12. Allegri miserere

12. Allegri Miserere
6th October 2013

What is 31 minus 13? Answer: The Sixteen.

We went to see them in Coventry Cathedral on Wednesday. There are thirty-one in the squad for each away fixture, but they select just sixteen - then throw in two extra sopranos to balance out the second basses, whose voices are richer and deeper than a sub-terranean Lindt 85% chocolate lake. That leaves thirteen on the bench, and eighteen on the pitch. Yet they call themselves The Sixteen. As there was no ref, they got away with it, and at 7.30 on the dot, they kicked off.

Unlike Sir Alex Ferguson, who seems to need the help of chewing what appears to be a squash ball in order for his players to obey his passionate gesticulations, (although I have to admit a grudging admiration for anyone who can, with a single get-those-chickens-off-the-road gesture, manage to tell the forwards to move ahead, and yet the goalie to stay where he is); anyway, unlike him, the conductor of The Sixteen, Harry Christophers, simply walked up to the hallowed Cathedral rostrum, neatly stuck his Wrigley's spearmint between the Bishop's and the Archdeacon's, and began waving.

I said that there were eighteen on the pitch, but 'on the pitch' does not begin to describe their precision, beauty and passion. I have been listening to (and singing) choral music since the 1960s, (with breaks for eating sausages and delivering babies), and this was quite simply the best.

The starter was Palestrina, which at first sounded no more than beautiful. Then, walking up the aisles like mediaeval monks, and filling the vast cathedral with their dark, rich sound, echoing from nave, nook and niche, came what you suddenly realised were the missing men; chanting a deep, yearning, haunting, mediaeval plainsong. The deepest, yearning-est, haunting-est, mediaeval-est ever heard.   I felt all the awe of a feudal serf walking past York Minster at vespers on a soggy Martinmas Eve. It was all I could do not to die of pleasure and /or bubonic plague on the spot. The fog-horn, mastodon low of the monks interlaced with the sparkling harmonies of the main group, like seams of praline in diamond, (which, for the purists, cannot be a mixed metaphor, as it is a simile). You get the idea, anyway, that their singing was indescribably beautiful. But the best was yet to come.

The second piece was Allegri's Miserere. If you have never heard it, listen to it now - it is, (or was, as I thought then), the most transcendently blissful piece of music ever written. So beautiful was it deemed in the past, that it was kept secret by the Vatican choir, and only sung once a year in the Sistine Chapel. Then Mozart heard it, wrote it down, and thereafter the souls of we ordinary citizens could immerse ourselves in it. The Sixteen's version, moving from the simplicity of the authentic article, to the modern embellished version, was indescribably sublime, but one feature in particular I wanted to mention.

When soldiers march across a bridge, they have to break the regular stomp-stomp of their relentlessly in-time bootbeats, or else the bridge might begin to resonate at that frequency. Were it to do so, the continued stomping would feed an amplifying effect, and within a minute the whole bridge could be undulating wildly - before spectacularly bursting. If you are a squaddie on leave and want to try this, but are separated from your fellow stompers, the same effect can be achieved by moving a wet finger lightly round a crystal wine glass at a constant speed. What should be a tiny noise self-amplifies, until it is an all-pervading note, and finally the wine glass shatters in joy. Amplification of human voices, to make a sound which gradually expands until it fills and vibrates the building, can only be achieved if every one of the voices is perfectly blended with the next; every mouth-shape the same; every vocal nuance mastered to the same high degree; and every pitch perfect.  I have been in the same Cathedral when five hundred voices did not make as much sound as those eighteen were capable of on Wednesday night. The magic was that they could expand from a whisper to a Cathedral-throbbing thrill in a heartbeat.

"Why", I hear you say, "is he drifting off on this musical odyssey?" "Aha!" I hear you answer yourself, oblivious to the seriousness of the potential psychiatric diagnoses typified by talking to yourself through someone else's blog, "He is going to draw parallels between The Sixteen, and saving mothers and babies in rural Tanzania." Perhaps you are imaging that I would pick up on the idea that plainsong is all very beautiful, but that when it creatively harmonises with the efforts of others it fulfils itself. Or maybe you think I might point to the self-amplification that occurs when harmony is perfect, whence seemingly impossible effects can be achieved. Even the old structures can come tumbling down, under the persistent vibrancy of simple, resonant harmony, you may be thinking I would note.

Certainly you would have a good point.  Development in rural Tanzania is an echoing, clashing, plaintive emptiness, ready and waiting to be filled with the music of harmonised effort.  Aligning the efforts of  Berega Hospital, the Diocese of Morogoro, the Tanzanian Health Agencies, BREAD, Hands4Africa, Ammalife, Mission Morogoro, Kofia, the Diocese of Worcester, and various universities, institutes, Quangos, and NGOs, will be worth all the effort put in. Three key meetings are approaching, and a fair amount of email traffic. By Christmas, we will all be on the same sheet.

However, if you were expecting that I was going to be so predictable as to make such comparisons, you underestimate me.  The actual story I was going to tell was this: Allegri Miserere was not the highlight of the show. After four centuries of prime time on Classic FM, move over Gregorio, and enter James Macmillan.

I had never been much of a fan of modern music. My unacceptably uncultured philosophy had been that if you wanted  to drop a piano from a tall building onto a barrel-organ player and his monkey; or if you wanted to put a tom-cat that keeps you awake at night in a food-blender with a duck-lure and some castanets; then by all means go ahead. But don't call it music.  By my simplistic and uneducated take, if it sounded like you had made the wrong note, then the reason was likely to have been that you had made the wrong note. I knew that many modern composers were geniuses. I knew that they could have written like Tallis, but chose not to.

Benjamin Britten, for instance, was perhaps the archetypal twentieth century genius. His tougher works, however, (unless you sang them as he planned, and that is quite an unlikely 'unless'), could have a tendency to sound like emptying a recycling bin onto the National Youth Orchestra when they were warming up. When I was in the Liverpool Philharmonic choir, thirty-five years ago, we once sang Britten's War Requiem and a modern Russian piece 'Poem to October', on the same programme. We had no time to rehearse both well, so the conductor, (looking at me, I think), told us: "Look!! I don't mind if you sing the wrong notes, but when you do, for God's sake don't cover your face with your hands and then mouth the word 'sorry'!" On the night, we pulled out the stops for the Britten, but the other we just winged. About three out of the two hundred of us were on the right page when it finished, and some I think had already left the podium. We got a standing ovation. (The strange thing is, I am not sure that the composer would have disapproved.)

Anyway, now the light has shone. Macmillan's modern Miserere was sublime, and even surpassed the genius of Allegri. It still had plainsong chanting. It still had blissful bursts of embellishment.  It also at times expanded to fill the Cathedral with thrilling perfection of resonance. But there was something new and bold and exhilarating, that, once heard, could not leave you in the same state in which it found you.

So here is my point. A new music is happening in Africa. Something new and bold and exhilarating, that, once heard, could not leave you in the same state in which it found you. Perhaps, I hope, you might even want to be part of it.