Cecilia is Patron Saint of Music because she ‘sang in her heart to God’ while being martyred in about 230. Little else is known of her; so I’ll nod respectfully, and pass on to speak of music.
What is music in church for? We tend to take it for granted – but should we? What sort of music should we have? Is it fit for purpose? What might that purpose be?
Scripture enjoins us to sing. Both Ephesians and Colossians urge us to sing ‘psalms and hymns and spiritual songs’ [Eph. 5.19; Col. 3.16], but they don’t specify the music! Styles of music have varied hugely from one culture to another, one century to another. Style is contentious. What attracts some, repels others. I myself struggle with drums and electric guitars. They seem, to my taste, ‘inappropriate’ in church. But why?
I suppose it’s to do with importing what seems like a very secular style into a sacred context. But what is sacred? What’s secular? What is appropriate in church? This debate has gone on for a long time.
The Middle Ages came to a fairly clear view that secular music – popular songs, the music of the tavern – should be excluded from worship. They distinguished the secular modes (essentially what we call major and minor scales) from church modes.
Furthermore, they didn’t like strong rhythms in church. It’s now thought that 8th and 9th century plainsong was strongly rhythmical. But by the 13th century, rhythms were smoothed out, replaced by long melismas of equal notes. The tunes were thus, in effect, rendered ‘sexless’ – though I don’t think medieval writers ever quite said that!
But human creativity doesn’t stop. Despite medieval restrictions, counterpoint was born. The philosopher Karl Popper even claimed that the invention and development of counterpoint was (and I quote) ‘possibly the most unprecedented, original, indeed miraculous achievement of our western civilization, not excluding science.’ Quite a claim!
Counterpoint grew ever more complex. Different voices moved at different speeds. Composers started sneaking in popular tunes – for example, the song known as ‘L’homme armé’ – hoping clergy wouldn’t notice! By the 16th century, church music had become hugely complex. Most of the Reformers didn’t like it one bit.
They complained that nobody could hear the words – and of course they wanted words in the vernacular. A new kind of music came to the rescue. The contrapuntal lines started moving all together, each voice singing the same syllable at the same time. The church music of Tallis and Byrd, like that of Palestrina, helped give the world something new: chords!
But many Reformers remained sour. Here’s an extract from the Second Book of Homilies of 1563, mocking those who liked music in church:
[The idolatrous, it says] see the false religion abandoned, and the true restored, which seemeth an unsavoury thing to their unsavoury taste; as may appear by this, that a woman said to her neighbour, ‘Alas Gossip, what shall we do now at church, since all the saints are taken away, since all the goodly sights we were wont to have are gone, since we cannot hear the piping, singing, chanting, and playing upon the organs, that we could before? – But, dearly beloved, we ought greatly to rejoice, and give God thanks, that our churches are delivered out of all those things which displeased God so sore, and filthily defiled his Holy House….
This dispute grew ever hotter. In the 1620s, John Cosin was taken to law by another Prebend at Durham, Peter Smart, who complained:
…you have so changed the whole liturgy that, though it be not in Latin, yet by reason of the confusedness of voices of so many singers, with a multitude of melodious instruments (directly contrary to the Injunctions and Homilies) the greatest part of the service is no better understood, than if it were in Hebrew or in Irish. Nay the Sacrament itself is turned well near into a theatrical stage play, that when men’s minds should be occupied about heavenly meditations about Christ’s bitter Death and Passion, of their own sins, of faith and repentance, of the joys of heaven and the torments of hell; at that very season, very unseasonably, their ears are possessed with pleasant tunes, and eyes fed with pompous spectacles of glittering pictures, and histrionical gestures, representing unto us Apollo’s solemnities in his temple at Delos….
With the Civil War and Commonwealth, Puritans got what they wanted – for a while. In a book of 1646 entitled Gods Arke Overtopping the Worlds Waves, we read:
[There has been] a most rare and strange alteration in the face of things…at Westminster. Namely that whereas there was wont to be heard nothing almost but roaring boys, tooting and squeaking organ pipes and the cathedral catches of Morley, and I know not what trash; now the popish altar is quite taken away, the bellowing organs are demolished and pulled down, … the singers …drive out, and … there is now set up a most blessed orthodox preaching ministry….
Few Christians wanted no music at all; but the debate continued. Mozart’s archbishop in Salzburg insisted that music should be, not so much simple, as short! In a letter, Mozart refers to the ‘special kind of skill’ required to meet the demand that the high mass, with full orchestral setting and a sermon, should last no more than forty-five minutes!
Hymns Ancient and Modern was first published in 1861. Until then, all hymns – seen as dangerously Methodistical – had been shunned by the Established Church. They encouraged enthusiasm! After two centuries of turmoil, Anglicans wanted no such thing. They liked it dull! But hymns, and parish choirs to give a lead, finally conquered the C of E in the late 19th century. True, there were sometimes riots when robed choirs were introduced! But the rebuilding of this church, with its fine chancel and choir stalls, epitomises the shift that took place.
Today, tastes are changing again. Fewer parishes have robed choirs singing ‘traditional’ music (much of which is actually quite modern). Some parishes have tried rock bands, or other music borrowed from secular models. The medievals would be astonished – and horrified. But go back further, and you might find more sympathy. Ambrose, the great 4th century Bishop of Milan, used popular songs to teach Church doctrine. The Wesleys did the same.
So – what is music in church for?
Our business here is worship. If our focus is genuinely on God, whatever we sing can’t be wholly wrong. Nevertheless, there’s an old Anglican phrase about doing things ‘decently and in order’, thus feeding both heart and mind. Church music that’s dry as dust is pointless; but it should never be mere ‘entertainment’. It can do so much more!
What, exactly?
You will know these lines of George Herbert, familiar from a hymn:
A man who looks on glass
On it may stay his eye
Or if he pleaseth, through it pass,
And then the heaven espy.
Music in church can (and, I think, should) be a window through which we look to see Christ – to see him in ways that reinforce and complement our rational grasp of faith. That, quite simply, is what I think music in church is for – though how any parish unpacks that will involve constant debate, and perhaps no little disagreement. So – over to you!
St Cecelia, if you’ve been listening to this, I hope you approve!