Our thanks to Mr Thomas Neal for sharing with NLM this summary and assessment of a lecture given by the well-known Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan last October at Oxford University, where Mr Neal lives, and serves as the Director of Music at New College School.
On Monday 28 October, the pre-eminent Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan gave one of the 2024 Oakeshott Lectures at the University of Oxford. Formerly named after the philosopher, writer, and critic Sir Roger Scruton (1944-2020), this annual series of free public lectures now honours the legacy of the philosopher and political theorist Michael Oakeshott (1901-90) by inviting eminent public intellectuals to speak on topics of “civilisational importance”. The lectures are held in Oxford’s historic Sheldonian Theatre.
MacMillan is well-known in the UK and internationally as a formidable champion of Catholic music, both in the liturgy and on the concert platform. Almost without exception, his symphonies, operas, and choral works have explored Catholic subjects, and he has also written a large corpus of music for the Novus Ordo liturgy. Through his organisation Musica Sacra Scotland, and his work as Director of Music at St. Columba’s Church, Maryhill, Glasgow, he has consistently advocated for wider use of Gregorian chant in the modern Roman Rite while also proposing new paths for contemporary liturgical music. At the same time, he is a long-standing patron of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales. His artistic credo was summed up in a series of interviews recently featured on this site.In his Oakeshott lecture, titled “Music and the Sacred in Antiquity and Modernity,” MacMillan sought to outline the historical and technical influences of plainchant—and ‘the sacred’ more broadly—on the development of Western art music. He began by observing that, despite the tide of secularisation and the collapse of cultural Christianity, the twentieth century produced some of history’s most profoundly religious composers. Indeed, he proposed that “the spiritual inspirations behind the great composers, past and present, continued and grew through the twentieth century.” One of the aims of his lecture, then, was to chart how “the multifaceted search for the sacred has been manifest in music’s journey through modernity.” This is an extraordinarily important observation, but one that has not yet featured in the standard narratives of twentieth-century music.
MacMillan emphasised the role of the sacred in the lives and works of three of the century’s greatest musical modernists: Igor Stravinsky, Francis Poulenc, and Oliver Messiaen. He made a powerful argument for considering Poulenc’s opera Dialogues des Carmélites (1956) as one of the most important works of sacred music in the twentieth century. In retelling the beautiful and tragic history of the martyrs of Compiègne (told through the lens of an adaptation of Georges Bernanos’ 1949 novel), Poulenc invited his public to reconsider the ‘founding myth’ of the French republic: here is the revolution in all its violence, cruelty, and brutality. It is indeed extraordinary to think that an opera composed and first performed in the mid-1950s—a cornerstone of musical modernism, and one of the most beloved and frequently-performed operas of the last century—should have in its climactic scene an impassioned setting of the Salve Regina, sung while the innocent religious are led to the guillotine.
Throughout his career, MacMillan has undertaken a careful scrutiny of Catholicism’s musical and spiritual heritages. This “quest for the sacred” (as he put it) has led him to embrace what he calls “Christianity’s most fundamental musical origins”: the ancient liturgical chant of the West. In the second part of his lecture, he attempted an overview of the role that plainchant has played in art music since apostolic times. After sketching the connections between Jewish liturgical music and the chants of the early Church (in which he quoted extensively from the writings of NLM publisher William Mahrt), MacMillan attempted to draw a direct connection between plainchant and certain masterworks of medieval and early modern Europe: the Messe de Nostre Dame composed sometime before 1365 by Guillaume de Machaut (1300-77); the sacred music of Michael Haydn (1737-1806); and the Romantic modality of the sacred choral music of Anton Bruckner (1824-96).
MacMillan concluded by reflecting on why plainchant is regarded as the fundamentum of Western art music, and why it is described as the paradigm of sacred music.
“There is holiness in the sound of this music. And music is an intrinsic part of the projection of sacredness in the liturgy. […] It does this in two ways. First, by setting the texts of the liturgy to singing [… and secondly,] it provides the entire liturgy [with] an elevated tone of voice that conveys its special character […]”
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I enjoyed this lecture very much, but nevertheless went away with several unanswered questions that concern the first principles of sacred music.
First: I would have liked to hear MacMillan draw out the connections between the two parts of his lecture. While there were certainly some modern composers whose “search for the sacred” did not lead them to reach for the Liber Usualis, there are many others for whom their initial exposure to plainchant was a defining moment in their artistic development. Countless twentieth-century composers were inspired by and even quoted plainchant in their works, usually to invoke a sense of the sacred. Gregorian modes and melodies among the primary Western influences on the music of Claude Debussy, Gabriel Fauré, Maurice Ravel, Ottorino Respighi, Benjamin Britten, and Gustav Holst—to mention only the most recognisable names. Britten, for example, made extensive use of plainchant in his opera Curlew River as a structural device and a source for thematic and motivic material; while other direct quotations can be found in works such as the Ceremony of Carols and the children’s opera Noye’s Fludde.
Composers of the French school made extensive use of plainchant themes (particularly in their liturgical music) including Maurice Duruflé, Charles Tournemire, Marcel Dupré, and Jean Langlais. And no one could deny the importance of both Western and Eastern liturgical chant to postmodernist composers such as Arvo Pärt, John Tavener, and Henryk Górecki. It would have served MacMillan’s purposes well to have acknowledged this rich tradition of twentieth-century composers who took inspiration from plainchant. It would also have been interesting to hear how plainchant has directly influenced his own development as a composer and specifically in works such as his percussion concerto Veni, veni Emmanuel (1992), Gaudeamus in loci pace (1998) for solo organ, or The Strathclyde Motets (2005).
But while these composers—and many others besides—have quoted plainchant melodies in their works, we do not yet have a definitive answer about whether (and, if so, how and why) such stylistic tropes work on the listener to communicate a sense of the sacred. If we are to adopt as broad a definition of ‘sacred music’ as MacMillan proposes, then what really differentiates the use of plainchant melodies in, say, the four chant paraphrase masses of Josquin des Prez (c.1450-1521) from the use of the Lamentation tone in Franz Josef Haydn’s Symphony no.26 (composed in the late 1760s)? How does the quotation of the plainchant hymn Pange lingua in Holst’s The Hymn of Jesus (Op.37, 1919) compare with Duruflé’s use of the Gregorian Mass for the Dead in his Messe de Requiem (Op.9, 1947)? It would be still more difficult to differentiate between Duruflé’s motet Ubi caritas, clearly intended for liturgical use, and the countless imitations by contemporary composers intended for concert performance (Ola Gjeilo, Paul Mealor, Morten Lauridsen, et al.)—yet they are all based on the same plainchant melody. For a comprehensive understanding of plainchant and sacred music through the centuries, we must chart not only its continuity but the constantly shifting expressions and changing meanings. I do not think it is possible to compare Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame with the modal colourings of Bruckner’s choral music: they may make use of similar material, perhaps sometimes even using similar techniques, but one cannot say they were working with the same intentions or aesthetic aims in mind.
I would like to make one final observation. MacMillan made an excellent argument for considering some ‘art’ music as sacred, but we must also consider that in our century the process can work both ways: sacred music is not necessarily considered sacred by all consumers. Today, it is rare indeed for listeners to encounter sacred music in the context for which it was originally composed. Most people are far more likely to hear plainchant or polyphony on their smartphone or in a live concert than in its original liturgical or devotional context. Even the context of ‘live’ performances has changed: in countries such as the UK, you are more likely to encounter a polyphonic Mass by Palestrina, Lassus, or Byrd in a Protestant cathedral service than in the traditional Latin Mass for which it was originally intended. While this does not necessarily mean that people no longer associate, say, Renaissance polyphony with the sacred per se, the separation of this music from its original cultural, doctrinal, and ceremonial meanings does inevitably affect how the music is received and understood in the new performance contexts of our time. Some might argue that music that was once described as ‘sacred’ now has such a broad aesthetic appeal to a non-religious audience that older definitions have become redundant. Yet it seems equally plausible that the sacred character (read: timelessness, antiquity, otherness) of the music is a large part of its appeal to most listeners—even, or perhaps especially, in our secularised age.
There are no easy answers to these questions; I certainly would have liked to have heard MacMillan’s views. He gave an engaging and thoroughly thought-provoking lecture, which I recommend to all NLM readers. It would be great to see others take up the various stands of this lecture and explore them in greater depth.
