We will be singing all of our hymns without an organist this week, as Wallace is out of town and David Heetderks, our usual substitute, is unavailable. It is helpful to remember that the term a cappella means literally, “in the chapel style,” that is, singing as it was for centuries experienced within churches, i.e., without any instrumental accompaniment.
Since we won’t have the benefit of accompanied singing this week, I thought it might be fitting to consider how and why organs became a standard part of Christian worship
In the second volume of his treatise Syntagma musicum, published in 1619, the composer and musician Michael Praetorius wrote the following: “. . . Almighty God alone can never be given sufficient thanks for having granted to man in His mercy and great goodness such gifts as have enabled him to achieve such a perfect, one might almost say the most perfect, creation and instrument of music as is the organ . . . in its arrangement and construction; and to play upon it with hands and feet in such a manner that God in Heaven may be praised, His worship adorned, and many moved and inspired to Christian devotion.”
It is worth noting that Praetorius does not commence his praise for this gift by saying how much he likes the sound of organ music. Rather, he first calls attention to its perfection of arrangement and construction. It is how the instrument works that impresses him. Praetorius is one of a very long line of Christian thinkers who commented on the virtues of the organ as a symbol of cosmic harmony.
Long before organs were permitted in churches (which was probably sometime in the tenth century) they were praised by Christian churchmen for the way in which their mechanism was a concrete, visible, and audible metaphor for spiritual realities. Tertullian — no friend of pagan culture and its forms — nevertheless praised the predecessor of the pipe organ in his treatise De Anima (On the Soul), written in the early third century. In commenting on the unity and diversity of the soul, Tertullian writes:
[A] single body is made up of various members, so that there is unity and not a division. Observe that marvelous creation of Archimedes — I speak of the hydraulic organ—with its many parts, sections, connections, passages—such a collection of sound, variety of tone, array of pipes—and yet it all constitutes a single entity. So too the air, expelled from below by the agitation of the water, is not thereby divided into parts because it is distributed into different places; rather it is one in substance though diverse in function.
In the twelfth century, some time after organs had been admitted into churches, a certain Bishop Baldric, who served in the northwestern section of France that became the province of Normandy, wrote the following in a letter to the people of one of his parishes:
For myself, I take no great pleasure in the sound of the organ; but it encourages me to reflect that, just as divers pipes, of differing weight and size, sound together in a single melody as a result of the air in them, so men should think the same thoughts, and inspired by the Holy Spirit, unite in a single purpose. . . . All this I have learned from the organs installed in this church. Are we not the organs of the Holy Spirit? And let any man who banishes them from the church likewise banish all vocal sound, and let him pray, with Moses, through motionless lips. For ourselves, we speak categorically — because organs are a good thing, if we regard them as mysteries and derive from them a spiritual harmony; it is this harmony that the Moderator of all things has instilled in us, by putting together elements entirely discordant in themselves and binding them together in a harmonious rhythm. . . . As we listen to the organs, let us be drawn together by a deeper harmony, and be cemented together by a two-fold charity.
As musicologist Quentin Faulkner observes, “The early appearance of organs in churches . . . may well not have been so much for practical music-making as for symbolic and didactic ends: symbolic in that the instrument was the material embodiment of cosmic harmony.”
In addition to the symbolism of the organ’s mechanism, Faulkner also notes that there were aspects of the quality of sound that was theologically attractive. Early medieval organs were, remember, quite different from the pipe organs we have today. Originally they had only a single rank of pipes, and the sound they produced was rather austere and unexciting. But that was seen as a virtue: “The very quality of the sound produced by the medieval organ had an affinity to the Christian ideal of cosmic harmony and to the objective, non-affective music which that ideal produced.”
In other words, music was not a means to excite emotion immediately, but to convey an aural impression of the objective structure of the universe. Faulkner continues:
“The sound had practically no expressive qualities and only the slightest capacity for nuance (if indeed it had any at all), little variety in tone, very little rhythmic capabilities, and no potential for crescendo and diminuendo. It was remote in its playing mechanism, remote from its listeners (often in a balcony or ‘swallows-nest’ high up on the church wall), and in a remote, mystic and awe-inspiring acoustical environment. Its most unique musical characteristic, the ability to hold a tone at a static dynamic level, theoretically endlessly, was distinctly superhuman. If one assumes, as the Middle Ages did, that variation and fluctuation belong to the human sphere, while awe, remoteness, and constancy are characteristic of the divine, the mysterious, the holy, then the qualities enumerated above would seem to render the organ a peculiarly hieratic [that is, priestly] musical instrument.”
Since we will be without an organist at our Trinity 17 mass, we will have to do without this priestly instrument. Here is a list of the hymns we’ll sing:
In today’s Mass, only one of our usual three female singers will be with us, so we’re singing portions of the Mass for Three Voices composed by William Byrd (1543–1623). Byrd is one of the most important composers in the history of Anglican music. It’s notable that Byrd remained a committed Roman Catholic all of his life, despite the pressures on church musicians after the English Reformation. In her book Byrd (Oxford University Press, 2013), Kerry McCarthy explains:
When Byrd set the mass to music in the early 1590s, he was doing something no English composer had done for thirty years. Given the political and cultural risks involved, it is surprising that he managed to do it at all. The 1559 Act of Uniformity strictly forbade the celebration of the old Catholic liturgy in England. Those who went on cultivating it could be punished with fines, imprisonment, or, in exceptional cases, even death. What had taken place daily at every pre-Reformation altar, from the humblest parish church to the greatest cathedral, was now a rare and dangerous luxury. William Allen, an Elizabethan cleric living in exile in Rome, saw the absence of the mass as the greatest difficulty facing his fellow Catholics back in England: ‘the universal lack of the sovereign Sacrifice and Sacraments catholicly ministered, without which the soul of man dieth, as the body doth without corporal food.’ The small group of Catholic priests who worked secretly in Elizabethan England did their best to provide regular masses for their flock. These were clandestine and closely guarded events. Altar furnishings were designed to masquerade as secular household goods, and hiding spaces were built to conceal the priest and his assistants in the event of a raid. An unexpected knock on the door could put everyone’s life at risk. The circumstances were, to say the least, not ideal for complex polyphony.
Byrd composed three settings of the mass, one for three voices, one for four voices, one for five voices. This Sunday, our smaller than usual choir will sing from the Mass for Three Voices the Kyrie, Sanctus and Benedictus at the Offertory and the Agnus Dei at Communion.
You can learn more about Byrd on this page. And here is a recording of the entire Mass for Three Voices, sung by the Tallis Scholars, directed by Peter Phillips.