77: Sanctus

Open your hymnals to page 41.

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune is a Maestro Will special. Here’s your hint: this one is slightly tougher than some of the recent challenges. The composer is second-tier but definitely known by name to everyone reading this newsletter. I’d say his music was much more popular 50 years ago than it is today.

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 76
Poulenc, Violin Sonata

Joey picked another good one! I got it (eventually), as did Listener Kevin (immediately), Listener Laurie, and Listener Gregor. Bravi tutti!

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

O Clap Your Hands

Will: OK Joey, for our first dialogue, we discussed New Music, particularly in the academic context. As I brought up, I consider this a separate, “cousin genre” to the mainstream of classical music, admittedly with a lot of overlap.

I think church music occupies a similar relationship to mainstream classical music, and since it’s something I’m involved in professionally, I’ve been wanting to explore my attitudes toward it.

“Church Music” is a broad category, so I’ll start by specifying a bit. I’m talking about music performed by choirs and organs as part of the repertoire for the mainline Protestant church denominations (Methodist, Presby, UCC, etc), to which I’ll add high Catholicism and Anglicanism, which is the tradition I’m most familiar with. This repertoire, as it is currently constituted, includes music stretching back to the 16th century, but a lot of it was written in the past 150 years.

As an example, here’s what I would consider a very average piece of church music from this repertoire. As a starting point, why don’t you give it a listen and tell me your reactions?

 Joey: I definitely feel like I’m in church, from the opening notes. This very quiet organ chordal noodling gets me in the mood to sit in a pew in medium-to-low lighting, and the (boy?) choir that comes in afterward is more or less what I would have expected. The preponderance of the major tonic chord in this music, returned to so often to the point of a kind of nostalgic stasis, is something that I find to be unique to this tradition of church music. I work at a Presbyterian church, and I hear this kind of music in the services fairly often.

Maybe I’m getting a bit ahead of ourselves here, but I think this would be described as “classical music” by almost anyone who doesn’t listen to classical music regularly, and most people who do. Perhaps a bit more ‘boring’ than Symphonie fantastique, but somehow of the same musical world.

Will: Oh I think this is exactly where we want to be, and I don’t disagree that some people would listen to this and say it’s “classical” music. But people say that about Einaudi and Broadway show tunes. This music definitely comes from a parallel tradition. It’s a tradition born of different values, venues, performing forces, educational apparatus, and career paths.

Of course, there is overlap between church musicians and classical musicians, and several great classical composers have written really important and beautiful church music (Bach, Handel, Franck, and Messiaen come immediately to mind.) And since ~90% of notated music prior to the Baroque era was church music, that stuff has gotten grouped in with “classical” music, but that’s just because it’s old. Not all old music is part of the classical tradition.

Now, I’m going to tread carefully here because I’m employed as a church musician, but I think the fact that church music is off in its own ghetto redounds to its detriment. I’ll overhear church musicians talk about this, that, or the other piece of church music, and their discussion will make it sound like they’re talking about Berio’s Sinfonia, but it’s really just a choral anthem with a couple of accents (which will be ignored in performance.) And I’ll just think to myself: if these people ever heard a piece of real music, they’d soil themselves

Joey: Interesting — so what exactly are the stylistic differences between church music and classical music, as you see them? Is there no music that can properly be called both? And why is church music looked down upon by classical musicians, if indeed that is the norm?

Will: You do have a way of getting to the crux of the matter.

Let’s start with the two basic musical building blocks of church music: chants and hymns. These two elements define so much of music in the church, and I think they’re a lot of what separates church music from classical music. 

As far as melody is concerned, classical music uses motives, tunes, and long lines. Chants don’t *really* have any of these things. You’re not going to go away humming a chant melody. They are by and large unmemorable, meandering, and designed for the recitation of large amounts of text. But they get used as the melodic basis for all sorts of church pieces by composers throughout the ages.

Hymns are works in four-voice homorhythmic texture that are designed to be sung by a large group of people. Here, the melodies may well be melodic in the classical sense (though there are a great many examples where chants have been used as the basis for a hymn tune!) and some of them are quite lovely indeed, usually ones that have a folk flavor. (My personal favorite hymn tunes, for whatever reason, tend to be Welsh.)

Just looking at these two musical elements, I come away with two main insights: 1) the focus of church music is *church*, which is to say, the priority is on the liturgical rituals and sacral texts. This is music “for use” and it’s meant specifically not to distract from those foci. 2) This is music primarily designed for non-professional musicians, oftentimes not even amateur musicians, such as members of a congregation.

I think those constraints end up defining a lot of church music and holding it back from ascending to the heights of real music. 

Joey: I have to agree with you there. You didn’t really sell chants by describing them as “unmemorable” and “meandering!” Hymns of course can be beautiful, but I would add that their textural limitation (four-voice homorhythmic, as you so theoretically put it) is their ceiling. If anything, chants and hymns are both part of the resources of classical music (topics, if longtime Listeners will recall the CGF podcast segment on topic theory, an area of music theory). In this way, church music is lumped in with military music, marches, exoticist music, pastoral music, etc.

But come now — you brought church music this week for a reason, no? There must be something you love about it? After this exploration of your feelings on the music, what’s your conclusion? Smash or Pass?

Will: For the most part, Pass. As inoffensive as most church music is, I would choose nearly any alternative for my listening pleasure.

There does exist some Smashing church music, but I find that it loses much of its magic outside of cathedral walls. Then of course there is some music written for the church that simply transcends its context and functions as exquisitely beautiful real music. (The Bach Passions, the Fauré Requiem, etc.)

But I’ll end this dialogue on a positive note by listing some church pieces that, for me, transcend the ecclesiastic ghetto: Sir Charles Villiers Stanford’s Beati quorum via, Déodat de Séverac’s Tantum Ergo, Jonathan Battishill’s “O Lord, Look Down from Heaven”, Louis Vierne’s Messe Solennelle, and Balfour Gardiner’s “Evening Hymn”.

I’ll also add that I am constitutionally incapable of writing church music, though I have tried many times. It’s a shame that, because church music is one area of professional composition where musicians can make actual money writing music (band music is another.) But I’m a concert composer at heart, and my church pieces tend to sound out of place in a sanctuary.

Tone Praise

Purcell, “Wondrous Machine!”

I (Will) know you people think I’m slightly loopy with all the Purcell, but come on — this is a bop! What’s even crazier is I had never heard this piece until about two weeks ago. Now I’ve listened to it probably 300 times. I’ve found a lot of versions I like, but this one is a good reference recording.

Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)