The Holy Trinity Cathedral, Sibiu:The Romanian Orthodox church retains its ancient music (©Otto Schemmel CC BY 2.5)


I  have just returned from the Enescu Festival in Bucharest, where the great orchestras, soloists and conductors of the world come and go on a daily basis. I was participating in the Ars Poetica conference of the National University of Music in Romania where composers from around Europe had gathered to reflect, analyse and discuss the music of our time. In the conversations emanating from one of my lectures I encountered some astonishment that major British composers of the 20th and 21st centuries had produced music for church liturgy and ritual, and were still doing so.

Obviously this had been the norm all over the continent in past centuries but, for various reasons, the music of our time had gone one way, and the music of the churches had either stayed pickled in aspic, or had headed off down banal populist paths. The international art music world has a great admiration for British composers — Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Britten, Walton, Tippett, Maxwell Davies, Tavener — but has largely missed the fact that they sometimes wrote music for actual church use, sung by ecclesial choirs for actual practical liturgical application. This doesn’t happen in Romania, or Russia or Greece, where the music in churches consists of well-loved 19th-century standard settings of the ritual texts, or wonderful ancient chants, evoking the timeless awe of Orthodoxy.

In Britain though, perhaps due to the fact that high professional artistic standards have been maintained in cathedral and collegiate chapel, there has always been a co-operative synthesis between music directors and the composers of the age, whether they were “religious” in motivation or confession, or not. There has been a steady flow of mass, canticle, anthem and motet settings here over the last 100 years, mainly for Anglican use, but not always. And these settings have respect and import in the secular musical world too, where performances can just as easily happen in concert context. The sacred music of Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Britten and Tippett is probably more known and revered in secular musical circles than in the company of the devout.

This has sometimes led to tensions. The professionalising of music in church is sometimes regarded with suspicion by clerics and laypeople dedicated to the “modernising” and “democratisation” of religious idea and practice, nervous of the alienating resonances of old-fashioned, hierarchical “elitism”. The churches went through their 1960s revolutions too, and in some things these were necessary and liberating. The musical fallout from these has been problematic, though, especially to those involved in maintaining high standards.