Chorale Music

Music brings us closest to our spirituality. A conductor was asked, ‘Do you believe in God? ‘Only when I’m performing Bach.’ he replied.  How does music impact on our sense…music goes beyond words. Examples – Handles’ Messiah; Mozart’s Sonata in C; Beethoven’s Sonata Pathetique; Bach’s Preludes for piano.

Oliver Sachs studied the relationship between music and the brain – why do harmonic progression or melodic contours leave us choked with emotion? Or make us believe in the power of love and that love can transcend all hatred, through musical methods and expressive devices and confront our questions about existence.

Religion and Music - I’m not religious in the traditional sense. Yet with live music….

Chorale Music
Many classical composers brought spiritual insights.
Handel took arias from Italian operas, choruses from English restoration anthems. Italian Palestrina’ choral harmonies move with heavenly assurances from one magisterial cadence to another with ethereal beauty – both mystical and affirmative.


QUOTE: Looking for lost souls
Peter Phillips : Director of Music at Merton College Oxford.
‘From the light eternal that will shine on us after death, to the day of wrath when the earth will dissolve into ashes, to the trumpet that will raise the dead from their tombs, to being led into Paradise by angels.’

Joyful music is harder and I’ve heard many composers say this. Palestrina and Bach had unusual depths and wrote movingly of the joy – but many simply sound like they are written for a party political broadcast. It is easier for composers to write of the tragedies.

The Passion Story of Christ’s suffering and rising again from the dead covers the full range of emotions from tragedy to joy; from the dramatic to contemplation and joyfulness. We need the dark to enjoy the light.

(There is a BBC series, the birth of British Music, which explores the earliest best know composers here - last week Purcell and this week Handel. They mostly learnt about music and composed in the church, and later for royalty. Handel, who came over from Germany when we had the new German King George I, brought the sophistication of Italian opera to the UK. (check BBC 2 Saturday 20.20)