“Does any living composer write better for choirs, or more demandingly when circumstances allow, than James MacMillan?”
This obviously rhetorical question opens one of the reviews of James MacMillan’s oratorio Ordo Virtutum, premiered in the UK last Thursday.
I agree, but with one minor amendment: even of the composers no longer living only Bach stands side by side with MacMillan, certainly in his handling of vocal harmonies. Sir James has the misfortune of being our contemporary, which is why reviewers hesitate to place him next to the giants of the past. Let’s wait a century or so, shall we?
The Latin text of Ordo Virtutum comes from Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179), medieval polymath with a fair claim to being the greatest woman in history.
Hildegard was a mystic visionary whose faith illuminated all her works, be it philosophy, theology, botany, medicine – or musical compositions. She was one of the few composers ever to write both the music and the words for her sublime chants, and many of them still survive.
Her Ordo Virtutum is a liturgical drama and also perhaps the world’s oldest morality play. Hildegard found poignant verbal and musical messages to depict a soul torn between virtues and Satan. One detects echoes of her personal fight against the devil, with his claims on her body, and one rejoices with Hildegard at the victory hard-won by her glorious soul.
Hildegard’s own chants, hymns and antiphons were monophonic, that is consisting of a single melodic line. Their drama is meditative and understated, drawing the listener in gradually and getting him in touch with his own soul note by note.
Anyone using her compositions as a starting point for his own faces the task of preserving Hildegard’s contemplative subtlety while adding the bold rhythms and dynamism expected from modern composers. That is what MacMillan did to perfection, and Hildegard would have been proud of him.
While Sir James did justice to Hildegard, the performance did justice to him. Both the choir and soloists of BBC singers were superb, as was the conducting of Sofi Jeannin. But I was especially impressed with the percussionist Andrew Barclay, the sole instrumental accompanist.
MacMillan has always treated percussion as a solo instrument, and Barclay played his crotales, vibraphone, suspended cymbal and tom-tom with subtlety and virtuosity. As a dilettante, I had never suspected that lurking within percussive instruments is so much range and finesse of expression. Hence I found the evening as instructive as it was moving.
The reviewer in question said most of the same things, and it’s always nice to see a kindred spirit sharing my aesthetic and spiritual tastes. However, if you look at the title above, you’ll know that he also found words of criticism.
Those words came across in the last paragraph: “… with the performers, however committed, facing us motionless, you’re also conscious that diversity is never the name in British professional choral singing, not even in the youth division.”
Excuse me? I’ve heard of non sequiturs, but this one stopped me dead. What in God’s name does this have to do with MacMillan, Hildegard, music, virtues, Satan, liturgy or anything else relevant to the performance?
Should the singers have turned their backs on the audience to conceal their irredeemable whiteness? I suppose that could have worked, especially with high collars covering their necks. Not sure about the acoustics though, but some things about musical performances seem to be more important than sheer sounds and the meaning they convey.
The reviewer had to send a message of political virtue ad urbi et orbi, but was it an inner compulsion or a diktat imposed from outside? I don’t know, and when I read that sentence I couldn’t think straight enough to ponder such questions. Distant memories came flooding in, and I shuddered.
When I was growing up in Moscow, no speech or written work passed muster if it didn’t contain quotations from Lenin. Alas, unlike Hildegard, the father of all progressive humanity wasn’t a polymath. He mostly wrote engaging texts on usurping power, using it to exterminate whole social classes and to rob people of whatever little property they possessed.
One typical statement was: “It matters not if 90 per cent of the Russian people perish so long as 10 per cent bring about a world revolution.” (90 per cent of the Russian population made up over 100 million at the time – Lenin thought on a large scale.) Regardless of what you think of such sentiments, you must agree they don’t fit easily into, say, research papers or concert reviews.
But Soviet leaders weren’t out to make life easy for scholars, writers or critics. They knew what mattered in life and had the means to enforce their view. Lenin couldn’t possibly be irrelevant to any subject, be it microbiology, music, physics, pharmaceuticals or, in my case, linguistics.
When I was at university, I once submitted a paper on the Great Vowel Shift, a sweeping change in English pronunciation that occurred between the 15th and 17th centuries. The work took much effort and long hours, what with the reference materials being almost impossible to find. In the end, I was quite proud of myself, a sentiment emphatically not shared by the academic panel.
They regretfully had to reject my paper because it contained not a single quotation from Lenin. My protests, such as that the great man had more important things to worry about than the articulation of English vowels, were in vain. My academic superiors shrugged and explained that such things were beyond their control.
Context be damned: even instructions on the use of electric appliances had to include Lenin quotations. Everything ever published was nothing but commentary on the 45 volumes of Lenin Collected Works.
That experience left scars, which open every time I see the same sort of thing happening in a supposedly free country. As they did the other day, when I read that review of a remarkable performance.
Do the editors of that paper demand expressions of wokery in every article, regardless of subject or context? I doubt it. Things haven’t degenerated quite as much yet, although they are definitely moving in that direction.
So I don’t think the critic was censored prescriptively. The situation is much worse than that: he censored himself. His sensitive antennae caught the emanations of the Zeitgeist, sent electric signals to his brain, the brain to the fingers – and out came a statement of loyalty to a pernicious ideology.
But why did he stop there? The English translation of Hildegard’s Latin text was projected above the platform, but why just English? The organisers are guilty of blatant discrimination against people who may not understand the language of white colonialism.
NHS leaflets, for example, are available in 32 languages, including such essential ones as Yoruba, Oromo and Pashto, with not a whiff of Anglo-white supremacy anywhere in sight. (I wish I owned the translation agency handling NHS work – it must be raking in millions.)
Putting so many translations on during a concert would have been logistically difficult, but at least such ubiquitous languages as Urdu, Bengali, Mandarin and Arabic surely should have been accommodated.
Or do the organisers think concert goers are more linguistically advanced than NHS patients? Surely not – such thoughts are elitist, classist and discriminatory.
You can understand my frustration: When I left the USSR, I didn’t expect it to follow me everywhere I went. It now has, and things like re-education centres and labour camps may well follow. A harrowing thought, that.
If the reviewer had troubled himself to find out what the BBC pays its ‘ad hoc’ singers, then he would know why young singers of black or asian ethnicity, who might have developed the requisite skills, perhaps by singing in Oxbridge collegiate choirs (there are a few) are more attracted to careers in medicine or law.