Home | Archive | Spring 2001 | Leading notes

Beyond words

Peter Phillips

To tour China with programmes made up exclusively of Renaissance sacred music – as I did recently with The Tallis Scholars – is probably to operate as far from our own cultural baseline as any professional performing ensemble these days. Apart from singing in countries where any Christian message is actively resisted, there are surely no other audiences available to us where we could take less for granted than those in China: the Latin texts, the religious content, the bewilderingly intellectual style of the music itself must surely put up formidable barriers of comprehension. In fact, the authorities in Beijing did try to draw a veil over our appearances there by making sure there was little or no advertising for them, which reduced the crowds to a modest few hundred; but even amongst these people we sensed a curiosity which was as keen at the end of the concert as it had been at the beginning of it. Their intervention was explained as due to nervousness with the Christian make-up of the programme, but at least we were allowed to perform without interrogation or harrassment, luxuries which did not necessarily apply to groups such as ours when touring in the old Soviet Union.

Perhaps the most complete barrier between us was that very few of our listeners can have had any practical experience of singing Western music. Faced with an orchestral instrument there would have been at least some understanding, since a trumpet or a violin is nothing if not graphic when being played, and Chinese music does have instruments which resemble Western ones. The highly cultivated, high-octane sound of a chamber ensemble of voices held in carefully controlled balance and blend, however, must have been profoundly foreign to them, a fact, interestingly enough, which seems not to be true of the people to whom we perform in Taiwan and South Korea, where choral singing is evidently something of a burgeoning industry and where British publishers of church music collections in particular are doing a good trade. Nor was it true of a choir I heard in Novosibirsk, Siberia, which I was recently invited to conduct in a programme of music by Taverner, Gibbons and Victoria. I knew, at the very least, there would be experienced voices in that remote city, because it boasts the largest opera house in Russia with a repertory company attached to it. What surprised me was that a group from the opera chorus, joined by some students, wanted to give a whole concert of Renaissance polyphony, a style of music which the Russians never fostered. They sang Taverner’s Western Wind Mass without error from the first rehearsal, yet they always sang it with their own sound, characterised by the famously strong low basses (and altos) alongside the straining of the tenors and sopranos after high notes in slavish imitation of Italian operatic style. The result was a strange hotch-potch but in the strength of the basses they gave me something I realised was a kind of ideal. To hear an ensemble with such power to its fundament is like driving a very fancy car full-throttle.

In all these situations I have wondered what it is about polyphony that makes people listen even when it is being performed so completely out of context. Surely it must make a difference that the setting of a church and its services has in our version been replaced by a gleaming concert hall; that instead of the faithful, for whom these texts are spiritual food and drink, there are audiences who can know nothing of the inner meaning of these words and precious little of the outer. The only explanation is that they hear it as abstract sound which, if true, suggests that polyphony has undergone an extreme aesthetic change: from beautifying and conveying the word of God to becoming an adjunct to the harmony of the spheres. It means something to people in many parts of the world, yet what it means is so far from what the composers in the first instance had in mind for it that one could almost argue it has become a different music: the same notes put to a new end. It adds to this picture to explain that our largest audiences are to be found in Japan and Australia – neither peoples particularly renowned for their commitment to denominational worship – and that the least interest comes from religious communities in Christian Europe.

The clue to this may lie in the reaction of many churchmen to polyphony at the time of its composition: it had become too élitist, too complicated for their purposes as an aid to understanding Christian teaching; and in this, as in many other related concerns, the Reformation, and its counter in the Roman Catholic church, was a necessary corrective. What is never divulged is what the composers themselves were thinking when they wrote their music. How religious were they, and what did these texts really mean to them? How could they, for example, lose the words so regularly and so utterly in mathematical arabesques if they had a burning desire to communicate them to the doubting? Whatever answer to this they may have had as individuals, the general style they all practised lacked the kind of obviousness which every church music worth the name has had before and since. Churches need to proselytise: music is one of the most powerful tools at its disposal. That polyphony failed to meet this standard requirement was felt to be a weakness at the time, but has become a strength since. Uninterested in specific dogmas and liturgies yet in need of spirituality, many people from different backgrounds have been listening to this music from the past with a particular kind of appreciation. Palestrina and Tallis might be surprised at such a turn of fortune but maybe they would not be as unhappy about it as the preachers they had to work for, with their precise messages. My feeling is that in the polyphonic repertoires a profounder understanding of the meaning of the texts does not lead to a profounder understanding of the music. The words were pegs giving a context for composition. The truth of this music is through and beyond words.

Peter Phillips directs The Tallis Scholars