resisting increasingly aggressive attempts to still their voices.
The language of the battle-field is
Macmillan’s own. If this is a fight for religion’s place within
society then, he suggests, even though there is a common ‘assumption
that a war has been won by the forces of the grand secular project’,
nevertheless, the atheists are on the losing side:
The campaigning atheists, as opposed
to the live-and-let-live variety, are raising their voices because
they recognise that they are losing; the project to establish a
narrow secular orthodoxy is failing.
For Macmillan, a bridge needs to be
built between the Christian world view and the secular European
culture in which they live. This is to be done by ‘speaking truth
to power’ and ‘expressing their insights in creativity according
to their beliefs.’
Macmillan’s idea finds its
inspiration in the words of Pope John Paul II in his Letter to
Artists:
Even beyond its typically religious
expressions true art has a close affinity with the world of faith so
that, even in situations where the culture and the Church are far
apart, art remains a kind of bridge to religious experience (Pope
John Paul II, 1992).
This is true particularly with music
of all ages, the ‘umbilical link with the sacred’ and the
musicians who are the ‘midwives of faith’.
It doesn’t really matter what
style you prefer, but the sincerity of engagement with the music in
worship, or meditation. Good music will transport you. It’s all
about transcendence.
Music has always been an essential
expression, not only of what it is to be a religious believer, but
what it is to be human. To engage with both religious text and music,
is to touch the numinous, the spiritual in all of us. As James
Macmillan so eloquently puts it:
‘I believe it is God's divine
spark which kindles the musical imagination now, as it has always
done, and reminds us, in an increasingly dehumanised world, of what
it means to be human.’
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