The great thing about sacred music is its ability to intensify a prevailing mood, especially the changing moods of the Church’s year. Or, as St Augustine puts it,
‘When they are sung, these sacred words stir my mind to greater religious fervour and kindle in me a more ardent flame of piety than they would if they were not sung ‘
There is no time in the year when we sense this more clearly than in the six sombre weeks of Lent, which began on Ash Wednesday with the brooding strains of Allegri’s Miserere drifting down from the galleries, and reaches its mournful climax in Passion week and Good Friday. The mood has been sustained each Sunday with a number of reflective, otherworldly 16thcentury service settings. On Passion Sunday, 9th March, in place of Evensong there will be a sequence of readings from mediaeval Mystery plays, interpolated with Passiontide music from the choir. Here again the power of music will be evident as the narrative of the events of Holy Week unfolds. The pieces will be drawn from a range of styles, but in both ancient and modern we can expect to hear the traditional musical rhetoric of sadness: plaintive minor tonalities and anguished chromaticism, weeping phrases and falling lines, and the slow pace of mourning.
What a contrast with the ebullient joyousness of the music which will greet the congregation on Easter Sunday morning! The setting will be Mozart’s Sparrow’ Mass (Spatzenmesse, K.220), so-called because of the little twittering figure in the accompaniment to the Sanctus (originally written for violins). It was probably first perfomed on an Easter Sunday, when Mozart’s Archbishop Colloredo celebrated the Easter Mass in Salzburg in 1776. Thanks to the Archbishop’s determination to reduce the excessive elaboration of church services, this is a Missa Brevis, and not a setting of inordinate length ( Our church music is very different from that of Italy,’ complained Mozart later the same year, a Mass must not last longer than three quarters of an hour’). It was originally scored with an accompaniment for two trumpets and two violins as well as timpani, bass and organ bright sounds which Oliver, our assistant organist, will undoubtedly do his best to reproduce. After the penitential mood and music of Lent, we can celebrate with chocolate Easter eggs and a feast of bright rhythms and uplifting vocal lines.
Music
Gill Perrin