A friend took part in a virtual choir event of vast scope recently. The organiser, Eric Whiteacre, launched this in 2010, with 185 people taking part.  Since then it has grown enormously and in 2020 over 17,500 singers, many recording their parts under lockdown, performed Sing Gently. The gorgeous result, combining voices and video, is  now available on YouTube.

It drips with symbolism.  But then music so often does.  Innately, music contains, creates significance:  a pop ballad gives iconic expression to our experience of love (I’m using the looser meaning of iconic, as exemplifying, but more of this overlap with religious language later);  folk song transforms an individual into an archetype; a choir embodies community, connection, collaboration, using difference to create harmony; listening to classical music can actually change our minds – soothe our emotions, lower our blood pressure, help our brains engage more effectively.

The association between religion and music is long standing, beyond memory and knowledge.  For many they are indivisibly intertwined.  Myself included.  If we want to attempt to approach the numinous, then music is a natural medium.  It is nearly impossible to take part in any musical event without it becoming metaphorical.   The last shared, communal event I attended before lockdown happened to be an LSO singing day, and I feel that nothing could have prepared me better.

The performance of music is bound up with time – rhythm, pulse, pace, beat; musical notation indicates duration as well as pitch.  Yet as a means of expression music stretches time, even escapes it.  It can take a moment, one moment of feeling, and extend that moment of ecstasy – or heartbreak – into minutes.  There’s a scene in Amadeus (thank you to the National Theatre for including that recently in their At Home broadcasts) when Mozart describes how opera works

“A dramatic poet would have to put all those thoughts down one after another to represent this second of time.  The composer can put them all down at once and still make us hear each one of them.  Astonishing device:  a Vocal Quartet!”

Opera always seems to me to be a highly artificial medium, full of overt technical virtuosity which cuts against the dramatic verisimilitude I am accustomed to, but in this explanation Schaffer gives me an insight, to apprehend and appreciate Mozart’s assertion that, in this, ‘it’s realer than any play!’  I can see that the construct is also a scaffold, making it possible to do something miraculous.   Bound as we are by this diurnal, linear temporal world, music grants us release, and through that release we find relief, meaning, therapy.

I am very struck by the thought that theatre and music pull in different directions, both in response to the same mess of human expereince and both – to me – inescapably religious.  Theatre grants ‘a local habitation and a name’;  it gives meaning through incarnation.  Binds it in human form, ties it to limited space, expresses it through voice and gesture and movement.  Takes ideas and ideology, and figures we can so easily idolise or demonise, and presents them frail and contained and fallible.  However heroic or flawed, through theatre we see them breathe, we sense their heart beats.    Music can change those very heart beats.  It draws us out of ourselves, absorbs us into something greater, something which can feel boundless, escaping time and place, even beyond description

At some point this week, the word ‘ineffable’ came to mind – a word I vaguely learned from a school assembly hymn (Oh Worship the King) and, as so often, I had to check the meaning.  I was charmed to discover that it is simply the opposite of ‘effable’, a word I hadn’t known existed.  The root is Latin – ‘effabilis’ – capable of being uttered.   What we can put into words.  Or, conversely, that which we can’t put into words.  Drama makes things effable.  Music is our entry into the ineffable.

We need both.  I need both.  Longing to be back in those spaces.