A History of Christianity

"It is a history of the whole of Christianity, but he has a wonderful subtitle: A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years . It takes a little bit of thinking about because you think, “Hang on, surely he means two thousand years?” He doesn’t, of course, because he refers back to the Old Testament, and the history of Christianity before Christ. It’s a hugely ambitious book, but it’s just wonderfully told, and it’s full of such variety and colour, but also a tremendous amount of sympathy. He’s a very erudite, cultured writer, and I enjoyed this book very much. Music has been around as part of the celebration of Christianity since there has been Christianity, which, to follow MacCulloch’s idea, means long before Christ. The Old Testament liturgy would be chanted. If you think of the Book of Psalms, for example, it’s full of references to music, and quite detailed and elaborate references to music: “Praise him in the cymbals and dances, praise him on the strings and pipes,” the loud organs, all of this kind of thing. This is an English translation, of course, that was made in the middle of the 16th century but it’s there in the Latin vulgate, and it’s there in the original Hebrew (I don’t read Hebrew but so I’m led to understand). What you don’t have, of course, is any music. There’s no written music, there’s no obvious evidence what the music was. But there is enough evidence that there was music, MacCulloch talks about this: there are indications that it was sung, and some indications about how it was sung. For example, certain words are picked out in a certain way, which he takes to indicate that they were treated to a certain kind of emphasis when the liturgy was sung. You’re working in this fascinating field of having to imagine something from a very disparate collection of clues. MacCulloch has identified a church in Aleppo, which he describes as perhaps the best survival of the very earliest Christian tradition, and he suggests that the way that the liturgy is sung there is not dissimilar to the way it would have been sung in the days of St Paul. You can hear this online. Then, of course, you have to go a thousand years on before you start to get any notes written down on paper, even then the earliest kind of notation is pretty difficult to interpret with any kind of scholarly authority. You have plainsong, and plainsong lasted for a very long time and became extremely elaborate and varied, to the extent that some scores of plainsong are full of little squiggles, and lines, and dots, and dashes which, even now, people don’t understand. Then the first two part music is written in the form of the Winchester Troper, from the 11th century, before the Norman conquest. Here, you have a written text, words, with what look like musical symbols over the top. Some of them look quite like modern symbols—like the tails of quavers—but there are no stave lines. You can see that the musical line goes up and down, but you don’t know exactly where, or by how much. Now, what’s happening there is that one singer would be singing that text to the Plainsong tune, which all the monks in the monastery already knew, because they learnt it as children, and had sung it from memory, and were singing it all their lives, and the other guy would be reading from this Troper, and would be improvising or adding a kind of embellished second line over the top by following these little dots, and dashes, and squiggles. So, you’ve got two part music which has been composed by somebody, but you don’t really know how it goes. This is another thing that I try to look at in my book: the extent to which the tradition of church music is affected by the social, and political, and intellectual currents that are going on around it and the extent to which it reflects back the lives of ordinary people, and it really does. In France, for example, before the French Revolution there was a wonderfully rich tradition of art music in the Church, composers like Lully, and Rameau, and Charpentier, during the reign of Louis XIV and beyond, which ended at the Revolution, which was passionately anti-clerical, very against the Church. So that was that, it really didn’t find its feet again until the late 19th century with the great French organ composers, Vierne, and Widor, and others, writing Mass settings for those enormous cavernous churches with enormous organs, or usually two organs. But England somehow managed to hang on to its tradition."