John Nelson and Australian Youth Orchestra celebrate Beethoven

Festival Centre, Australia
Festival Centre – Adelaide, Australia / photo: Mathew Hillier

Conductor John Nelson, SDG’s Artistic Director, was in Australia last week where he lead the Australian Youth Orchestra in performances of works by Beethoven. This wasn’t an SDG undertaking, but the review that appeared this week in The Australian may be of interest to readers of this blog.

July 30, 2008 | Filed Under Concerts | Leave a Comment

Fiddling while Rome burns?

Among my principal concerns for Soli Deo Gloria these days is the need to present our work in a way that better illumines its relevance to the world around us. To do this, we must articulate not simply what SDG does, i.e. our mission statement, but why that is important. One of the most familiar rally cries for SDG is the call to nurture the venerable but dwindling tradition of sacred music, to pick up a baton dropped long ago by the church and the royal houses of Europe. Of course there is validity to this, and I’ve made it a central point of conversation on many occasions. But I’ve begun to question this emphasis, given the context of our troubled world, and I’ve come to consider it only marginally compelling.

So, I recently challenged the directors of SDG to express in their own words the all-important ‘why’ behind our efforts. At the end of the day, I hope to arrive at a simple statement of vision that communicates the urgency of our work, something that captures our aim to “speak to the human condition”, as one friend put it, and to glorify God as our name espouses. Perhaps we’ll borrow a bit of framework from J. S. Bach’s statement that “The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.”

One of the first SDG board members to respond to this challenge was composer Peter Bannister, who sent the following magnificent reply. My thanks go out to Peter for allowing me to post this, as I consider it a worthy read for anyone who is serious about faith and the arts.

In a world of massive and glaring challenges facing us all, such as climate change, endemic violence, widespread poverty, disease and hopelessness, it is not self-evident that allocation of precious time and resources to the arts can be justified. Some might argue - not without reason - that we are fiddling while Rome burns. Knowing that one day we will be held accountable for the use of our talents on this earth, I regularly ask myself whether my decision to engage in artistic activity is a valid moral choice when I could be doing a whole host of things that are more obviously and immediately beneficial to humanity.

If I feel that it is important to offer something by way of a defense of contemporary art in general and music in particular, I can only do so with several important qualifications. I do have the impression that much modern art is indeed essentially futile if not downright destructive, whether it is tied to notions of ‘art for art’s sake’ or functions as mere entertainment pandering to market forces. It would seem clear that Christian engagement with the arts, if it is to be subject to an overriding call to discipleship, has to provide not only an alternative vision in terms of its subject-matter but also an alternative form of praxis. As with any other human endeavor, art surely has to be approached as an apostolate, pursued with the same passionate, self-emptying commitment and a desire for the beautiful, the good and the true as any other calling.

However, the unfortunate truth is that sincerity is not enough. In his searching ‘Reflections on Art and Love’ entitled Grace and Necessity, Archbishop Rowan Williams makes the telling point that ‘there is a difference between the choices that a person makes for the good of their soul and the choices made for the good of the work.’ He explains this by quoting the author Flannery O’Connor: ‘The Catholic novelist doesn’t have to be a saint; he doesn’t even have to be a Catholic; he does, unfortunately, have to be a novelist.’ Even when art is placed at the service of a Christian message, it is difficult not to feel uneasy if the artwork itself is ‘conformed to this world’s mode’, merely reflecting (without necessarily being aware of it) the shallowness of much of the cultural production associated with late capitalism.

My sense is that this is where SDG can have a real role to play in stressing that artistic quality is one of the most important witnesses of sacred music to the world at large. It is not merely an optional extra tacked on to worthy religious sentiments. The continuing capacity of the Judeo-Christian tradition to inspire living contemporary creation provides evidence of the present-day relevance of the Biblical message and testifies to the creative power of the Holy Spirit. In a world where faith is politely (or not so politely) dismissed as charmingly irrelevant at best and inimical to human happiness at worst, the vitality of sacred art is surely one of the ‘kingdom signs’ pointing to God’s future and counters the view prevalent in secular culture that great sacred art is a mere relic of a dethroned ‘Christendom’. Creation is not merely something that God ‘did’ - creating in disinterested love characterizes God’s very being and implies creatio continua, ongoing creation which should surely be mirrored by the Church universal as the Body of Christ. Art is one dimension of that creative expression. In the words of Rowan Williams, ‘human making seeks to echo, necessarily imperfectly, the character of God’s love as shown in making and becoming incarnate’. As God’s love is gratuitous, so art’s value can at times be similar to that ‘useless’ Beauty which Dostoevsky claimed would save the world. Like Mary Magdelene’s extravagantly useless anointing of Christ’s feet, artistic labor can be that gesture of worship which, according to the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain who inspired a generation of Christian artists in the inter-war years in France and elsewhere, unmasks the ‘fecundity of money and the finality of the useful’ for what they are - idols.

Many cultures since the dawn of civilization have openly or tacitly acknowledged the connection between the ’sacred’ and the primal physical and psychological impact of sound on the human body, mind and spirit. The Western classical tradition has no claim to exclusivity in this respect, even if for many of us it offers some of the most sublime examples of transcendent musical beauty. However, history has shown us that art can be harnessed for ill as well as for good. Music’s power to touch regions of the self too deep for words is a two-edged sword. The devastatingly effective appropriation of Wagner - or, perhaps still worse, Beethoven - by the Third Reich is a chilling warning against the naïve view that artistic greatness by itself renders the musical work immune to being co-opted by powers of monstrous evil. Indeed, the very notion of the ‘greatness’ of the artist (a child of Modernity in all its ambiguity) has more than a touch of hubris to it of which we should be wary.

These considerations would seem to indicate that while artistic quality is indispensable to the integrity of SDG’s endeavors, on its own it is not enough. Ours surely has to be a dual focus - we are aiming to promote sacred music from the past, present and future where a burning spiritual vision and artistic excellence work in harmony in a way that cannot but command the respect even of those who do not believe.

Click here to download a printable version of this post.

July 9, 2008 | Filed Under Faith, SDG general, Culture | 2 Comments

Sacred music’s top 10 (or so)

I once joined a few friends in compiling a list of sacred music favorites. The idea was for us each to list our top 20 favorite sacred classical music masterworks, with a somewhat loose allowance for pieces that on reputation alone might not qualify as “masterworks” but which we personally held in high regard–terribly unscientific, admittedly, but fun nonetheless. Combining lists, we ended up with the following ubiquitous favorites, listed here in no particular order:

MENDELSSOHN: Elijah
BRAHMS: Requiem
BACH: St. Matthew Passion / St. John Passion / Mass in B Minor
ALLEGRI: Miserere
MOZART: Requiem / Ave Verum Corpus
HAYDN: The Creation
HANDEL: Messiah
VERDI: Requiem
BRITTEN: War Requiem

I find it interesting that no less than four settings of the Requiem made the list. Also noteworthy is that among this company of predominantly epic, multi-movement pieces there stand two small gems, Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus and Allegri’s Miserere. (I own a recording of the latter stunning work, sung in English, that I highly recommend - Sir David Willcocks leading the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge.)

The runners-up included:

BACH: Cantata No. 147
BEETHOVEN: Missa solemnis
ELGAR: The Dream of Gerontius
GORECKI: Totus Tuus, op. 60
HARRIS: Faire is the Heaven
JANACEK: Glagolitic Mass
MAHLER: Symphony 2 “Resurrection”
MOZART: Vesperae solennes de confessore (Laudate Dominum) / Great Mass in c, k427
PALESTRINA: Missa Papae Marcelli
RACHMONINOV: Vespers
SCHUBERT: Mass in Eb, D.950
SIBELIUS: Cantata for the Conferment Ceremony 1894
TALLIS: Spem in Alium / If Ye Love Me
BERLIOZ: L’enfance du Christ / Grande Messe des Morts (Requiem) / Te Deum
BRUCKNER: Te Deum
FAURE: Requiem
GRETCHANINOV: The Lord’s Prayer
ROSSINI: Stabat Mater
DURUFLE: Requiem
MACMILLAN: Seven Last Words from the Cross