Song, souls and sacred sound.

Music- the undiscovered means of evangelisation

Fresh from mass in the parish church of St Bernadette, not very far from Mont St Michel, I have just been recovering from chasing notes around my brain during the singing of hymns at Mass.

I know very few of the French hymns, but in England I can usually guess where the harmonic journey is taking one. And so, I join in singing tunes I’ve not met before with reasonable confidence that I will remain on the same, page, in the same key, ending at the expected cadence.

Not in France.

There is some French contrarian musical spirit, particularly strong in modern French hymn writing, that lures you up a melodic path to the top of a cliff. It then invites you to jump, promising you a safe landing, and just as you go over the top, it changes direction and ends up somewhere completely unpredicted, unpredictable and frankly, not very nice.

And to mix metaphors, one falls off the melodic bicycle and considers if it might not be better just stop singing and observe; withdrawn from the fray- hurt; pride injured.

Instead of lost in wonder love and praise, one finds oneself bruised befuddled and bewildered.

This is a shame because it is totally unnecessary. One of the most moving pieces of praise is the French ‘Hail Mary’. ‘Je vous salut Marie, comblée de grace.’ Listen to a you tube recording of the Parisians kneeling desolate in prayer by the edge of the Seine, asking our Lady for help as Notre Dame was enveloped in flames in the darkness of one tragic night.

The dark night, the flames, the desolation all acted as metaphors of collapse for a broken Christendom. What do we do, we who have been entrusted with the Church that Jesus founded at a time of civilisational distress and exhaustion?

Pray of course, repent, think, argue, engage, but also sing. Sing, because music may be one of the most important and powerful advocates for the love, presence, beauty and reality of God.

But music needs to be rescued. It has to be reclaimed by the Church. There is a captivating interview on YouTube during which Pierpaolo Finaldi asks Sir James MacMillan about his Catholic faith and the relationship between the western musical canon and Christianity.

He points out that it was Catholicism that created Western music. It all flows from the monk’s and monasteries. It was birthed in communities of men and women drawn into worship by the experience of an encounter with the love of Christ. Faith found form and expression in liturgy; beginning with the simplicity of love songs in Gregorian chant it exploded out to become a riotous ecstasy of polyphony.

And whilst all that’s true in terms of historical development, there is a further dynamic.