The English Carol

"I wanted to feature Erik Routley because he’s been a bit of a discovery of mine since I started writing these books. He was a priest, he lived and worked in the latter half of the 20th century, he was a hymnologist, he was very interested in English hymns. He wrote about the Wesley family—John and Charles, through Charles’ two sons, Samuel and Charles junior, and then Samuel Sebastian—and he wrote this book called The English Carol . He is my kind of writer, and I think he should be read more today. He not only knows his subject inside out he also just loves it, but not uncritically. He is passionately committed to it, but he is aware of its oddities and its inconsistencies. Above all he writes with this wonderful twinkle in his eye. There’s the occasional little joke creeping in. When he’s talking about two different versions of one particular carol he says that one of them has the atmosphere of the town, it’s a kind of constructed thing, and the other one has very much the feeling of a country carol. So he describes going from one to the other as like approaching Wolverhampton from the North by train. There’s no doubt it is true, yes. MacCulloch writes rather movingly about this actually, and I quoted from him at the end of my book. Certainly in the last 150 years or so—before that it’s difficult to say because the matter of belief was rather less equivocal, effectively there was no such thing as an atheist, that’s not entirely true, of course, because during the Enlightenment there were—it begins to be possible for establishment figures to be openly free-thinkers—to use the term of the time—and, of course, musicians and composers are by definition people who think freely about things, they are creative spirits. A great many of the leading composers of music for the English Church during the 20th century have been people who would by no means have described themselves as Orthodox believers, including some in whose cases this might be rather surprising, like Parry, for example. Well, Britten had a very conventional upbringing: churchgoing, small town, East Anglia. I think as a young man he would have considered himself to be a fairly conventional Christian, but I don’t think he would as an adult. Certainly Vaughan Williams, whose father was a vicar, wasn’t. Michael Tippett very much wasn’t, nor was Herbert Howells, and there you have some very important contributors to the tradition. That’s an interesting question. We’re getting into rather philosophical territory here, but I feel it’s possible to hear these composers using the liturgy and the words of the Church of England as a work of art. The point of a work of art is to try and explore the human condition. I think that you’ve got composers here who are saying these words, this tradition, represents a monumental, very profound, very moving, and beautifully expressed attempt to make sense of what it means to be human. Now I, as an individual, can’t pretend that I think that it has found the answers, but I find that the manner of the investigation is worth my while, worth being part of, I think that’s partly how I see it. I was lucky enough to have a conversation with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies about this, and he very kindly allowed me to quote from this in my book. He said “I admire the Church as a work of art, but I find it very difficult to believe.” There will be some who find that statement difficult, possibly even unwelcome, but he has contributed some wonderful music. Well, it’s all down to the individual isn’t it? A more extreme example would be Michael Tippett, who was clearly a free-thinker in all sorts of ways, not by any means a conventional believer in any kind of orthodox system. But it didn’t stop him writing church music. He wouldn’t write anything that contained any statement of belief, but he was able to compose a Magnificat and Nunc dimittis for my old college: St John’s, Cambridge. But when he was asked to write a piece for Canterbury Cathedral, he tied himself into knots trying to find a text that he could live with, and he ended up with a Latin medieval poem about angels, which is great, why not? Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But let’s be clear, this isn’t everybody. You say, do you think that is a creative thing, that sort of tension inside the personality, and yes, in the case of these people, absolutely it is. But at the same time you’ve got a composer like James MacMillan for example, whose faith permeates every aspect of his creativity, and, again, with absolutely wonderful musical results."