The spirit moved me
Which comes first: music or faith?
From the Kyrie to Qawwali, faith has always provided artists with inspiration. But what it is really like to work within a faith tradition in the 21st century? Which comes first: music or faith? And can you understand devotional music without faith?
Opera singer and composer Roderick Williams (Guildhall alumnus, Vocal Studies 1995) trained as a boy chorister and won a choral scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, before completing his education at the Guildhall School. He says that for him, religion has been the context in which he learned his trade.
“The structure and framework which link music and Christianity were given to me in the choir stalls,” he says. “There’s the musical language and then the spiritual language.”
However, even though the music takes place within a sacred setting, it need not necessarily follow that the composer’s intentions were devout. Indeed, historically, many composers have subverted the constraints and forms of their musical/religious tradition to provide magnificent secular entertainment too. “Handel’s oratorios have some fantastically gruesome sections of the Old Testament — particularly some of the evil female characters. They made for terrific plots when he was prohibited from writing opera,” says Williams.
Perhaps that is because music is often a space in which religion, culture and community can intersect, as Katie Hainbach (Guildhall alumna, Vocal Studies, 2015), Head of Music and Arts at the Alyth Synagogue, points out.
“I think for many Jewish people it’s not just about God but about connecting to your culture. We still have a lot of connections to people who were killed in the Holocaust, including my own great-grandparents. My grandfather is in his 90s, and not a spiritual person, but he sings Jewish music all the time; and when he comes here it makes him think of being a boy and that he’s connected to his family.”
At the same time music has a specific spiritual role in Judaism, she explains. “Music is what brings us back to our faith: to celebrate and also to mourn. You have lots of different types of music in Judaism, but the one thing that doesn’t change is the words. With a lot of the older music, you’ll also hear the same tunes for which we don’t have a composer.” Her own role in this is even more specifically spiritual. “I came in as a performer — but I’m not employed as a performer. My job is to lead people in prayer and facilitate spiritual experience. Every week people come in, in mourning or celebration, and all of those have their own musical forms and parts of the liturgy. Everyone experiences it differently, but we all have a shared experience together.”
That shared experience is something that Williams recognises. As an opera singer, he often works with large groups of musicians. But being part of a church choir, he says, takes that one step further as you sing — literally — from the same hymn sheet. And choristers — from a young age — play their role as virtually professional musicians.
“As a chorister from the age of seven, it was part of my job to lead the service in a loud, confident voice. Then my experience later in life of dropping into a sung Evensong, anywhere in the world where the Anglican church flourishes, is that it’s the same familiar format. I’m sure I’m not alone in taking comfort from that.”
In other traditions, spirituality is the force that underpins music. Jan Hendrickse (Guildhall alumnus, Flute 1991) is an artist and composer who has had a long engagement with the philosophy and aesthetics of Islam and now teaches at Guildhall. He specialises in the ney, a Turkish end-blown flute which has an iconic significance in the Mevlevi Sufi order.
“There are some schools of Islam where music is not permitted at all, but within the Sufi orders, those brotherhoods that do use music within their ceremony use it as a practice rather than entertainment. Sema, a ceremony perfomed in many Sufi orders, is translated as ‘audition’ or listening. It’s a spiritual practice in which people listen to music with the intention of transcending ordinary consciousness, and it is a very specific activity. In fact, my understanding is that the music itself is not perceived as spiritual; the important thing is the context and intention with which it’s performed and listened to.”
One of the best-known performers of Qawwali (a form of devotional music popular in Pakistan and North India) was the late Nusret Fateh Ali Khan. However, explains Hendrickse, ideas of perfect performance (as they are understood in the West) are possibly less important than the devotional feelings that music arouses in listeners.
“You can go and pay money to hear a concert, and use concepts that come from outside that tradition, like musical excellence. But that’s very different from a performance within the tradition for which the music was intended.”
While musicians needn’t necessarily share the faith of the music they perform, the impact of performing devotional music can sometimes be overwhelming, as Williams explains. “I sang the role of Christus in a staged performance of Bach’s St John Passion in Berlin. It was a very dramatic reading of the Passion Play and I found it an extraordinarily cathartic experience. I glimpsed a sense of what it might actually be like to ‘take the sins of the world upon you’; for example, there was one moment when, as Christus, I faced the 50-strong chorus, all baying as a mob for my execution — and I experienced a moment of forgiveness despite their violence. That was a spiritual revelation arrived at through performance.”
If that is the legacy of the past, what about the future? The tension between old and new, spirit and performance, is still there — often very creatively — for contemporary musicans. “Jewish music is alive and developing,” says Hainbach, who has specialised in the Jewish influence on Western classical music.
“There’s so much musical history within Judaism and it’s very interesting hearing that within western music. It’s very obvious when you hear the traditional Jewish modes. A lot of composers have Jewish backgrounds, like Reich, Glass and Bernstein. In some of Glass’s choral music, for instance, you hear the ancient words but it’s also very contemporary.”
Williams agrees. He has composed, among other things, the ‘Oxford Blues Service’, an entire jazz evensong. “As a composer, the choral tradition I was brought up in is one I go back to a lot for inspiration,” he says. “For the Oxford Blues Service, I used the old Common Prayer Book text, in all its majesty and resonance, but set it to jazz — sometimes almost ‘lounge’ — music. I was confident that the format was strong enough to survive being set in virtually any musical idiom.”
However, this is not the case for everyone, Hendrickse explains. “My relationship to the ney tradition is very much one of being a student and wanting to understand the traditions. Composition in the west is associated with the individual. In Sufism, the idea is to become closer to God, or a Universal Principle. The meaning isn’t embedded in the music and the intention of the composer: it emerges in the relationship between the listener and the music.”
Yet despite the differences between these different religious communities and traditions, music — and its potential to bring about spiritual awakening — is central. “My own feeling about music and performance has changed,” says Hainbach, describing how her job leading others in prayer and remembrance has built on her training as a vocal performer.
“Here, I’m part of a community, which gives you fulfilment and helps you grow. It’s made me appreciate being able to sing and help people through difficult times with my voice. I feel more now that I sing for others, not for myself.”
Williams adds: “I’m also aware that if any of the religious music I have written resonates with someone of faith, then I am very glad of that. It’s not as if I’m standing on the sidelines. I would love to think that something I had written had helped someone strengthen their faith, irrespective of my own personal beliefs.”
That sense of enriching the lives and devotions of the audience, rather than the performer, is something that Hendrickse recognises. “The aim, in the Sufi tradition, is simply to produce the perfect human being. Music is one of many practices that contribute to this.” Which makes sense because, sometimes, whether as a performer or audience, and across whatever tradition, it is simply not possible to make the distinction between faith and music — and the essential humanity of both.
This article first featured in the Spring/Summer 2018 edition of the Guildhall magazine, PLAY, and was written by YBM for the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.
