| WHEN he pitched the idea of a series of programmes on sacred music in collaboration with the Open University, the Head of BBC Classical Music, Peter Maniura, enthusiastically threw in all kinds of themes to complement a printed round-the-table first draft.
Below the full-colour stained-glass window on its cover, there was the celebrated saying attributed to St Augustine that he who sings “prays twice”. To this, Mr Maniura added an important note of modernity: he wanted to capture the context — evocatively past and immediately present — of the four cities on which the programmes would be focused: respectively, Paris, Rome, London, and Leipzig.
What were they like when the featured composers were there — Léonin and Pérotin; Palestrina; Byrd and Tallis; and Bach? And what are they like now: how does the legacy of these composers live on?
Mr Maniura was adamant that there should no rosy-cheeked choirboys in ruffs and red surplices, with soft-focus beeswax candles smoking in the background; and the choir on which the music would focus would not be cathedral boys, but a professional group whose mainstay was early church music, but who used women for the top parts.
Other choirs who still sing the repertoire would complement the professionals: there are Palestrina enthusiasts from the home town from which the composer took his name, and there is some lusty singing from Lutheran hymn-singers. In a separately televised concert, the star in Allegri’s Miserere would be the top pop-Baroque madonna-soprano Elin Manahan Thomas, whose easy-on-the-ear floating high-notes would complement her blue-eyed easiness on the eyes of the viewers.
There is modern paraphernalia — Volkswagens, Audis, and smart Deutsche Bundesbahn trains, their clean lines and efficiency not at all at odds with the music of Bach. Tourists are not edited out: quite the reverse. The testimony of those involved in keeping the music alive features prominently: an Italian choir-trainer on a fancy motorbike; a somewhat severe German organist; a few librarians and musicologists; and a couple of Lutheran pastors who happened to be passing through when the crew were filming.
Amid this context, the continuing vibrant life of the music is underlined as much as its history is explored: sacred music in a secular world.
The one term no one really thought to define was “sacred music” itself. A meaningless genre, perhaps, is it synonymous with “church music” — “worship music”, even? Not quite that. It can be extended beyond Christianity, and there is perhaps a notion that it is a cut above mere liturgical fodder. Is “sacred” music more elaborate, perhaps? Or could it be defined by its durability: music that somehow has lasted? A lot of it certainly has.
Few would dispute the designation of the corpus of Bach’s cantatas as among the pinnacles of this repertoire, but a glance at their history rides a coach-and-four through the durability theory. Never published in their day, they were eminently disposable, specific to a particular Sunday in a particular church. No sooner had they been performed than Bach was back to the drawing board to compose more. How surprised he would have been at their durability, eternity even. Perhaps music becomes sacred the longer it lasts.
Can it be explained why some pieces last and others do not? Here we touch on the nub of one of those most fascinating questions that no empirical discipline can ever answer — neither psychology, nor musical analysis, nor aesthetics.
THAT’S not to say that a psychologically and physiologically driven scrutiny of music cannot teach us a few things. Take the case of plainsong, for example — a powerful unifying tool adopted by the Church once musical notation, albeit of a rudimentary sort, had been established.
We can view it historically as the foundation stone of medieval and Renaissance music, and many pieces later on; but that tells us little about its effect and why it is still popular — especially among those who have lost their faith — as an invoker of the spiritual, a stress-reliever even, a hypnotic therapy. A glance at its components helps to tell us why.
It is almost unique in Western music in being ametrical — without regular rhythm. Unlike most other musics, it therefore has no engagement with the regular motor-rhythms of our bodies: the heartbeat and pulse, and the rhythms of walking, running, marching, or working. Nor does it engage with the rhythms of sex. Suppressing these aspects of our corporeality, it none the less engages with one crucial aspect: our breathing.
Those who have sung it will be aware of its acutely physical effects: inculcating a slow regularity of breathing, sometimes even with hints of dizziness. It is certainly a prime example of the way people singing together empathise. In chant, as with jazz musicians, you have to “get it together”, although, in the case of plainsong, entirely without a groove.
Then there is the hypnosis of repetition, a common feature of many sacred musics worldwide, which induce a certain sort of trance. In plainsong, this is intensified by the repetitive arch-shapes of the melismas (a melisma is a passage of several notes to a single syllable), a feature that has caused many to draw parallels with architecture, cathedral vaulting in particular.
The celebrated Miserere of Allegri is based on chant — a clearly audible feature — but its unfolding repetitions also resemble the way plainsong works on the listener by litanic repetition, levitating us into a state of profound meditation. Are we here on the threshold of a more robust definition of sacred music: its effect?
THE choice of the celebrated actor Simon Russell Beale as presenter for the series was entirely apt; for he brings to the programmes a highly pertinent autobiography: a story of his own. He was a choirboy at St Paul’s, steeped in the music of the daily offices; so he comes over not as an actor, but rather as someone delighting in revisiting his past, a youth that filtered the essence of these repertoires into his bloodstream.
His delight in the music shines through in his responses as it is sung or played. On one occasion, he joins in, holding a part with the singers. On another, he grins with feline pleasure as he has a go at the Toccata and Fugue on a grand and immense organ — an enthusiasm that is refreshingly catching in today’s world of professional presenters.
In my long career as a university lecturer, I have met many musical enthusiasts for whom the landmarks of sacred music mean far more than those of the central European symphonic canon, whether or not they have any truck with the Established Church (and they most often don’t).
Monteverdi’s Vespers; the intricate music of the Notre-Dame school (late-12th- and early-13th-century, bravely made the mainstay of the first programme); the anthems of Purcell; the 40-part motet of Thomas Tallis; the cantatas and Passions of Bach, not to forget his great B-Minor Mass — these are just some of the most durable works that somehow light people up.
In our downloadable world, this music is more available — and cheaper — than ever. You can sit at home and print it, put it on your phone, stream it from the internet, or listen to it on your Wi-Fi radio. One wavelength, “Sacred Music Preserved”, has got the genre very wrong. “Musica Religiosa” has no chat, but a loop only of organ music and plainsong. “Reformatorische Omroep Breedband” is generally uplifting. More exciting is the insight into sacred music from around the world which the “religious” rather than the “Christian” genre button gives.
Its context and history is more accessible, too: you can have a rolling score on screen, pictorial archives, and even some of the manuscripts of its composers, as libraries and archives share their knowledge with all and sundry surfers.
But lonely listening can never replace the other side of the circle of context on which the authentic experience of sacred music relies: that of listening — and perhaps participating — together; for music, like worship, gains simply from sitting next to somebody. Pace the internet parish of St Pixels, and the flurry of other internet communities, the power generated by listening together will outlive passing fashion.
Wherever its strength comes from, sacred music will continue to adapt to the changing world, to reflect its light and its darkness, and to enhance those vaults of the Gothic and Romanesque, and complement the most modern of devoted spaces. It will move the hearts of the godly and godless alike; and we can hope that its magic power will go some way towards humanising what we might call, in the words of Thomas Tomkins, a composer at the time of the Civil War and Commonwealth, “these sad and distracted times”.
Richard Langham Smith was the Open University’s academic adviser to the four TV programmes Sacred Music, to be presented by Simon Russell Beale with the Sixteen, conducted by Harry Christophers. The first will be shown on BBC4 on Good Friday from 8 to 9 p.m.
http://open2.net/sacredmusic (website goes live in Holy Week)
The Open University has just presented a new third-level course on “Words and Music” (AA317), including sections on sacred music of several types.
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