Sacred Music

I have enjoyed and appreciated this series, including the final programme this evening on 'The Legacy of Luther and Bach'.



Television: Such divine music
by Gillean Craig
“WHAT makes sacred music so divine?” is a jolly encouraging question to hear posed at the start of a four-part documentary series. No shilly-shallying about here; no woolly liberal angst such as: “Some think it is, some do not. What about you?” The questioner takes it for granted that we all agree: sacred music is divine. The only question is why, or how?
Much as I respect the musical traditions of other faiths, this series is about our Christian church music, about the glorious Western tradition to which we are heirs. Here we have a celebrity endorsement from Simon Russell Beale, who is proud of his time as a chorister at St Paul’s, and willing to demonstrate that he can still hold his own on a bass line. He shows how being able to read music or understand musical or liturgical terms is not the domain of out-of-touch academics, requiring dumbed-down explanation before anyone normal might be expected to understand, but simply a mark of reasonable education and culture.
Sacred Music (BBC4, Fridays) has now broadcast three episodes, focusing first on the medieval Notre-Dame school, then on Palestrina and the Roman Renaissance, and then on our own beloved Tallis and Byrd. Of these, the bravest was the first: how terrific to hear the development from plainchant to organum then flowering into polyphony, sung with vigour in the churches in the Ile de France for which it was composed.
Mr Russell Beale does not treat the music as an independent laboratory specimen: he sets it within the political, social, cultural, and religious movements of its period. Context is all. We might, though, feel justifiable pride that the English Tudor programme was perhaps the best of the lot so far (Luther and Bach next week).
The story of the English Reformation was set in the context of surviving buildings — not all churches — demonstrating the remarkable continuity of our institutions. But our pride is properly tempered: however much we might cherish and perform the works of these towering Tudor masters, the shameful fact is that Tallis (probably) and Byrd (certainly) were recusants, their finest music saturated with longing for the old religion, their deepest sympathies lying with those being imprisoned, tortured, and executed for allegiance to the Pope. It is an irony of history that their legacy is celebrated largely by the Church that usurped and tried to extirpate theirs.
There is a wider context here: as the woeful attempt of the choir of the Sistine Chapel to sing some Palestrina demonstrated, if you want Western church music sung well, book an English choir whose members will have been brought up within the Anglican tradition. Harry Christophers’s The Sixteen is simply superb — subtle, rhapsodic, and tender, as the music requires.
This series is a glorious treat, an Eastertide delight that, I hope, will shortly transfer to one of the main channels to give the widest possible audience a glimpse of the pleasure to be derived and shared from the best church music, wonderfully sung.
It might even lead a few people to realise the inspiration that lies behind it all — the Church’s offering of praise and prayer to Almighty God.