Article
- Date:
- Sunday 12th June 2022
Year C, Trinity Sunday - Place:
- Holy Trinity, Hurstpierpoint
- Service:
- Evensong
Probably the best known quotation about music, not surprisingly, is Shakespeare's "If music be the food of love, play on", so often delivered as if there is no doubt, as if the "if" at the beginning is not there, so that the sentence is taken to say: "As music is the food of love, play on." This is no doubt because our experience tells us that music is the food of love. Most of us, even in our later years, love best the music of our teenage romances, our courtships and our weddings.
Not surprisingly, then, Western Christianity has had as ambivalent a relationship with music as it has with love, phenomena that are so wonderful that they can easily elude hierarchical control; music can be as disobedient as were Romeo and Juliet. The Papacy was so worried about the ability of music to divert attention from the liturgy, in the rich polyphony of such composers as Striggio, that it threatened to ban all but the most austere and skeletal compositions which elicited Palestrina's response in the Missa Papa Marcelli. In our Church, suffering from similar fears, most congregations for two centuries only heard metrical Psalms in church, driving out the old tunes to become carols sung in the streets and the pubs.
But great art is always purposeful and, in the case of Church music, as long as it is a means to an end and not an end in itself, an act of worship and not a performance, all will be well.
i believe that the suspicion of music at the Reformation and in the Catholic Counter-Reformation arose from a deeper suspicion than that which I mentioned at the beginning. 16th Century Protestantism, in seeking to connect the people with Holy Scripture without ecclesiastical intermediaries, took an intellectual turn. Medieval Catholicism had its fair share of great intellectuals but their discourse was for the elite, not the people. Coming so soon after the development of the printing press, the individual experience of Christianity poured forth in new translations of the Bible, pamphlets and tracts, collections of sermons and prayers, spiritual meditations and theological disputations. At the same time, as all revolutions will, it looked down on what it replaced as primitive. There was, in both Protestantism and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, a substantial element of ascetic spirituality and the few centres where beauty was still valued and promoted were looked upon with suspicion. For a stiff English response to Romish decadence you only have to look at Casaubon and Dorothea's experience of Rome in Middlemarch.
It is all too easy to make generalisations but I think it is safe to say that as a nation we are somewhat physically reticent and tend towards abstraction. I wonder, for example, whether after Covid we will ever restore a tactile peace. This reticence is firmly anchored to the central Christian heresy that our souls, because they 'go to heaven' are far superior to our bodies and that, by extension, bodies are somehow corrupt even though everything that God made is equally wonderful and valid. Our bodies and our souls are integral, inseparable, and it therefore follows that there must be a role for bodily as well as intellectual worship. After the creation of beautiful worship language, music is the next resort. It is supposed to, and it does, elevate, it elevates us towards God in a form of worship which is more wholehearted than mere theological assent. We find ourselves 'out of ourselves' insofar as people like us will allow. We give ourselves away, for example, labelling other more bodily-oriented Christianity as 'happy clappy', as if there were anything wrong with being happy or clappy.
There is, though, one more thing to be said about the role of music which elaborates what I have said already. In describing the reaction of the Apostles to the Resurrection, I have said that it must have been as disorienting as falling in love for the first time; and so, as we celebrate our great festivals, being in love with Jesus, we do need to renew our sense of falling in love, of putting the books to one side, and dressing, singing and even dancing for Jesus.
This may sound more than a little outlandish and not everybody is suited to do everything but our love for Jesus, our thankfulness for God's creation and our openness to the animation of the Holy Spirit are only partly matters of contractual assent, of reading Holy Scripture, studying doctrine and saying our prayers, for that is the process that can turn true love into desiccated marriages.
It is good, therefore, to celebrate today the Royal School of Church Music's special Sunday with some uplifting music as a means of bringing us ever so slightly closer to god, for in terms of our distance from God "ever so slightly" is a long way.
One of the most unlikely cultural trends of the past 150 years has been the flourishing in the United Kingdom of Church music. Nobody surveying its state in 1870 could have foreseen this great flourishing against a backdrop of declining numbers and influence, represented, to name but a few, in the music of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Parry, Wood, Stanford, Ireland, Howells, Francis Jackson, Gabriel Jackson, Chilcot, rutter, O'Reagan and Macmillan. And this magnificent music is no doubt at least in part responsible for increased attendance for worship in our Cathedrals. People with less of an ascetic sense than their theological leaders know the value of music as a vital part of celebration; and that really is the key word. All we can do with the incommensurate, with the very otherness of God is, after trying to account for it, to celebrate it. We were created to praise God; and we were created to sing.