I can remember it like it was yesterday: I was 16 years old and on an afternoon excursion with my high school friend, Betzi Robb. (Well, I think she was “Betsy” in those days.) We took a trip into Washington to visit Washington Cathedral, a favorite haunt of mine in my years growing up in a DC suburb. We walked into the building just as the men of the choir were singing an a cappella motet – most likely by William Byrd. Hearing, for the first time, a cappella music from the English Tudor period, and in that sublime acoustical setting, I was instantly awe-struck; and it started my life-long love affair with Renaissance and Tudor music.
I’ve been fortunate to be able to conduct my affairs (pardon the pun) in such a way that I could engage church choirs in hundreds of 16th century motets and Mass settings, eventually leading to the founding and directing of Artists’ Vocal Ensemble – which made 16th century music its main Calling Card. Last night, for the nth time, I attended a concert of Peter Phillips conducting the famed Tallis Scholars – surely the pre-eminent ensemble for Renaissance and Tudor polyphony in the world. Now that I’m not actively conducting choirs, with ready-access to the incredible depth of 16th century music available, I approached the concert differently than I had all the others. This time it wasn’t about learning which pieces in the repertoire I might wish to perform at a future date, instead it was about reveling in the sound of the voices, the imagination of the composer, and the vibratory effect of the music itself. Of the many times I’ve heard the Tallis Scholars, this was by far the most enjoyable and the most profound.
As I sat there, perfectly blended voices rolling through the air, I was trying to identify the effect the music was having on me. I had the feeling that the music was more inside of me than outside of me even though much of the music they sang was unfamiliar to me. How did it get inside? And why did I have such a keen sense that it was something about the specific musical vocabulary of the 16th century that was magnifying the cosmic dimension that I was experiencing?
Although I consider myself somewhat of a singer, I’m primarily an instrumentalist and have spent countless hours identifying “music” as instrumental, or vocal and instrumental. There’s something naked about a cappella singing that I experienced (in this concert) as rootless, floating, growing and pulsating like a nebula cloud. And it seemed incredibly strange to me that I had never noticed this effect before, at least, not consciously. The music seemed to enter me through my chest, not through my ears.
I do think that part of the impact music has on us is contingent on our frame of reference. For me, Renaissance and Tudor music evokes Gothic buildings of Europe – and the incredible thirst of people of that era to understand the mind of God. I can’t speak for anyone else in the (sold out) concert last night, though. Why were all the others sitting in wrapt attention? What actually happens to us when we listen to beautiful music? And what makes it beautiful?
All these questions were running through my head, not because I was distracted from the glorious polyphony, but because I sensed a profundity that I hadn’t witnessed in myself before. I wanted to understand it, to be grateful for it, and (selfishly, perhaps) be able to replicate the feeling again. I couldn’t help but think that the real heroes of the evening were not the performers, as incredible as they were, but the composers themselves – now dead for half a millennium. In their wildest dreams, they could have never envisioned that concert, outside a liturgical context, people with cell phones, the music itself being performed with a level of perfection that would surely have been beyond their imagination. Yet the music itself is proving to be eternal, as eternal as the Divine energy which inspired the creative minds which were open and able to tap into the transformative “juice” of the cosmos.
And we’re the fortunate recipients