The Living Voice of the Gospel

“A virtuoso hardened to every difficulty” is how the famous French organist and composer Camille Saint-Saëns described the ideal organist (writing, surprising as it may seem, in the pages of the oldest musical publication in America,The Musical Quarterly, in 1916). This phrase came to mind, not merely upon contemplating our own organists, Mark Dwyer and Andrew Scanlon (blessed though they are to work now in the difficulty-free environment we all know the Church of the Advent to be) but also, as we look forward to welcoming next week Barry Rose, the organist and choirmaster extraordinaire from Britain. 

Barry Rose will be speaking here next Wednesday evening (see separate sign up page) and will also be the guest conductor of our choir the following Sunday. Born in in 1934, his amazing career has spanned being the youngest Cathedral Organist and Master of the Choristers in Britain from the time of the Consecration of the newly built Guildford Cathedral in 1961,  through his service at St Paul’s Cathedral, The King’s School Canterbury and on to St Alban’s Cathedral just north of London. In addition, he has had many other roles such as succeeding George Thalben-Ball as religious music advisor to the BBC for over twenty years, quite aside from his work as a composer. It will be a great pleasure for us all to have him with us.

That opening quotation from Saint-Saëns, however, came from a longer article which raised and discussed some very large and perennial questions, including, “What music is most suitable for the church? Shall it be that which is executed by voices alone, as in the Greek Church? Or chorals, accompanied by instruments and the organ, as in the Lutheran Church? Or the anthems, correctly written and sung, of the Anglican Church? Or the florid counterpoint of the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century? Or pure Gregorian plainchant? Should we admit or exclude the light and ornate music of the eighteenth century, and our contemporary music?”

In the current intellectual climate establishing how things should be, in positive terms, is rather harder than identifying error, albeit that this has been a long running challenge within the church. Thus the Council of Narbonne in 1551 fulminated: “Nor, when festal days are being celebrated or on any other occasion, should spectacles… buffooneries, secular ditties, outcries, either by clergy or laiety, or other such things take place; for by them the people are distracted from religion and are reduced to giggling and immoderate laughter” (Conc. Labb., XV, 26; Mansi, XXXII, 1247); And how “Many organists too frequently cause profane organ melodies to resound in the churches,…. and other ditties which the mob knows are base, obscene, and passionate.This is manifestly sinful, … both on account of the irreverence which thus occurs in a sacred place and because of the occasion that is given for turning minds away from attention to divine and spiritual matters and directing them to frivolous and wicked temporal matters…. Moreover many organists, in order to make a display of their skill and be heard at greater length, pound away so long (though that pounding…. is nothing more than sound without sense) that sometimes they draw the Mass out a whole hour longer than is proper.” (Gerbert, De Cantu et music sacra, 1724, vol II, 194.). Ratisbon had earlier in 1512 condemned the fact that “There was dancing and uproar with musical instruments” while the 1536 Provincial Council of Cologne observed with dismay that “One time theatrical shows and masked jesters were brought in with so bad an example that there was need for canonical prescription to abolish that wicked abuse.”

The truly outlandish is thankfully now rare, but transcending the banal, and grounding the criteria needed upon which to discern aright, remain challenging to many. Yet, in the words of Thomas Trotter, while, “It is commonly assumed that music in the Church is (mere) embellishment of worship, somewhat in the same category as architecture or stained glass windows, Church musicians, while deploring this lower estate, do not often make the case for the theological function of their vocation. Reflection upon the nature of religious experience and the art of music reveals the possibility that music is, in fact, the most complete mode of bearing the structure of worship. How to say the unsayable? That is the dilemma of religion.” (In his essay, “A Theology of Church Music”, in the Choral Journal of March 1974). And Trotter goes on, to argue that representation or imitation (mimesis) of the reality that is at the heart of that with which religion seeks to grapple, is possible through music which transcends the verbal: “Mimesis is possible in music. The power of natural events is recreated in the expressions of music. So the great supernatural events of religious faith are best “described” by music whereas they may appear problematic in discursive speech. …..That is why Alex Robertson could say: “To sing the chorales of Bach is for the disbeliever to experience the suspension of disbelief.” Church musicians are engaged in serious theological work.”

While the philosopher my feel that there is in such assertions a need still to demonstrate missing steps in the overall argument — as is reflected in the large difference between a suspension of disbelief and the articles of the Creed —  the direction of the argument relates compellingly to that unique experience of transcendence which good church music can provide. 

This use of the word “good” in turn relates to the forceful point that Saint-Saëns went on to make regarding discernment of the good in church music right back in 1916, when he observed that, “All this is very difficult to decide; or, rather, impossible to decide — and for the very simple reason that in reality there is no religious art, properly so called, absolutely to be distinguished from secular art. There is good music, and there is bad music; for the rest, it is a matter of fashion, of convention, and nothing else.”

And all of this surely also lies behind the sentiment Rowan Williams captured so well in a sermon for the English Three Choirs Festival, in saying that:

“To listen seriously to music and to perform it are among our most potent ways of learning what it is to live with and before God, learning a service that is a perfect freedom. Noone and nothing can compel our contemplation, except the object in its own right. In this ‘obedience’ of listening and following, we are stretched and deepened, physically challenged as performers, imaginatively as listeners. The time we have renounced, given up, is given back to us as a time in which we have become more human, more real, even when we can’t say what we have learned, only that we have changed” (Open to Judgement; Sermons and Addresses, 1994, p.248).

It is in this spirit that I urge that successful church music can be no less than (to borrow a phrase with much Lutheran resonance) viva Vox Evangelii: the living voice of the Gospel.

The Rev. Canon Alistair Macdonald-Radcliff
Rector