In the name of God
Peter Phillips
Looking at the icons of Andrei Rublev, the eponymous hero of Tarkovsky's great film. in Moscow's Trityakov gallery, I felt I could have been looking at plainchant, if it hadn't been for the fact that their author was named. It is one of the peculiarities of the history of chant that very few indeed of those melodies has any author's name attached to it (Hildegard of Bingen's compositions provide the most famous, late exceptions). Of course this anonymity was a convention, maintained well into the period of polyphonic writing, where the composers are named in the interests of a kind of modesty: that the gift came from God and it was unseemly to claim any credit for it. For some reason no such modesty applied to polyphony from the day it was born; but anyway at that point Rublev's art is left behind because there is no 'polyphony' in it: no perspective, only line, and idealised if very intense expression.
By what twist of fate it was thought appropriate for Rublev, a monk in a severe tradition who died in 1360, to be named, while chant writers in the West surrounded by people promoting themselves in other artistic endeavours followed tradition, is a mystery; but traditions are never more interesting than when they are humanised. What interests me is that if Rublev's icons (and those of his colleagues and predecessors Dionysius and Theophanes the Greek) had been painted anonymously, we would scarcely be able to tell them apart from the anonymous ones, if at all. Furthermore, there would have been no build-up of fame and appreciation, no received judgments which make him a significant figure in the history of Russian culture, no Tarkovsky film. We would be left with what we have in chant, and what there is in the vast bulk of icon painting in the Byzantine tradition, a sea of anonymous works which so closely resemble each other that it is difficult even to tell which century they are from. But once name the author and we suddenly know what we are talking about. Dates become fixed, a personality becomes involved (Rublev was said to be full of joy and light, like his Trinity in the Trityakov), a style is assumed which experts can trace and attribute context and a development to; and we all become involved as amateurs of cultural history. An industry can be built up.
How our perception of chant would be changed if we had the name of just one master composer to study! Instead of all that idealised nonsense about doves and Pope Gregory the Great, we would have proper flesh-and-blood landmarks. We would have more idea of how it was done: how those melodies grew out of simpler forms, how the inspiration and technical fluency of one man transformed the merely capable, what was handed on to the next generation because, as with Rublev, once it can be seen what he himself did and when, so the next stage becomes definable. As it is, we have no choice but to sit and listen to chant as if it were all one, timeless and above human intervention, which in actuality was simply not true.
Is it better this way? It depends whether you prefer your artefacts, your aids to contemplation to be put further beyond human comprehension than they need to be. Is it not mystery enough to know that a man's genius has been able to conceive the thing we so admire? His or her ability is evidently so far beyond our own that we can do little other than attribute it to something out of this world; but to deny or hide it is to insult the human element inherent in every creative act. One begins to wonder why it
was thought necessary to do this. Attributing everything to God has a murky past, and present.
The naming of artists enables us to get greater pleasure out of their work than otherwise. We begin to understand it, which paradoxically enables us to admire, even worship it all the more. Somehow this truth got through to the world Rublev inhabited; and it comes as no surprise to me that those modern composers who make so much noise about burying themselves in the monastic tradition are as named as anyone else. In fact, it isn't possible to remain anonymous these days and appear on concert programmes; but I have wondered how much our proto-monk composers would really like it if it were.
Previous page
