Today, I heard for the first time Morten Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium (1994), and was amazed by it. I’m not a religious person at all, but sacred music is such a massive part of the history of music—Western music, yes, but really all music across cultures—that it’s just one of those things you can’t get away from, if you care about traditional music forms at all. For European classical music, especially, the role of sacred music is huge: a vast amount of the earliest written music was church music, and even into the 19th century you find composers writing masses. Hell, I’ve written a Latin mass. (I was already an open atheist when I did it, too. That is a bit unusual, but it goes to show you that the Latin mass is a very longstanding musical form.)
All of this is to say that, while I’m not very open when I hear people talking about religious ideas, I do listen to sacred music with open ears, because it’s a rich vein of musical creation. Lauridsen’s piece is a great example of that: I find it haunting and beautiful, and I would love to hear it in person someday.
It’s an astonishing work that even the most atheist of us can appreciate and feel somehow burns with a sacred fire. It’s gorgeous, and if you love this kind of music, well—really, that’s all the church you need, I think. It’s not all the ethics you need, but it takes a lot of emotional strength and presence to sit through it, to allow yourself to feel what this composer is doing to you, and to accept it. I think music like this can be a homecoming for us: we return to childhood, to when all sounds were astonishing, to when things made sense though we didn’t know how or why, when we felt a pure and simple kind of love for those who cared for us, and when we hadn’t yet been so bombarded with all the noise and disappointment of the world—before we learned how to close our eyes, and ears, and our hearts. It washes over you. It carries you to a place that feels somehow otherworldly.
But how disquieting it is to see how the churches use it. I mean “use” in a negative sense. While sacred music has long been part of religious traditions, in the tradition I know best—Western musical history—that intertwining has at times been far from respectful or dignified. This video of the song being performed at Westminster Cathedral might hint at what I mean:
It’s stage entry music, used to fill the silence as the offertory processional comes in, as they arrange the chalices on the altar, as they rattle about their incense censer before passing it to the kids to go waft a bit more at the worshippers gathered there on Christmas. I suppose the piece is no less beautiful—but it is stage music, or what we used to call “program music” for stage plays. I suppose that’s not a big deal to some, probably not even to the composer, but to me, it’s sad.
To me, a piece like Lauridsen’s begs us to stop what we are doing, become silent and still, and just listen to it with open ears. It is more miraculous to me in its manifest beauty than any supposed miracle I’ve heard a Christian relate, including the eucharist ritual. Perhaps that is why they clear the altar, and march, and waft about their incense: to put the music in its place, to subordinate it. It reminds me of businessmen pushing hired musicians around and talking down to them, this mere use of such a gorgeous piece in such a manner.
Churches did employ many of the great European composers for a long time, just as they did many of its stonemasons and painters. The rhetoric was that they were building churches, painting them gorgeously, and filling them with astonishing music in the service of—and for the glorification of—God. The reality, though, is that for most people, experiencing these things was probably something like taking a hit of acid: a sense of tininess in an enormous structure was something the ancients had figured out made temples “work” better, and the paintings and music would have made it all that much more kaleidoscopic—especially for people who did not have the kind of ready access to music and art that we can have anytime, if we so choose. They employed music for this purpose, as much as anything, and they didn’t necessarily respect it.
But we don’t have to listen to O Magnum Mysterium in a church. The lyrics are a meditation on the nativity, sure, but the music is a meditation on transcendent joy and awe in the calm, still, quiet moments of the world. (Indeed, part of its inspiration was a still life painting—this one. Which, yeah, some interpret as a religious allegory.) Lauridsen wrote it on a $50 piano in an abandoned shop, while trying to fend off visitors. I believe Lauridsen is religious, but he’s also made clear in interviews that for him, sacred and spiritual music aren’t really separate things. He’s also set to music the verse of Robert Graves, Howard Moss, Rilke, Neruda, Agee, and Lorca, so it’s not all church songs—but there’s still that deeply meditative quality to a lot of it, at least of what I’ve heard so far. It’s not really about whether something is or isn’t church music: there’s a devotionality to all of it, and a profound beauty that Lauridsen seems to be able to create no matter what he’s using as his text.
Well worth the listen, anyway.