The importance of a spiritual dimension to life
I am not very religious, but I love the sounds that religion makes. That may seem a strange admission to come from someone who has played the organ in a parish church for decades. So let me briefly elaborate. Theology bores me rigid. And I’m quite content to be open-minded about whether there is life after death until I’m in a position to find out first-hand.
On the other hand, I feel strongly that a life without a spiritual dimension is a life only half-lived. For me, that spiritual dimension comes from music, literature, architecture and the comforting continuity of rituals that have been repeated across centuries, unifying generations in an otherwise unstable and ever-changing world.
Evensong as an important ritual
One of those rituals is the appreciation of what you might call the ‘twilight zone’ – that moment every evening when, in Cardinal Newman’s famous words, ‘The busy world is hushed, the fever of life is over, and our work is done’. Of course, he was talking as much about the hour of death as about sunset, but his words resonate on both levels. And it’s to the eternal credit of the Anglican Church that back in the 16th century its leaders created a daily ritual that perfectly expressed the spiritual dimension of that twilight zone.
They called it Evensong, and it has survived – miraculously unscathed by meddling reformers – to the present day. More than that, it has spawned its own spin-off ritual: BBC Radio 3’s weekly broadcast of Choral Evensong, which has now been running for 100 years.
Choral Evensong... the perfect format
Those 16th-century Anglicans weren’t being completely original. Their new liturgy pulled together bits from the Roman Catholic evening services of vespers and compline. But somehow the new format they created, balancing the ecstatic song of the teenage Mary (the Magnificat) with the elegiac testimony of the dying Simeon (the Nunc Dimittis), chimed perfectly with the circumspect, pragmatic and restrained spiritual inclinations of the English people.
It perfectly complemented the slow fading of light in these northerly isles, the tranquility of ancient parish churches that have stood through centuries of turmoil and the ‘broad church’ aspect of Anglicanism which maintains (or used to maintain) that it’s more important to welcome half-believers and even non-believers into your rituals than to force narrow-minded dogma down people’s throats.
- Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols: how the beloved Christmas service began in a lowly Cornish barn
And what attracts those half-believers so strongly that some of them (I speak from experience) make Evensong a weekly spiritual ‘fix’ in their lives? It is two things: the majestic prose of the Book of Common Prayer and King James Bible, and the transfixing beauty of the music it has inspired.
A wealth of available repertoire
Admittedly, that musical repertoire does have weaknesses. It’s sad, for instance, that three of the greatest figures in British musical life – Handel, Elgar and Britten – never wrote settings of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, and that the standard cathedral stock of evensong canticles still seems over-focused on lower-rank composers from the 19th and early-20th centuries.
On the other hand, there’s a huge repertoire of Renaissance sacred music – much of it written by Catholic composers now shamefully neglected by the Catholic Church – available to be purloined for evensong anthems. Many choir directors have done exactly that. And although cathedral choir budgets are horribly stretched these days, some directors still manage to commission new canticles. And that is starting to address the almost complete absence of women composers from the standard Evensong repertoire until our own era.
Evensong... fostering teamwork and concentration
My own parish church has a weekly sung Evensong, and the choir loves it. I wish it hadn’t been abandoned in so many other parish churches. Yes, enjoying a fine cathedral choir chanting the psalms with sense and sensibility is a wonderful experience. But even more fulfilling for young singers and amateurs is the discipline of trying to do it yourself. Anglican chant has its critics (‘Why are they singing that dreary tune over and over again?’ Dvořák famously remarked when taken to hear evensong at St Paul’s Cathedral). Yet there can’t be many better ways of fostering choral teamwork, concentration, balance, tuning and enunciation.
And for me that wonderful prose, largely unaltered for five centuries and based on texts going back millennia, really does seem to speak directly to the soul. Indeed, I would go further. Singing evensong every week is probably the most vital thing I do to keep myself serene and relatively sane. Is it also a little foretaste of heaven? Well, let’s wait and see.
