The literature on words and music is vast. This was already the case even before the proliferation of writing about Western classical music that was evident in books, journals, encyclopaedias, and more ephemeral sources during the 1980s and 1990s, not only in English, and not only restricted to ‘pure’ studies but also in the realm of intra- and intercultural research. So why is yet another book needed? If it is difficult to pinpoint a conclusive answer to that question, the direction of thought leading to Making Words Sing is clear enough.

Firstly, musicological thinking moves on from one short period to the next as each new wave of writers brings fresh insight and knowledge, and in particular as taste changes. For example, in the specialized field of music analysis – on which I draw throughout these pages intermittently, although without importing too much of its fascinating and necessary jargon and technical routines, or, all being well, its tendency to redescribe the known and even to state the obvious – a sense of the appropriate repertoire has changed beyond recognition in recent years. There was a time, say twenty years ago, when those interested directly or vicariously in music theory and analysis would rightly joke that ‘analysis’ could be defined roughly as: the detailed study of the music of Anton Webern. And if that pleasantry is nowadays wearing very thin, this is a sign of the broadening of technical engagement with music that some would say has led to dilution and lack of focus, but that others welcome as a way forward from the perceived tyrannies of high modernism in its ascetic intellectualism, and of structuralism in its obsession with the apparent mechanisms of art.

‘You'd think that people would have had enough’ – wrote Paul McCartney, and more to the point he sang with his group Wings on record, in 1976, becoming an overnight world success – ‘of silly love songs’. Enough of love songs; it's quite a thought. Whether one should be quoting a popular singer on the subject is open to question, scholarly question that is, in a study centring on Brahms; while on the other hand one imagines that if anyone is qualified to comment on song at least in the later twentieth century, it ought to be someone like McCartney who was the era's most globalized writer and performer of song. ‘Classical’ his song world may not be, but representative of the most widespread and highly valued form of vocality it certainly was.

Admittedly there is something painfully overindulgent in taking too forensic a view of popular culture – not that it fails to be as significant as any other kind of art, and from many points of view it is among the most important expressions of human sentiment, if important means sincere and, in the age of technology, truly widely shared, art of the people if ever there was one. It is always difficult to wonder how to evaluate the fleetingly memorable (deeply though popular art penetrates into our psyche) in comparison with art designed to be lasting; all too easy to give in to some form of cultural imperialism when we compare a work of supposedly ‘high’ art with something perceived to be its opposite – popular, improvisatory perhaps, laden with reference so contemporaneous that it is dated almost the moment it is produced, and in short therefore, dare one even write it, ‘low’.

A CURIOUS EARTH

Those who know something about the story of Emily Dickinson's life – and there is rather little to know in terms of adventure, life events and the like – tend to invest their natural reverence in place, time, themes. Amherst is the supposedly idyllic American town that through Dickinson became a shrine to poetry and to biographical mystery. The mid nineteenth century knew of trains and kangaroos, that is, of technology beyond the imagination of any one person and of lands beyond the possibility of normal, individual travel, but not, say, of penicillin or of world war. Looking back at the Romantic world, from which emerged art that has subsequently been as enduringly adored as it was urgently nurtured at the time, we need to sense its smaller frames and gentler reference points despite its disquietingly lurking contemporary trends of displacement and ‘chronosis’. And themes – ‘topoi’ as they have sometimes come to be called in recent musicological discourse – are usually indexed as such in the many books of secondary literature on Dickinson's thus rather self-evidently ‘thematic’ poetry, themes that are archetypal, recurrent and arch-Romantic preoccupations of this effulgent poet – love, death, journeys and, not least, heaven itself.

‘Place’ in thinking about Dickinson means not only Amherst but America, and enfolds ideas that have touched the many dozens of composers – mostly ones who in all fairness must be called the minor artists – stimulated creatively by her eerily rhyming (when it does rhyme) ‘verse’.

If much of the music discussed in this book can be considered either popular or at least familiar and accessible, the same may not be quite true of Schoenberg's orchestral song ‘Premonition’, Op. 22, No. 4, or indeed music of Kurtág and Berberian to be discussed in Chapter 4. Although Op. 22 is mentioned often enough in the Schoenberg literature, this is not a work that is frequently performed or that has been recorded by many different artists. There is something difficult about the music; as has been perfectly obvious for nearly a century, there is something ‘difficult’ about Schoenberg's music anyway.

The encouraging title of this chapter, ‘Boundless opulence’, is a translated phrase taken from Alban Berg's apparently discouraging essay, to go by its famous title at least, ‘Why is Schoenberg's Music So Hard to Understand?’. Although that issue, of the nature of the difficulty of understanding Schoenberg's music, is not the main issue in this chapter, there will be some attempt to deal with it obliquely; this will not be by avoiding it, but in a sense by complicating it (as a by-product rather than an intention) by asking what ‘difficulty’ may mean in the context of vocality. It is not so much a question of whether Schoenberg's music for voice and instruments is inherently more difficult than his purely instrumental music, or his a cappella vocal music, one choice item of which will be contemplated more briefly in Chapter 4; rather the question is whether ‘difficulty’ is a useful paradigm for musical thinking, paying all due respect to Berg's rhetorical purposes in foregrounding what appears on the face of it to be a negative – or at least hardly uplifting – approach to assimilating avowedly ‘modernistic’ music.

This history of music at Christ Church cathedral, Dublin, has evolved out of the chapters which I was invited to contribute to a history of the cathedral published in 2000. As I began to research the cathedral’s music history it soon became evident not only how extensive the documentary and musical sources were, but also how significant they were both for the history of music and society in Ireland, and also within the wider context of Anglican cathedral music. An edition of documents related to music and of selected anthems was published in 1999 as an ancillary volume to the Christ Church history project, and a CD recording of anthems was issued in the same year. But a single-volume history with eight contributors also covering the history, liturgy, architecture, and archives meant that the space that could be devoted to the cathedral’s musical history was necessarily limited. The subject demanded more extensive treatment. The present book answers this need, being very significantly expanded from what has appeared in the cathedral history and developing a number of aspects, some of which I have already explored in individual published papers. This book not only does fuller justice to the musical history of an institution that has been in existence for nearly one thousand years, but it also acknowledges the unique role played by Christ Church cathedral within the religious, social and political history of Ireland and within the wider context of Anglican cathedrals. The greater emphasis accorded here to the period from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century reflects on the one hand the more extensive survival of records following the beginning of this period, and on the other hand that this is the period during which Christ Church cathedral was at the height of its status and influence. The institutional, administrative and architectural histories of the cathedral have been extensively covered in the recent cathedral history and associated volumes to which the interested reader is referred. These aspects are only dealt with here inasmuch as is considered necessary to explain or provide an immediate context for the musical developments.

Since the pioneering works on English cathedral music by John Bumpus at the beginning of the twentieth century and later by Edmund Fellowes, more recent publications have focused on specific periods or aspects, or on individual cathedrals.

The New Foundation

In the autumn of 1537 royal commissioners arrived in Ireland charged by Henry VIII with authority to suppress monastic houses. Archbishop George Browne of Dublin supported reform and may have had a hand in the resignation early in 1537 of William Hassard, prior of Christ Church since 1520. He ordered reference to ‘the bishop of Rome’ to be removed from all liturgical books, this being carried out in the case of the church of St John the Evangelist which was under the cure of Christ Church. The priory of All Hallows, the second Arrouasian house of the Augustinian canons regular in Dublin, was dissolved in autumn 1538 and in the following February the destruction of all shrines and relics was ordered, the jewels and precious metals being sent to the Irish exchequer. The value yielded by Christ Church, £35 15s 6d, was second only to Our Lady’s shrine in Trim and reflected the cathedral’s importance as a centre of pilgrimage. Amongst items lost to Christ Church was the baculus Ihesu, the offerings to which had supported the boys of the choir since 1493. The future for the priory of Holy Trinity at Christ Church must have seemed bleak. In May 1539 the remaining religious houses in Ireland were ordered to be dissolved and by December the commissioners, who had been travelling southwards from Dundalk, reached Dublin. For the first time they encountered popular resistance when they turned their attentions to Christ Church, the mayor and aldermen, supported by the lord deputy and council, protesting to the king’s principal secretary of state that the cathedral, like St Paul’s in London

If the opening decades of the nineteenth century had witnessed a decline in the status and fortunes of Christ Church cathedral, those following the passing of the Church Temporalities Act in 1833 would see that process continued to the point where the cathedral’s very survival would be cast into doubt. The Protestant domination of politics was on the decline and Ireland’s Anglican cathedrals now occupied an increasingly marginal place within the country as a whole. Freed from the repressive legislation of previous centuries, the majority of the population could now openly express its Catholic identity and new cathedrals were built throughout the country to serve the re-established, Catholic diocesan system. Although a significant proportion of Dublin’s wealth remained in the hands of the Protestant minority, the presence of two cathedrals within the city began to be called into question. But it is to the credit of Dean Henry Pakenham of St Patrick’s (who assumed the deanery of Christ Church in 1846 under the terms of the Church Temporalities Act) that he proved assiduous in carrying out his additional duties as dean of Christ Church and maintained its independent role where otherwise it might have been subsumed under the shadow of its sister cathedral. The recommendation in a report of the royal commissioners in 1868 that Christ Church be reduced to the status of a parish church, a move which might have brought with it an end to Christ Church cathedral’s musical tradition, was not carried out, but growing political pressure for the Church of Ireland to be disestablished culminated in the Irish Church Act of 1869. Not only was the Church of Ireland’s privileged (but by now quite anomalous) position as the established church removed but it was also largely disendowed: from the point of view of music at Christ Church this would mean that the vicars choral would no longer constitute a corporate body owning properties which, together with the ‘augmentation estate’ established by Charles II (now also to be annulled), had provided the exceptional salaries that had attracted leading singers to the choir.

The radical changes which were to take place in the organisation of the cathedral during the nineteenth century were paralleled by equally profound changes in its physical structure.

The century after the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1871 would witness social and political changes arguably more challenging than any that had previously affected Christ Church, changes which would alter the relationships between the cathedral, the city of Dublin and the country as a whole and which would at times call into question the very survival of the cathedral, not to mention the continuation of its musical traditions. The Land Acts of the late nineteenth century, the establishment of democratically elected county councils in 1898 and the vigorous growth of Ireland as a Catholic nation had contributed to the reduction in the wealth and influence of the Protestant landed gentry whom Grindle characterised as ‘those pillars of the Church of Ireland’. This process came to a head during the period of ‘the Troubles’ immediately preceding independence when the houses of many Protestant landowners were burnt down, their owners often moving to England or Northern Ireland. After 1922 when (with the exception of the six counties of Northern Ireland in which Protestants constituted a majority of the population) Ireland gained its independence from British rule, the Church of Ireland represented no more than 5 per cent of the population of a new, independent nation whose religious ethos was overtly, even triumphantly Catholic. Christ Church cathedral, which had maintained its tradition of loyalty to the British crown during the decades leading up to independence, holding memorial services for Queen Victoria in 1901 and presenting an address of welcome to the king and queen on their visit to Ireland in 1903, now found itself very much an outsider within its own city and state. With diminishing congregations and finances but inheriting the country’s historic church buildings, the Church of Ireland struggled to maintain both its buildings and its traditions. In this climate it is little wonder that Christ Church cathedral entered one of the darkest periods of its existence, an inward-looking period during which its musical tradition largely stagnated, reaching a nadir with the closure of the choir school in 1972 after nearly five hundred years of existence. But by then change was already in the air.

The Restoration in 1660 initiated a period of exceptional activity and creativity in the musical life of Christ Church cathedral. This activity is closely related to the cathedral’s role as the state cathedral and chapel royal for the English administration in an Ireland whose political and religious landscape had been transformed since the 1640s. More than a decade of warfare had followed the rebellion in October 1641 in which the lines of conflict were not simply defined. Initially the Irish Catholics had risen in rebellion in Ulster where the largest numbers of Protestant plantations and land seizures had taken place. They were soon joined by many of the ‘Old English’ throughout Ireland, the Catholic gentry and landowners who traced their ancestry back to English settlers of the medieval period and who most often supported the English Royalist cause. Matters were complicated by the outbreak of the Civil War in England, the insurrection against English rule and appropriation of land becoming clouded by many of the Irish Catholic gentry’s support for the English Royalist cause, the rebellion increasingly taking the form as much of a religious war as of a war of independence. Oliver Cromwell’s arrival in Ireland in 1649 marked the beginning of nine months of ruthless repression and reconquest which have ever since made Cromwell into ‘a by-word for brutality, and the worst personification of that English racial and religious animus against the Irish which stretched over several centuries’. By the late 1650s the exclusion of Ireland’s majority Catholic population from land ownership, public office and political rights had begun, a process which would culminate in the discriminatory penal laws enacted from the 1690s. The Restoration in 1660 thus marked not just the return to power of the monarchy and the re-establishment of cathedral services after the Commonwealth: it also saw the consolidation of English rule in Ireland after nearly two decades of unrest and political uncertainly and defined the demarcation of political difference along religious lines which has haunted Anglo-Irish relationships ever since.

The Restoration also ushered in a new era in cathedral music following the complete break in the practice of cathedral music since the 1640s.

Religious and historical background

Cathedrals have long held a special place not only in the religious but also in the social and cultural lives of the cities of which they have formed such prominent architectural features since medieval times. Since the Reformation English cathedrals have also symbolised secular authority and the political establishment through the intimate association established by Henry VIII between church and monarchy. This association would manifest itself in cathedral music particularly between the later sixteenth and eighteenth centuries when the Chapel Royal provided the musical model which cathedrals sought to emulate. The study of music within the Anglican cathedral tradition therefore not only embraces matters of musical concern, but also draws on the broader social, cultural, and political environments within which the cathedrals have developed and evolved. Irish cathedrals of the Anglican tradition however differ in significant respects from their British counterparts. Although sharing essentially the same traditions, liturgy and structures as the Church of England, the Church of Ireland has always occupied a very different position in terms of its relationship with Irish society. Whereas the Church of England is a national religion representing the majority of the population, the Church of Ireland has never embraced more than a small minority of the Irish people despite wielding a disproportionate influence throughout much of its history and having custodianship of all the country’s surviving medieval cathedrals. The reasons for this anomalous situation can be traced back to the sixteenth century.

The Reformation coincided in Ireland with a more aggressive policy of conquest and settlement by England than had previously been the case. Protestantism became closely identified with English control and settlement, and instead of the country as a whole adopting the religion of its rulers, as was the case elsewhere in Europe after the Reformation, religion largely became a signifier of political and ethnic difference. Churches and cathedrals were anglicised and the public practice of Catholicism prohibited. The majority Catholic population was subjected to increasing repression and expected to worship in the established church. By the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the penal laws had been enacted whereby Catholics were excluded from public office and prohibited from owning land and having a political voice, a situation which encouraged the pragmatic conversion to Protestantism of a number of Gaelic landowners.

Liturgy and chant

As the Introduction emphasised, it is to the south of England that one must look in order to understand the musical and liturgical practices at Christ Church during the first century or so of its existence. The Benedictine cathedral-priory of Worcester, where Bishop Pátraic of Dublin was trained between 1074 and 1084, was already noted by the ninth century for its classical tradition of Roman chant, and surviving sources of the early eleventh century from Winchester and Canterbury demonstrate that English chant was closely linked to French and Rhenish forms of the Roman liturgy. The early eleventh-century Winchester troper, the earliest surviving practical source of liturgical polyphony in western Europe, provides clear evidence not only of the importance of music in the Anglo-Saxon liturgy but also of how advanced polyphony was in pre-Conquest England. One can reasonably assume that a comparable liturgy and chant repertoire, and possibly even polyphony similar to that of the Winchester troper, was sung at Christ Church during this period. Around 1075–80 Archbishop Lanfranc replaced earlier English practices at Canterbury by reforms based on those of Cluny and, particularly in the light of Bishop Donngus (Donatus) of Dublin’s having been consecrated by Lanfranc in 1089, one must again suppose that these reforms were reflected at Christ Church.

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries the liturgy as used at Salisbury cathedral became the most widely practised in England. Known as the Sarum use, it was officially established in Ireland at a synod at Cashel called by Henry II in 1172. The fact that a synod held fourteen years later in 1186 at Christ Church itself found it necessary to declare its adoption within the diocese of Dublin is a reminder that actual implementation could lag significantly behind the issuing of synodal decrees. While the liturgy celebrated in most monasteries followed monastic use rather than secular (such as that of Sarum), Augustinian houses being under the authority of their local bishop most often followed the secular use of their diocese. That this was indeed the case at Christ Church under the Augustinian canons of the Arrouasian order introduced by Lorcán Ua Tuathail in 1162 is confirmed by the late fourteenth-century Christ Church psalter discussed below.

‘Not angels but Anglicans’, the title of a 1970s book on Anglicanism, might be a fair summary of this splendid account of the music and musicians of Christ Church Cathedral. This writer has memories of angelic choirboys giving a deep bow to each member of the congregation on receiving back collection plates that were rather more valuable in themselves than in the amount of money that lay on them. He also has memories of organists and choirmen equally as grumpy as any of those listed in this history. Cathedrals may be houses of God but the people that run and serve them are only too human – with all the frailties to which humankind is prone.

Christ Church and St Patrick’s, as Dr Boydell shows, are the only two Irish cathedrals that could ever compare with the great English cathedrals in the choral scale and the complex ordering of the liturgy, whether pre- or post-reformation. By skilfully combining their resources they managed to attract many of the best voices from the larger kingdom to Ireland’s capital. Dublin in the eighteenth century was a musical city the equal of many in Europe.

Such peaks, we are shown, were usually short-lived. The Act of Union may have been intended to unite eternally the two kingdoms and the two churches but the church succumbed to disestablishment in 1870 and twenty-six of the counties became independent in 1922. The union deprived the city and the cathedral of the trappings of state, disestablishment removed its few remaining endowments and independence left it a tiny Anglican rump in an overwhelmingly catholic state. Yet against this must be remembered the mid-Victorian surge as the Roe restoration renewed the fabric and re-endowed the choir. So too must the vision of Dean Salmon never be forgotten in the reinvigoration of the music by the enforced change from boys and men to that of a mixed voice ensemble from 1975.

Through the vicissitudes of time and the anathemas of Ireland’s turbulent history of bad religious tensions, Christ Church has moved to the relative serenity of the twenty-first century where choirs and church leaders move freely between each other’s churches. Here music can bring together within the Anglican liturgy the ethereal sound of Palestrina, the rich magnificence of Haydn, the grand opulence of Stanford who learned his early musicianship in this place, or the modernisms of Tippett and Leighton.