The Bishop Gets Down

The New York Times arts section seems to have a house policy: a respectable story on some encouraging trend in art, music, or architecture, must be balanced by a story on an equally despicable trend, one that lifts the hearts of NYT editors but inspires disgust in average readers.

This particular day (May 4, 2000) the revolting story is on the Midwest death-metal rock group "Slipknot," which features guys in "grotesque masks and prison-style jump suits" doing "scream-singing." "Two teenagers had already been treated for injuries before Slipknot had even finished thrashing, banging and raging through its first song about exploding angst."

Ah, what joy. The story reluctantly admitted that Slipknot doesn't represent a real social trend (unlike swing music, the preferred genre of the high-brow college set), much less signal a return to alternative rock (which "began fading in 1994 with the suicide of Kurt Cobain"). But the survival of rock's remnants does give some hope to those who delight in exploiting the idiocies of youth to gain recruits for an adult population of moral nihilists, perpetual adolescents, and bad taste in general. As the leader of the band says, "Slipknot is not just an average band. It's not just music. It's a way of life and it's the real way of life."

With any luck, Slipknot will go the way of Cobain.

Now to the good news. Sir John Tavener (the Times misspells his name), an Englishmen and the world's leading liturgical composer, is making his American debut. The name is close to that of John Taverner (with an "r"), the English composer from the 16th century, and his music bears some resemblance as well: they both write complicated and difficult polyphony designed for liturgy and spiritual reflection, and they both set the standard for sacred music in their own time.

Tavener graduated from the Royal Academy of Music in London, and set out on a conventional conducting career which included a Verdi's "Trovetore" at Covent Garden. But a change of heart – a conversion of heart – led him entirely away from the secular toward the sacred. As he eloquently puts it, he went from trying to express his own musical voice to attempting to reveal the transcendent voice through the medium of music. Today, Tavener works from the premise that Western music has been heading in the wrong direction since the end of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.

It is not such an unusual path. The history of music includes thousands of Masses, motets, Vespers services, Marian hymns, and cantatas that great composers wrote with an eye toward touching the transcendent. As one church musician told me, composing sacred music for liturgy is a means by which an artist can seek to expiate sins and have some hope of gaining a measure of immortality for his art.

Sadly, the incidents of such attempts are fewer in our times than any previous century. The Catholic Church scrapped its Latin liturgy of ancient origin to be replaced by a vernacular service whose text has changed every few years since the close of the Vatican council. The Catholic liturgy is no longer a stable outlet for composition, and hasn't been since 1969 (the text of Tavener’s 1969 Celtic Requiem is in the dustbin of history). In the same way, the Protestant church has turned toward egalitarian "Praise Songs" in which the congregation and the choir sing the same dull popular choruses, over and over and over again.

It is no surprise, then, that Tavener, along with many other serious sacred composers of our time, have turned toward Eastern rite liturgies, which have experienced far less reform since the dreadful liturgical revolution of the 1960s and 70s. In any case, it is the texts of those churches which now hold out the prospect of immortality in art. Hence, John Tavener himself converted to Russian Orthodoxy in1977. In the midst of a massacre of talent unlike anything seen in the history of Christendom, the West lost him to the East.

How can such a person, such a voice, gain headlines in the New York Times? Tavener is hugely popular by the standards of the classical music industry, benefitting from an amazing upsurge in public interest in sacred texts and transcendent sounds. Well, says the Times, "his study of ancient, durable musical forms led him to develop a style that, it turned out, was perfectly suited to a part of the new-music world that was taking shape in the mid-1980's. Like the music of Arvo Pärt, Giya Kancheli and others of the Eastern European mystical school, his works tend to be slow-moving and intense, and in an eclectic, accessible language."

Had the Catholic Church protected her liturgy from corruption, and held out its own rites as the alternative to the secular world 1960-2000, it would be well positioned to have gained from this remarkable resurgence in sacred music. Alas, this music is distributed by secular companies via secular institutions, even as the religious recording houses are hawking "Christian contemporary" music (which be even more grating than Slipknot). For the Vatican's part, its recent forays into music distribution include the Pope's New Age CD (sorry, about ten years too late on that trend), and a rock concert at the Vatican featuring Lou Reed, Alanis Morissette, and the Eurythmics.

It was one thing to give an Papal audience to Bon Jovi, but even the Pope had to avert his eyes when Noa, an Israeli singer, crooned in front of him in a low-cut top with a bare midriff. Does an event like this make the Vatican want to rethink it forays into pop-rock, which create scenes worthy of a disrespectful Saturday Night Live skit? On the contrary: "Rock music, when it is performed by great artists, is stupendous," Bishop Fernando Charrier told the press.

And what is a bad artist?  Not Bon Jovi, Lou Reed, or Noa. A bad artist would be someone who, said the Bishop, "might try to exploit the media attention, brandishing crucifixes, or something." So there you have it, at last a coherent explanation for why Tavener, who brandishes crucifixes, plays for socialites in New York while Lou Reed plays the Vatican.

May 6, 2000

Jeffrey Tucker lives in Auburn, Alabama.