October 8th, 2018

On Saturday morning at the workshop run by our distinguished visitor Stephen Darlington, the attendees sang excerpts of Tudor music including works of William Byrd (1538-1623) and lesser known composers Robert Wylkynson (c. 1475-1515?) and John Hampton (c, 1455 – 1520?)

Listening to this workshop taking place, it made me think how each voice was resonating into the acoustic with its own richness – and as this sound reached higher and higher into the Cathedral it was just like incense – phrases rising higher and higher – and as this ‘aural incense’ rang into the opulent acoustic, it created such a sense of beauty.

The music of this era is truly something exceptional – did the composers of these works know something we don’t? Or perhaps that compositional skill of creating an aural sense of an all-pervading, prayerful stillness has become somewhat lost to the passage of time as we find ourselves in an increasingly fast-paced and impersonal world.

It’s almost as if the composers of these masterworks created a sense of the text in their music – so that when we hear this music, we can somehow feel it’s text – and thus pray it with our whole being. So this music somehow becomes an aid to our prayer.

It’s interesting to note that the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (GIRM) makes mention of beauty in a number of places – in one particular instance it refers to beauty as fostering devotion (GIRM 294) – and, on reflection, the experience of this music perhaps leads us to that prayerful interior participation mentioned in documents emanating from Vatican II: that the faithful ‘unite themselves interiorly to…what the choir sings, so that by listening they may raise their minds to God’ (Musicam Sacram, Art 15b).