St Matthew Passion and school assemblies
Last Saturday, I, like many others, went to a performance of Bach’s Matthäus Passion. It has, through the years become part of the Easter ritual. Composed for Good Friday service, it is now usually heard close to Palm Sunday.
On Good Friday itself I go, when possible, to the Johannes Passion at the Westerkerk in Amsterdam. In many ways I prefer this Passion. It is more intense, more despairing, and possibly more human. Yet within the despair and suffering there is something more satisfyingly complete in ‘Es ist vollbracht.’
There is something about Bach’s work that is startlingly familiar on first hearing it. And that is because Bach arranged, to a large extent, existing popular hymns in his chorales and cantatas. But many of these works we used to sing at school assemblies. Alas, no more, I believe. From what I have heard, secularism in schools has chosen to follow a grim, grey and utterly joyless path.
I enjoyed singing in school assemblies. So for me it seems rather silly to remove music from them and replace it with – as far as I know - nothing of any worth. And what does it matter if the music is religious of origin?
There are indeed some boring and dreary hymns but many are memorable because of the music and poetry. ‘Through the earthquake wind and fire the still, small voice of calm.’ I used to love that. And does it matter that it was first composed as a poem by a Quaker? And the poetry of Blake – neither he nor we might have approved of Jerusalem being a prop for the bellicose mindset of 1916 but by the Lord Harry, it woke us up!
I always remember Miss Carver, her hair wound in the tight earphones of her youth taking a deep breath and rolling up her sleeves in preparation for pounding the piano, an act that served almost as a lifting of a drawbridge, allowing those bows of burning gold, those spears and chariots of fire to enter the bastion of our sleepy consciousness.
And as for Bach - why shouldn’t a Lutheran compose a mass? It’s the music that matters. I have attended mass and listened to music of the Roman Catholic Church. But that makes me no more an adherent of a specific creed, whether it is the Apostolic, Nicean or Athanasian than a subscription to any other form of dogma.
Do you have to be a Christian to appreciate all of this? No of course not. Am I a Christian? Nope, although I am interested in the historical Jesus. Do I belong to any of the other Abrahamic religions? Nope. Do I read the Bible? Yep. And why? Because of the stories, because of the poetry, because of the vast fund of historical – anthropological data that can be found in its pages. And of course because of its inspiration to musicians.
A school assembly used to give us the first glimpse of that world of poetry and music that reaches way back in time to, I suspect, the dawn of consciousness. That’s all that matters really. The rest, the creeds and so forth, can be left to the casuists of theology.
On Good Friday itself I go, when possible, to the Johannes Passion at the Westerkerk in Amsterdam. In many ways I prefer this Passion. It is more intense, more despairing, and possibly more human. Yet within the despair and suffering there is something more satisfyingly complete in ‘Es ist vollbracht.’
There is something about Bach’s work that is startlingly familiar on first hearing it. And that is because Bach arranged, to a large extent, existing popular hymns in his chorales and cantatas. But many of these works we used to sing at school assemblies. Alas, no more, I believe. From what I have heard, secularism in schools has chosen to follow a grim, grey and utterly joyless path.
I enjoyed singing in school assemblies. So for me it seems rather silly to remove music from them and replace it with – as far as I know - nothing of any worth. And what does it matter if the music is religious of origin?
There are indeed some boring and dreary hymns but many are memorable because of the music and poetry. ‘Through the earthquake wind and fire the still, small voice of calm.’ I used to love that. And does it matter that it was first composed as a poem by a Quaker? And the poetry of Blake – neither he nor we might have approved of Jerusalem being a prop for the bellicose mindset of 1916 but by the Lord Harry, it woke us up!
I always remember Miss Carver, her hair wound in the tight earphones of her youth taking a deep breath and rolling up her sleeves in preparation for pounding the piano, an act that served almost as a lifting of a drawbridge, allowing those bows of burning gold, those spears and chariots of fire to enter the bastion of our sleepy consciousness.
And as for Bach - why shouldn’t a Lutheran compose a mass? It’s the music that matters. I have attended mass and listened to music of the Roman Catholic Church. But that makes me no more an adherent of a specific creed, whether it is the Apostolic, Nicean or Athanasian than a subscription to any other form of dogma.
Do you have to be a Christian to appreciate all of this? No of course not. Am I a Christian? Nope, although I am interested in the historical Jesus. Do I belong to any of the other Abrahamic religions? Nope. Do I read the Bible? Yep. And why? Because of the stories, because of the poetry, because of the vast fund of historical – anthropological data that can be found in its pages. And of course because of its inspiration to musicians.
A school assembly used to give us the first glimpse of that world of poetry and music that reaches way back in time to, I suspect, the dawn of consciousness. That’s all that matters really. The rest, the creeds and so forth, can be left to the casuists of theology.
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