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York celebrates the bright and the beautiful

by
03 May 2024

The first Church Times Festival of Faith and Music took place last weekend. Pat Ashworth was one of the participants

Duncan Lomax

The glories of York Minster. See gallery for more images

The glories of York Minster. See gallery for more images

THERE was a moment in York Minster on Saturday morning when, after a triumphant, full-bodied, unrehearsed rendition of the Magnificat (Stanford in C) and Zadok the Priest, this august gathering of church-music practitioners persuaded the organist to show his face.

The face appeared, slightly bashful and smiling broadly, from the eyrie of an organ loft that appeared carved out of a forest of slender, soaring pinnacles. It was a kind of metaphor.

Here was an assembly of people with a shared commitment to finding practical ways to encourage heavenly music in cathedrals and parish churches across the land; and, queuing for tea in a Regency building suffused in light and beauty, a dean, a precentor, or a director of music had the same mission and purpose as someone running a church choir that might have dwindled to single figures, but that remained a cherished expression of the divine.

The Archbishop of York put his finger on it. He was upbeat, urging his listeners never to take for granted the “precious and beautiful treasure” that was church music. He declared, in a talk, “Tuning Forks and Orchestras”, that he didn’t personally take up the offer of a tuning fork when leading responses — “I prefer to choose a note myself” — provoking from this assembly a mock intake of breath.

But his point was that the unifying single note of the tuning fork was the will of God. Those assembled were his orchestra. And whether they played trombone or kazoo, violin or spoons, they were called to sing God’s praise “for our own day . . . our own churches . . . our own communities”. The Church was seeing a renaissance of music-making in all its diversity, he suggested, thus demonstrating the gospel to be “good and true but also beautiful”.

He revealed that he daily picked up the guitar he had toyed with since he was ten. He loves the call and answer of the Responses, the ease and simplicity of singing rounds, and the rising popularity of community choirs: he speculated happily that he might head for one of these when he retired. There were many things, he suggested, from which the Church could learn.

How respectful a gathering this was! In any other setting, a session, “So what makes for good worship?” that began with the Dean of York, the Very Revd Dominic Barrington, asking what makes bad worship would have provoked some shuddering recollections. I’d reel mine off with relish.

But he asked it of Carl Jackson, director of music at the Chapel Royal, Hampton Court; the Revd Peter Gunstone, recently Interim Precentor of Bradford Cathedral; the Director of Music of Peterborough Cathedral, Tansy Castledine; and the Revd Dr Victoria Johnson, Dean of St John’s College, Cambridge.

And, instead, it prompted fruitful discussion that wandered into the realms of silence before worship, connection with God, intentionality, responding to the charge of exclusivity or elitism, transcendence versus immanence, the popularity of sung compline (revealed to be “an amazing mission opportunity with young people”).

Great sacred music didn’t have to be sung in church. This was demonstrated by the Ebor Singers, in a performance led by Dr Andrew Earis, directed by Dr Paul Gameson, and designed to “speak to heart, head and soul” in its choice of great classical music of the country’s religious heritage.

They stilled a lecture room with the beauty and quality of a 35-minute programme that included Philip Moore’s setting of Caedmon of Whitby’s first hymn; Holst’s Nunc Dimittis; Lucy Walker’s “I saw Eternity”; Kate Rusby’s “Underneath the Stars”; and, most moving of all, Rani Arbo’s pure and beautiful setting of Tennyson’s poem, “Crossing the Bar”.

And they got to sing about eternity, too — “Lord of the boundless curves of space” and “How shall I sing that majesty Which angels do admire?”. “Those last few lines . . .” reflected the person seated next to me, almost lost for words. She quoted: “Thou art a sea without a shore, A sun without a sphere; Thy time is now and evermore, Thy place is everywhere.”

Dr Gameson founded the vocal ensemble while studying on a postgraduate course at the University of York and singing in the choir of York Minster. Twenty years on, a choral director, workshop leader, academic, and singing teacher, he still sings in that choir. Knowing that background gave even more impetus to the question posed of others in another session: “What did a church choir ever do for me?”

It was asked of the tenor James Gilchrist and the soprano Hannah Davey. For Mr Gilchrist, who started as a boy chorister, aged ten, after his primary-school teacher encouraged his voice, and who emphatically never thought for a moment that he would make a career in music, it was “a hugely important part of what made me who I am”. For Ms Davey, who didn’t have that background, it was a consciousness of what she had missed. She loved the collaborative nature of choral singing, a place “where I feel connected to other people”.

Accompanied by Hugh Morris, director of the RSCM, they sang together and individually in the early-evening light and the fine acoustic of the Minster’s Lady chapel.

When Mr Gilchrist began to sing the Salve Regina, which is the antiphon for compline from Trinity to Advent, it was as though he had reached out a hand and seamlessly caught something divine passing on the breeze. So it was when Davey soared effortlessly to the heights in “I know that my redeemer liveth”.

Here was the power of sacred music. But the weekend wasn’t only about the mountaintops. It was about the valleys, too: the simple power of music to bring back something lost. In the serenity and simplicity of little St Helen’s Church, on bustling Stonegate, Adrian Bawtree, co-director of Kent Arts and Wellbeing, sat in the aisle at the centre of the group gathered for his workshop “Not Forgotten: Music and Dementia”.

With no introduction, no agenda, no music, no copies, he simply sang: “All things bright and beautiful”. We all joined in, and we all sang several verses, because we had known it since childhood, as we had “Happy birthday to you”, or “My bonnie lies over the ocean”. Any lone church singer with a mind to share their musical gifts and bring back remembered things to people struggling with words could do it. There was no result or even progression looked for, suggested the music therapist Dr Alison Barrington: “Just people joining in.”

In York, it seems that they can’t get enough of choral evensong: they queue to get into it. And the sung eucharist on Sunday morning, set against the golden background and rich history of the choir screen, sporting a parade of kings from William the Conqueror to Henry VI, is pure sacred theatre. The congregation responds with fervour.

The choir goes out to Psalm 150 — mostly sung out of sight and fading in the distance — during which even to take breath feels like an interruption. It is the very embodiment of faith and music.

Read more on this story in this week’s Leader comment

Recordings of talks were made during the festival and will be made available in coming weeks. For information, see: faithandmusic.hymnsam.co.uk

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