Sacred Music in Secular Society

Jonathan Arnold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317060246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

If music has ever given you 'a glimpse of something beyond the horizons of our materialism or our contemporary values' (James MacMillan), then you will find this book essential reading. Sacred Music in Secular Society is a new and challenging work asking why Christian sacred music is now appealing afresh to a wide and varied audience, both religious and secular. Jonathan Arnold offers unique insights as a professional singer of sacred music in liturgical and concert settings worldwide, as an ordained Anglican priest and as a senior research fellow. Blending scholarship, theological reflection and interviews with some of the greatest musicians and spiritual leaders of our day, including James MacMillan and Rowan Williams, Arnold suggests that the intrinsically theological and spiritual nature of sacred music remains an immense attraction particularly in secular society. Intended by the composer and inspired by religious intentions this theological and spiritual heart reflects our inherent need to express our humanity and search for the mystical or the transcendent. Offering a unique examination of the relationship between sacred music and secular society, this book will appeal to readers interested in contemporary spirituality, Christianity, music, worship, faith and society, whether believers or not, including theologians, musicians and sociologists.

PART I
The Practice of Sacred Music

Chapter 1
Composers – Midwives of Faith

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 MacMillan¹

Writing [music] for me is prayer, it’s my umbilical cord, my reason for existing.

Sir John Tavener²

The artist, whether he knows it or not, is consulting God when he looks at things.

Jacques Maritian³

In this first part of the book, I address the practice of sacred music by adopting a personal and first-hand approach to the question of what it means to engage with sacred music today. This is centred upon the areas in which we encounter music: composition and performance, both within and outside of organized religion.

In order to assess the current state and status of sacred music within secular society I have undertaken a number of interviews with composers, performers, theologians and philosophers. I also make use of material from published interviews with Sir John Tavener, Jonathan Harvey, Sir John Eliot Gardiner and others. Thus, in the next three chapters, my own questions and views are mixed with those of various colleagues with whom I have worked in the world of music, academia and the Church.

First, I examine what it means to be a composer of Christian music today. Many composers’ sacred music has been shaped by the religious and cultural challenges posed by the times in which they lived. In Europe, composers were forced to adapt to the shift from the Medieval to the Renaissance world, and indeed to the cultural, political and religious upheaval of the Reformation. Emerging from a Puritan Commonwealth with the Restoration of monarchy in 1660, England sought to rebuild culture, art, music and sacramental religion, along with social and political harmony. Tensions, however, remained well into the eighteenth century; and this was characterized by fears (well-founded, or otherwise) of the uncertain denominational allegiance of many of its monarchs. From huge Church growth in the nineteenth century to what is popularly believed to be a slow decline of religious attendance in the twentieth, we now live in a new era of a so-called ‘secular society’ where ‘much debate about religion in recent times has become polarized and fractious’.⁴

So what does it mean to be a composer of sacred music today? Is the task primarily defined by the subject matter treated – the words or text? Is it, alternatively, concerned above all with the intention of the composer or their personal faith? Do you have to be a believer at all, or can you be a believer of another faith? How much does one’s upbringing matter, and to what degree can it influence their music? What compositional techniques are used in creating sacred music and, if music sets a text, does it necessarily have to be a biblical or religious one? For the composer, does it matter what context one is writing for – the church or the concert hall? These are just some of the areas covered in my discussions. The conclusions reached from these investigations, which reveal divergent yet heart-felt and strongly-held beliefs, point in one very distinct direction: that, for the contemporary composer of sacred Christian music, the religious liturgy is by no means the only intended destiny for their music, nor is it necessarily a significant motivation for composition. The concert hall is an equally valid, and perhaps an even more appropriate place, for sacred music to be encountered as a religious house of worship. Thus, in today’s society, the sacred is no longer confined to the ‘insiders’ of the church-going few, but is now more available than ever to the majority of people, through many different types of media, and in a more accessible way than ever before.

This chapter will begin by assessing the significance of subject matter, whether textual or thematic, in the composition process. The following section will ask whether the composer’s personal faith matters in producing good sacred music, or whether sincerity of purpose is sufficient. Thereafter we consider how composers of the past have had an influence on the sacred music composed today. This is followed by an investigation into the importance, or otherwise, of the context for which the composer is writing. Finally, I examine whether there are specific compositional techniques that are particularly appropriate or powerful in the creation of meaningful sacred music.

Subject Matter

Religious text is only one way in which music can be defined as sacred. There can be a strong spiritual presence in purely instrumental music, such as J.S. Bach’s works for solo violin, cello or organ. So it was interesting to note that, when I interviewed James MacMillan in October 2011, he was working on an instrumental piece that he described as ‘theological’:⁵

JA: Are you composing at the moment?

JM: I’m writing an orchestral piece for Marin Alsop, who’s been a great champion of mine over the years and performed quite a lot of my music. It has a theological aspect to it but is purely instrumental – no text.

JA: Like Veni Veni Emmanuel for percussion – instrumental but with a text foremost in your mind?

JM: Yes. In fact, some of the more abstract works that I write do have a kind of extra musical dimension – a theological nature, sometimes text-based, sometimes image-based. The piece I’m writing now is both really. One of the pieces that Marin performed recently was my third piano concerto called The Mysteries of Light. It tries to revive an ancient practice of writing music based on the rosary. The Biber Rosary Sonatas came to mind but John Paul [II] introduced this new set of mysteries in the 1990s – the luminous mysteries – using five titles and reflections, so that was the basis. The work is in one movement but it has five sections: the Baptism of Jesus, The Miracle at Cana, and so on. So there’s something both visual and textually reflective theologically.⁶

JA: Is that the case with all of your instrumental music or is some more abstract?

JM: Some of it has become more abstract. There are two piano sonatas, cello sonatas and a horn quintet where there’s nothing extra – no theological context. I think, in the past, there have been more composers open to non-musical stimulus and that sometimes leads to a degree of suspicion. As you know, in the music world, amongst composers especially, there is a pride about music’s abstract nature. There’s a pride in the fact that music is complete in itself. It doesn’t need anything other than its own material to communicate itself. That’s fine and absolutely true and I quite enjoy a lot of abstract things. However, music does have this power of representation, connection and sometimes collaboration with the other arts – with words, with images and so on and it seems perverse to ignore that, especially for someone like me who’s fascinated by these other things.

JA: There’s no spiritual subtext or agenda to your Cello Concerto, but is your faith as a composer or the faith of the listener somehow involved in that?

JM: I think so. When lovers of music talk about the ‘spirit’ of the arts, they mean all music, not just music that’s been inspired by liturgy or theology. It’s the purely abstract works as well. It’s the fact that the Bach Cello Suites can have that numinous effect on a listener even if they’re not believers in any conventional sense. They will nevertheless, many of them, lapse into a terminology that implies a spiritual base to what the whole process is about. I’m certainly cognizant of that and there probably isn’t anything substantially different in the effect of communication between the works that are purely abstract and non-theological and the ones that are theological.

JA: So, you can’t take the faith out of the composer and whatever the listener perceives, the initial process of composition involves a spiritual aspect?

JM: I think so.⁷

This passage of conversation was very revealing: from this composer’s point of view, the music could be sacred by virtue of its theological subtext, its power of connection, representation or collaboration, or its essential musical luminosity that can only be described by the language of the spirit. The liturgical context is not a prerequisite for any of these, and MacMillan perceives a sacred aspect to non-theological and theological works alike.

This leads me to my next question: does the devoutness, or sincerity, of the composer have a bearing on the quality of sacredness in the music?

Sincerity of Faith

Some composers are Christian and write from an explicitly faith-based perspective. Others produce wonderful sacred music almost as a by-product of their main intention of simply writing music. As Karl Barth wrote of Mozart:

[He] does not intend to proclaim the praise of God. He just does so in fact; precisely in the humility in which he – himself to a certain extent only as an instrument – lets be heard what he apparently hears, that which impresses itself on him from God’s creation, which rises up in him and demands to proceed out of him.⁸

For others, sincerity of faith is at the heart of the motivation for composing, something as true for some living composers as their Renaissance predecessors. For Harry Christophers, founder and conductor of The Sixteen, integrity of faith comes through in certain musical compositions:

The music of the Renaissance is so incredibly special and composers like [John] Tavener and [Arvo] Pärt have brought things full circle, and are equally important – in particular Pärt, whose personal faith has made his music so exceptional. He uses silences to great effect – giving time to reflect … He says that people who perform his music must find their own way into it. If you look at his scores, there are very few markings – he does not dictate how you interpret his music.⁹

Harry is clear that, in today’s society we take it for granted that Medieval and Renaissance composers from the West were, naturally, Christian and perhaps we relegate the significance of their religious belief to a past age. But one cannot ignore that some of the greatest composers of the twentieth century were also writing from a stance of faith:

More and more I find that sincerity [of faith] in their music sets those composers apart from others. We know that for most Renaissance composers their main employment was the Church; they were immersed in Church life all the time. Only a handful of the top composers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have made a real impact on Church music. If you compare [Francis] Poulenc with Michael Tippet … it’s quite clear Tippet lacked faith. In the same way that Tomas Luis da Victoria’s music is personal, Poulenc’s music is personal. Particularly in the Lenten Motets, there’s an intimate interpretation of the words, which only he could write – they are extraordinary and highly individual.¹⁰

The same is true of some of our greatest living composers, like James MacMillan:

James’s music is constantly amazing because he is so imbued with the Catholic faith and is able to project that. He’s a great composer, first and foremost, and that’s why his music has such effect and we’ve found that, every time we perform a piece by James, we may find the audience a little bit nervous at the beginning [of the concert] because it has a modern piece of music in it, but come the end of the concert, that’s the piece they go back and talk about. It’s the same with his new setting of Psalm fifty-one, the Miserere, which is highly charged with emotion. There are one or two phrases where he’s chosen to be absolutely joyous where another composer would probably follow a more reserved form. Other composers, who don’t necessarily possess a faith, might, if they were to write a Miserere, think: ‘This is a piece for Lent so we have to write it a traditionally penitential way.’ Not James. It’s the same with Arvo Pärt. Obviously he’s much more introverted about his faith and his whole existence has been against political strife. He’s coming at things from a different angle but nevertheless his music is deeply felt. [John] Tavener was a master at writing effective pieces. I sometimes question whether it’s too formulaic. The Song for Athene and The Lamb are great pieces and very effective and they conjure up wonderful things. But I worry about many contemporary composers who copy him … In the world of choral music, there are three composers for me whose personalities come out of their music, so overtly in a really powerful way full of incredible faith, and that’s Victoria, Poulenc and MacMillan. They happen all to be Catholic.¹¹

For Harry Christophers, good sacred choral composition is not just about high art classical music:

In more recent times, Taizé music and chants have become very evocative. Margaret Rizza has written similar chants … She’s a late convert Catholic and it’s interesting to see how her music works in a different way from that of James MacMillan, for instance. They’re perhaps easier on the ear than some other music and they don’t challenge you in the way that James MacMillan will challenge. But they have an important part to play in sacred music today.¹²

For the conductor Peter Phillips, the choral music of the Renaissance is as great as any piece of large-scale Romantic repertoire:

When it comes to the craft of music, there have been composers of every period who have been masters of [it]. But I get the impression that in the Renaissance period an awful lot of people were very good … I used to go into the library and I’d think, let’s do a piece by Mouton. So I’d get the Mouton volumes down and, literally, I could open any volume on any page and the pieces I found would be worth doing … There aren’t very many Renaissance composers that fall below that litmus test … I’ve never understood why the average standard was so high in the Renaissance. Line up Strauss, Beethoven and Josquin, they’re on the same level! Josquin and Beethoven are a very interesting comparison. These two have the technique and the brain to tower over their contemporaries and do absolutely anything they wanted with music as they found it.¹³

Likewise, Harry Christophers sees quality throughout Renaissance choral music that has endured:

How many pieces from the Renaissance would you call rubbish? There aren’t many … Maybe it’s the form in which they were written. They weren’t all going by the textbook at the time. You think of Sheppard and all those false relations in his music – what were they there for?¹⁴ They’re there for a crea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Interviewees
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I The Practice of Sacred Music
• Part II The Reception of Sacred Music
• Conclusion
• Select Bibliography
• Index