Beyond words
Peter Phillips
By the time you read this I shall have watched two days of the 3rd Test between India and Australia at the WACA in Perth, and given a paper on how important good Church music is in the context of modern worship. Both events will not be without their political sides: the novelty of an Indian being penalised for racist comments about an Australian, however mixed-race, has not escaped the attention of cartoonists in the local media; and my lecture topic is designed to rebut the pronouncements of the current Dean of Sydney, whose extreme evangelical views have been making waves throughout the global Anglican communion for some years now.
The fact that the Dean and the Archbishop of Sydney are brothers makes the situation for lovers of good music at Sydney’s Anglican Cathedral especially unfortunate. For the parishioners there is no escaping the hard-line and destructive opinions of these two, whose double-whammy reminds one of the accumulation of power by the Kaczynski twins in Poland. There is a difference, though: the Kaczynskis never made any pretence about being politicians who wanted to be elected to high office; whereas the Jensen brothers speak derogatively about how formalised religion, with buildings, hierarchies and ritual, runs counter to the spirit of the early Church, and then allow themselves to be appointed to just the kind of posts they think shouldn’t exist.
One wonders how they came to be appointed in the first place. Here is what the Dean, the Very Reverend Phillip Jensen (a title he doesn’t hesitate to use), has to say about large religious buildings of the kind he now runs: ‘There is no discussion in the Bible about buildings. So we must not make too much of them, they are not central to God’s purpose, not important, not the church of God, not a replacement for the Temple.’ And about Church music he opines: ‘Using the language and categories of worship in church is untenable ... It is no accident that feelings of epiphany (transcendence) occur when certain human activities are undertaken, especially music’, and that they can induce these feelings ‘regardless of the content or the religious context. We need to help people to see that nice feelings are nice. But they don’t represent contact with God.’ Is it then merely to be nice that the men who wrote the Bible, and especially the Psalms, never cease to refer to how often and how passionately one should sing one’s praises to the Lord, from sheer joy? A more mod erate observer than Dr Jensen might have pointed out that these Biblical exhortations are to the whole body of the congregation present — not to specialist robed choirs singing a cappela polyphony — and that therefore specialist performance is questionable, but there’s no point even in putting forward this standard argument against elitism in Sydney Cathedral, where no kind of singing can represent contact with God.
Congregational singing is one side of this coin. One wonders whether Jesus and his disciples sang when they were at prayer together: by the law of averages some of them must have had reasonable voices. The other side — anathema to the evangelicals, but relevant to a Cathedral which has a longestablished choir-school and an educational responsibility to the local community in music — is that of the trained choir, singing complicated music by itself. The argument against such choirs is that they exclude the unmusical; the argument in favour is that (as the 12th-century Abbot Suger put it) ‘we can only come to understand absolute beauty, which is God, through the effect of precious and beautiful things on our senses’. In this way of looking at things the better the music and the more trained the performance, the nearer we come to God, as much for the people who are listening as for those who are singing.
Why is it that music is always the first art to be used as a weapon by doctrinaire people? Are they frightened of its unique ability to express the inexpressible? Evangelicals dislike abstraction and mysticism. They seem to need everything to be explained in down-to-earth language, so no one can say that someone else is trying to exclude them. Music has the power to hint at meanings which cannot be put into words, to tear into us in a way we cannot resist. This really won’t do for those who want to root everything down into the earth. For the rest of us, keen to have experiences which are larger than ourselves, which can make our imaginations fly, upwards is the only way to go. I will take my stand with Hrabanus Maurus (d. 856): ‘Without music no discipline can be perfect, nothing can exist without it. For the world itself is composed of the harmony of sounds, and heaven itself moves according to the motions of this harmony.’ And I would add that there is no better music to conjure it up than unaccompanied Renaissance polyphony.
Previous page
