UK Edition
Why do the godless yearn for religious music?
Today is the high-water mark of the great tide of religious music that sweeps over the country at this time of year.
In churches up and down the country there are performances of Bach’s Passions, those dramatic retellings of Christ’s arrest, trial and crucifixion, and also Handel’s oratorios, above all the Messiah. In concert halls, remarkably, it’s the same story.
And yet the sudden rush of Passions and oratorios at Easter obscures an astonishing fact about our secular age, which is that religious music is absolutely everywhere, all the time.
This hunger for music with a spiritual dimension takes many forms. On the populist side there are albums that lace easy-listening with a spiritual ambience such as Pure by New Zealand-born singer Hayley Westenra, which 15 years after its release is still the bestselling classical album of the 21st century.
Alongside pop covers it has arrangements of Maori religious songs, Amazing Grace, and a sacred piece from Carmina Burana. More than 20 years on, Charlotte Church’s debut Voice of an Angel, which features Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Pie Jesu and César Franck’s Panis Angelicus, is still at number five in Classic FM’s list of top sellers of the past 25 years. Just a few places below are those plainchant-singing Priests at number 10.
Far away from these albums in terms of greater historical accuracy, but quite close in terms of pure “angelic” voices, are the choirs performing church music from centuries ago, much of it in Latin. The trend was launched more than 40 years ago by the Tallis Scholars, who found there was a terrific appetite for their performances of masses and motets by great figures of Renaissance music such as Thomas Tallis and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.
Hard on their heels came the Sixteen, who every year undertake a sold-out tour of churches and cathedrals called a Choral Pilgrimage – doesn’t that name tell us the impetus is more than musical? Numerous younger choirs have since followed in their footsteps, such as the Orlando Consort and the Gesualdo Six.
Even more surprising is the popularity of contemporary religious composers. At one time “new music” was an aggressively secular thing; now it’s the composers of religious or “spiritual” music who dominate the market. Almost 30 years ago, a recording of the third symphony by a completely unknown Polish composer named Henryk Górecki was an unexpected hit, despite consisting of deeply melancholy settings of prayers in Polish.
Since then, numerous other composers of avowedly spiritual music have emerged, all of them vastly more popular than their secular colleagues. Among the best-known is the Estonian Arvo Pärt, whose bell-like harmonies and interwoven textures are sometimes stark and grand, sometimes naive and playful. Even better known is John Tavener, who became a household name for his ecstatic meditative pieces such as The Protecting Veil and The Lamb. Song for Athene was played at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales.
Tavener, who died in 2013, made a point of embracing music and sounds from beyond the Christian church; one of his last pieces was one celebrating the “ninety-nine beautiful names” that God is given in Islam. Other composers stay firmly within the ambit of Christianity, and some are even happy to submit to the discipline of writing modest pieces for use in church services.
Among them is Scottish composer James MacMillan, who has a genius for making perfectly turned pieces for choir of a rapt and unsentimental devotional spirit. US composer Eric Whitacre is even more popular, perhaps because – unlike MacMillan – he’s careful to keep all trace of doubt and conflict out of his music.
This astonishing revival of sacred music has brought a vast treasury of great music back into general circulation, which a few decades ago was known only to churchgoers or scholars. In doing so it has completely transformed the public’s view of what “classical music” consists of. At one time it was a fairly narrow sliver of the tradition, extending from Bach in the early 18th century to Mahler and Elgar in the 20th. Now there’s a general awareness that classical music stretches back to the Renaissance and medieval periods, and also forward, to our own time. That has to be a good thing.
But what is the significance of this boom in religious or “spiritual” music? I would say it shows that in a stressful age, people have developed a need for music that quietens the mind, offers a haven from the hurry and noise of everyday life, and unlocks a passage to our deeper selves.
Despite the decline of organised religion, there is still a vast, inchoate sense in the population at large that there is more to life than getting and spending. Surveys of religious attitudes bear this out. A Eurobarometer poll in 2010 found 37 per cent of UK citizens “believe there is a God”, and 33 per cent believed there was “some sort of spirit or life force”.
Religious music gives us access to that realm, without the commitments of organised religion. And while everyday music is full of messages one has to labour to grasp, the stillness of Pärt or Tavener is simpler, and seems to go far beyond time and place.
However, I think the wave of Bach Passions and Handel oratorios taking place all over the UK this weekend stands apart from the general hunger for spiritual music. You can’t ignore that fact that it’s happening now, at the most solemn time of year for Christians.
And it would be a strange listener who ignored the Passion story in Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and treated it just as nice music. There’s an urgent message in those tragic arias and angry choruses that we have to pay attention to. Just for a moment, we are reminded with blazing force of what religious music truly meant, before belief ebbed away.