BBC 4 has been proving once again that, should the corporation be forced to cut some of its TV services, this channel must be retained: the second series of Sacred Music, knowledgeably and sensitively hosted by the actor Simon Russell Beale, with music provided by Harry Christophers and The Sixteen, is an absolute triumph.
As a result of the edition on “Holy Minimalism” I’ve been listening almost constantly for the past week to the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s stunning mystic masterpiece, Tabula Rasa – a work I’d heard previously, but had never listened to properly.
Scrap BBC3 (please!), sell off Radios 1 and 2, cut regional output to the bone, ditch the Asian Network, get rid of any number of executives (apart, of course, from my old pals), but hands off BBC4 (and, it goes without saying, Radio 3).
As my previous blog was a largely negative attack on the leader of my church, I thought I’d introduce a rather more uplifting subject: religious music. As the world probably doesn’t need a musical ignoramus banging on about how much they loveThe St. Matthew Passion or Spem in Alium or Mozart’s Requiem, I thought I’d concentrate on a few 20th century favourites from a variety of musical traditions. The only thing they have in common is that they all evoke - in this writer, at least - a powerful and immediate emotional response to the numinous.
First up is the aforementioned Tabula Rasa. It is controlled, delicate and repetitive, conveying a sense of infinity and renewal in the way it regularly whispers to halt, only to recommence after a silence - like the silence between breaths in meditation - with a distinctive, swaying, downward falling, bell-like sequence that is beautiful and compelling.
I’m more familiar works by another exponent of Holy Minimalism - the Greek Orthodox English composer, Sir John Tavener. His Funeral Ikos, a 1981 work, is a setting for a deeply touching poem in which a dying monk contemplates what awaits him – “I am parted from my brethren./ All my friends do I abandon and go hence.” David Gammie described it as "the essence of freedom and simplicity, a monadic or barely harmonised chant, shared between lower and upper voices and full choir, each verse ending with the same haunting Alleluia refrain." It is beautiful beyond words, and somehow terribly comforting.
The track I have listened to most frequently during the past five years - and the only overtly Christian contemporary recording that I can stand - is by the American songwriter and performer Julie Miller, who is, I suppose, from the folk rock tradition. Her greatest song, “All My Tears (Be Washed Away)”, like Funeral Ikos, is an affirmation that death holds no fears for a believer:
When I go, don’t cry for me:
In my father’s arms I’ll be.
The wounds this world left on my soul
Will all be healed and I’ll be whole.
Emmylou Harris covered the song on her seminal Wrecking Crew album, and Julie Miller has, of course, recorded her own version – and they’re both excellent. But the version I love, the one with the greatest emotional impact – harder and more savagely joyous than the originals in that slightly deranged minor key Appalachian way – is one featuring both women sharing the verses (see illustration above).
Most people assume “Lord of the Dance” is an ancient hymn. Certainly, the tune comes from a Shaker dance song, “Simple Gifts”(used by Aaron Copland in Appalachian Spring) but the words – which tell the story of the Crucifixion from Jesus’ point of view - were written by Sydney Carter in 1963. Something about the combination of the awful events described, the happy defiance of the lyrics (“They buried my body and they thought I’d gone/But I am the dance and the dance goes on.”) and the stirring jauntiness of the tune lend this song an extraordinary emotional punch.
Like most people, I came to the Missa Luba, a Congolese version of the Latin Mass, by seeing Lyndsay Anderson’s 1968 British film, If... , which featured the Sanctus.The mass was composed – or organized – in 1958 by Father Guido Naazen, a Franciscan friar from Belgium, using native musical forms. He then formed Les Troubadours du Roi Baudoin, a choir consisting of 45 boys from Kamina, to perform it. The results were startlingly fresh, haunting and other-worldly.
I’ll end with two wonderful Black American religious recordings. The first is the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi’s 1950 gospel recording of the “Our Father”. A bass drum, a snare drum and five stupendously rich voices conjoin to produce a slice of sheer gut-wrenching rapture: as powerful and visceral an affirmation of faith as I’ve ever heard. Simply magnificent.
Finally, one of the oddest records in my collection: “John the Revelator” by the genius bluesman Blind Willie Johnson, a track which sounds as if it’s being broadcast – imperfectly - from some other dimension. The subject of the song is the writing of the Book of Revelations:
Who's that writin'? John the Revelator
Tell me who's that writin'? John the Revelator
Tell me who's that writin'? John the Revelator
Wrote the book of the seven seals.
Although it was recorded in 1930, it sounds as if the singer is actually reporting an event he is witnessing in the first century AD. You could describe it as a call-and-response blues/gospel performance (many have) – but its eerie magnificence bears little resemblance to anything any of us has heard before. Johnson sounds as if he regularly gargles with battery acid, and his wife’s affectless, ethereal responses are actually quite creepy.
Now, that’s what I call numinous.
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