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To
say that music is the most Christian of the arts may seem a contentious
statement. Yet what is often forgotten is that all the other art forms were
highly developed before the Christian age.
Music was the only exception.
Of course there are specifically Christian forms in all the arts but,
nevertheless, architecture, sculpture, poetry and painting had all reached
sophisticated levels in the ancient world.
Even a thousand years before the ancient Greeks (that is, in the 20th
century BC) we can see at Knossos highly developed art and architecture.
In comparison with all this artistic activity, music alone
remained largely undeveloped. There
were, of course, various instruments that existed in pre-Christian days such
as the lyre, drums and elementary woodwind instruments.
But from what we can deduce, ancient music was of the very simplest
kind: basic tunes, perhaps with one or two accompanying chords.
Plato mentions music briefly in The Republic, referring to the power of
the ancient musical modes and their ability to alter human moods.
This is certainly evidence that the ancients had worked out musical
scales. A double flute was used to
keep rowers in time, or to provide a rhythm for gymnastic exercises, just as
pop music is used today for aerobics. A
strumming lyre would be used to accompany lyric poetry.
But the fact remains that anything beyond the very simplest harmonic
blocks, let alone polyphony, was unknown.
We have to skip forward into the Christian era, and to Catholic Europe,
to find the invention of what we would understand as music.
I realize in this very simple description that I have left out what is loosely
described as ethnic or folk music. I
am also leaving out the vast subject of plainsong, which was part of the
worship of the early Church - not because it is unimportant, but because what
I want to focus on is the whole notion of music as chordal progression or
several voices singing together in different parts.
What I am saying is that music as we know it, music sometimes referred
to as “art music”, was an invention specifically of the Catholic Church -
and that a similar claim could not be made for any other art form.
I am talking here about the motets and masses of Machaut, Josquin des
Pres, Palestrina, and then on through Byrd, Monteverdi, to Vivaldi and beyond.
The world never saw anything like it before, and it staggers me to
think that it all happened so recently in relation to the history of
civilization. It has all happened
in the last five or six hundred years.
Bearing in mind that it was under the auspices of the Church that music
exploded into being with little or no reference to the ancient world, unlike
every other art form in the Renaissance period, I want to ask how this could
be? Is it coincidence or luck?
Or is there something unique about Christianity, or even about
Catholicism, that allowed music finally to come of age in Europe?
Many great composers have of course not been Catholics.
The example that immediately springs to mind is Bach.
Sir Thomas Beecham, when asked why he didn’t like Bach said,
“It’s the counterpoint, and even worse, it’s Protestant counterpoint.”
Now I don’t want to spoil my argument by overstating things.
Bach was, undeniably, a devout Lutheran.
However, any musicologist will tell you that part of the reason for
Bach’s greatness is that he was international in his outlook, and was
particularly influenced by the music of Catholic Italy and France.
From Italy we find the influence of Vivaldi, about whose music Bach was
so passionate that he arranged six of the composer’s concertos for organ.
Vivaldi’s influence can be seen clearly in the way Bach builds
musical structures where the themes reappear in different keys.
Without wanting to get too technical, this is known as ritornello
structure. From France, copies of
the music of Couperin and other French masters have been found in Bach’s
hand - and from France many believe comes the grace in Bach’s music, and the
influence of dance and the works called Suites (there is a tradition of French
Suites and of Italian Suites). It
is not hard to make a case that Bach was profoundly influenced by music from
Catholic countries and cultures - and that without this he would almost
certainly not have achieved his greatness.
As for the two other members of the trinity of the world’s greatest
composers, Mozart and Beethoven, although they both worked for Catholic
patrons, our image of them is not as especially devout.
(I remember in the biography of Mozart I read as a child there was a
very dramatic picture of the Archbishop of Salzburg in full clericals
physically kicking Mozart down some stairs, to illustrate his being sacked.
You might have thought that this would be quite enough to put Mozart
off the Catholic faith.) Of
course, I do not need to remind you of the sublime beauty of Mozart’s
Requiem. Yet surely he was more at home, more characteristically “Mozart”
in his symphonies and operas? And
we know that he was that anti-Catholic thing, a Freemason.
Nevertheless, an old family friend, Abbé Maximilian Stadler, stated
emphatically that Mozart nevertheless considered church music to be his
favourite genre, and in his famous Ave Verum Corpus, a gem we perhaps too
easily take for granted, Mozart was even instigating a new style of religious
music - unadorned, devotional and easily understood.
In the case of Beethoven, apart from the fact that the whole of Vienna, where
he lived and worked, was steeped in Roman Catholicism, he himself was not
orthodox in his belief and practice. However,
he repeatedly refers in his letters to his aspiration to bring into the world
music that will reveal the divine, and praise the glory of God.
To my ears this is apparent in everything I have heard by him and,
given his cultural background and working environment, leaving aside the not
insignificant matter of the Missa Solemnis, I think, whether Beethoven
admitted it or not, he was heavily influenced by his Catholic environment.
What could it be about music, then, that is essentially religious, Christian,
or even Catholic? One important
factor is that music, like religious experience, is beyond words.
It is less representational than visual art.
Its lack of rootedness in life, such as that maintained by arts like
poetry, can be felt sometimes to put it at a disadvantage, but it does mean
that music lends itself to expressing transcendence better than other art
forms - as has long been acknowledged by both poets and philosophers.
All very well, but what is it about our Faith that could have led to
the invention of the harmonic system and to the cycle of keys?
What did Christianity have that the artistic genius of the Greeks or
Romans did not? Indeed, why did
the Jews not work out harmonic music beyond their admittedly ravishing, but
basically very simple, songs of praise and lamentation?
After all, they, had, and have, a profound sense of the ineffability of
God.
One rather prosaic answer to the last question is that the making of musical
sound on instruments of any kind counted as work and would therefore have been
illegal on the Sabbath. But I
think we can go deeper. If we are
prepared to acknowledge that music more than any other art form is able to
capture or evoke transcendent experience, then perhaps it was only in the
Christian era, when God had revealed who he truly was, when he had manifested
his transcendence within the world in the person of Christ, that man could
develop the transcendent art of music. The
scandal of God becoming man in the theology of Christianity demands, to put it
crudely, a new level of faith. To
believe in the Incarnation and the Resurrection demands more of us than to
believe simply in a transcendent God, difficult though even that may be for
many people.
Religion
and Faith
Music has
syntax and rules that no one has ever been able fully to understand or
explain. Having studied music to a
fairly high level myself, I am always surprised that people who have not done
so assume that learning music is equivalent to learning a foreign language.
The art of music is still a tremendous and perplexing mystery.
It has no equivalent of the "laws of perspective".
It demands, at its theoretical roots, tremendous faith.
That is why I suspect that it could only be in the faith-soaked
Christian age that the laws of music could be discerned - that music could be
"made flesh".
I think I can even demonstrate the dependence of music on faith historically.
It always amazed me how such disparate musical styles as baroque,
classical and romantic music (in fact the whole range of music from Josquin
des Pres to Bruckner) has far more that unites it than separates it.
In this period of five hundred years, a period in which music retained
faith in its musical laws, the supremacy of the so-called musical triad
(otherwise known as the common chord) remained inviolate.
The key system was expanded though never changed, and the chordal
relationships within keys remained constant.
In terms of basic musical structures, form and chordal procedure, a
Josquin motet works in a surprisingly similar way to a Bruckner symphony.
This is astonishing. But
what happened to music as it entered the last century?
Those laws, based essentially on faith rather than proven by science,
were rejected. Is it mere
coincidence that in the very year, 1907, that Schoenberg began ripping the
intestines out of music in his first atonal compositions, Pope St Pius X was
issuing his encyclical Pascendi Gregis against Modernism?
To the casual historical observer the activities of an atonal composer
and a Pope shoring up the theological purity of the Catholic faith would seem
entirely separate. But with
hindsight we can discern a relationship between the decline in Catholic, and
indeed in all Christian, belief in the West and the collapse of music.
Many of those who rejected religious faith at that time still believed
that the common-sense moral assumptions of their culture would remain in
place, and they were proved wrong during the twentieth century.
In a similar way, the commonly accepted musical laws of Western culture
could not survive the loss of the faith which provided a context in which they
made sense.
There are parallels between bad music and false doctrine.
Heresy is the distortion of an aspect of truth so that it becomes out
of proportion. (The most famous
example in Christian history is the misunderstanding of Christ’s humanity
versus his divinity.) It seems
that a similar failure to keep melody, harmony and rhythm in balance and in
proportion has been the case with music over the last century.
Percussion instruments, for instance, which are so magical in their
effects, seem to swamp so many modern scores at the expense of melody.
Indeed the reliance on instrumental timbre, which is vital in any
music, has grown out of proportion so that musical form itself has been all
but abandoned. Indeed Modernism in
all its forms could be said to be an exaggeration of things that are vital to
all great art, whether it be colour in art or rhythm in music.
Certain elements are isolated and then blown into nightmarish
proportions, just as in heresy an aspect of truth is taken out of its context
and placed in a false perspective.
I am not here advocating any sort of timidity in musical creation.
Indeed the music of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven shows a kind of radical
extremism in its attention to the balance and proportion of rhythm, harmony
and melody. What these composers
accepted was that there were timeless laws of music that could be adapted to
every age, in the same way that Catholic dogma remains the same but may be
subject to new insights through time. The
whole background of a culture steeped in the Catholic faith allowed composers
to accept both the order and freedom that tonality brings with a
"religious" faith, even if they never stopped to think of it in
those terms.
It is sobering to think that the entire history of music rested on a faith in
tonal principles which scarcely any music college or university would now
accept as valid for undergraduate or postgraduate composition.
In the field of architecture, the Protestant architect, Quinlan Terry,
argues that the classical style of architecture is divinely ordered and
inspired. I would love to come up
with similar arguments to defend my own musical language, though I am defeated
by the essential mystery of musical expression.
I am convinced, however, that, just as the Catholic Church was in
effect the midwife of classical music, so it could yet guide music out of the
difficulties in which it presently finds itself after many decades of crisis
and stagnation. Let me try to
suggest how.
I recently heard love described in terms of the utmost simplicity as the
ability to pay attention. It
suddenly struck me that paying attention was also the very essence of being a
musician - paying close attention always to every sound you are playing, or as
a composer, creating. The listener
who pays close attention to music almost becomes the music whilst it is
playing. If love is at the centre
of the Christian message then perhaps music, fostering, as it does, our
capacity for attention, has a unique mission in the fostering of this divine
love.
The idea of paying deep attention was also beloved of the mystics.
In modern culture almost the highest term of praise that can be given
to a work of art is to describe it as imaginative.
Yet the author of The Cloud of Unknowing reminds us that the
imagination needs careful control. He
says: “The disobedience of the imagination is clearly seen in the prayers of
those newly converted to the life of devotion.
Until the time when their imagination is largely controlled by the
light of grace in their reason… they cannot dispel the amazing range of
thought, hallucinations and images which are projected and imprinted by their
fertile imaginations. All this
disobedience is the result of original sin.”
The Church has the ability to teach us how to rescue the imagination - or, as
the author of The Cloud of Unknowing states, to keep the imagination
“restrained by reason in the light of grace.”
If I think of the phrases of praise used to describe contemporary
music, which I have read in reviews in newspapers, they are almost identical
to those used in The Cloud to describe a mind far from God.
I believe that just as the Church invented music, it is only Christ who
will once again teach composers to turn away from the “resounding gong and
clanging cymbal” of so much modern music, towards a vision of music more in
line with St Paul’s plea to the Philippians, and which fits so well with the
music of composers such as Palestrina, Mozart, or Bruckner: “Fill your minds
with everything that is true, everything that is noble, everything that is
good and pure, everything that we love and honour, and everything that can be
thought virtuous and worthy of praise.”
Frederick
Stocken is a
composer whose commissions include a mass for the Brompton Oratory in London
and a Symphony for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He read music at St
Catharine’s College Cambridge, and he was also awarded a PhD from the
University of Manchester in 2008 for his work on nineteenth-century harmonic
theory. This article appeared in Second Spring issue 5.
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