As a professional singer and a non-believer, I can vouch for the fact that music is its own mystery. I have often been approached after oratorio performances by those who are convinced that my faith is apparent in my delivery – I just smile. No point in upsetting people needlessly.
I find it an interesting point that many of the most powerful works were written by those who doubt. Certainty can often manifest as complacency, and that is a dreadful basis for art.
If what those people who approach you is true, it doesn’t depend on your sharing their belief!
rbailey5555
3 years ago
Perhaps the wonderful sacred music of Christmas reflects a longing for the certainty of the divine for those composers whose faith is in doubt.
Alison Houston
3 years ago
Do you have to believe in God with your conscious mind to do God’s work? The sermon from Ely Cathedral last Sunday mentioned a theologist who said that God doesn’t keep bothering people who do not accept that He has revealed Himself to them. But God can still move you and guide your hand without you understanding that is what is happening. He can address you directly, out loud and you can obey His command and still in your arrogance refuse to accept that has happened, because you define yourself in relation to modern ‘scientific’ ideas about reality and rationality.
That does not mean God has failed to impart Himself to you or that your creative inspiration is not divine, though it may not be. But if it is, its divinity will be obvious to those who hear it. Musicians and composers in particular, in fact provide a line of communication for others.
A few years ago the chimney sweep I called out turned out to be a chap of nearly 80, who was a Mormon. He’d left school aged 14 and worked for a coal merchant and then doing similar hard and filthy jobs in the power stations. He’d had no formal musical education but after he became religious God had inspired him to write a couple of hymns. He sang them to me, in his beautiful wavering, high tenor voice on that late autumn morning in a shaft of sunlight as it streamed in through the drawing room windows. I am familiar with the Mormon musical tradition and we’d sung some Mack Wilberg arrangements at choir, it may be that he was just singing 2 beautiful hymns he liked. I only have his word against my own ignorance of particular Mormon hymns that he’d really written them in a moment of divine inspiration, but it was a wonderful experience I’ll never forget. Though sadly I had a chimney fire a couple of weeks later.
Some years ago when taking my grandchildren around a South London Park to see life sized, Victorian, replicas of Dinosaurs, one of them piped up with “what was God doing when Dinosaurs were around?”. To which I could only answer “not a lot”.
If every breath we take is enabled by God, we do not have to believe to do His work!
Andrew D
3 years ago
Music to the ears of us devout sceptics!
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
‘In his splendidly sourced and argued book Dominion, Tom Holland has shown how Christian precepts and feelings shape today’s secularism.’
I didn’t find this book to be ‘splendid’ at all. Instead, I found vast chunks of lumpen, regurgitated history that made a number of extremely tenuous claims as to Christianity’s shaping of ‘today’s secularism’. Perhaps most tenuous of all is Holland’s claim that Christianity underpins the woke/SJW movement when, quite plainly, there is nothing remotely Christian or forgiving about these people. I read another of Holland’s books this year and that, too, was very poor. Bah humbug!
I couldn’t agree more! A hopeless book. Holland completely ignored the incontrovertible fact that the entire matrix of Western Civilisation is the inestimable gift of Ancient Greece and Rome.
Well I think you can probably claim that the West was partly shaped by Christianity, with some Ancient Greece and Rome thrown in. Other factors, of course, would be the fact that the Industrial Revolution took place here, and the Enlightenment. Of course, Holland would claim that the Enlightenment arose from Christianity and I have no problem with that to some extent. It’s just that he overstates his case and is, in my opinion, a bad writer.
Anyway, all these elements, and doubtless many others, combined and conspired to create the West which, for all its faults, gave the world the fairest and most advanced societies in history, with the possible exception of present day Japan.
As things stand, however, the West is going backwards very quickly. Or, if you prefer, forwards into a future that is unmoored from both reason and religion, and likely to be very bad indeed. The West seems now to be based largely on nothing but the printing of fake money for fake jobs. Our governments and governing structures, for some decades now, have been devoid of all competence or integrity. Our corporations are often competent – even too competent in some respects – but lack all integrity. Our education systems are devoid of all reason, rigour or discipline. And one could go on.
Well under the chicken and egg theory, the Classical World predates Christianity by several centuries. JC & Co were just an unfortunate mystical, oriental cult that gained traction because of tensions within the Roman administration. They also introduced some weird ‘desert’ taboos in terms of art, treatment of women, intolerance etc, that we are still saddled with.
However the complete decadence of the West that you describe is all too real. We seem to be intellectually and morally exhausted, and bent on self destruction. This bodes ill with Fu Manchu & Co snapping at our heels.
The irony is that the greatest event in human history bar none, the Industrial Revolution took place in England/Cornwall. (Not a Scotchman in sight). Even the sainted Romans had rejected it under Vespasian! Now the wretched Chinese, who have piggy backed our ‘genius’ are about to hoist us on our petard!
Judy Johnson
3 years ago
I don’t think it is true to say that Rutter ‘laid down much of the Western soundtrack of religious observance.’
Michael Whittock
3 years ago
I think John Rutter is right to see a connection between music and faith. Somebody once said that music is the “gateway to Heaven”. That was a poetic way of saying that music can help us to feel after and perhaps even experience something of the Cosmic Mystery if you are an unbeliever, or to reach out and be deeply moved by the presence of God if you are a believer. Many unbelievers and those on the edge of faith have told me that a beautiful piece of music, or a breathtaking view etc. can grant them a moment of transcendence when they feel they are in the presence of Mystery. However the big difference between that and the Christian believer is that he/she knows who the Mystery is, and because of His grace and mercy can relate to Him as a child relates to a loving father. Added to this there is a more than confident hope that this relationship with God the Father (made possible through the work on earth of Jesus Christ, God the Son, and made real in our lives through God the Holy Spirit) will continue into Eternity. This means that there is a fundamental difference between the worship of the unbeliever, devout sceptic or whatever they want to call themselves and the worship offered by the believing and committed Christian. For the unbeliever the notes composed or the words written and sung are devoid of the true qualities of worship God asks of His people. And they are love,gratitude,humility and the deepest appreciation of who God is as revealed in the Bible, and also the deepest appreciation of what God has done for humanity through the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Unbelieving, sceptical and sarcastic composers and poets may well produce,through God’s grace, sublime works which believers can use as vehicles of worship. But the same composers and poets,and those of like mind,will never be able to understand or experience the presence, power, mercy and love of God in worship or in anything else unless and until they repent and believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ which is the true gateway to Heaven.
Tony Nunn
3 years ago
Having read the article I found myself wondering about the faith, or otherwise, of earlier composers like Thomas Tallis, “the father of English church music”. Tallis was undoubtedly a pragmatist who maintained his career as a composer and Gentleman of the Chapel Royal through the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, adapting his style to suit the prevailing orthodoxy, but what did he actually believe? Was he an agnostic like his much later admirer Vaughan Williams? Or was he, as I would like to think, a believer whose personal faith transcended the religious politics of his day?
As a professional singer and a non-believer, I can vouch for the fact that music is its own mystery. I have often been approached after oratorio performances by those who are convinced that my faith is apparent in my delivery – I just smile. No point in upsetting people needlessly.
I find it an interesting point that many of the most powerful works were written by those who doubt. Certainty can often manifest as complacency, and that is a dreadful basis for art.
If what those people who approach you is true, it doesn’t depend on your sharing their belief!
Perhaps the wonderful sacred music of Christmas reflects a longing for the certainty of the divine for those composers whose faith is in doubt.
Do you have to believe in God with your conscious mind to do God’s work? The sermon from Ely Cathedral last Sunday mentioned a theologist who said that God doesn’t keep bothering people who do not accept that He has revealed Himself to them. But God can still move you and guide your hand without you understanding that is what is happening. He can address you directly, out loud and you can obey His command and still in your arrogance refuse to accept that has happened, because you define yourself in relation to modern ‘scientific’ ideas about reality and rationality.
That does not mean God has failed to impart Himself to you or that your creative inspiration is not divine, though it may not be. But if it is, its divinity will be obvious to those who hear it. Musicians and composers in particular, in fact provide a line of communication for others.
A few years ago the chimney sweep I called out turned out to be a chap of nearly 80, who was a Mormon. He’d left school aged 14 and worked for a coal merchant and then doing similar hard and filthy jobs in the power stations. He’d had no formal musical education but after he became religious God had inspired him to write a couple of hymns. He sang them to me, in his beautiful wavering, high tenor voice on that late autumn morning in a shaft of sunlight as it streamed in through the drawing room windows. I am familiar with the Mormon musical tradition and we’d sung some Mack Wilberg arrangements at choir, it may be that he was just singing 2 beautiful hymns he liked. I only have his word against my own ignorance of particular Mormon hymns that he’d really written them in a moment of divine inspiration, but it was a wonderful experience I’ll never forget. Though sadly I had a chimney fire a couple of weeks later.
Some years ago when taking my grandchildren around a South London Park to see life sized, Victorian, replicas of Dinosaurs, one of them piped up with “what was God doing when Dinosaurs were around?”. To which I could only answer “not a lot”.
If every breath we take is enabled by God, we do not have to believe to do His work!
Music to the ears of us devout sceptics!
‘In his splendidly sourced and argued book Dominion, Tom Holland has shown how Christian precepts and feelings shape today’s secularism.’
I didn’t find this book to be ‘splendid’ at all. Instead, I found vast chunks of lumpen, regurgitated history that made a number of extremely tenuous claims as to Christianity’s shaping of ‘today’s secularism’. Perhaps most tenuous of all is Holland’s claim that Christianity underpins the woke/SJW movement when, quite plainly, there is nothing remotely Christian or forgiving about these people. I read another of Holland’s books this year and that, too, was very poor. Bah humbug!
I couldn’t agree more! A hopeless book.
Holland completely ignored the incontrovertible fact that the entire matrix of Western Civilisation is the inestimable gift of Ancient Greece and Rome.
Sadly, we will not see their like again.
Well I think you can probably claim that the West was partly shaped by Christianity, with some Ancient Greece and Rome thrown in. Other factors, of course, would be the fact that the Industrial Revolution took place here, and the Enlightenment. Of course, Holland would claim that the Enlightenment arose from Christianity and I have no problem with that to some extent. It’s just that he overstates his case and is, in my opinion, a bad writer.
Anyway, all these elements, and doubtless many others, combined and conspired to create the West which, for all its faults, gave the world the fairest and most advanced societies in history, with the possible exception of present day Japan.
As things stand, however, the West is going backwards very quickly. Or, if you prefer, forwards into a future that is unmoored from both reason and religion, and likely to be very bad indeed. The West seems now to be based largely on nothing but the printing of fake money for fake jobs. Our governments and governing structures, for some decades now, have been devoid of all competence or integrity. Our corporations are often competent – even too competent in some respects – but lack all integrity. Our education systems are devoid of all reason, rigour or discipline. And one could go on.
Well under the chicken and egg theory, the Classical World predates Christianity by several centuries. JC & Co were just an unfortunate mystical, oriental cult that gained traction because of tensions within the Roman administration. They also introduced some weird ‘desert’ taboos in terms of art, treatment of women, intolerance etc, that we are still saddled with.
However the complete decadence of the West that you describe is all too real. We seem to be intellectually and morally exhausted, and bent on self destruction.
This bodes ill with Fu Manchu & Co snapping at our heels.
The irony is that the greatest event in human history bar none, the Industrial Revolution took place in England/Cornwall. (Not a Scotchman in sight). Even the sainted Romans had rejected it under Vespasian!
Now the wretched Chinese, who have piggy backed our ‘genius’ are about to hoist us on our petard!
I don’t think it is true to say that Rutter ‘laid down much of the Western soundtrack of religious observance.’
I think John Rutter is right to see a connection between music and faith. Somebody once said that music is the “gateway to Heaven”. That was a poetic way of saying that music can help us to feel after and perhaps even experience something of the Cosmic Mystery if you are an unbeliever, or to reach out and be deeply moved by the presence of God if you are a believer.
Many unbelievers and those on the edge of faith have told me that a beautiful piece of music, or a breathtaking view etc. can grant them a moment of transcendence when they feel they are in the presence of Mystery. However the big difference between that and the Christian believer is that he/she knows who the Mystery is, and because of His grace and mercy can relate to Him as a child relates to a loving father. Added to this there is a more than confident hope that this relationship with God the Father (made possible through the work on earth of Jesus Christ, God the Son, and made real in our lives through God the Holy Spirit) will continue into Eternity.
This means that there is a fundamental difference between the worship of the unbeliever, devout sceptic or whatever they want to call themselves and the worship offered by the believing and committed Christian. For the unbeliever the notes composed or the words written and sung are devoid of the true qualities of worship God asks of His people. And they are love,gratitude,humility and the deepest appreciation of who God is as revealed in the Bible, and also the deepest appreciation of what God has done for humanity through the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Unbelieving, sceptical and sarcastic composers and poets may well produce,through God’s grace, sublime works which believers can use as vehicles of worship. But the same composers and poets,and those of like mind,will never be able to understand or experience the presence, power, mercy and love of God in worship or in anything else unless and until they repent and believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ which is the true gateway to Heaven.
Having read the article I found myself wondering about the faith, or otherwise, of earlier composers like Thomas Tallis, “the father of English church music”. Tallis was undoubtedly a pragmatist who maintained his career as a composer and Gentleman of the Chapel Royal through the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and Elizabeth, adapting his style to suit the prevailing orthodoxy, but what did he actually believe? Was he an agnostic like his much later admirer Vaughan Williams? Or was he, as I would like to think, a believer whose personal faith transcended the religious politics of his day?
He was the Word Who spake it
He took the bread and brake it
And What His Word doth make it
That I believe and take it.
Personally I find Rutters music shallow and completely devoid of the spiritual. Style wise it’s easy to spot and even easier to forget.
Thanks for a very informative article. Sorry I don’t have anything at all insightful to contribute beyond my gratitude.