In comparison with all this artistic activity, music alone remained largely undeveloped with no proper system of notation. There were various instruments that existed in pre-Christian days of course such as the lyre, drums and elementary woodwind instruments such as panpipes. But, from what we can deduce, Ancient music was of the simplest kind: basic tunes, perhaps with one or two accompanying chords. Plato mentions music briefly in the Republic, referring to the power of the ancient musical modes and their ability to alter human moods. Plato therefore showed that the Ancients had worked out various musical scales although there is controversy about what they actually were. But it would seem that, in comparison with all the achievements of poetry, architecture, philosophy, and science in the Ancient World, music remained relatively undeveloped. Almost certainly, anything beyond the simplest musical harmonic sequences, let alone polyphony, was unknown to them.

We have to skip forward about 13 centuries into the Christian era and to Catholic Europe to find the invention of what we would understand as music. I realize in this very simple description that I have left out what is loosely described as ethnic or folk music. I am also leaving out the vast subject of plainsong which was part of the early Church, not because it is unimportant, but because I want to focus on the whole idea of musical harmony and music as chordal progression or several voices singing together in different parts. What I am saying is that, music as we know it, music which is sometimes rather clumsily called art music was an invention specifically of the Catholic Church, and that a similar claim could not be made for any other art form. I am talking about the motets and masses of Machaut, Josquin des Pres, Palestrina, and then on and on through Byrd, Monteverdi, to Vivaldi and beyond. The world never saw anything like it before and it staggers me to think that it all happened so recently in relation to the history of civilization: it has all happened in only the last five or six hundred years. Bearing in mind that it was under the auspices of the Catholic Church that music exploded into being with little or no reference to the ancient world, unlike every other art form in the Renaissance period, I want to ask how this could be? Is it coincidence or luck? Or is there something unique about Catholicism that allowed music finally to come of age?

If there is something specifically Catholic about music, before I turn to what exactly that is, I would like to briefly comment on the fact that many great composers have of course not been Catholics. The example that immediately springs to mind is, of course Bach. Sir Thomas Beecham, when asked why he didn’t like Bach said, “It’s the counterpoint, and even worse it’s Protestant counterpoint.” Now I don’t want to spoil my argument by overstating things because, undeniably Bach was a devout Lutheran but, as any musicologist will tell you, part of the reason for Bach’s greatness is that he was very international in his outlook and was particularly influenced by the music of Catholic Italy and France. From Italy we find the influence of Vivaldi, about whose music Bach was so passionate that he arranged six of the composer’s concertos for organ. Vivaldi’s influence can be seen clearly in the way Bach builds up musical structures where the themes reappear in different keys. Without wanting to get too technical, this is known as ritornello structure. From France, copies of the music of Couperin and other French masters have been found in Bach’s hand—and from France many believe comes the grace in Bach’s music, and the influence of dance and works called Suites. It is not hard to make a case that Bach was profoundly influenced by music from Catholic countries and Catholic cultures—and that without this he would almost certainly not have achieved his greatness.

Of the two other composers in the Trinity of the world’s greatest composers, Mozart and Beethoven, although they both worked for Catholic patrons, our image of them is not as especially devout composers. I remember in my ladybird biography of Mozart there was a very dramatic picture of the Archbishop of Salzburg in full clericals physically kicking Mozart down some stairs, to illustrate his being sacked, and you might have thought that this would have been quite enough to put Mozart off the Catholic faith. Of course I do not need to remind you of the sublime beauty of Mozart’s Requiem. Yet surely he was more at home, more typically Mozart in his symphonies and operas? And of course we know that he was that anti-Catholic thing, a Freemason. Nevertheless, an old family friend, Abbe Maximilian Stadeler, stated emphatically that Mozart considered Church music to be his favorite genre of music and, in his famous Ave Verum Corpus, a gem we perhaps too easily take for granted, Mozart was, in fact, instigating a new style of composing religious music of the period—unadorned, devotional and easily understood.

In the case of Beethoven, apart from the fact that the whole of Vienna where he lived and worked was Catholic, he himself was not an orthodox Catholic in his belief and practice. Nevertheless, he repeatedly refers in his letters to his aspirations of bringing into the world music which will reveal the divine and praise the glory of God. To my ears this is apparent in almost everything he ever wrote and, given his cultural background and working environment, leaving aside the not insignificant matter of the Missa Solemnis, I think, whether Beethoven would have admitted it or not, he was in actual fact heavily influenced by his Catholic environment.

To return to the subject of music being a specifically Christian Art, what could it be about music that is essentially religious or even Christian? An important factor is that music, like all religious experience, is beyond words. The visual arts are of course beyond words but in some sense they will always be representational. Of course music’s lack of rootedness in life, such as that maintained by arts employing words like poetry, can be felt sometimes to put it at a disadvantage. But does that not mean that music is perhaps THE art form for expressing transcendence? This has long been acknowledged by poets and indeed in this century, when T.S. Eliot wished to sum up his own religious feelings and impulses he chose to call his work the Four Quartets.

But crucially, and I would like this to be at the center of our thoughts, what is it about the Catholic Faith that could have led, in effect to the invention of the harmonic system, to the cycle of keys? What did or do we have that the artistic genius of the Greeks or Romans did not?

Why did the Jews not invent worked out harmonic music beyond their, admittedly ravishing, but very simple songs? They, after all, had a profound sense of the ineffability of God. One reason may have been the rather prosaic one that the making of musical sound on instruments of any kind was banned in orthodox synagogues because, if attempted on the Sabbath, it would have counted as work and would therefore have been illegal. This applies in orthodox synagogues to this day and it may be the simple explanation why the full implications of musical harmonic language could never be discovered or fully developed by practicing orthodox Jews.

I would like to offer a few further thoughts on this, all of them tentative for these matters are, like music, perhaps beyond words. If we acknowledge that music perhaps more than any other art form is able to capture in some form transcendent experience, then perhaps it could only be in the Christian Era, when God revealed who he was, when he had revealed his transcendence to the World in the person of Christ, that it would at last be possible for Man to develop the transcendent art of Music.

To try and take this very difficult subject a little further I would like to explore briefly a relationship I perceive between music and the concept of faith generally. It is the central importance of the whole idea of Faith in the religion of Christianity which crucially separates it from the religions of the other civilizations which preceded it. Although the Jews had in place the whole notion of the transcendent God, the emphasis is nevertheless upon obedience. Although obedience implies faith in the first place, nevertheless the whole scandal of God becoming Man in the theology of Christianity demands, to put it crudely, new levels of Faith. To believe in the Incarnation and the Resurrection demands more of us than to believe in the Jewish transcendent God, difficult though even that may be to many people.

But what has this to do with music? Well, music more than any other Art form, perhaps has syntax and rules which no one has ever been able fully to understand or explain. Having studied music to a high level myself, I am always surprised that people who have not done this assume that music is perhaps equivalent to learning a foreign language—they believe that music has its own equivalent of nouns, verbs and the various parts of speech that one simply has to learn. Of course there is an element of truth in this, but the laws of music, unlike, say the laws of perspective in art, are more or less unexplained.

One of the most formative experiences I had while studying music at university was reading an article about how the listener experiences even the simplest sequence of chords. By this I mean, how do we REALLY understand how such a thing as a perfect cadence is understood and experienced by the listener. (The perfect cadence, by the way, is the rough equivalent of a full stop in music). Amidst the arrows, graphs and dotted lines, the footnotes and brackets, that looked like something from a Professor Brainstorm’s notebook, it hit home to me that the art of music is a tremendous and perplexing mystery that demands at root, tremendous faith. I have no way of proving this but I offer as a thought to you that, if we accept the claim of music to be a transcendent art, arguably THE transcendent art, then it might be that it could only be in the Faith-soaked Christian Age that the laws of music could be discerned so that, if you like, music could be made flesh.

Now all this may seem rather airy-fairy, but I had to think this through because of various discussions I have had over the years about so-called modern music and the future of music generally. It could be argued that the laws of music were discovered empirically and were adopted and developed because it was found that they in fact worked. This has a compelling sense to it, but I would like to draw a parallel which I hope will not seem too forced with Christian Ethics. It could have been argued a hundred years ago that the collapse of Christian ethics in Society would not affect universally held beliefs about the validity of the Ten Commandments or what we might term common sense humanistic ethics—in other words the validity of the Ten Commandments would remain obvious even if Society gradually ceased to believe that they were divinely revealed. But, as the last century has shown, this has not in fact been the case. The Ten Commandments are now not seen as simple common sense. From the Catholic perspective, we would say that the collapse of the underlying faith-structure has led inevitably and unsurprisingly, to the collapse of the ethical standards it supported.

An equivalent thing has happened in music. It always amazes me how such disparate musical styles as baroque music, classical music and romantic music (in fact all music from Josquin to Bruckner) have far more that unite them than separated them. In this period of some five hundred years, in a period in which music retained faith in its musical laws, the supremacy of the so called musical triad, (otherwise known as the common chord) remain inviolate, the key system was expanded though never changed, and the hierarchy of chordal relationships within keys remained constant. In terms of basic musical structures, form and chordal procedure a Josquin Motet works in a surprisingly similar way as in a Bruckner Symphony. True—and astonishing.

But what happened when music entered the twentieth century? Those laws, based I stress again essentially on faith rather than proven science, were rejected. Is it mere coincidence that in the very year, 1907, that Schoenberg began ripping the intestines out of music in his first atonal compositions, Pope St. Pius X was issuing his encyclical Pascendi Gregis, against Modernism? To the casual historical observer the activities of an atonal composer and a Pope shoring up the theological purity of the Catholic Faith would seem entirely separate. But bearing in mind everything I have said so far about the connection between music and Catholicism, it is only too easy to see that there may be a link, a spiritual causal relationship between the decline in Catholic, and indeed all Christian, belief in the west, and the collapse of music. If I had given the first part of this talk a hundred years ago it would have been easy to dismiss my claims that the laws of music were based perhaps more on faith than on empiricism, but the fact is that these musical laws have been dismissed by most serious twentieth century composers —they are not apparently the common sense laws of music, just as the Ten Commandments have turned out not to be common sense morality either.

Pierre Boulez, the highly influential, modernist French composer who has recently had a huge festival of his music organized by the BBC said recently “I equate tradition with laziness.” I would like to repeat this because it sums up for me the entire modernist viewpoint not only in music, but in all the arts: “I equate tradition with laziness.” Therefore laws of music which have been handed down are automatically defunct. Every artist must start from a year zero, every artist is his own Pol Pot, forming civilization anew. I do not need to dwell on the obvious absurdities of this remark. But it is shocking to find that Olivier Messiaen, Boulez’s teacher and a Catholic composer of such renown held identical views. He stated in interviews that the tonal system used by Mozart was only an experiment for his time, no more than that. The idea of timeless laws for music which could be adapted to every age, in the same way perhaps that Catholic Dogma remains the same but can also be subject to new insights in every age, seemed to be absent from his artistic vision. I wonder if this goes some way to explaining why his music has been more accepted by Modernist music critics rather than loved by Catholics, despite his claim that his music was primarily composed to serve the Church.

This means that when I am asked to justify my musical language to those who may not think it advanced or modern enough, it is very difficult to argue that the laws of music within which I work, and within which all composers worked until very recently, can be proven, scientifically to be any better than any others. Why were the tonal laws of music accepted for so long when they could not be proven? Could it be, to return to my initial thoughts, that the whole background of a culture steeped in the Catholic Faith could have allowed composers to accept both the order and freedom which tonality brings with a religious faith even if they never stopped to think about it in such terms?

Perhaps you may think this line of thought rather theoretical, but it is sobering to think that the entire history of music rested on a faith in tonal principles which scarcely any music college or university would now accept as valid for undergraduate or post-graduate composition. In the field of architecture, the devout Protestant classical architect Quinlan Terry argues that his style of architecture is divinely inspired and ordered. Though I would dearly love to come up with similar arguments to defend my own musical language, I am at a loss because of the central mystery of musical language, reliant as it is more on faith that any science of aesthetics.

So, will it be only when our culture rediscovers its Christian, if not Catholic roots that musical language will once more recover? It must seem no accident that the new tonalism of such composers as John Taverner and Arvo Paart is closely bound with their own Eastern Orthodox faith: Holy Minimalism as their style has been dubbed by the press. I have found that when they talk about the impossibility of explaining artistic principles they have taken on trust. It is far easier to explain the theoretical systems of more modern music, in fact, if nothing else can be said about Modern Art generally there is always loads to talk about: interviews, pre-concert talks, documentaries, seminars and Ph.D.s. All this would have been unknown to composers of the past and I rather suspect that the occurrence of any composer of the past talking to a gathering as I am doing now, would have been very rare indeed. Either their music was played and accepted or not and no special pleading on the part of the composer would have made any difference.

Finally, I offer the thought that any composer who works within the God-given tonal system, even if they are not Catholic themselves, indeed even if they believe themselves to be atheists, are in fact paying homage to the discoveries of Catholic musicians, under the patronage of the Catholic Church, and this is one thing at least which is historical fact and never can be denied.

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