I often encourage my students to think of historical ages in terms of what the people of the time could imagine and what they could not. And I suppose in the last hundred years or so, the great thing that we have going for us is our tools. Bring someone from Shakespeare’s time into this world, and of course he will marvel – and sometimes his marveling will be mingled with fear – at our cars and airplanes and earth-moving machines and this computer I am writing on, and the speed with which we can communicate with people across the world. Yet once that amazement has calmed down a bit, I think that the same man from another age would wonder what had happened to life itself: would wonder, for example, why he was far more likely to hear machines from far away than children from nearby.
When Sir John Stainer (1840-1901) was a little boy, his father, a schoolmaster of many talents including the musical, built a small organ for his home, and the boy John, a precocious lad, would play classical organ pieces on it, while his father accompanied him on the violin. The whole family, in fact, was musical. Mr. Stainer sent John to be a choirboy in the cathedral school at St. Paul’s in London, and that was the beginning of a long career in sacred music, composing, conducting, arranging, and recovering. For to Stainer we owe the recovery of many of our most beloved Christmas carols – for example, “The First Noel,” and the setting of “What Child Is This” to the old melody Greensleeves. Very little of the story of Stainer’s young life is imaginable today. Our children go to and from school on a bus. Young John took a steamboat.
In 1887, Stainer wrote his best-known work, The Crucifixion, an oratorio modeled after Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, and from that oratorio we have the four-voice hymn, “For God So Loved the World.” The words come from John’s gospel, when Jesus tries to explain to Nicodemus what it means to be born again in the Spirit. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved” (3:16-17). In Stainer’s hymn, that second verse is bracketed by the first verse, and the opening words of the first verse bracket the whole. He leaves us thus with the staggering truth, that God does love the world, even when that same world does not love him. I have pasted the words in below. Stainer set the middle section, which deals with God’s not condemning the world, in a minor key, with softer voices, so as to set off the quietly triumphant finale. It really is an exquisitely tender and beautiful piece.
And all this leads me to think again about that world, that cosmos of the life of man, that God loves. For the world does not love God. The apostle tells us so, as the Word, the Light of the world, “was in the world, and the world was made through him, and the world knew it not.” And the apostle also warns us that “All that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world” (1 Jn. 2:16). And that world must pass away. It is the world of man, swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, as frail and transient as the grass, which is here today but tomorrow is thrown into the fire. Yet God loves that world, that world of man, that world that would nail Christ to the tree, and by the very blood of Christ we who nailed him there may be saved.
Stainer composed the hymn to be sung by a choir of men and boys, and that too is like a message from another universe, that mere children should be essential to performing a work of art of the highest rank. “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” says Jesus.
St. Paul Cathedral Cathedral Choir (Men and Boys) Circa 2009
A stunningly beautiful piece, and as such, I could just linger in its morning-fresh atmosphere. So I kinda hate to even head into a discordant direction about a comparison to our modern smoggy exhaust-filled air of modern "music."
But in concert with your line from the article about bringing someone from Shakespeare's time into this world , "...that the same man from another age would wonder what had happened to life itself: would wonder, for example, why he was far more likely to hear machines from far away than children from nearby," my immediate thought upon listening to the piece you linked to was that, were it a hymn to be sung in church, a congregation might have a somewhat difficult time with it. It is, after all, not the easiest melody to "pick up" quickly with its large range and accidentals and varying intervals and many different notes and phrasings and such.
But my immediate subsequent thought was that virtually ANY of the slew of modern so-called hymns with wandering, going-nowhere melodies that may in fact only have two or three primary notes at most, repeated ad infinitum, with possibly a few other "um, where should I go now?"-sounding notes in an equally bleak break, and leading into a chorus that gives the adjective "bland" a paper crown of glory, would be -- for me anyway -- FAR more difficult to sing (let alone actually enjoy doing so).
That man from Shakespeare's time might say that the melodically dreary modern hymn is akin to trying to hear and remember, let alone enjoy and reproduce, what the sound of those "machines from far away" are creating, compared to the joyful sound of nearby children playing that the Stainer composition might conjure.
It strikes me that the modern effort (whether intentionally and consciously or not) to "simplify" congregational music has in fact made it far more difficult (let alone desirable) to in fact sing.
I'm thinking future generations (if we can get past this age) could easily call this the "Ironic Age," not because it is good at creating clever irony with intention, but that the very things it tries to do to "correct" what it sees as problems, instead amplifies, with intense irony, those very problems in an almost exponential fashion.
The collective human voice in majesty when praising the grandeur of God. One is mystically transported to the Heavenly KIngdom completely enveloped by the love between Father and Son.
To be spiritually lifted above the ordinary then is to experience Paradise itself. .