Valuating Liturgical Choirs – When Art Is Not Enough
By Robert Busiakiewicz
One of the inherent problems in dealing with ‘Works of Art’ is that they require work. Likewise, stewarding Culture requires cultivation. In our age of Convenience, these two concepts (Works of Art and Culture) are no longer processes, but commodities. And like all commodities, once we have consumed our fair share of them, they become baggage: disposable and unwieldly.
Clinging to the idea that liturgical choirs are part of a cultural fabric, which deal exclusively in Works of Art, is not enough to help them flourish among the secular business models of our age and our increasingly cash-strapped churches. Virginia Woolf complained in 1936 that “Art is the first luxury to be discarded in times of stress; the artist is the first to suffer.”
How do church musicians extricate themselves from this cycle of ephemeral ambition? One idea worth considering is that liturgical music is not Art or luxurious, and that liturgical choirs are not cultural entities at all. This seems like an offensive position for hard working musicians to stomach, so let’s look closer at the terms.
In the time of Aristotle, music was considered in a scheme of education shared with grammar and arithmetic. Ancient philosophers were not able to separate the aesthetic quality of music from its moral, religious, and practical function. Indeed, Art with a capital A in its modern sense only originated in the eighteenth century. What this means is that when William Byrd or Johann Sebastian Bach sat down to compose and deliver their choral or keyboard works in church, they did not think that what they were doing was “Artistic”, but perhaps more along the lines of craft or science. The fruits of their labours ultimately transcended their function.
As for culture, the great Austrian Pianist, Eduard Steuermann best formulated the nature of its fundamental paradox: “The more that is done for culture, the worse it fares. Culture suffers damage when it is planned and administered by bureaucrats; when it is left to itself, however, everything cultural threatens not only to lose its possibility of effect, but its very existence as well.” This balancing act ebbs and flows like the stock-market, crashing and skyrocketing with the weeks and regions.
Leaving Art and Culture behind us is not a blueprint for illiteracy and philistinism, but rather a recalibration of value. The valley of human values is filled with fickle pleasures, and so we turn to notions of power to justify something’s value. Much has been written on the power of music to evangelise, the power of music to lull, to enchant, to thrill, to challenge, to disgust, to provoke, and to illuminate holy scripture. These powers, however, are not why we have music in church. Music persists in our liturgies because it reveals truth about the human condition. Good, useful music is about truth. Cheap music is fake.
What is fake music? This is not to compare Foie Gras to KFC, but rather to choose between nutrition to starvation. It is akin to cheap garments. They can only carry you so far, and after a certain point you need boots which are made for walking. This slow-burn enduring quality of musical excellence is in direct conflict with our technological hall-of-mirrors society, where swift obsolescence of software, skills and taste are defining characteristics. In short, fake music is a kitsch-driven tourist in a chocolate-box rom-com, and enduring music is an adventurer, sure of the path behind them, while seeking the interesting, the wider truth.
Material value and spiritual value are not the same thing. While infrastructure rots and paint peels, Susan Sontag tells us “the capacity to be spiritually overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions. Even war, even the prospect of certain death, cannot expunge it.” Those who produce beautiful truth, even the aweful truth, must transcend material considerations, as we know where our treasure is, there our hearts will be also. John Milton warned in his Reason of Church Government of 1641 that there are many “who will not so much look upon Truth herself unless they see her elegantly dressed”. Why is this important? Because we are not valuing hardware or amusement, but an elegant truth ritual.
“What bird can soar with broken wing?” asks Emily Brontë in 1838. Keeping an eye on timeless expression is difficult when history is said to be accelerating. Perhaps Adorno does have a point when he wrote in the fifties that “it would be better for art to fall silent and be dispensed with altogether than to try to secure some paltry right to exist in the disenchanted world.” Indeed, much of the finest sacred music with an undoubtable right to exist was written in secret, hidden in a desk, or locked away in a castle (Byrd, Gesualdo, Gombert, Howells, Brahms are but a few examples). This kind of utterance, from a Requiem for a young son, to a fearful account of religious persecution is not discount wallpaper, but something closer to a harbinger of spiritual surrender.
Liturgical music is a tool which forces us into existential self-recognition. It heightens the significance of any moment (simply google ‘Star Wars Throne Scene Without Music’ to relish the absurd hilarity of this truth). The ‘Just Price’ for such a tool is “hopelessly unscientific: it is an affair of feeling and instinct” or so says the Urwick textbook on social philosophy. Who better to guide us in the affairs of feeling and instinct than poets – and what is the cost of ignoring them?
If music typifies celestial ever fresh delight; vocal music,
as the highest form, exhibits special appositeness in illustration of heaven.
Words cannot describe it, notes cannot register it;
It remains as a tradition, or if stored up and re-uttered,
We listen not to any imitative sound, but to a reproduction
Of the original voice.
Christina Rossetti
If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft
And from thy slender store two loaves alone are left
Sell one and with the dole
Buy beauty’s hyacinths, feed the soul.
Muslihuddin Sadi
An emotion does not exist, or does not become active among us,
till it has found its expression in sound or form.
Because no two modulations evoke the same emotion,
musicians are continually making and unmaking humankind.
W.B. Yeats
Not all melodies sung into the world’s ear
Are useless: sure, an artist is a sage;
A humanist, physician to all […]
Calling youth from idle slumbers,
Rousing them from Pleasure’s lair:
Then o’er the string, fingers gently move,
And melt the soul to pity and to love […]
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness.
John Keats
The sublime is indispensable – if only I knew what for!
Jean Cocteau
Does Church Music represent value-for-money?
Written by Robert Busiakiewicz,
Once every few months I receive a familiar email from other church musicians, or committee members who are negotiating a budget. Once every six months or so, I receive a similar email but from other cathedrals discussing larger annual spending. Music budgets, it seems, are low hanging fruit when savings need to be made. These emails come from all sorts of personalities, from faithful problem-solvers and embittered ranters, to prayerful questioners and frustrated choristers. The institutions in question are not like Winchester Cathedral in the UK, which has a statute dating back to 1544 that demands specific musical provisions be made in liturgy. They do not, on the whole, feel the immense expectation that is pressed upon Canterbury Cathedral, which has so far funded 1,400 years of continuous choral commitment. The identity, stability and flourishing of much North American church music hangs on the opinions of those running the shop at any given time. This is exciting and useful in that it guards against lazy ministry, but it is troubling in its potentially ephemeral ambition. Here are my five pieces of advice for those engaging in these important debates with regard to funding church music programmes:
1. To forget your function is to forgo funding. Be clear on what liturgical music is for. Its raison d'être is fundamentally entwined with the ethos of the church. Christian art music is only dispensable if it is understood in stark opposition to the ideas listed below.
The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation, but moral. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind. The mind follows later, in the wake. D.H. Lawrence
Beauty, if it light well, it certainly maketh virtue shine, and vices blush. Francis Bacon
What does all art do? Does it not praise? Does it not glorify? Does it not select? Does it not bring things into prominence? In all this it strengthens or weakens certain valuations. Friedrich Nietzsche
Without art, religion is inarticulate, but without religion, art would lack its most potent themes. Melvin Rader
Art is the great cultural means of arousing our sympathies and removing our moral blind spots. Georg Hegel
Art music is influenced by the willingness to bear uncertainty and to forgo immediate, lesser gratification, for the sake of future ultimate gratification and this willingness is a moral trait. Leonard Mayer
Great music is how we should like our emotions to run, full of strenuous purpose and deep aims. Christopher Caudwell
Art unites people. Through it we feel the mysterious gladness of a communion which, reaching beyond the grave, unites us with all those of the past who have been moved by the same feelings and with all those of the future who will yet be touched by them. The task of art is enormous. Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this. Leo Tolstoy
2. Music is the best evangelist in an increasingly secular world. We know that, unfortunately, many churches may need to close. Organised religion is playing a smaller role in western people's lives than it did a century ago. The wealth of wisdom in scripture is being squeezed out from the equation of the future which equals “sex, times technology, squared” according to J.G. Ballard. The good news is that many people simply require a nudge through the door, a way in, before they can reform a deeper relationship with a church that only seems to get negative media attention. Excellent art music in liturgy is a proven catalyst for a profound home-coming.
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious side of life. It is the deep feeling which is at the cradle of all true art. In this sense, I count myself among the most deeply religious people. Albert Einstein
Tintern Abbey forced me to accept the holiness that is everywhere in everything. Something had happened to me. I began humming a strange piece of music. When I listen, I know I am in the debt of beauty, and when that happens I feel an obligation to repay that debt. Put simply: you need to lower your defences through a leap of faith or a retuning from nothing, or from a negative, into something soaring and positive and sublime. Into the pure nothingness of my non-knowledge something beyond consciousness was able to occur. Zadie Smith
I see Evensong in a country church and I have a certain love for it. Richard Dawkins
Howling is the noise of Hell, singing the voice of Heaven. And them that hath not this joy here lacks one of the best pieces of his evidence for the joys of Heaven, which God uses to bind his bargain. It is an earthquake which shakes an earthly soul by the sons of thunder and scatters a cloudy conscience. It is as the fall of waters and as the roaring of a lion. John Donne
I've heard an Organ talk, sometimes in a Cathedral aisle, and understood no word it said – Yet held my breath the while – and risen up – and gone away a more Bernardine girl – yet – know not what was done to me in the old chapel aisle. Emily Dickinson
Let this be my epitaph: The only proof he ever needed for the existence of God, was music. Kurt Vonnegut
3. Interacting with art is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. Since the dawn of our species we have explored ideas of divinity through art. Too often it is considered a pithy decoration which does not involve or immerse us actively. When congregations have experienced liturgical music regularly over hundreds of years, we can easily take for granted what is right in front of us. It is helpful to reflect upon the participatory nature of music in worship, particularly when it is offered by a trained choir or professional organist. Iconography and idolatry should never be confused for one another when it comes to investing in high quality Christian art.
Art is no passive pleasure; it demands our most earnest efforts and gives us many of our most precious values. Pure art is useless, but not worthless. Bertram Jessup
All which isn't singing is mere talking. If what calls itself a world should have the luck to hear such singing everyone certainly would believe in nothing but love. Music is the holy note... like a footstep of God in a sick-room's hush. E.E. Cummings
Beauty is holiness, and its radiance a participation of the creature in Divine Beauty. Leonid Ouspensky
Sing his praise without delays... The cross taught all wood to resound his name. His stretched sinews taught all strings what key is best to celebrate this most high day. Consort both heart and lute, and twist a song pleasant and long: or, since all music is but three parts vied and multiplied, O let thy blessed spirit bear a part, and make up our defects with his sweet art. George Herbert
Do your hearing not with your ears, but with your mind; not with your mind, but with your very soul. Confucius
If God exists he isn't just churches, He's the Museum of Fine Arts. Mary Oliver
What is law doesn't make progress, but what is gospel does. God has preached the gospel through music. Martin Luther
Evocative music and numinous solemnity all ensure that the process is not a dry cerebral exercise but, like any great aesthetic performance, touches people and stirs them at a deeper level of their being. As words sung in a special chant separate it from normal discourse, congregants would in effect be saying to themselves: 'the reality we call God was not this, not that, but immeasurably other.' Karen Armstrong
4. Great art can be hard to understand. That does not make it invalid. Can you think of anything in life that was truly worth having which was easy to get? Feeling good is important, but liturgy is not the entertainment business. The idea that excellence in church music is elitist, detached or irrelevant to our 21st Century lives is challengingly prevalent. Even Archbishops of Canterbury in both the 1590s and 1990s have expressed a discomfort in the notion that some Cathedrals “have nothing to offer but music.” This should not be interpreted as a fault in music, to be unpicked as it was during the Reformation, but rather a call to diverse ministries to harness the power of the expressive arts.
Good Christian art of our time may be unintelligible to people because we are inattentive to it. Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. To see the aim and purpose of art in the pleasure we get from it, is like assuming that the purpose and aim of food is the pleasure derived when consuming it. Leo Tolstoy
To my mind Bach is unapproachable – he is unfathomable. The best discourse on this music is silence. It is the characteristic of the extraordinary that it cannot be easily understood. The majority is always attuned to the enjoyment of virtuoso display. No children can be brought to healthy adulthood on sweetmeats and pastry. Spiritual like bodily nourishment must be solid. Robert Schumann
The tree is indeed known by its fruits. Like all devices, from psalm-singing to the internal-combustion engine, spiritual exercises can be used either well or badly. The path of spirituality is a knife-edge between abysses. On one side is the danger of mere escape, on the other the danger of mere enjoyment of things which should only be used as instruments. Aldous Huxley
The fly that touches honey cannot use its wings; so the soul that clings to sweetness ruins its freedom and hinders contemplation. St. John of the Cross
Kitsch is an enemy of the Christian faith and must be exposed as such. The failure of kitsch is a moral and spiritual failure as much as an aesthetic one. It is not so much ugliness as the mask of fashionable beauty we try to wear. Beauty is in the end about honesty, about seeing what is actually there. Bishop Richard Harries
There should be a distinct song, so used in the common prayers in the church... to the praise of Almighty God, in the best sort of melody and music that may be devised. Queen Elizabeth I
5. Christian art is resistant to ideas of monetary value. Putting a price on transcendent history requires great humility. There are many ways in which the church is beholden to ideas of supply and demand. It is comparable to a business – that is why we maintain a vast bureaucracy to perpetuate it. To survive we require logos, planning and responsibility. To thrive we require mystical story-telling, pathos, and an openness to irrational sublimity courting the slippery side of subjectivism. Music budgets represent the intersection between these two overlapping nets. Much like untangling electrical cables, we cannot proceed with haste or frustration – for that only makes the situation worse. Carefully tracing the cords back to their source is the surest path to clarity. In our case the source is a transcendent experience of the Divine, not a concert or a frippery, and it is to that end which all financial debates should passionately tend.
Our factories pour forth a vast quantity of ugly junk simply because it will sell. Aesthetic values, like values of friendship, justice, and holiness, remain opaque to numerical measure. The only way to defend the objectivity of beauty against a corrosive relativism is to identify it with the power of experience. Melvin Rader
It is well known, that periods of highest development in art stand in no direct connection with the general economic development of society. Karl Marx
Let us do something beautiful for God. Mother Teresa
The task is to throw light upon the knavish trick, which is for the advantage of mediocrity under the name of Christian ardour and zeal – Oh, how subtle! All true effort to help begins with self-humiliation. If you are capable of it, present the aesthetic with all its fascinating magic, enthral if possible, present it with passion, but above all do not forget one thing: the purpose you have to bring forward. Søren Kierkegaard
Wouldest thou consecrate a chalice to God that is broken? No-one would present a lame horse, a disordered clock, a torn book, to the King. Therefore, if you can hear a good organ at church and have the music of peace at home, peace in thy bosom, never hunt after the knowledge of higher secrets than appertain to thee. John Donne
To what serves mortal beauty —
Our law says: Love what are love’s worthiest...
What do then? how meet beauty? Merely meet it; own,
Home at heart, heaven’s sweet gift; then leave, let that alone.
Gerald Manley Hopkins
The world is imprisoned in its own activity, except when actions are performed as worship of God. Therefore you must perform every action sacramentally and be free from all attachment to results. Bhagavad Gita
Certainly it is our nature of misplaced servant-hood as will set an house on fire, and it were but to roast our eggs. Francis Bacon
Yes it may be quicker, but then cutting your arm off will reduce your weight faster and more irreversibly than any exercise. Kingsley Amis
INTERVIEW – In Defence of Beauty
Robert Busiakiewicz
Why is there Church music, and not public Church mathematics each Sunday? Why music and not liturgical mime or congregational origami?
Music is part of our physiology. The heart circulates blood around our bodies in a rhythm. It is not a coincidence that the two extremes of heart-rate, 0 beats per minute and 200 beats per minute, are also the limits of almost all musical speeds, or tempo markings, throughout history. That we walk on two legs is an inescapable rhythmic feature of our lives. The gift of phonation, not even speech - just the ability to make a sound, is something we share as a primal faculty with our animal cousins. This gift is almost inseparable from music-making, as can be attested to by bathrooms and shower-rooms or aviaries across the globe. Rhythm and phonation in combination have followed us as a species long before Pythagoras, Archimedes, or the construction of the Pyramids. Now there is certainly mathematics on display each Sunday in the form of the Church roof or the arches above the windows, but the timeless transcendence and mysterious qualities of music separate it from language, sciences, and the visual arts. These flexible and infinitely diverse qualities lend themselves well to the useful purposes of liturgy, praise, scriptural reflection, and describing the indescribable; this is the habitual business of the Church.
Isn't Church music a dead or dying art; an irrelevant eccentricity now like the Vinyl LP or the printed encyclopedia?
We must acknowledge that North Americans spend more on strip clubs than they spend on theatre, opera, ballet, jazz, and classical music combined. In the words of W.H. Auden, if “a poet among physicists feels like a shabby curate among the bishops”, just imagine how a church musician feels among a society of smart-phone addicts, investing as they do. Our secular culture engages itself in disposable music: can you tell me what was number one in the charts three years ago? In 1974 the Canadian-born novelist Saul Bellow wrote, “The new era will soon produce people who are no longer attached to the past by any habit of mind. For them history will be nothing but strange, incomprehensible tales, there will be nothing in their time that was ever heard before.” Now I'm not as cynical as all that. Choral Canada commissioned a national survey through a company called Hill Strategies Research in 2017. It reported that there are 28,000 choirs in Canada, with 17,500 of those being church choirs. 72% of the repertoire all choirs sing in this country is sacred music. They estimate that 3.5 million Canadians have sung in a choir in the past year. That is three times as many as have been participating in hockey matches (Oh, how irrelevant). The Anglican Church is also the largest commissioner of new compositions in the English speaking world. But truly transcendent art does not concern itself with surveys and percentages. Johann von Goethe wrote in 1830, “I have never bothered to ask in what way I was useful in society as a whole. I contended myself with what I recognized as good or true.” Should we be as lackadaisical as that? Of course not. The enduring nature of the church musician's craft is best alluded to by the great Russian academic and writer, Andrei Sinyavsky: “The whole world is God's art. At the level of mere existence we can survive without art, but if we consciously do away with art, then being – in the sense of a universe full of mysteries, wonders, individuality, personality – will disappear. All that will remain is flatness. And then art to me is salt: in principle you can eat unsalted food and not die, but it is salt which gives life.”
How do you distinguish between what you do on a Sunday from a concert of the same music on a Saturday night?
When concerts are given at Cathedrals they should be preceded by a prayer. This is a reminder that what is being offered, in much the same way as the architecture, plaques, stained glass, lawns and linens, are offered AMDG. AMDG is an acronym you find on many brass plates through the Cathedral. It stands for Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, which is the Latin for “To the greater glory of God.” Those four letters AMDG form the essential spirit of a faithful church musician's work and mentality. Richard Harries, a former bishop of Oxford claimed in 1993 that “If I did not believe that God is the source and standard of all that I experience as beautiful, that God is beauty as much as truth and goodness, I would not be a believer at all.” Religion and beauty must not be seen as rivals. The pursuit of beauty for its own aesthetic sake, unrelated to other values, is not possible for the Christian. Musical excellence with a liturgical function can rest upon the truism that instruction doesn't always delight, but delight always instructs. At the more local level, choral services are not concerts because if they were, the individual pay of the musicians would have to increase four-fold. There is no applause and the motets are chosen as handmaids to the readings. No concert-giving institution in the world would be stupid enough to try to put on 5 free concerts every week. No concert-giving institution in the world would dedicate the energy and effort to perform on Christmas Day, New Years Day, Easter Sunday, Thanksgiving, and throughout the blazing and humid summer. The musicians know they are working for something far beyond showing off.
The music you offer at the Cathedral is not always beautiful, it can be harsh, don't you think that is off-putting?
C.S. Lewis wrote in 1961: “If you tell me that something is a pleasure, I do not know whether it is more like revenge, or buttered toast, or success, or adoration, or relief from danger, or a good scratch. You have to say that art gives, not just pleasure, but the particular pleasure proper to it; and it is in defining this that all your real work will have to be done. We must never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.” I try to reflect upon the challenging nature of the parables, the confrontation of the gospels, jealousy, betrayal, murder, family feud, sea monsters, erotica, earthquakes, pescacide, unicorns, lions, delightful legs, leery drunks, olfactory malfunction, culinary adventures, and gnashing teeth when considering what music we should offer alongside such biblical language. I am spurred on by the words of D.H. Lawrence at the dawn of the 20th Century: “Nothing is wonderful unless it is dangerous. Dangerous to the status quo of the soul. And therefore to some degree detestable. It is still nice to eat candy, though one has eaten it every day for years. But the spiritual record of eating candy is a rather thin noise. We must set the whole tree trembling with a new access of life.”
Isn't there something elitist and detached about what you do? Why can't the music be more accessible for those of us who want to join in?
The most profoundly moving and motivating sermon I have ever heard in my life did not call upon me to do anything more than listen while it was being preached. In that I was sitting in a pew, not moving, and not engaging in a dialogue, I was not participating. In a sense it was elitist, because the highly qualified, well read and learned Ph.D. priest was speaking of matters that were beyond my experiences as a young man. In a sense it was detached, because it was a skilled didactic effort of persuasion. It was inaccessible in that it pointed to the verse, “No-one has ever seen God”, and called us to change our lives in a way that seemed counter-intuitive. Clearly we can participate through listening, it is not passive. Cardinal Robert Sarah, the chief liturgist for the Vatican was giving a speech last Friday in Germany at a liturgical conference and said this, “It is necessary to recognize that the serious, profound crisis that has affected the Church is due to the fact that its centre is no longer God and the adoration of God, but rather humanity and our alleged ability to "do" something to keep ourselves busy during the liturgy.” The composer and historian Constant Lambert traces this phenomenon back to the 16th Century: “Those who listened to a motet such as Vittoria's O Vos Omnes took part in it spiritually. By the 17th Century, music ceased to be a vital and spiritual experience and degenerated into a mere aural decoration.” The introduction to the 1985 Canadian Book of Alternative Services is clear in calling us back, however: “the intimate relationship between liturgy and music transcends the merely decorative. Music is not brought into liturgy to enhance it but belongs by right.” When considered in this light, it is impossible to see liturgical music as being detached. We were lucky at St. James because we had resources to cater to diverse liturgical fashions of the age. Our 9am service music was entirely congregational. The 11am music was a 50/50 split, with hymns, mass movements, and acclamations sung by all. The 4.30pm Evensong was mostly sung on our behalf by the Cathedral Choir, though there is still hymnody and responsorial prose. 'Joining in' is more than possible at all three, just in different ways.
You say you are defending beauty, but is anyone really attacking it?
I think the threat against beauty exists in each of us. Saul Bellow puts it better than anyone in saying, “We are waiting to hear from art what we do not hear from philosophy, social theory, and what we cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, fuller, more coherent account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. I don't really know whether art can exist without a certain degree of spiritual poise; we are in danger of losing our arts together with the quiet of soul that art demands.” It is this spiritual poise and the humility attached to it that I wish to promote. Past presidents of the Royal Schools of Church Music have railed endlessly about how their precious traditions have been whittled away by liturgical reform in the past forty years, but I think the challenge is much more personal than the institutional scapegoat. We rush hastily forward to do things with art instead of waiting, “we give it too little chance to work on us. Thus increasingly we meet only ourselves. One of the chief operations of art is to remove our gaze from that mirrored face”, wrote C.S. Lewis again. The musicians themselves are part of the problem, in the words of Constant Lambert, “The paintings of Da Vinci speak an international language, and so do lavatory drawings. We must beware lest in aiming at one we produce the other. It is fatally easy for the modern composer to rid themselves of parochialism not by intensifying their thought but by denuding it, and to reach universality through nullity.”
What can we expect for the fate of Church music and its musicians in the future?
More open opportunities for female composers, organists, and conductors. The repression of these creative talents for centuries in western church music must be passionately corrected. We should anticipate a fierce debate extolling the virtues of live music when a growing percentage of underfunded churches are opting for cheap recorded music. I think that experimentation and risk taking in liturgical music continues at a steady pace – one reads in a given month of John Cage's silent 4,33 being offered at Choral Evensong as the anthem, of avant-garde composer Gabriel Jackson composing an Ave Regina Caelorum for choir and electric guitar being broadcast to millions, of Christmas Carols fit with foot stomping and birdsong, of improvisation, whistling, and tongue clicking. This healthy pushing of the envelope is what makes Anglican Church music so alive and refreshing. To carry on a tradition you must add something to the tradition, and this is certainly happening. Children must encounter church music at its finest. They do not encounter it at school and they encounter it less and less on Sundays as society becomes more and more secular. Church musicians must leave the chancel and the cloister and take their music to where the people are, particularly if that means singing and performing in unfamiliar territory. This will require creativity. We must be sceptical of the marinade of correctness and reject what Martin Amis calls “the fat wet handshake and grinning dentures of bad art.” We must reacquaint ourselves with wonder and discipline, because excellence cannot be had without them. Lastly we must present one another with the gift of patience and humility. One last quotation from C.S. Lewis, “The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you can not possibly find out.”
Sublime and Suspicious Singing
By Robert Busiakiewicz
Singing is as natural to human beings as walking on two legs. From Newfoundland sea shanties to Katajjaq throat singing or a new opera by Rufus Wainwright to Les Chansons d'Acadie, we are a nation enveloped by singing. Canada boasts some of the world's best singers on the classical and contemporary stages – so what do Avril Lavigne, Jon Vickers, Barbara Hannigan, Gerald Finley, Ben Heppner, and Jackie Richardson have in common other than their ability to move us with their spectacular voices? They all started out singing sacred music in choirs. But choirs are not only hotbeds for musical superstars, they are also the dominion of the Volunteer, the grandmother and the grandson. As a choral conductor based in Toronto and a former choral scholar of King's College, Cambridge, I have spent most of my professional life interacting with singers of various abilities, from those agile technicians at the height of their careers to those finding their voices for the first time. When I began to ask myself, “what is all this singing for?” it sounded about as valid a question as “what is gravity for?” or “what is turquoise for?” There are many reasons why we like to sing together, but I have come to believe that a force deeper than entertainment has enthralled us in choral singing. Sacred music is not a frippery or a luxury or just a pastime. Something else is going on in this most popular of pursuits for Canadians, but what? Let me begin with a left-field question:
Is Music... Magic?
All music is mysterious. Mysterious, in that it acts upon us in ways we cannot fully understand. Though it is not a writer's “spooky art” pace Norman Mailer, it is arguably a suspicious art or at least a shady one. A little over sixteen-hundred years ago in Milan, a cleric in his mid-thirties called Aurelius Ambrosius thought it might be a nice idea to spice up the weekly grind of devotional ceremonies with some extra music. He tried it out, and was immediately accused of working with sinister magical formulas, a deeply heretical move for a character now revered as Saint Ambrose. Curiously, he did not deny the charges against him. In the Hebrew Nevi'im however, we are told in no uncertain terms that finding someone who can rock out on the harp will certainly banish any evil spirits you have lurking about (1 Shmuel 16:16). The ancient Greeks had a great diversity of words for different types of beauty. Because the product of music was not directly observable like painting or sculpture, it was categorised with Chaos: a dark side of Apollonian Beauty which manipulates the very soul of a bewitched listener. Shopenhauer called music the “telephone of the beyond, a ventriloquist of God”. The great atheist Virginia Woolf too describes the spell of strolling past a university chapel in 1928: “The sound of music reached my ear. The organ complained magnificently. Even sorrow sounded in that serene air more like the recollection of sorrow than sorrow itself; even the groaning of the ancient organ seemed lapped in peace.” Emily Dickinson encounters music in a similar way, leaving more questions than answers: “I've heard an Organ talk, sometimes in a Cathedral aisle, and understood no word it said – Yet held my breath the while – and risen up – and gone away a more Bernardine girl – yet – know not what was done to me in that old chapel aisle.” The Kwakwaka'wakw people, indigenous to western Canada, understand their drumming as direct communication with the spirit realm. The Araphano tribe of the Great Plains maintain elaborate rudiments as to who can sing specific songs (and when). This is done with a practical sense of supernatural musical purposes and outcomes. They can't all be wrong.
You mention music being able to manipulate souls, don't you think that's a problem?
D.H. Lawrence seemed to have an optimistic outlook when he wrote that “The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind. The mind follows later, in the wake.” Note how he doesn't mention whether these morals are positive or destructive. For many years the head choirboy with the purest voice at a small family-oriented church in eastern Georgia was the young Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili (Joseph Stalin to you and me). Clearly, exposure to art alone does not make you a better person. This applies to minor and major offences alike. At Southwell Minster, Nottinghamshire in 1503, the Dean wrote: “the vestments of the choristers are disgraceful, the choristers do not gird the deacons and themselves properly, they rave and swear and disturb the priest, and want a good whipping.” Singing gorgeous music daily at the height of the renaissance didn't steer them away from such a beating. Neither did the mellifluous musical inspiration of Thomas Weelkes, organist of Chichester Cathedral in the 17th Century, save him from the fines imposed for “urinating on the Dean from the organ loft and for constant blaspheming during services.” A sometime chorister of St. Stephen's in Vienna, Joseph Haydn, was expelled for cutting off other boys' hair mid-sermon. More serious is the story of the southern Italian choral composer Carlo Gesualdo who murdered his wife and her lover after finding them in flagrante delicto in 1590. The list goes on.
So being involved in a choir makes you an awful person?
Not at all. The Dutch historian and politician Gerardus Van Der Leeuw wrote that “In spite of everything, the fact remains that genuine altruism, genuine love, genuine pity, are the driving forces of all great art. For the work of art is a creation, and there is no creation without love.” When considering the great (and necessarily flawed) composers of history, in spite of everything, I would readily label them what Martin Amis calls “nature's bridesmaids.” Choral music can escort us down the aisle of our confusing lives when we least expect it and most need it. This is one of its most crucial functions and is bound up in what Zadie Smith writes about art: “I believe art is here to help, even if the help is painful – especially then. I am aware that remarkable acts of art-making – bold, unbeholden, free – have had the side effect of changing the weather in a people and finally conferring freedoms for which I am now very grateful.” How can we quantify the effect of the countless times 'Alle Menschen werden Brüder' has been hurled from the mouths of singers in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? How many people know the meaning of the word 'Hallelujah' not from a dictionary but from how a piece of baroque choral music makes them feel? Choral music can offer a solution to a problem outlined by T.S. Eliot: “The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God as they did,” whatever our ideas of the divine may be.
Isn't feeling a simple enjoyment of choral music enough?
C.S. Lewis wrote in 1961: “If you tell me that something is a pleasure, I do not know whether it is more like revenge, or buttered toast, or success, or adoration, or relief from danger, or a good scratch. You have to say that art gives, not just pleasure, but the particular pleasure proper to it; and it is in defining this that all your real work will have to be done. We must never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.” The particular pleasure proper to choral music depends on the text being sung and the venue in which it is performed. When I sing Choral Evensong at St. James Cathedral, where I work in Toronto, the notion of pleasure plays a different role than it would singing Wake me up before you go-go as a flash-mob in the Eaton Centre. Of course we can enjoy and understand art, but the door should be opened to transcendence too. Leo Tolstoy reflected on this question brilliantly in 1897: “Art is not a pleasure, a solace, or an amusement; art is a great matter. To see the aim and purpose of art in the pleasure we get from it, is like assuming that the purpose and aim of food is the pleasure derived when consuming it. Art unites people. Through it we feel the mysterious gladness of a communion which, reaching beyond the grave, unites us with all those of the past who have been moved by the same feelings and with all those of the future who will yet be touched by them. The task of art is enormous. Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this.”
Do you really think music can stop violence?
Absolutely. If we do away with music, do away with arts, cut libraries, cut concert series, we can also be contributing to an increase in violence. The great 20th Century pacifist, Aldous Huxley, elaborates: “From lovelessness in relation to Nature we advance to lovelessness in relation to art – a lovelessness so extreme that we have effectively killed all the useful arts. And of course this lovelessness in regard to art is at the same time a lovelessness in regard to the human beings who have to perform the fool-proof and grace-proof tasks imposed by our mechanical art-surrogates.” When we go deeper into the question (what is art for?) this response makes many appearances. T.S. Eliot agrees again in arguing that, “it is ultimately the function of art […] to bring us to a condition of serenity, stillness, and reconciliation with one another; and then leave us to proceed toward a region where that guide can avail us no farther.” The cynic within me has to admit that the music of battle drums, marching hornpipes, and jingoist nationalistic songs all have a role to play in provoking violence too. Shortly after the Norman invasion of England, a number of monasteries were overcome with murderous rage following arguments over which new chants and hymns to use. The way we use music is political and unstable: one need only consult the Sex Pistols in God Save The Queen or Pussy Riot outside the Kremlin.
Does religious, spiritual, or sacred choral music have a new role to play in our increasingly secular society?
Choral Canada commissioned a national survey through a company called Hill Strategies Research in 2017. It reported that there are 28,000 choirs in Canada, with 17,500 of those being faith-based choirs. 72% of the repertoire all choirs sing in this country is sacred music. They estimate that 3.5 million Canadians have sung in a choir in the past year. That is three times as many as have been participating in hockey matches. There is clearly something about singing together that nourishes us as a species. I think we are drawn to the choral idiom in the same way that we are, according to Saul Bellow, “waiting to hear from art what we do not hear from philosophy, and social theory. Out of the struggle at the centre has come an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are, and what this life is for. Science has postulated a nature with no soul in it; commerce does not deal in souls, and higher aspirations - matters like love and beauty - are none of its business. So artists are stuck with what is left of the soul and its mysteries”. These vocal artists are not just concert singers. They are employed in Gurdwaras, and as Muezzin calling to prayer, as Tibetan throat singers, as Hazzanim in the Synagogue, as well as the familiar robed cathedral Anglicans in their undying refrain: O Lord, open thou our lips. Renowned atheist, Richard Dawkins, has publicly conceded that when “I see Evensong in a country church, I have a certain love for it.” A more inspiring vision of choral music's future can be found in the poetry of E.E. Cummings: “All which isn't singing is mere talking. If what calls itself a world should have the luck to hear such singing everyone certainly would believe in nothing but love. Music is the holy note... like a footstep of God in a sick-room's hush.” But perhaps the greatest rallying cry for choral practitioners is emblazoned in the lines of Everybody Sang by Siegfried Sassoon in 1919:
'Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.
Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.'