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(photo courtesy of Straits Times) |
It was good to be back in the pews at Singapore’s Cathedral
of the Good Shepherd on Sunday after a four-month absence. In the UK I had access to the most
spectacular buildings, the most superb choirs and some of the most uplifting
and inspiring music, but there is still something warm and homely about the Good
Shepherd, and Peter Low’s marvellous choir is always a joy to hear, irrespective
of the music they sing. Sunday morning’s
Mass included some lovely items; most notably the Sanctus and Benedictus from
Schubert’s Deutsche Messe – an object
lesson in sublime musical simplicity – as well as a couple of gorgeous hymns, Repton (although an inserted verse had
me in fits with the strange phrase “Temptous Seas” – suggesting that Peter had stepped
out of the boat allured by the tempting water rather than appalled by its
tempestuousness) and Jerusalem, used
somewhat incongruously as a setting for words about “a new song” but which proved
to be a gloriously invigorating start to the service. I do miss a concluding organ voluntary which
would send the congregation out on a high, especially as the Good Shepherd
boasts a very fine organ, but I suppose there are good reasons for this which a
simple musician cannot be expected to appreciate. The absence of an organ voluntary does,
however, allow an immediate upsurge in conversation among the congregation as
they head towards the doors, and I got caught up in one of these as I left on
Sunday.
I was reminded that on a previous occasion I had suggested
that some of the music sung at Mass was “vulgar”, and I was asked what I meant
by the word. That caught me up
short. How often we use a word to hang a
whole range of ideas on without really thinking about the word itself. I know what I mean by “vulgar music”; but
does anyone else?
“Vulgar music” implies for me Street Music, or the
kind of innocuous musical sounds which impinge on our daily lives without any requirement
for us to exercise our brains to process what we hear; not so much easy
listening, as brainless absorption of unexceptional musical noises. But others have a very different perception
of the word “vulgar” as applied to music.
There are clear dictionary definitions of “vulgar”,
many of which veer towards the concept of “rude”, “indecent” and “sordid”, but I
see it, when applied to music, more along the lines of “tawdry”, “unrefined”
and “kitsch”. In short, the word’s definition
spreads so widely that to use it loosely is a pretty pointless exercise, and I
apologise for having done so. But how,
then, should I explain why some of the music I hear in church is, to my way of
thinking, wholly objectionable when it is deliberately designed to be harmless
and innocuous?
The Roman Catholic Church, more than any other
Christian denomination, can look to centuries of musical tradition which have yielded
up some of the very greatest and most inspiring artistic creations man has ever
produced. In the service of the church,
composers have drawn from the deepest wells of their skill, creating
magnificent music intended expressly for the glory of God and the inspiration
of those who hear it. Their driving
force was always a desire to produce the best in praise of their Creator. The modern-day idea that serving God through
music simply involves taking what is popular in the streets, bars, clubs and
brothels of every day existence, was anathema.
That all changed in the immediate aftermath of Vatican
II in the early 1960s. Coinciding with a
general loosening of public morals and the explosion of Pop culture (not for
nothing is the decade still referred to as the “Swinging Sixties”), the church’s
decision to dispense with some of its hallowed traditions – notably the abandonment
of the ancient language of the church, Latin, and the shattering of the
mysteries of the Mass by turning the priests round so that they showed the
congregation what they were doing rather than keeping it hidden from sight –
seemed to open the door for a complete relaxation of standards across the
board. That, as Pope John XXIII put it,
the church needed to let in some fresh air, was obvious; but as is so often the
case, give an inch and people take a mile, and the repercussions of Vatican II
led to an almost total abandonment of the high artistic standards which up to
that point had permeated all church music.
One of the joys at the Good Shepherd is that they happily
use Latin and invoke the musical traditions of the church by frequent use of plainchant,
which is easily woven into the fabric of the service greatly assisted by the
consummate skill of the choir in performing it.
But alongside this, they often regurgitate nasty, tasteless and wholly inappropriate
street music presumably in the misguided belief that “it’s what the people like
and experience in their daily lives, so let’s bring it into church”.
That is an attitude which destroys the whole fabric of
church music, the purpose of which should be to uplift, reflect and inspire on
the great principles of faith – not to serve as a sordid accompaniment to bland
utterances of simplistic notions of peace, happiness and joy. An act of religious worship should take
people beyond the drudgery of their daily lives and into a spiritual place way
beyond their normal existence. The
function of music is to make that journey easier, not to keep us firmly rooted
to our daily existence.
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