Hints of the numinous

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

It is not that I am squeamish. We have performed settings of the Requiem in school gymnasiums on rural American campuses; we have sung Byrd’s Four-part Mass under a tree in a botanical garden in Fez, Morocco. For that matter, we regularly sing settings of the Lamentations at Christmas-time and the Allegri Miserere in programmes optimistically entitled ‘Music for the Blessed Virgin’, which might not sell so well without it. But there was something disturbing about marrying Pärt with those stone lions. It was as if Mussolini was engaged in a very last-ditch stand at respectability.

There is little more respectable than Pärt’s music at the moment. On the occasion of the lions we sang his Nunc dimittis for the first time. We have repeatedly sung his Magnificat, which was not composed to go with the Nunc, evensong-style, but was written quite a few years earlier and which has established itself as a masterpiece of the genre. We also sang his Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen. This is pretty well the sum total of my knowledge of Pärt, whose music of course reminds me of that of John Tavener, much though I am told they both dislike the comparison. Yet they both have the same strength in simplicity, the same hint of the numinous through an artful combination of silence, ritualistic repetition and almost-saccharine gestures of harmony. And however powerful the resulting sounds may be, it is in the end pure music. Although I get the impression that they are both religious men and the words matter to them, I do not get the impression from what they write that they are committedly adherent to any particular creed. Their music, while seeming to be so deeply rooted, comes over as being merely their own message. As Leon Wieseltier once pointed out, this music can seem wide but not very deep.

I find myself on guard at a style which so overwhelms me at the first hearing that I think I shall be in thrall to it for ever, as happened with the music of Tallis, but which slowly retreats. The first time I heard Pärt’s Magnificat I was enthralled; I am still reeling from the experience of conducting the Nunc, its melodies and harmonic turns haunting my sleep; yet I am already too familiar with the method of the Magnificat to have the same frisson as I originally had, and I very much fear the same will happen with the Nunc in time. In fact, it keeps happening to me with the artefacts of even the best modern sacred music composers, and I wonder why. Is it ultimately a lack of religious commitment, vitiated by the bitch-goddess? Or a lack of intellectual rigour?

It is too easy to programme Pärt with Renaissance polyphony and say it all comes from the same tradition. Not that it was easy for me to say it the last time I tried, because I was live on Rai Tre speaking in Italian down a friend’s mobile phone. Rai is not like the BBC. It has programmes in the same way, with a presenter and interviewees, but it is more careless about how the material comes over while asking really mind-bending questions. This presenter, whom I could barely hear, asked whether I had a sense of the same tradition underpinning the music of Pärt and Palestrina, both of whom we were singing on this occasion. ‘Si,’ I said, expansively. But, came the well-prepared rejoinder, Palestrina is so complicated and Pärt is so simple, how can there be any comparison or connection? At this point someone came into the room where I had been secreted with the mobile phone and asked whether we wanted to have water on the stage. The Italian nation must have thrilled to that one.

Of course, the interviewer was right. There is no connection between Pärt and Palestrina except that their music tends to be sung by small choirs a cappella and both generate a religious feeling. The detail of polyphony is largely missing from the modern idiom, which might explain why I can perform the same piece of polyphony literally hundreds of times and always find something new in it. All of which reminds me that the annual Allegri Miserere-hunting season is about to be launched with its usual vengeance. There, if ever there was one, is a piece which puts effect over substance, and yet plays to packed houses. There is the ultimately successful piece of Holy Minimalism.