December 1 (late)

wintercreek asked for a post about vocal music, specifically mentioning your experiences singing for religious services.


So what can I say? I'm a singer, and most of what I sing is religious in nature, though I myself am not. My voice is best-suited as a soloist to earlyish music (in European terms), and what those guys were writing was - at least what we're still using of what they were writing is - generally sacred music, or musical settings of sacred texts. (As a choral singer there's more secular stuff out there, but I've still tended to be with groups that do older stuff that has demonstrated its appeal over time more often than newer stuff that, well, hasn't. Not never! But a new work by a modern composer still has as much of a chance of being a setting of a biblical text, or a poem by a religious poet like Hopkins or Donne, as of being a setting of a secular text or even - gasp - one written by the same composer who wrote the music. I'm afraid I'm thinking of Sir Paul McCartney's Ecce Cor Meum as an example of the very last. For pre-contemporary works, the most obvious example to me is Carmina Burana, which of course is not merely not-sacred but actually profane.)

( Lots of rambly background. )

Just as when I was singing in the Church of England, singing for the Catholics does involve leading a worship service in which I am not actually participating. I mean to say: there's not really a mechanical difference between singing parts of the Mass in a performance of, say, Bach's Mass in B Minor and in an actual Mass. Except that, non-mechanically, one is a performance and one is somebody's religious experience. I don't think I do my singing any differently in those different circumstances. When I'm in a chorus that's performing a work with a sacred text, I try to think about the composer's faith when I'm singing the words; I don't need to be a religious person as long as I can make the audience understand that the composer was a religious person. (Or not. Apparently, at least according to the program notes from our last concert, Verdi was a great atheist? But you'd never know it by his Requiem. So as long as I can make the audience believe that the composer was a religious person, then, it doesn't matter what they think about me.) (Somewhere back in my archive there's a post about Rachmaninov's Vespers, in which I make essentially that point about one of the bits that goes "aliluiya, aliluiya", and someone in the comments invoked Cleveland-area homeboy Marc Cohn, who, as all the world knows, wrote And she said "Tell me, are you a Christian, child?" And I said, "Ma'am, I am tonight.")

So it's the same with singing in a choir that's providing music for a church service. Sometimes I try to think about the composer's faith, and sometimes about the congregation's. I don't believe in the words I'm singing myself, but I don't have to, as long as I enrich the experience of those who do. We did a funeral a few months ago in which one of the hymns was to the tune of the Old Hundredth - you probably know it as "All People That on Earth do Dwell" - but with different words; the last verse began "I know that my Redeemer lives". And the thing is that even without being Catholic or in fact religious at all, I can recognize the important bits of the text and emphasize them in appropriate ways. I feel like that's musicianship just like knowing how to read and count and breathe and produce the right notes. ... I don't take Communion, obviously. And I never say the prayers.* In the C of E, when the psalm was spoken, I never spoke it. But I'll sing every note you put in front of me, because my job in that situation is to be a musician and a musical leader, not to be a religious leader. (Incidentally, those who are there to be religious leaders - i.e. the priests - read every word they're saying out of a book. I feel like if I know your liturgy by now, surely you must, and wouldn't it be more meaningful to your flock if you gave it by heart? Anyone can pray off a page. But hey: not my department, so I just sit up in the loft and wait for the next cue.)

( * )