Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi, everybody. Welcome along to this special preview snippet from our monthly Conservations Interview podcast. This month we have a little bit of a treat for you, actually, because the interview we recorded with Dr. Robert Loretz about the power of music goes for more than 2 hours. So this special preview is actually going to be about 60 minutes long. If you want to hear the full two hour interview and get access to all of our other exclusive patrons only content, then you need to go to Patreon.com Left Footmedia and become a five dollar monthly patron. That's Patreon.com left footmedia. The link is in today's show notes. In the meantime, enjoy this special preview.
Welcome to Conservations, the podcast which got its name by literally combining the words conservative and conversations, which is exactly what happens on this show. Every month, each episode, we host a conversation with at least one other guest where we go in depth on a topic or hear about their experiences on this journey we all share together called Life. The aim of this show is to foster and promote dialogue which cultivates goodness, truth and beauty, and in doing so, unpacks the richness of the authentic conservative tradition. My hope is that you'll find these conservative conversations intellectually engaging and enriching, and that they will draw you ever more deeply into an authentic, truly flourishing and more meaningfully lived human experience. In this month's episode, we are going to be talking with Dr. Robert Loretz about the power of music. Robert has a Bachelor of Music in Performance, a Master's of Music with honours in the analysis of music, and a PhD in Ethics entitled Deep Friendship, Virtue and Fulfillment, as well as numerous papers in theology and another four years of study in France in Philosophy and Theology. He has lectured for the Marist Seminary and for Good Shepherd College, both here in New Zealand in the history of church music, and has presented lectures in the discernment of Sacred music and its history for the Catholic Chaplaincy at Notre Dame Sydney University and in Brisbane for the Catholic National Conference of University Students. He was a finalist in every national piano competition in New Zealand in the early 1990s, and he has taught piano and general music privately and in schools over the last few decades. He has also been the musical director for the Ten Day Hearts of Flame Catholic Summer School for over 20 years, and he has co written an opera comedy for tours of New Zealand primary and secondary schools called Singarella, as well as a musical about the founder of the Sisters of Mercy called Catherine Song. For the 150th anniversary of St Mary's College in Auckland. He founded the Auckland Sacred Music Choir Sirsem Quarter, which he conducted for several decades, as well as developing parish choirs and conducting the North Harbour Women's Choir in Auckland. On top of all of that, he has set all of the Christian Psalms to newly written modal antiphons and ancient modal psalm tones. And these are used in churches all around New Zealand, Australia and other parts of the world, as well as writing the lyrics, music or both for over 60 different hymns. As a special addition to this episode of Conservations, we will be including snippets from some of Robert's hymns as musical interludes between the discussion, which covers all sorts of music related topics that we hope you find as enjoyable to listen to as we did to discuss. So, without any further ado, let's have this month's Conservative conversation with Dr. Robert Loretz about the power of music.
Robert, it is great to have you here with us today on Conservations. To have this, I think, is a really important conversation about music, a topic that I don't know, I don't think we talk about it enough, and I think that authentic conservatism and authentic conservative thought has a lot of interesting things, I think, to offer in this space. And there's something really beautiful about music that's powerful and transformative. But when I was deciding where to start, I thought, well, where should I start today? And I thought, Well, I remember probably I think it was the first time I ever met you, and it was at an event, it was at a Hearts of Flame Catholic summer school, a big ten day event that's run in New Zealand. So some of our listeners are Protestants, they may not have heard of that before. And I am a musician myself.
I met this guy called Robert Loretz and I encountered some of your music and it was just yeah, I was just in awe of your ability. And there was something for me, it really transformed my appreciation of music, particularly the sacredness of what sacred music could be and how important that all was.
I'm really interested to know, was there a moment in your life when you knew, I'm going to be a musician, a music teacher, that's a path I'm going to pursue, or were there other options open to you?
[00:05:15] Speaker B: Well, thank you for your kind words there, Bret.
Yeah, I thought I would be a lawyer and I wanted to be a prosecuting lawyer.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: I could also see you doing that.
[00:05:29] Speaker B: Yeah, because when we were sick and got to stay home from school, mum would be watching Crown Court, and the prosecuting lawyer was a real dramatist, and I thought, oh, I'd love to reduce people to tears like they do.
And I really was right up to the end of school, I was thinking of doing Law, except that I'd always played the piano from seven years old, and my mother had tricked me into getting up at 630 every morning, making them a cup of tea in bed and then doing my practice for half an hour. That's all you really need to do to kick off.
[00:06:00] Speaker A: Was there music in your family?
[00:06:01] Speaker B: My mother was very musical. Yeah. She got to grade eight by about twelve years old.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: Wow, okay.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: Yeah, some classical music, just piano.
And yeah, I stuck at it. And then I just happened to get a very good piano teacher at Avondale College. We didn't have much money and we only learnt off the teacher that was attached to the school. So we had a nun in St. Mary's, $30 a term, and then we thought, well, they might not be able to afford anymore. And I got to secondary and Avondock College was one of the schools that had a permanent piano teacher government funded, so I ended up just paying something like $60 a term there.
But she was one of the best teachers that Auckland has.
She actually refined all my technique. I had a lot of musicianship, but not much technique at all, and she refined all that and then put me in competitions and put me in exams and all those letters and all those things. And then it just came time. One of my options would be a piano degrees. You had to audition in 7th form. So I auditioned and then when I got in and I was the only well, there were two of us that got in in Auckland and one the other guy left, so I was the only guy in my year doing piano. But it's a very small little group of people did it. You had to get to quite a high standard, more or less, because I got in, I thought, well, I got in, I should go. But also I also thought, well, if I do law, I probably won't enjoy the degree, but I might enjoy the pay.
But at least if I do music and then change my mind later and do something else, I would have enjoyed myself while I was there. I just boasted on as simple as that and chose music.
[00:07:50] Speaker A: I think those people who know, you know that you have a very sacred music as a style classical. Did you always have that leaning or were you thinking, I'm going to be a pop musician, and then you discover something?
[00:08:00] Speaker B: I didn't really grow up with pop music because I played piano and I knew all the classical repertoire, but still that's very different to the sacred music. Piano is mainly just Beethoven, Mozart, all that sort of thing. So I only learned about sacred music properly at university and even then, late, so I did my performance piano degree, where you cover all the history of music, but as much as you're interested in then. But we had Dr. Fiana McAlpine, who's one of the world experts on medieval music. She was there. I didn't take that paper when I was there, because when you're a pianist, you think medieval music is irrelevant because the piano wasn't invented back then.
It wasn't until later on that I realized I've missed out on learning about that. And I wanted to go back because I found out how to compose in the ancient style of the Renaissance composers, we got taught the counterpoint methods, and all the great composers learnt those when they were five, six and seven years old. And it's a very, very simple method. I could teach it to at the moment, I'm teaching it to twelve year olds and ten year olds. So I went back to learn about medieval music when I was a bit older. Then I could be one of those annoying adult students that asks all the questions anyway.
[00:09:16] Speaker A: And so did you catch the fire, then? You caught a bug, did you?
[00:09:19] Speaker B: Yeah, the more I did after piano degree, I did a Master of Music and Analysis.
It's funny, at the end of each thing you think you know something, but then when you do more, you realize you didn't know anything.
Even though you know a lot more, you feel like now there's way more that you don't know. So when I left school, I thought, I know all about music. After I finished my piano degree, I thought, I'm only just touching the surface. I don't really. Then after the masters, I'm like, wow, there's so much I don't know. But at the same time, you're getting an overview. And the beauty of going backwards in time, you really understand music if you really understand, I think, the roots of it, the medieval roots of it. It's really even earlier, if we look at it properly, christian music has come out of the Jewish music.
What we hear today in most music is major or minor scale, and everybody knows those who plays music. But in the ancient world, they used a series of modes. So the Dorian Mode is basically the white notes from D to D on the piano. It's a different set of notes to if you started on E and went to E or F and then went to F, so you get different intervals and different feel for each mode. And what I learned from Fiona was, well, we sort of studied the ancient chants to look at their construction. How do you write in the Dorian mode? How do you write in the Phrygian mode? What are the main tones you'd linger on?
It gives you a deep appreciation for a whole different feel. That the sacred music's always had these modes right through. And the other one was, I went to what is it? The Oasis of Peace, for about six months over in Italy. It's quite a contemplative religious order. And they chanted 150 psalms a week because they were using the old office 150 a week? Yeah. So the old office used to do every psalm in one week?
[00:11:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: Wow.
But they used those old tones. They were in Italian, they weren't doing Latin, but they were using all those old tones. And I fell in love with them because after a while, they're just so natural, they're very peaceful.
[00:11:41] Speaker A: And I don't say this lightly. I think you have a sort of musical genius about you, and people often say genius has a sort of borderline madness to it as well. Have there been madness?
Have there been moments for you when you felt that sort of madness of music, or maybe that you're seeing musically the world differently than others around you. They're not quite getting it. And if only they could see the wonder of what you're seeing.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: I used to feel that a lot as a teenager, because back in those days, you had a ghetto blaster. And we'd go down to school camp with about a six hour journey down to the mountains, and I would bring the ghetto blaster so that I could control the music, because I had completely different tastes.
[00:12:25] Speaker A: Well played.
[00:12:26] Speaker B: And I'd say to them, you can play one of your songs and then one of my songs, one of your songs, and then one of my songs. So they'd play their three minute well, maybe a six minute Bohemian Rhapsody is about as long as it gets.
And then I would play a 20 minutes Mozart symphony, I remember, down in the mountains blasting handles, messiah. Well, I guess the thing and that's in classical music. In classical music, there's such an emotional journey going on that at first, when I was young, I couldn't relate to modern music because it never changed its mood enough in one song. It tends to capture a certain mood. I do like modern music a lot more now.
[00:13:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
So when you were younger, you were actually getting that sense of the depth and the personality of what it was.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: Because when you play these big pieces, you have to enter that journey deeply to play them properly. And your teacher guides you through all of that. And mine was brilliant. She used to make up a story, basically, about every single piece, so every inflection in the music, I was imagining a whole saga of a story and bringing out that inflection. And then when you go to you got a song that's just verse, chorus. Verse, chorus. What do they call that other bit?
[00:13:40] Speaker A: The bridge.
[00:13:41] Speaker B: Bridge.
The modern pop chorus.
What do you say about it? Once you said that this isn't catchy, but it's not deep. Yeah.
But what I came to realize later is we've always had the two musics alongside each other. A fun music and a sacred music.
[00:14:03] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:14:03] Speaker B: And it's usually the sacred music in history. That's been the deep music.
[00:14:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: And then there's the celebratory dance music.
Let your hair down. And if you listen to medieval dance music, it's quite wild, it's quite jazzy, it's quite amazing, but it's very rhythmic. Then you go to the Gregorian chant, it's not rhythmic at all. So there's no pulse, there's no 1234, it's no straightjacket on, it no it's free flowing. It's like waves of sound and impulses of sighing, you could say.
[00:14:40] Speaker A: Probably the closest modern expression I mean, I could be wrong about this, but I get the sense that maybe jazz is the closest to maybe what the way in which it's not sacred. Jazz is not sacred. But do you know what I mean? There's a sense in which it's not constrained in the same way.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: Quite interesting what you're saying, because jazz is the one field that takes up all the old modes when you learn jazz theory, which I'd never learned, but I have had students now from when I was teaching at secondary that went on to do jazz degrees. And they come back all excited to show me what jazz theory is all about because I taught them classical theory and I taught them the modes, which isn't even usually taught at schools, but they went in knowing from a classical point of view, and then they could map on so many things onto jazz. And jazz will study not just the Dorian Mode, but seven adaptations of the Dorian mode in different ways. And they have to really become familiar and improvise in all of these different modes.
So there is that. Yeah. I was thinking the other day, though, that jazz is very the closest thing to jazz in history is really the Baroque period of Bach and Handel and all of those guys.
When you used to talking about Buck the other day, when you think how hard these guys worked.
He wrote a canta, which is about a 20 minutes long piece of music for orchestra, four big soloists, soprano, tuna, bass, choir every week for church on a different theme of the gospel.
[00:16:25] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: And that means he has to write all the music and rehearse it and put it on and start again the next week on a new one.
Of course, he has to write every part out, violin part written out wow. Scroll them all out as fast as he can and then get it all written and out there to the musicians. They would have had a day or two to quickly read it. And the musicians in those days just could do things instantly.
Then there's never any time to write the keyboard part down for the Hup score. So all they did was they wrote just the one note of the bass that your little finger would play and then little codes of numbers underneath of if you saw a C, you'd play a C chord. If you didn't want it to be a C chord but an A minor chord with a C at the bottom, then you'd have to put the number six on it to tell you don't put a fifth, put a 6th, and that'll give you a minor. And so there was a few codes that they learned. It's called figured bass.
And all they got was the one bass line, like the cello line, a few numbers, and they'd just improvise away and play beautiful music on top. And you had to be that kind of musician in those days. Even go back a period to the know Henry VI and Elizabeth I Madrigals, which are complicated, really fun part music that you'd sing at a posh dinner party. After dinner, someone would turn up with a madrigal written oh, John's written us a madrigal John Farmer Fair. Phyllis and the aristocracy would just sight read it on the spot, no rehearsal.
[00:18:05] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:18:05] Speaker B: And it was considered be like, don't you know how to read? Like, if you can't read music, that's how much they were into it back then.
[00:18:13] Speaker A: That's fascinating.
[00:18:15] Speaker B: It's amazing the skill they had. And we've lost a lot of it now one way.
[00:18:21] Speaker A: Well, we'll talk about that in a second, because I have a theory about what's going on here, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. But I was thinking, too, when you mentioned storytelling in medieval funnily enough, I thought to myself in preparing for today.
And I didn't know you were going to say that because I was thinking, you know who I think of as probably quite close to that medieval concept of music? And there's a certain timelessness to him, even though he's not and that's Johnny Cash. He tells stories and he celebrates events. And his songs, so many of them are just ballads.
[00:18:52] Speaker B: Ballads.
[00:18:53] Speaker A: And then when he's not talking about.
[00:18:54] Speaker B: McLean a little bit, those old guys that just they basically are telling a story.
[00:18:58] Speaker A: It's like a tuberdor who might have wandered the yeah. And also when he's not doing that, the other big theme in his music is God. It's God and event. God and event. It's very interesting.
[00:19:09] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. Secular and sacred music has a completely different sound through the whole Middle Ages. So when I say Middle Ages, we're really talking 400 until 1450. So it's a big period. Thousand years. And it does develop quite a lot. And it's fairly experimental, even. It's amazing what the developments they did in that time. Like, I used to give the kids at school a bit of a music oral test after they studied all of the history, and they'd get 1 minute excerpts, 20 pieces of music from the whole of Western history, and then the first thing they have to do is go, is it sacred or is it secular? Which you don't always judge by the words because you can't always hear the words or whatever, but it's basically for them to know it was Gregorian chant as opposed to medieval folk music.
You're going to feel a pulse in medieval if you think Scarborough Fair, we are going to Scarborough Fair past Lisa, there's a definite pulse.
It either sounds like dance if it's fast, or trance if it's slow.
Church music never sounds like either of those, actually.
It's much more free flowing. And when we when I used to start with Gregorian chant and I was at a state school, you know, messy high school, and usually schools start a bit later, they start music maybe at Baroque period, which is 1600, or they might start if they're a really good school, they might go back another hundred years. We'd start with Gregorian chant. And the Westies from West Auckland aren't that familiar unless they go to the attitude.
[00:20:47] Speaker A: It's not the first thing you think when you think of West Auckland Gregorian chant.
[00:20:51] Speaker B: Yeah. So the first thing I used to say, what do you notice?
And what you notice from a modern point of view is there isn't this and there isn't that and there isn't that and there isn't that. So there's no harmony. Just one line.
There's no pulse or fixed rhythm, if you like. It's free flowing and it takes off. I almost want to play. Is there somewhere I can play? One, one alleluia.
Can you hear that?
[00:21:29] Speaker C: Hallelujah.
Ha ho.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: That's the completion of one word.
[00:22:16] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:22:16] Speaker A: Hallelujah.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: Yeah. And the idea there is the soul's almost left the body.
It's like all your desire to go up there and be with God. It's like the souls just floated up like incense up the whole cathedral or whatever. The basilica with its high roof.
[00:22:36] Speaker A: Well, because one of the things too, that's actually interesting, isn't it, is that with sacred music, the music is at service of the worship and what is being prayed, right?
[00:22:45] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:22:47] Speaker A: What you find with spirit of prayer. Yeah. So if you invoke the Trinity, you go up, right? You say Jesus, you go up for the elevation or God the Father, is it? You go up.
[00:22:57] Speaker B: Not necessarily word painting like that. That does happen later on, but funnily enough, in the Middle Ages, they didn't do that. There's about two examples of it. Well, not many. Anyway, there is a Gregorian chant for the Ascension that goes up just because he's going up.
But mostly what I found quite striking when I did learn about medieval music was they don't really paint the mood of the words, they paint the spirit of prayer. So if you think of the spirit of prayer as that the mind and the heart want to lift up to God, the soul is yearning and thirsting.
And it's quite interesting with guru and chant, because if people first hear it, they can think it's a little bit sad. That sounds a bit funerally or something like that, because it's solemn.
And funerals and weddings should always sound similar because they're two solemn occasions.
By the way, just a quick word to anyone thinking of getting married. Don't you dare use CDs and ruin your whole wedding with your favorite song. Talk to us and we'll make it a lot better than it would be.
[00:24:04] Speaker A: Yeah, that's true. Anyway, make it sacred.
[00:24:08] Speaker B: Yeah, but sorry, what we say half.
[00:24:13] Speaker A: The audience has just checked out.
[00:24:14] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:24:15] Speaker A: You're talking about the way in which it's sort of the nature of prayer is what the music is.
[00:24:20] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. So it's quite interesting that you could get a Christmas chant, you could get a Good Friday chant, you could get an Easter Sunday chant, and they're not going to sound that different in the mood, because the mood isn't, oh, we're happy today because it's Christmas, we're sad today because it's Good Friday.
That comes later. That came when opera was basically invented in 1600.
[00:24:44] Speaker A: Well, let's talk about that, because this is where music owes this huge debt to Christianity, right, to the church. Opera is something that comes out of the singing of the gospel on big high Christian feasts, right, correct.
[00:24:59] Speaker B: And the liturgical dramas. So the Middle Ages really flourished around the twelve and 13 hundreds and everything overflows from the liturgy. So a good example would be the chance of Montserrat, which Montserrat was one of the shrines you walk to on a huge pilgrimage in Spain.
What you got was the pilgrims would normally go on pilgrimage and as they went, they'd have certain songs they sang while they marched and walked, even on the Crusades, there's crusader songs and they're really cool and they've got a kind of rhythm to them because they're walking and marching and they've got this oomph to them. And then you've got the style that you'd sing in the church, which is much more you could say it's more reverent than that, even though a lot of the music that they used for fun, we can use almost in church, because it's still a lot more reverent than most of the music we have.
But what they used to do is they'd get to church, they'd do their chance, and then they'd go to the pub at night and they'd sing their slightly naughty songs of their folk music, or songs all about death, but in a funny way.
[00:26:18] Speaker A: Or the plague has got your wife.
[00:26:20] Speaker B: And your third son even their lullabies are like, oh, please stop crying, dearest darling boy, or I'll give you back to God or I'll give you to a witch, but she'd give you back in a day. That's the kind of words in the happy times. But there was no pub in Montserrat, so they had to sleep in the church at night. But they wanted to have fun at night. But they couldn't sing their body songs in the church, so they created a whole lot of sacred music for fun that wasn't for the mass that they would sing. And it's much more it's may I play one?
[00:26:56] Speaker A: Yeah, of course you can go for it.
[00:26:58] Speaker B: So this is called Maria Martrim and it's from the manuscripts of Montserrat. And if you think about it, compared to Gregorian chant, it's a little bit more nifty.
Dun DA DA DA DA DA DA yes, dun DA DA DA DA.
[00:27:36] Speaker A: So you can actually hear the constraints of a rhythm and a melody and.
[00:27:40] Speaker B: Singing a bit faster. It's like amari.
[00:27:52] Speaker A: And that grows out of they can't go to the pub. They want to sing songs that are.
[00:27:56] Speaker B: A bit more bouncy, a bit like their pub music. And what they did do in the later Middle Ages, that links to what we're talking about, where opera came from.
If you have Christmas, you're not just going to have the Christmas Mass, you're going to have plays afterwards. And the different guilds would put on different aspects of the day and someone might do a play about herod killing the babies. And that's where we get Lula, the little tiny child, the beautiful carol from that, from the medieval dramas. The music for these things is quite startling.
[00:28:35] Speaker A: And so that is what the beginning of opera as we know it?
[00:28:39] Speaker B: Well, it's musical festival, festival music, but it's religious folk music.
[00:29:00] Speaker C: Saudi.
[00:29:04] Speaker B: So, yeah, that kind of music isn't the style of Gregorian chant, which is actually the style of the liturgical music, but you can use these things, like on a Christmas Carol Night or something like that.
It's quite beautiful music.
The very original, you could say, origin of opera, apart from being a fantasy, because opera came from two things. One was reading about the ancient Greek plays which were sung, and we don't have the music and we don't know what it sounded like, but all we know is they wrote down about them that the audience were wailing and crying and almost screaming at times because it was also emotionally moving.
And then when the people of the Renaissance read that in about 1450 well, actually 1600 was when opera came along, but that but they were like, well, how come everything was so moving back then, but nothing's that moving now? They must have had and then they invented opera thinking what they must have had to make the drama that emotional. But it wouldn't have been anything like that, actually. But that's the imaginary origin, as promised.
[00:30:22] Speaker A: It's time to take a little break, to hear a snippet of one of the hymns that Robert Loretz has written. This one is one of my favorites. It's called? Let us come to you, O Lord. It is a beautiful combination of Christian scripture and sacred music and I hope you agree with me, this is something really, really special. So please enjoy this one.
[00:30:50] Speaker C: Let us come to your Lord, our living stone.
Come to let ourselves be built as living stones into a spiritual temple.
Make us a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God, our Father through you, Christ all strong which the bitters reach you have become the cornerstone in you. We are being built into our heart where God lives in the spirit.
Let us come to your Lord our living stone come to let ourselves be built at leaving stones into a spiritual temple.
Make us a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God. Of you Christ.
You said to Simon you are Peter.
I will build my church off found me on the. Apostles and prophets with you as a minor storm.
Let us come to you, O Lord, our living stone.
Come to let us have the build as living stones into a spiritual temple.
Make us a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God, our Father. Through you, O Christ, your.
[00:33:11] Speaker A: So that was. Let us come to you, O Lord one of the hymns written by Robert Loretz. Let's get back to our conversation now. And Robert was explaining to us the origins of opera. So one part was fantasy, and he's now about to tell us the second point of origin for the musical form we know as opera.
[00:33:30] Speaker B: But the other origin is the Easter Gospel of Sunday Morning, where it's tell us, Mary, what did you see along the way? And Mary answers and there's a dialogue.
And to jazz up the gospel on that day, they actually used to use different people like they do with the passion reading nowadays. So you got your narrator and your different so they would actually have different singers for that chant just to make it special.
And then that overflowed into the festivals around Easter where you tell other stories, but it would all be sung.
But the other origin of opera is the madrigal. Because in the madrigal, which is tell.
[00:34:19] Speaker A: Me, what is a madrigal? You've already talked about this. These are performance pieces that someone, just a layperson, writes and brings to a party.
[00:34:26] Speaker B: Yeah. Basically, if you think of the medieval period as having kind of folk song on the one hand and church music on the other, in the Renaissance, when it all gets more sophisticated and they develop part writing, we move from Gregorian chant to the Motet, which is overlapping for soprano, alta, tenor, bass in polyphony.
[00:34:55] Speaker A: So Motet's got parts, polyphony, overlapping lines of music, different voices.
[00:34:59] Speaker B: Yeah. And yet they wanted to respect the heritage of chant because they're not people that are going to go, we've just sung Gugorean chant for 1500 years. Chuck it out, we got a better idea now.
[00:35:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:11] Speaker B: Okay. The only people that would ever be that crass would be people from the 60s.
[00:35:18] Speaker A: We'll get to that.
[00:35:21] Speaker B: What they did was connection to tradition.
[00:35:22] Speaker A: Though tradition is important for them.
[00:35:24] Speaker B: What they did was every day of the year had a different chance, a different set of chance. Christmas Day's got its chance, Boxing Day's got its chance.
And if you were in the monasteries for 1000 years, you didn't even have it written down. So everything was just oral tradition. You sung this song on Christmas, you sung these quite a few chants on Christmas Day because you had morning prayer, evening prayer, they all had different antiphons and the Mass had different things. And then you'd only sing that again next Christmas.
[00:35:55] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:35:56] Speaker B: So every day of the year, you can imagine there's a whole repertoire of music that they're remembering in the monasteries. Wow. And they're just correcting the new guy who comes in and starts singing it wrong.
[00:36:05] Speaker A: Well, this is where we get staves and music written down right, isn't it? Because my right here, there's a group of monks who say, well, we have to be able to teach this. So some basic dots are put on paper.
[00:36:16] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. The monk called Guido Obarezo, he came up with a genius idea of putting a couple of dots going up if the music went up, and a couple of dots going down if the music went down. And then he came up with an amazing idea of putting a line across so you could tell how far it went. And then when they clapped him for that and told him he was a genius, he did another line. And then he did another line and he did four lines.
[00:36:37] Speaker A: This man's an inventor. When will he stop?
[00:36:40] Speaker B: So it was a stave and you could tell then exactly once you could write music down, and that happened around 1100. They quickly tried to write down all the music they had and it spread right across Europe, of course.
And you have to think that Gregorian chants been a little bit codified by Pope Gregory. Around 600, was it?
[00:37:05] Speaker A: Explain for our lay listeners. We got people here who don't probably wouldn't touch an instrument or wouldn't know music, or maybe who are out, some not even Christian or Protestant. What does codified mean in this context?
[00:37:18] Speaker B: They kind of make it standard for the whole church to sing the same song on that day, like the Christmas Day chants, the feast of whatever.
[00:37:28] Speaker A: This is the music you use this thing.
[00:37:32] Speaker B: It's like how Latin was the language used in the whole Western church, and then the Eastern churches had their other ancient languages, and so the texts of the mass were all the same everywhere. So was the music that went with that day. I think the monks were keeping your liturgy going. Mainly when I say monks, I'm including nuns, so they're keeping the liturgies going. And the village life is around the monasteries often. Later on, it's around the cathedrals. And that you have the age of the cathedrals comes later. The age of the monasteries and castles is there first, and then there's palaces and cathedrals and universities and things. But what was stunning was when they gather, everyone's writing down their music, but it turns out that Tantamurgo will be exactly the same, whether it was sung in Germany, France, all across Europe, whichever part of Spain, wherever they're singing, Tantamurgo the same.
[00:38:35] Speaker A: And that's not by design, it's just that oral tradition.
[00:38:38] Speaker B: By oral tradition, yeah, that alleluia we played earlier is very old. The alleluias are one of the first things written in the early church and they're really elaborate. They've got really long tails on the alleluia and they're actually like little cells that they put together and make into large structures.
[00:38:58] Speaker A: And are they consistent as well.
[00:38:59] Speaker B: They're consistent. Yeah. And then it turned out.
[00:39:02] Speaker A: So that's the power of oral tradition, the modern skepticism for oral tradition.
[00:39:06] Speaker B: I know. Yeah. It only works, though, if you consider the thing you're passing on to be holy. Yes, because it's like the Bible.
If the Bible is the word of God and the monks are copying it out, I was telling somebody, a child the other day about how well, they had to copy it out and copy it out also, the paper doesn't last, but you have to write it out again. And somebody said, oh, they must have changed it a lot then as they wrote it out. And I said, no, they didn't change a word because they respected it so much. This is the word of God. I'm not changing it. Terribly wrong of me to change it. Well, Gregorian chants, not the word of God. But it was considered that the Holy Spirit had given the music somehow, because even whenever you see an icon of a picture of Pope Gregory, who's famous for getting the same chance codified around Europe as in Standardizing it all you see a picture of Pope Gregory, and then behind him is the scribe.
He's got the Holy Spirit in his ear, the love. And then next to him is Guido Varetzo, who's 800 years later, writing it down.
It's coming from the Holy Spirit through the oral tradition, and now it's been written down. And the other thing which I found really interesting was the earliest Christian chance and the earliest Jewish chance are nearly identical in contour, isn't there, in our.
[00:40:34] Speaker A: Father, if I understand it correctly? Yeah. The chant is almost certainly the patanosta comes Jewish.
[00:40:41] Speaker B: Think how that goes. Partenosta queers in JLE. It comes from the ancient pilgrim mode, which is so you'd sing a psalm to that to that tone, like, have mercy on me, God, in your kindness, in your compassion, blot out my offense, or Wash me more and more from my guilt and cleanse me from my sin. Well, that melody is one of our oldest, but it's also probably the music used.
It comes from the Jewish setting of particular psalms, which is their Halal psalms, I think their Hallelujah style psalms, which are the ones used in the Passover meal.
It's quite probable. The actual original Jewish one is nearly note for note.
It's quite probable that Jesus and the apostles sang that tune on their way down to the Kidron Valley because they sang those psalms. And the most ancient Jewish thing corresponds to the most ancient Roman in lots of modes, especially that one.
[00:42:04] Speaker A: That's fascinating. And there's something mystical about that that is just look, as you were speaking and talking about, like monks who are writing out scripture, I think straight away I thought of the difference between that modern mindset where we insert ourselves into it, our own ego. And I'll reinterpret this, thank you very much, as opposed to, no, I am at service of something good and true.
[00:42:30] Speaker B: Because tradition is literally handing on, isn't it?
[00:42:33] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:42:34] Speaker B: And even at the cross, St John says, bowing his head, he handed on his Spirit. He traditioned, his Holy Spirit is how he says, Jesus died.
He handed on the spirit. And he didn't just hand it on like as he breathed his last. He handed it on to the Father as worship, and he handed it on to us as mercy to make the so.
The idea that the Church is always handing on the fullness of what it received from Jesus, it mustn't water that down or change it for any generation. It can deepen our understanding, but it can't leave out some.
And so they had this respect for the heritage, even into the music, and therefore, when polyphony came along, for those.
[00:43:20] Speaker A: Who don't know, polyphony is multiple voices.
[00:43:21] Speaker B: Yeah, multiple voices.
So, for example, if you always sing the chant tantamago sacrament on Corpus Christi Feast.
[00:43:33] Speaker A: Yep. The Feast of Body and Blood of Christ, for those who are not Catholic.
[00:43:37] Speaker B: By the way, and Thomas Aquinas actually wrote that music for that feast. So when they go to write part music and it's irresistible thing to do once you can do it, they would take one of the singers and it's the tenor would sing the chant slowly, about four beats for each note, so it'd be ton.
And while he's doing that, the other three parts weave around much faster. So you haven't got rid of the tantamurgo. It's still there, but it's become the musical structure of the piece that is quite complex when you listen to the surface of it. So you don't necessarily even notice that tantamurgo is the bass line. And it's a long, slow bass line. It's not actually a bass line, it's a tenor line. Tenor means to hold tenore. And the reason they got its name was because that guy held the chant, and then bass just means bottom. So there was a guy on the bottom, there was a woman on the top. So that's sopra soprano is based on Italian or Latin, I suppose, and then the contra alto is against the high. Alto means high, so contra alto is the contralto. Then it got shortened to alto, which means high, which kind of wrecks confused everyone. But those three parts were weaved around a tenor who held the ancient chant, and that went on for at least about 100 years of the Renaissance period. And then bit by bit, they let that strictness go. So it's imbued with the spirit of chant, but it's like chant, all overlapping and becoming glorious.
[00:45:22] Speaker A: Well, birds mass sitting for three parts, the curie, it's just so beautiful. And it is a perfect example of that. Right. It's faithful to that tradition.
[00:45:33] Speaker B: I'll give you a quick example of the beginning of a motet. This is the Ascension, and you can hear probably.
[00:45:54] Speaker A: So you hear it climbing in there.
[00:45:57] Speaker B: They did occasionally paint it's called word painting, when the music reflects in its shape what the words are saying.
[00:46:09] Speaker A: See, this is something I wanted to talk to you about before, is the sense in which we often don't think about it like this, but music actually encompasses that powerful sense of allegory right. And even like sacred music. What it's trying to tell you, the story it's trying to tell you, is that you're entering into sort of a heavenly realm. It's divine.
[00:46:28] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:46:28] Speaker A: It shouldn't sound like the rest of the world does.
[00:46:32] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:46:32] Speaker A: And the rest of the world, for me, there is something almost magical about music as a form of beauty like nothing else. It literally has the power to change the emotions of the mind of a person.
[00:46:46] Speaker B: It's a very strange art. Like, all the arts will touch the emotions, in a way. If you think some people are quite moved by poetry, you're moved by a good drama dance as well. But music has a particular most people I think most artists even agree that music is the most spiritual of the arts because it has the power we even without words, to change our emotional state. So it's like it communicates at a level of emotion. It's not just emotion either, because it's really the spiritual yearning which isn't all emotional.
And it's mysterious like that, because if you think you can use words, it's a bit like describing wine. So it's a cheeky little wine. What do you mean by cheeky? How can a wine be cheeky? But with music, you could say people would definitely think, well, there's a beautiful moment of hope that comes into the music at the end, or there's a moment of despair, or there's a moment of this or that, and you can describe the emotions and get quite good at that. But in some ways that's mysterious, because for us to have hope, we need a structure of thought, usually, which says there's something in the future where we will have success because we've got the means to get there and we have hope to get there. Or if we have sadness, it might be because in the end we can't overcome the obstacle and our different emotions are framed by different thoughts. But in music, it goes straight to the emotion without necessarily the words. And I think it's to do with a mixture of things, but one of them is human gesture. If you think about speech, I suppose there's a whole expression that goes with it, and then music sort of picks up on this and delivers it in a more refined way than speech. But then you take off the words and you've still got this thing psychological journey.
[00:48:43] Speaker A: Well, even, I think, the other day about like even beautiful poetry, in a sense, still relies on characteristics of music, like rhythm.
[00:48:52] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:48:52] Speaker A: You know what I mean?
[00:48:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:54] Speaker A: There's something very profound in that.
[00:48:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And rhythm is the key element in music, really.
[00:49:01] Speaker A: Same with good filmmaking, I think, is the same. There's a certain rhythm that you see in the shot composition and the way a story unfolds visually.
[00:49:09] Speaker B: Very true. Yeah. The timing, anything that happens through time, like all of the great arts that go on through time, so they're over when they're over, as opposed to a painting on the wall, which is always there. But then you get music where you have to actually pay attention for this period of time and follow a journey.
And it's sort of like every art expresses something. If you want to take a mystical view, it actually expresses something about God, because all the arts point to beauty and the ultimate beauty is God, but the arts themselves aren't ever going to be able to give you that. But they're like a John the Baptist that points to a Messiah. That's not say. When you look at, say, painting, it's like vision. Our sense of vision gives us the most if you think about senses, you can see a star and you can get the whole picture of a horizon in your vision and in the painting, you get a whole world universe in one hit.
And that's almost expressing our desire for the beatific vision, you could say, for the vision of God.
But in the sound journey, like music, you've always got a home place. You've always got something that unfolded, usually with some tension, and you got away from home and then you came back home.
[00:50:37] Speaker A: There's a resolution.
[00:50:38] Speaker B: Yeah, there's always a resolution and it always makes it back to where it's like its origin is its destiny. Usually you start and end in the same key, you change key in the middle.
[00:50:47] Speaker A: Well, I'll tell you what, even it's amazing how some people have used music in this very striking way. I can't remember the composer's name, but he wrote that piece for Hiroshima. And it's just those voices. Yeah, that's it. And just in agony.
It's almost like you're listening to souls being destroyed with an atomic bomb.
[00:51:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
Now, music is so powerful like that.
[00:51:11] Speaker A: What's the implication of that, then? Because if there's, like, you listen to a beautiful, sacred piece of music that is designed to reverence God and it's pulling your soul upwards, does that then mean that there is a potential for music to pull it downwards?
[00:51:24] Speaker B: Well, that's right. I think so.
Just to finish one thing we were leading to, which was what's a magical it will be relevant to this because we heard a quick snippet of a motet there, which is quite high music from the point of view of composition, but at the same time it's like the mysteriousness of a Gregorian chant, but this time in layers. It's like 3D, as opposed to even when you look at the art of medieval, it's often two dimensional, hasn't got the depth factor, but it's very, very symbolic. Everything symbolizes something and it's very deep. The art of the Middle Ages. And then in the Renaissance, they took great pride in making it realistic, with perspective, depth, and in a funny sort of way, music echoed it because it suddenly went into harmony, became the third dimension. So there was always melody and rhythm, two dimensions.
And then you add harmony and you get this rich thing that's sort of 3D.
[00:52:25] Speaker A: Is there a sense, fair to say, of a deepening of the dynamics, too? I mean, there's always dynamics in even enchant, but it feels like it becomes more pronounced because you have the ability to pull entire sections or instruments out and put them back in.
[00:52:38] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's right. Yeah, exactly. So you can pull away, just go down to two voices for a special moment or something like that. If I just show you quickly what this is. A madrigal by John Farmer. It's only 1 minute long. The words are fair. Phyllis I saw sitting all alone feeding her flock near to the mountainside the shepherds knew not whether she was gone but after her lover amintus hide, meaning hurried. So basically, a lover is looking for Phyllis. He's asked the shepherds, Where is she? They go, we don't know. And then it says, up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down 17 times. Up and down he wandered while she was missing when he found her oh, then they fell at kissing up and down, up and down, up and down 17 more times. But it's not anything rude, it's just repeating the music. Yeah.
[00:53:28] Speaker A: And so that this is what, something he would when would he compose this for?
[00:53:32] Speaker B: Like, a party after dinner? Music of posh posh parties.
[00:53:36] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:53:40] Speaker C: Feeding a flock near to the mountainside feeding a flock near to the mountainside with her she was gone after her.
[00:53:56] Speaker B: Love after her love.
[00:54:02] Speaker C: And down he wandered. She was missing she was missing when.
[00:54:11] Speaker B: He found her old. Then they fell up, kissing.
[00:54:19] Speaker C: All them kissing.
[00:54:21] Speaker B: Up and down. Up and down. Up and down.
Naughty.
[00:54:27] Speaker A: But risque.
[00:54:28] Speaker B: Yeah, but it's innocent because they're just repeating.
What did you think it meant?
That's why it's fun.
[00:54:37] Speaker A: And so this is a communal event. You gather together around the harpsichord.
[00:54:42] Speaker B: No, this is just sung without anything. This is just sung after you've had a bit to drink.
[00:54:47] Speaker A: So Uncle John gets up and says, I have a new piece.
[00:54:50] Speaker B: Yes. And actually wrote the music down on a large piece of paper facing four different directions. So he put it on the table and you sat at that seat and read the bass.
There are surviving manuscripts like that. Now, if you listen to that, that's such a different style to the motet. And yet every single compositional technique in there came from writing motets. What's different is the rhythm. Snappy. The words are funny and that paints every single line. You might not have noticed it, but when they said Fear Phyllis, I saw sitting all alone, only one person saying that because she's alone, and it was a soprano. Then it said, feeding her flock near to the mountainside. That was in a block harmony, because sheep and flocks move in blocks.
[00:55:40] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:55:40] Speaker B: And then when the shepherds are being interviewed, do you know where she is? It was polyphony. The shepherd. The shepherd, because they're having a conversation. And then when it was up and down, up and down, the word up was higher than the word down. And 17 out of the 19 times it's mentioned or something like that, or 16 out of whatever it is, every single part, when it said, oh, then they fell a kissing, he just placed the rhythm and put an extra beat in, so that you went, oh.
And he turned kissing into a three four, like a Walsh. So every single thing, he's being very attentive to the mood of the funny poetry.
[00:56:16] Speaker A: It's a musical painting.
[00:56:17] Speaker B: Laugh yeah, it's a musical painting.
[00:56:19] Speaker A: And so that's the depth you're talking about. That comes into music.
[00:56:22] Speaker B: Yeah. And that style is for the fun music, but it wasn't in the church music. They didn't do that so much.
[00:56:33] Speaker A: I'm thinking this through. Is there a sense of finitude in that?
Whereas in the chart there's not, because there's the eternal, do you know what I mean? Like, things resolve quickly, they finish. Do you know what I mean?
[00:56:46] Speaker B: Maybe. Yeah. Maybe you're more in control of secular music because you're telling your story.
[00:56:52] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:56:53] Speaker B: And you can make it end however you want and all of that. Whereas in the church's thing, you're telling the Holy Spirit's story, you're telling God's story, and you don't have the liberty to change the ending.
[00:57:08] Speaker A: So let's get to that point that we started on and we've been all around the place.
[00:57:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:57:12] Speaker A: This is like an out of control rambling central.
I asked you about the soul and if it can be elevated upwards, does that mean it can be pulled downwards? Is this a reflection, then, of perhaps where the passions start to probably after Enlightenment liberalism, the passions and Rousseau's whole take on that very interior, psychological, subjective approach to life, does that start to influence and music then becomes more at the service of the passions?
[00:57:40] Speaker B: Well, it's funny. Yeah, it's a good question, because I think the passions I mean, we love the passions part of our life, but when it comes to prayer, you're not primarily focusing on your passions.
[00:57:55] Speaker A: No.
[00:57:56] Speaker B: You're primarily trying to lift things higher than that or offer them. And yet, funny thing, in Christian prayer, it's not like Buddhist prayer, where you try to empty your mind, have a blank, get to Nirvana.
In Christian prayer, if you go into the church or whatever with a lot of worries and you've got your family and this isn't going well, and blah, blah, you end up lifting all of that up to God in the raising of the heart and mind to God.
[00:58:25] Speaker A: It's incarnational, right?
[00:58:26] Speaker B: You go with it, it all goes up. And the Lord came down to bring us up.
[00:58:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:58:31] Speaker B: So he went to the lowest of the low on the cross to lift us with Him in that ascension.
So the idea there is that the Spirit is wanting to go to God, and that's what I think comes through in the chant and in the Renaissance polyphony. Now, what happens next? Because the Madrigal was such genius, that was a 1 minute piece full of creativity.
[00:58:53] Speaker A: Were they typically that short?
[00:58:54] Speaker B: Yeah, two or three minutes. So short things, even my TETS aren't that long.
[00:58:58] Speaker A: So is this the beginning, then, of what we might like? A modern pop song becomes a three minute radio play?
[00:59:06] Speaker B: Is it starting to move in that direction necessarily? Because there isn't a lot of long music yet anywhere.
In fact, the reason we got long music was precisely because we learned how to take a chant, spin it out as a slow thing, ten minute music around it.
[00:59:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:59:28] Speaker B: And then composers learned to think like that, that they had a long range, simple melody that no one can see, but it's actually there underneath the whole time, even of a Beethoven symphony that might last 20 minutes or half an hour. When people analyze Beethoven, part of the job is, well, if you think of anything like little bark thing, dumb bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum don't nice tune, but what's he really doing? He's just going, Bum, bum bum bum bum bum bum. The rest is just froth.
So the structure is something simple, usually linear.
And what you find when you analyze any classical piece of music all the way through to the end of Writing in Harmony, which was about the end of the 19th century.
If you pull out from the surface notes the main contours. And then you looked at that like a piece and then pulled out from them their main contours. You get yourself down in the end to a little simple chant, and it's like the composer somehow knew there was a long range linear tune underneath this big, complicated thing that you're hearing when you hear the symphony.
That's quite stunning to know that, because it actually is the history of music backwards when you analyze so you start with simple tunes and then they grow into these structures through the polyphony of the Renaissance. And then when you analyze music, you're going, oh, what's the simple tune that's hiding underneath that complex structure that's holding it together? It's like a skeleton. It's a little bit like in nature, when you look at a leaf on a tree and you look, oh, look at the little lines. It's like a little tree and it's echoing the whole tree. Yes, and some composers even do that on the surface of their music. They might go and then over the whole course of that, all they're like leaves hanging notes that make up those key changes in that right, it's time.
[01:01:41] Speaker A: For another little musical interlude. And this time I'm going to play you a Christmas carol that Robert wrote. It is called Sleep in our Gentle Jesus. It's a very, very beautiful piece of music. And whenever I hear it, I often find myself in tears, actually. And it is set to the music of Franz Schubert. And what I find so beautiful about this hymn is the way in which Robert has written it as a sort of foreshadowing of Easter. So everything is about Jesus lying in the manger, but all of it is pointing towards his eventual death on the cross. And there is this beautiful pathos in the moment of Christ, the vulnerable child looking to the moment of profound vulnerability that will befall him upon the cross and that profound act of self giving love that we remember every Good Friday. So this is Sleep Now, Gentle Jesus by Robert Loretz.
[01:02:51] Speaker C: With love will you love your rest, your name the lam with read in the hand and your only crown bring out and don't cry one day what will read your dying in the same way into one day let my heart be die to them to do all.
[01:05:11] Speaker A: Thanks for listening. I really hope you enjoyed this preview snippet from our latest episode of Conservations. If you want to hear the full two hour episode with Robert Loretz, it's actually more than 2 hours with Robert. Then you can go to Patreon.com Left Foot Media, become a $5 monthly patron, and you will get access to that and all of the other great patrons only content. That's Patreon.com left footmedia. The link is in today's show notes. Thanks for tuning in. Don't forget live by goodness, truth and beauty, not by lies. And I will see you on next month's episode of Conservations for another one of our conservative conversations with a new and interesting guest.
