Thanks to those wonderful YouTube chaps, I’ve just discovered the fascinating and surprisingly contemporary-sounding music of Pérotin, the thirteenth century composer of Notre Dame, Paris, who was the first to write choral music for four parts, eight centuries ago. I’m tempted to say I’ve developed Pérotinitis, as it’s such good stuff.
Where YouTube took me was to this video, in which a music professor explains how Pérotin’s style came about, and what it consists of. Essentially the bishop of the time wanted to lengthen the duration of the services, and commissioned this entirely new style in order for the choral monks to do so. Originally, Gregorian chart was a simple music for worship, concentrating on sacred words and unison melody with no regard to tempo, probably for theological reasons: they were worshipping God in unity through the sung word, not dancing a jig.
As we find in our own time, though, theological reasons tend to give way to other priorities, and the first departure was for one voice to hold the tune (hence “tenor”), and a second to parallel the tune four or five tones above or below. Fast forward to Pérotin, and in his development each syllable of the chant was drawn out to extraordinary length, like a kind of bagpipe drone, whilst over the top three voices did extraordinary things with inversions and variations of the tune, including (for the first time in church music) rhythmic elements. Yet when finally the main note changed, not only to the next note in the chant, but to an entirely different vowel sound, the whole mood of the music was changed.
The result was a splendid variety of harmonic and melodic ideas, and an astonishingly beautiful musical experience. Of course, it became entirely impossible to make sense of the words, even if you were fluent in church Latin. You can hear a version of the piece Viderunt omnes on the video previously linked, but I’m going to suggest instead that you listen to a more perfect rendition at the end of this podcast:
That’s because it starts with an interview with American Jewish composer Steve Reich, with whose Tehillim (psalms) I closed a recent blog. Maybe that link was what prompted the YouTube algorithms to flag up Pérotin for me. The thrust of the interview is the way that the ancient Catholic composer was a formative influence on an important modern composer, and indeed I’d been vaguely reminded of Reich’s apparently avant garde Tehillim as I listened to the mediaeval piece.
But for the purposes of this column, I was struck by one section of Reich’s comments, speaking as a practising Jew. The Christian Church, he said, has for centuries commissioned music to form a significant part of its liturgy. But it’s different in the synagogue, in which a single cantor chants the words of the torah, and the rest of the service proceeds without music. That made me wonder if it was the young Christian church that rediscovered congregational singing, or whether the rabbis after Jesus’s time suppressed it.
Be that as it may, Reich goes on to ask if Pérotin’s music is “religious,” and he concludes it is not, but rather performance music set to religious words. Like his own Tehillim, he says, its place is in the concert hall, or in the kitchen, rather than the service of worship. And surely we must concede that this is so for Pérotin’s works – they are difficult to perform and, though insanely beautiful, actually serve to obscure the words of Scripture, which in this piece state:
All the ends of the earth have seen
the salvation of our God.
Rejoice in the Lord, all lands.
The Lord has made known his salvation;
in the sight of the nations
he has revealed his righteousnessAnd yet they are not irreligious in the sense of “profane,” any more than Reich’s Hebrew setting of the psalms is, although apparently inappropriate for the synagogue. In the right setting, the believer familiar with the original text (or given a decent programme!) is likely to have his own revelation of God’s righteousness enhanced by the musical experience. I’m reminded of John Wesley’s critique of Handel’s Messiah, then new, for its repetitions, counterpoints and so on that, in Wesley’s eyes, obscured the meaning of Scripture. And Wesley was right, as far as Christians meeting in assembly “for mutual edification” are concerned. A performance of Messiah might well take place in a church, but not in church, where the whole gathering sings spiritual truths in order to encourage and edify each other.
Perhaps that is one of my major beefs with Contemporary Christian Music, which has somehow managed to confuse worship with songwriting and performance virtuosity, at best making instrumentation a core feature rather than merely a support for the singing congregation, and at worst reducing the congregation, as with Pérotin’s Viderunt omnes, to passive hearers rather than active ministers of the Holy Spirit.
The album tracks, as Steve Reich so sagely and modestly observes, are for the concert hall and the kitchen.
