[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hi everybody. My name is Brendan Malone and you're listening to the Dispatchers podcast every single Friday from the end of December until the start of February. We're giving you the chance to sample just some of the awesome subscriber only podcast content that our five dollar monthly patrons have been exclusively enjoying over the past twelve months. If you like what you hear in this episode and you want more of it, then all you need to do is become a patron of the dispatchers with $5 or more per
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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 Cinderella, 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, Sirsom Corda, 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?
[00:06:17] Speaker B: Well, thank you for your kind words there, Brett.
Yeah, I thought I would be a lawyer and I wanted to be a prosecuting lawyer.
[00:06:30] Speaker A: I could also see you doing that.
[00:06:31] 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. And that's all you really need to do to kick off.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: Was there music in your family?
[00:07:04] Speaker B: My mother was very musical. Yeah, she got to grade eight by about twelve years old.
[00:07:08] Speaker A: Wow. Okay.
[00:07:09] 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, I might not be able to afford anymore. And I got to secondary, and Avondark 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. We 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 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.
[00:08:52] 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.
[00:09:03] 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 because 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 know as much as you're interested in.
Um, but we had Dr. Fianna 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.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: And so did you catch the fire then you caught a bug? Did you?
[00:10:21] Speaker B: Yeah, because 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. And 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 master's, 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 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 it 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.
[00:12:23] Speaker A: 150 a week?
[00:12:24] Speaker B: Yeah. So the old office used to do every psalm in one week?
[00:12:28] Speaker A: Yeah. Wow.
[00:12:30] Speaker B: 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.
[00:12:43] 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 moments.
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.
[00:13:07] 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.
[00:13:27] Speaker A: Well played.
[00:13:28] 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, 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.
[00:14:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
So when you were younger, you were actually getting that sense of the depth and the personality of what it was.
[00:14:16] 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?
[00:14:42] Speaker A: The bridge.
[00:14:43] Speaker B: Bridge.
[00:14:44] Speaker A: The modern pop chorus.
[00:14:48] Speaker B: 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.
[00:15:05] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:15:05] Speaker B: And it's usually the sacred music in history that's been the deep music.
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.
[00:15:41] Speaker A: You could say 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.
[00:15:59] 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, sopano, Tina, bass choir, every week for church on a different theme of the gospel.
[00:17:27] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:17:29] 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.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: 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 hub 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. So if you saw a c, you 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.
[00:19:07] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:19:07] Speaker B: And it was considered be like, don't you know how to read if you can't read music? That's how much they were into it back then.
[00:19:16] Speaker A: That's fascinating.
[00:19:17] Speaker B: It's amazing the skill they had. And we've lost a lot of it now, one way.
[00:19:23] 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.
[00:19:54] Speaker B: Ballads.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: And then when he's not talking about.
[00:19:56] Speaker B: McLean a little bit, those old guys that just. They basically are telling a story.
[00:20:00] 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.
[00:20:11] 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 I used to start with gregorian chant, and I was at a state school, Massey 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 100 years. We'd start with gregorian chant. And the westies from West Auckland aren't that familiar unless they get a t attitude.
[00:21:49] Speaker A: It's not the first thing you think of when you think of West Auckland. Gregorian chant.
[00:21:53] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:21:53] Speaker B: So the first thing I'd 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.
[00:22:19] Speaker C: Almost.
[00:22:19] Speaker B: Want to play? Is there somewhere I can play one?
Alleluia.
Can you to that?
[00:22:31] Speaker C: Ha.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: O'That'S? The completion of one word.
[00:23:18] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:18] Speaker A: Hallelujah.
[00:23:19] 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.
[00:23:38] 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?
[00:23:47] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:23:48] 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.
[00:23:59] 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 greeting 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.
[00:25:06] Speaker A: Yeah, that's true. Anyway, make it sacred.
[00:25:10] Speaker B: Yeah, but. Sorry, what were we saying?
[00:25:14] Speaker A: Half the audience has just checked out. Yeah.
You're talking about the way in which it's sort of the nature of prayer is what the music is.
[00:25:22] 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.
[00:25:46] 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.
[00:25:59] Speaker B: Right, correct. 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 walked 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, or the plague has.
[00:27:21] Speaker A: Got you, third son.
[00:27:23] Speaker B: Like, 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. 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?
[00:27:58] Speaker A: Yeah, of course you can go for it.
[00:27:59] 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 da.
Yes.
[00:28:37] Speaker A: So you can. You can actually hear the constraints of a rhythm and a melody and singing a bit faster.
[00:28:43] Speaker B: It's like Amari.
[00:28:54] Speaker A: And that grows out of. They can't go to the pub. They want to sing songs that are.
[00:28:58] 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.
[00:29:38] Speaker A: That is what the beginning of opera.
[00:29:40] Speaker B: As we know it well, it's musical festival, festival music, but it's religious folk music.
[00:30:02] Speaker C: Saudi.
[00:30:06] 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 knife or something like that.
It's quite beautiful music, but, yeah. So 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.
[00:31:23] Speaker A: As promised, 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.
[00:31:51] 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.
Post on which the bitters reach a cut, 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 as leading stones into a spiritual temple.
Make us a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God, a father.
You said to Simon, you are Peter.
I will build my church off found me on the apostles and prophets with you as the main cornerstone.
Let us come to you, O Lord, our living stone.
Come to let us have the beers as living stones into a spiritual temple.
Make us a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God our father through you, Christ, your example of God.
[00:34:13] 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.
[00:34:32] 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.
[00:35:20] Speaker A: Tell me, what is a madrigal? You've already talked about this earlier on. These are performance pieces that someone, just a layperson, writes and brings to a party.
[00:35:28] 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, altar, tennabase in polyphony.
[00:35:56] Speaker A: So motet's got parts, polyphony, overlapping lines of music, different voices.
[00:36:00] 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.
[00:36:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:13] Speaker B: Okay. The only people that would ever be that crass would be people from the 60s.
[00:36:20] Speaker A: We'll get to that connection to tradition, though. Tradition is important for them.
[00:36:25] Speaker B: So 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 Days 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.
[00:36:56] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:36:57] 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.
[00:37:06] 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.
[00:37:18] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. The monk called Guido of Orzo, 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.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: This man's an inventor. When will he stop?
[00:37:42] 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?
[00:38:07] 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?
[00:38:19] 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.
[00:38:30] Speaker A: This is the music you use this.
[00:38:32] Speaker B: Thing, 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. And 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.
[00:39:36] Speaker A: And that's not by design, it's just that oral tradition.
[00:39:40] Speaker B: 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 got really long tails on the Alleluia, and they're actually like little cells that they put together and make into large structures.
[00:40:00] Speaker A: And are they consistent as well?
[00:40:01] Speaker B: They're consistent, yeah. And then it turned out that's the.
[00:40:05] Speaker A: Power of oral tradition, the modern skepticism for oral tradition.
[00:40:08] 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, 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 dove. 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 chants and the earliest jewish chants are nearly identical in contour, isn't there?
[00:41:35] Speaker A: In our father, if I understand it correctly?
Yeah. The chant is almost certainly the Patanosta comes jewish.
[00:41:42] 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 sing those psalms. And the most ancient jewish thing corresponds to the most ancient roman in lots of modes, especially that one.
[00:43:05] Speaker A: That's fascinating.
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 sort of. 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.
[00:43:30] Speaker B: True, because tradition is literally handing on, isn't it? 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 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.
[00:44:21] Speaker A: Those who don't know, polyphony is multiple voices.
[00:44:23] Speaker B: Yeah, multiple voices.
So, for example, if you always sing the chant tantamago sacrament on Corpus Christi feast.
[00:44:35] Speaker A: Yep. The feast of body and blood of Christ, for those who are not Catholics, by the way.
[00:44:39] Speaker B: 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 it 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 chart, 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.
[00:46:23] 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.
[00:46:34] Speaker B: I'll give you a quick example of the beginning of a motet. This is the ascension. And you can hear probably.
[00:46:56] Speaker A: So you hear it climbing in there.
[00:46:58] Speaker B: They did occasionally paint. It's called word painting. When the music reflects in its shape what the words are saying.
[00:47:11] 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. It shouldn't sound like the rest of the world does.
[00:47:33] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:47:34] Speaker A: And the rest of the world, for me, this is something. There is something almost magical about music as a form of beauty, like nothing else. It literally has the power to change the emotions or the mind of a person.
[00:47:47] 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.
[00:49:45] 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.
[00:49:53] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:49:54] Speaker A: You know what I mean?
[00:49:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:49:55] Speaker A: There's something very profound in there.
[00:49:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And rhythm is the key element in music, really.
[00:50:02] 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.
[00:50:10] 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.
So you could 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.
[00:51:38] Speaker A: There's a resolution.
[00:51:39] 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.
[00:51:49] 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.
[00:52:09] Speaker B: Yeah.
No, music's so powerful like that.
[00:52:12] 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?
[00:52:25] 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 and 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.
[00:53:27] Speaker A: Is there a sense too, it's 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.
[00:53:39] 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 loverment is 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.
[00:54:29] Speaker A: And so that this is what something he would. When would he compose this for?
[00:54:34] Speaker B: Like a party after dinner music of posh. Posh parties.
[00:54:38] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:54:41] Speaker C: Feeding a flock near to the mountainside feeding a flock near to the mountainside wither she was gone.
[00:54:57] Speaker B: After her love after her love.
[00:55:03] Speaker C: And down he wandered. She was missing.
[00:55:11] Speaker B: She was missing when he found her old. Then they fell up kissing all them.
[00:55:18] Speaker C: Big fella kissing, kissing all them big.
[00:55:21] Speaker B: Fella kissing up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down.
Naughty.
[00:55:29] Speaker A: But risque.
[00:55:30] Speaker B: Yeah, but it's innocent because they're just repeating.
What did you think it meant?
That's why it's fun.
[00:55:38] Speaker A: And so this is a communal event. You gather together around the harpsichord?
[00:55:43] Speaker B: No, this is just sung without anything. This is just sung after you've had a bit to drink.
[00:55:48] Speaker A: So Uncle John gets up and says, I have a new piece.
[00:55:51] 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.
[00:55:58] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:55:59] Speaker B: 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.
[00:56:41] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense.
[00:56:42] Speaker B: And then when the shepherds are being interviewed, do you know where she is? It was polyphony. The shepherds knew 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.
[00:57:17] Speaker A: It's a musical painting. Laugh.
[00:57:19] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a musical painting.
[00:57:20] Speaker A: And so that's the depth you're talking about that comes into music.
[00:57:24] 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.
[00:57:34] 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?
[00:57:47] Speaker B: Maybe. Yeah, maybe you're more in control of secular music because you're telling your story. Yes, 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.
[00:58:09] Speaker A: So let's get to that point that we started on, and we've been all around the place. 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?
[00:58:42] 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.
[00:58:57] Speaker A: No.
[00:58:58] 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.
[00:59:26] Speaker A: It's incarnational, right?
[00:59:28] Speaker B: You go with it, it all goes up. And the Lord came down to bring us up.
[00:59:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:59:32] 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.
[00:59:54] Speaker A: Were they typically that Short?
[00:59:56] Speaker B: Yeah, two or three minutes. So short things. Even my tets aren't that long.
[01:00:00] Speaker A: So is this the beginning, then, of what we might like? A modern pop song becomes a three minute radio play. Is it starting to move in that direction, necessarily?
[01:00:10] Speaker B: Because there isn't a lot of long music yet.
[01:00:13] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:00:14] Speaker B: 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.
[01:00:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:00:30] 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.
[01:01:00] Speaker C: Don't.
[01:01:01] Speaker B: 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.
[01:02:29] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:02:29] Speaker B: And some composers even do that on the surface of their music. They might go doodle, little lump. And then over the whole course of.
[01:02:36] Speaker A: That all they're like leaves, main notes.
[01:02:40] Speaker B: That make up those key changes in that.
[01:02:42] Speaker A: Right, it's time 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.
[01:04:06] Speaker C: Jesus all worship your name I dream of Jesus for might kings bow down one day with the hand and lose your only crown drink not in don't cry one day what I know Jesus lame in my heart be all all man just die to them to do all.
[01:06:12] Speaker A: So where does it then start to, I guess is corrupted the right word, but it starts to come undone. Because we look at music today.
[01:06:22] Speaker B: I don't want to say corrupted.
[01:06:26] Speaker A: Emphasis changes. Is it change of emphasis?
[01:06:28] Speaker B: Yeah. I think we lost the distinction between sacred and secular music really early around the baroque period. Why?
Because opera was so exciting. Opera came from the madrigal because it continued the idea of painting all the words. If you went to someone's house with your madrigal and you needed four singers, but in that particular house, only two of them can sing, but one can play the flute and one can play the violin. So they would play that part on their instruments, and then after a while, they realized, hey, it sounds really nice when you just have the soprano and the other's on instruments. And that led to the song.
And once you got the song, like an aria in an opera, where every time it's time for an emotion, one of the performers will sing out their heart and you'll have the orchestra underneath. That came directly out of the madrigal's fluidity, changing instruments for voices. The madrigal itself came from the motet. Even though it's got a completely different style, it's got exactly the same idea of what intervals are harmonic and what are the rules for writing? It just jazzes them up with rhythm.
[01:07:39] Speaker A: How does this take off, though? Is it, like, memetic? Is it just everyone is culturally doing these things, and so it just becomes normative.
[01:07:47] Speaker B: I think a new thing does get exciting, a little bit like rap or rock and roll.
[01:07:51] Speaker A: Yeah, sure.
[01:07:51] Speaker B: It has a burst hip hop, whatever, and it goes boom. Well, the magical went for about 50 years. This is only 50 years of writing madrigals, and then they were over. They're amazing gems. And every country in Europe had their own style. There was german ones, french ones and italian ones. So they're all trying to be funny. But when an Italian tries to be funny, he just becomes lamenting and overly emotional about how he wants to kill himself because she doesn't love him back and has much more heart wrenching music.
[01:08:19] Speaker A: Than when the English the russian ones were the worst. Yeah.
[01:08:22] Speaker B: Imagine a russian mandrigo, Boris and Natasha.
Two octaves below middle sea would be the highest note.
[01:08:32] Speaker A: Were there famous ones? Did they go global? Everyone goes, have you heard John Smithy's mate? Exactly.
[01:08:39] Speaker B: It did. Because, you know, it's the same thing that when the protestant reformation came along, it was the moment the printing press was.
[01:08:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[01:08:48] Speaker B: Well, they soon worked out how to print musical notes and then music suddenly was distributed widely before you had to listen to someone sing it.
So suddenly, the madrigal was the first thing, actually, the first fad that spread through Europe really fast. And every country wanted to put its own stamp on in its own way.
[01:09:08] Speaker A: And they had the technique to actually, they could take a piece of music on a piece of paper and they could interpret it straight.
[01:09:14] Speaker B: Yeah. Because they'd worked out notation for several centuries.
[01:09:17] Speaker A: Because how different is that today? When you think about today, most people turn on a radio, listen to a song, and they go, I wish I could sing like that. Or I wish I could play like that. Well, once upon a time, it was the other way around, right?
[01:09:27] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. Obviously, music starts by being an oral tradition, and then it's just a code on the paper.
But if you know the code, if you're in the world of music, the more you're in the world of music and making music, the more that code becomes second nature, like any language, and then you can just quickly produce it.
And the best singers can sight sing today, but a lot of singers can't. Whereas in those days, that was just considered in the posh circles to be what everyone should be able to do. Every woman should be able to play the piano in the 19th century, from a decent upbringing.
[01:10:08] Speaker A: Yeah, that's what they did.
What kind of lowbrow commoner it was?
[01:10:13] Speaker B: The girls instrument of the 19th century was interesting, and then the wild composers would come in and dazzle them all and teach them.
[01:10:22] Speaker A: Is there a technique versus artistry? Because I think there is a sense here, we were talking about this before we started recording earlier on, that there's a musical technique one can have, but the soul can be missing the sense of something more elevated and beautiful.
There's often a struggle, isn't there, between those two competing ideas? And it feels like maybe at times today, technique, like I think of modern pop music. And you've got, if I understand it correctly, a very small handful of composers who are writing for all of the big artists, and they are just writing to a formula. Formula.
[01:10:55] Speaker B: It's a technique right, yeah, that's true.
[01:10:57] Speaker A: But what does it mean if you're writing a song? My baby left me, I'm alone, I'm sad, but literally that never happened to you. There's a certain fraud in all of that, but the technique's there.
[01:11:07] Speaker B: You could say it like that, but I mean, we write stories about things that didn't happen to us.
[01:11:12] Speaker A: Well, that's true. I suppose the question is ownership, who owns it?
[01:11:16] Speaker B: I think you're right about formula, though. I think people like Lloyd Weber.
We had the coronation and then Lloyd Weber wrote something for it. And I thought at the time, it's particularly bad piece, that I don't know exactly what he was trying to do. But when you heard the glorious music from the baroque period, that fits coronations, and then you hear his attempt, and he could have imitated the style that sounds much more royal and coronation, but it had too much of that syrupy feel of one of his little musicals.
[01:11:53] Speaker A: Which I love, by the way, as a musical. But in that context, great as musical, it doesn't fit. Right?
[01:11:58] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's maybe something really important to stress, because often we get misinterpreted when we say sacred music has this particular feel. It doesn't mean that it's the only good music and there isn't any other good or that something wrong with the musical snobbery. Yeah, because the folk songs of the middle ages are fantastic, but they are songs to celebrate life with, songs to tell stories to. They had their purpose. Sacred music was to worship God with, and it was to elevate. And because of the concept of the liturgy we have in catholic liturgy and the orthodox, which is that heaven is always worshipping God and Christ is there in his wounded body, like his wounds are glorious, but he's offering them to the father as a priest. And because his body is before us in the liturgy, it's like we are suddenly elevated up to be part of a heavenly liturgy.
[01:12:55] Speaker A: That's chiros.
[01:12:56] Speaker B: Right.
[01:12:56] Speaker A: We're stepping out of time, we're stepping out of the secular, out of the profane. When people hear the word profane today, they think, oh, you mean dirty? No, just non sacred.
[01:13:05] Speaker B: Yeah, that's what it means. And we are joining a liturgy that's already going on and that actually reflects the ancient concepts of music in lots of cultures, that when we say music today, we just mean what we can hear in tunes and songs. But music to the ancients was the first. Music was the music of the spheres, the music of the universe. Then there was the music of the harmony of the human body. And then there was the third music, which we call music, which was our imitation of this in sound.
[01:13:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:13:39] Speaker B: And then you have christian concept of music, which is that you could say the Son is the word of God, but he's, in a certain way singing to the Father all the time. You could say the Holy Spirit is the voice, and there is a kind of harmony or a song, eternal song of love between the Father and the Son in the.
So when we get the scriptures, we get God's own words to give back to God and we sing them back to God.
[01:14:17] Speaker A: Why is sacred music then not bound by fad in the same way? Because it did arise in a particular time. But I'll give you an example, a comparison. You watch through the lot of films, for whatever reason, decided, doesn't matter what the theme was, they decided disco soundtracks were the way to go because it was bad. Now, you watch a film like that today, and it's dated. The films from that era that used orchestral, classical settings are still timeless, and you don't get pulled out of the film and into that period. Why is sacred music not dated in that same way, do you think? Because it did arise in a particular period of history?
[01:14:51] Speaker B: Well, at the beginning, it was at the service of the words first.
It was using very natural and very simple cells. So, like, if you think of kids when they're taunting each other, you can't play.
They're singing three notes, so they're singing a minor third, la, and a major second on top, la.
So that's dum.
Every mode is based on that little set. And then take another one and put it at the bottom of it, and you'll get six notes, and then fill in the little gap with either a semitone that side or that side, and you'll get the eight modes.
There's something very natural about the modes when you hear them. You know that, too.
I think it just arose from the very natural way that happened to be the Jews sang their psalms. So you've got to go back to King David, really, the whole book of Songs there.
[01:15:59] Speaker A: Well, so this would make sense of why then you have these medieval musicians, quote unquote, who really understand or view this as a gift from the Holy Spirit.
There's something quite profound, because the prayer.
[01:16:13] Speaker B: Of the church itself was going on. The Jews used to pray at least seven times a day, and the apostles carried that on, just that. They understood that every word of the psalm was really about Christ or somehow. And so they added, glory be to the Father at the end of every psalm. But really, glory be to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But you see it in the acts of the apostles. Peter goes up on the roof to do his office, to do his prayers, because it's 12:00 or 03:00 or 09:00. That's right. There's times of the day, and it also happens to correspond to special times around Lower Lord's passion, when he got arrested, when he got nailed to the cross, when he died on the cross, those kind of things. The hours was the synagogue liturgy. So the liturgy of the word, which we have in mass, where at the beginning of mass, and you would have readings and singing psalms, that was what you would have encountered in the synagogue. Then the Christians would meet in their houses for the breaking of bread. That was the eucharistic part.
And then at the beginning of the church, the apostles went to the synagogue still and they joined in interpreting and said, it's all about.
[01:17:30] Speaker A: Until they were kicked out.
[01:17:31] Speaker B: Right? Kicked out. And then they take that bit and stick it with the breaking of the bread part. And so you get the structure of the mass having a first half around the word and the second half around the eucharist.
But then the whole day is punctuated by those singing of psalms.
And most of the music in the history of medieval church is from psalms.
So you didn't sing a song as an entrance song. You sang some lines of. You sang a psalm.
[01:18:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Interesting.
[01:18:08] Speaker B: And there'd be a psalm for that day that fitted the theme of that day in the Gospel. So you know how we got a psalm now in the middle, there would have been a psalm at the beginning, a psalm of communion, psalm of the offer tree.
[01:18:19] Speaker A: And you are connecting yourself to something bigger than yourself. Right. That's a powerful man of tradition. You're saying I connect to this thing that comes before me. I don't have to invent something to entertain?
[01:18:28] Speaker B: Or what we tended to invent wasn't ever to entertain, but what we did tend to invent was the antiphon. So we have a phrase, especially for that day, that sums up. And it might even be from a gospel or something.
[01:18:42] Speaker A: Yeah, like the ascension. He rose back to the father while we watch.
[01:18:46] Speaker B: And then we sing ancient psalm, which might refer to elements of the ascension subtly in the ancient words. But the antiphons got created musically differently to the psalm. So the psalm would always be yearning and never ending. For example, it might go, 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. Hanging all the time up there, and it's been around there, then it's going to come down. But that's not the home. The home of that mode is dumb.
So it never hits the home in the psalm. It's yearning and staying up there. And then the antiphon's job is, anchor this thing and make sure you end right there.
Now you're finished. So it was the antiphon that anchored the psalm, musically speaking.
And that was always the way the psalms were set.
And the gregorian chant are really antipons in the middle. You sing the psalms, and then you go back to the chant.
[01:19:56] Speaker A: Just putting on my authentically conservative hat here. The authentic conservative mind would say, this is a beautiful example of a tradition that is being flourishing. It's not being torn down and replaced with my own latest egomaniacal or my own personal preference creation. I'm building on what is, and I don't lose what is to come. But I also add a contribution from this moment.
[01:20:20] Speaker B: Now, we had hymns. One hymn in morning prayer, one hymn in evening prayer. And a hymn is a specific thing. A hymn is where you have the same tune with different words called verses.
That's not the norm for chant. Chant normally unfolds completely freely through the whole text.
So when you get to the hymn, it's got a meter, effectively, because it's got a set tune, and you fit each verse to that. So you've got poetry that fits that. It's like a normal song to us. That's completely normal. But that's what a hymn strictly is. But even the catholic hymns weren't like the lutheran hymns. So Martin Luther was a great musician. Not a great one, actually, but he was a musician.
Bach was a great musician, but he was a Lutheran, and we had 20 kids. So, you know, it's arguable that he was also catholic.
[01:21:19] Speaker A: To any of our non catholic listeners, we love you. We love you.
[01:21:23] Speaker B: We do.
[01:21:24] Speaker A: Robbie likes to.
[01:21:25] Speaker B: And we'd love you to come back right now. Back. Anyway, one of the things at the reformation was one of the complaints, especially Calvin, more than Luther, because he was less of a musician.
He thought that all of the singing in four parts was complicating the music, not making it comprehensible, the words getting in the way, the composers trying to be flash and showing off.
And so he wanted it banned, polyphonic music, and go back to just.
[01:21:56] Speaker A: So did he do that in Geneva? Did he?
[01:21:58] Speaker B: I think so, yeah. Well, they basically just went to the hymn, so they don't use polyphony. Luther, interesting.
[01:22:05] Speaker A: Wasn't quite so kept hymns, no polyphony.
[01:22:07] Speaker B: Yeah, but they made their new hymns because Luther spread a lot of his ideas through songs. They were like pub songs. There might have been songs about how bad the church is, but things spread through songs really well.
[01:22:20] Speaker A: Dirty old Rome.
[01:22:27] Speaker B: Keeps morale up.
A lot of the hymns, and I like the hymns, but they can be a little bit straightjacketed. If you think of like some of the great hymns we use, most of them go back to around Luther's time.
[01:22:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:22:45] Speaker B: And praise to the holiest in the heights and in the depths be praised for in all his works, most wonderful, most sure, in all his ways. They're singable melodies. They're nice enough. But that was actually the style of the pub song back then.
Like actually sacred head surrounded, which is a beautiful hymn, was originally a show.
[01:23:13] Speaker A: Was it? Don't tell me that I love.
[01:23:14] Speaker B: Because they sang nice music in pubs back then.
[01:23:17] Speaker A: Oh, no, I'm shocked. I'm scandalized.
[01:23:20] Speaker B: But even the church did this. Like the composers for the church and the Renaissance, they didn't always choose gregorian chant and make it the basis. There was a very famous pub song about a soldier in France, which is a nice folky sound. They would use that as the slow thing. You slowed right down because it gave a really cool harmony of chord. One chord, four chord, five. Like the basic modern day guitarists would know.
That's me. First listen, three chords and you can play anything.
[01:23:58] Speaker A: Yeah, you've got it.
[01:24:00] Speaker B: That's it.
One and four and down you go. 515-432-1551 so it became a very good harmonic basis for a thing. So even at the reformation, we did need to purify some of our music because it was true that some of the composers were being extra flesh for their own kick. They'd write a piece forwards to the middle and then write it exactly in reverse on the way back. Okay, but it was clever, very clever.
[01:24:31] Speaker A: But it was about them.
[01:24:33] Speaker B: It could be, you start there and I'll start there. We'll meet in the middle and it all harmonizes. It's just a clever writing, but it's not unnecessary to.
[01:24:40] Speaker A: Okay, so what are the implications for that for today then?
Why can't someone say, let's say, well, I heard a song in a pub last night, I'm going to put some words from.
[01:24:50] Speaker B: The difference is the style of music, which we call pop music now so far, radically, has gone quite a long way from even medieval folk music. There's some of it you could use as hymns today because it's quite peaceful.
[01:25:07] Speaker A: Well, because when you do, you think about, oh, sacred head surrounded.
[01:25:16] Speaker B: There's no sense sort of lovely yearning in it.
[01:25:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:25:19] Speaker B: And there's one I know you quite like.
Oh, beauty ever range.
[01:25:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that.
[01:25:29] Speaker B: And yet so new. Beautiful tune with Augustine.
Well, I just put Augustine's words to that tune, but that tune is actually a norwegian ancient folk song.
[01:25:39] Speaker A: It's not a norwegian wood.
[01:25:42] Speaker B: Yeah, but it's got a beautiful feel to it that you can tell. Oh, that's very yearning. Sad and yearning. That would actually work very well as a hymn. So a musical person can, I suppose, detect more easily the exact nuance in a tune.
[01:25:57] Speaker A: I see the sorcery, the dark arts going on here. I know what you're up to.
Does that mean that o sacred head surrounded might have been faster in a pub and they've slowed.
[01:26:06] Speaker B: Possible. But not every pub song has to be like. It could just be like. You could sing Scarborough fair in a pub. We are going to Scarborough, I suppose, in the old days. And it's a very folky little song, that's all.
[01:26:23] Speaker A: Or you could say, remember old maid.
[01:26:26] Speaker C: Mary who by the sea.
[01:26:29] Speaker B: It's probably just telling a story like an irish jig does.
Irish ballad.
[01:26:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:26:37] Speaker B: A lot of ballads are a story mode for story.
[01:26:43] Speaker A: This is something I wanted to talk to you about. We've talked for a while, but this is good. I love this. But a couple of things I wanted to touch on before we wrap up. One is this common complaint about. Well, isn't just sort of some sort of veiled subjectivism here? Is it just preference? Is it just taste? Why can't we apply our modern tastes and sensibilities?
[01:27:01] Speaker B: Well, I think there is a certain subjectivity to that. Is music's got an amazing power.
Obviously, if a song is written well, the feel of the music fits well, what the words are either getting at, specifically, like in word painting, or what the words are getting at overall, like the spirit of prayer in a prayer.
And the music should support it.
When you think of the soundtrack of a movie. I think the best composers these days are often people who write soundtracks for movies because they're really using Zimmer and skill. A lot of the old school that.
[01:27:41] Speaker A: Would have been like, Max Richter is another one.
[01:27:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
And their job is to see that film exactly in its timing, construct the thing that works musically and follows every nuance of that story with the right backing.
[01:27:56] Speaker A: It's allegory again. Right. They are telling the musical story that draws you into the story. Yeah.
[01:28:01] Speaker B: So you could throw out the film in the end and just play the soundtrack, and the person might not know the actual story, but they would get an emotionally compelling journey. That made sense.
[01:28:12] Speaker A: When I hear the Imperial March by John Williams, if I'd never seen Star wars and I didn't know Darth Vader, I would know that a serious military force has entered the story.
[01:28:22] Speaker B: And list actually came up with this thing before movies were invented. It's called the symphonic poem, where instead of writing the symphony based on, we start in this key and go to that key and follow structures like that. He got a story, say it was Cinderella, and so the opening would be the ugly sisters. But there's no words in this thing. It's a symphonic piece. He doesn't tell anyone it's Cinderella, but it makes sense because of the emotional journey and that story being applied to music. Interesting, but I guess what I'm mentioning that is it's not really subjective what music is expressing.
If you had to use descriptive words, there'll be a range of words people would come up with around the same piece of music, but they're not contradictory. It's not like here's a really sad, yearning, poignant piece of music that's quite profound, and someone else says, no, that's really joyful and bouncy and celebration. They're not going to say that about the same thing unless there's something really wrong with them.
[01:29:30] Speaker A: The Russian.
[01:29:31] Speaker B: Yeah, from that point of view.
[01:29:35] Speaker A: So are there constraints, then? The music has a certain law to it that you can't really break and say, well, I'm just being subjective here.
[01:29:44] Speaker B: Well, there's music for so many different reasons.
If you're having a fun dance, if you're having a fun poke at something, a parody, if you're telling a story and you really want the words to come through, if you're trying to express prayer, if you're trying to express absolute drama, it's completely different. Now, if you think of Hannah's messiah, which is a glorious two hour long thing, telling the story of Jesus, but you don't sing that in church as part of the liturgy.
But it is an amazing musical reflection on the scriptures, that you'd sit in a hall and listen to and go, that was profound and wonderful. It made me think of the whole story of Christ from the point of view of the Old Testament with this glorious music or one of the bark passions. He hasn't written it for you to sit in church at the time of Good Friday and hear the passion reading like that. It's actually meant to be an extension. It's like a movie. Say we made a movie, Jesus of Nazareth. You're not going to watch it in church, but it's to make you reflect through high art on the thing. There's high art and the church has really got it right in Vatican too. Sacred sanctum concilium. Not all.
[01:31:03] Speaker A: For our non catholic listeners. That's a document that was written at the Second Vatican Council by the Catholic Church. And it focuses on some of these, on the liturgy.
[01:31:11] Speaker B: Yeah. And it know the church is always welcomed, all high art, but it allows some of it into the liturgy. So it's not that because a piece is high art, it belongs in the liturgy. It depends if it's got the right.
[01:31:26] Speaker A: Spirit, so the right character. It's got to be fitting music.
[01:31:30] Speaker B: And then it says the high art that has the spirit of sacred music is welcomed in the liturgy. But then there's high art for plays, for coronations, for dramas. Then there's not so high art like folk song isn't really high art, but it's beautiful. It's great for singing around the fire, it's great for singing at home, it's great for telling a story in a play, but it's not great for you wouldn't do the king's coronation with just a few folk songs.
[01:32:00] Speaker A: No, you want it to sound grand and glorious.
[01:32:02] Speaker B: So you use the grand, glorious music of the baroque period where they're trying to do.
So you've got to say, well, why did the Beatles write what they wrote? What are they getting at? What are the bands that came along in the. On it went, what were they expressing? What were they getting at? Can you just put Jesus words on top of their music and say, now I've got a sacred song? Yeah, you haven't. You've got the completely wrong mood for a sacred song.
[01:32:33] Speaker A: So you say you'd have christian pop.
[01:32:36] Speaker B: Christian pop should not be used for worship.
But it can be very nice because you have to think, what is pop music for? And it's often for unwinding, relaxing, turning your mind off, but in a nice way.
[01:32:53] Speaker A: Celebration.
[01:32:54] Speaker B: Celebration, yeah.
When I say turn your mind off, I don't mean that derogatory, I mean all the worries.
[01:33:02] Speaker A: You relax.
[01:33:07] Speaker B: But then is that what prayer is? You see, that's where Pope Benedict's so good on this.
He goes right back to the ancient Greeks and says they had two basic styles of. They had the worship of apollos and the worship of Dionysius. And one was like full on orgiestic, self indulgent, all of a rhythm full of working you into a frenzy and getting a group alarm. So getting a group bounce.
[01:33:39] Speaker A: Euphoria.
[01:33:40] Speaker B: Yeah, euphoria from the music, almost like a trance. And the other one was really intellectual and kind of balanced. And it was in the perfection of the structure that made you think noble thoughts.
And he identifies those two forces in music have always been present. And if you look at the medievals, you can see it. You can see in the chant one style, you can see in the celebrations another style.
In the renaissance, it's quite ordered. In the baroque, they're trying to be more and more big and expressive and emotional, because the counter reformation was about saying, well, we've got the true religion if we've got better music than you. So it was basically a competition between Bach and everyone else.
[01:34:26] Speaker A: Rap battles.
[01:34:29] Speaker B: The first rap battle was Bach was a lutheran, and who can beat Bach? So we have to go all out to try and beat. Oh, that's hilarious.
And then you get to the classical period where they want to go back to the refinement of form with Mozart. The structure, the balance. And they think it's gordy to be like they were in the broke. The broke actually means gordy, and they named them Gordy.
And then you have the romantic period that says, oh, these structured people, we want to let out our raw.
The humanity is always swinging between those two.
[01:35:02] Speaker A: There's a wrestling, right?
[01:35:03] Speaker B: Yeah, because they're part of us. The raw emotion is wonderful, but so is refinement and control, and it's a little bit like virtue.
If you have the great desire to be a really nice, a really good guy and a generous guy and everything, but you had no actual thought of how.
So you end up throwing money at everything or throwing burgers at every beggar or whatever, thinking you're doing a great work, but there's no intelligence in the way.
[01:35:34] Speaker A: And the guy with the cholesterol problem, you kill him by giving him a burger.
[01:35:38] Speaker B: You haven't got wisdom yet. You need practical wisdom. But you also do need, you don't want everything reduced down to a formula to be told, oh, well, this is what you do in this situation. That's what you do in that. No, you've got to be able to judge that thing, but you still want the goodwill from the heart that is spontaneous, but with wisdom on top of it, you know what I mean? And judging the situation of the person in front of you is, what do they really need? What will really help? That sort of thing. So all of those components are there. It's a little bit like that in music as well.
[01:36:09] Speaker A: It's funny, isn't it, that wrestling is a great analogy, really, isn't it? Because it seems that that reality, because even you can have something that really is quite beautifully ordered and sacred. But if it gets into excess, like whoever's, I guess, the conductor of ceremonies or whatever it might be, if they get into excess, then that rigidity actually crushes what that's meant to aid. It's meant to be a vehicle for going upwards.
[01:36:36] Speaker B: There are different schools of thought, because some people think that if it's high music, it's fine for, say, church.
I think the best church music we ever wrote, really, is from the medieval and Renaissance period, because we were really focusing then they were full time church composers writing for the glory of God from the tradition. And then we got a little bit seduced by the emotional character of opera. And so these sacred music started copying the secular style, which was a high style. It wasn't low music, it was really high music. So we put an orchestra in the church. We had proper operatic soloists, soprano, alta, tenor, bass, singing in the main parts of the kyrie with the choir behind them. It was like we're trying to do an opera without the acting and the costumes.
But we were doing it to the words of the Gloria, and it worked.
A lot of composers did it very well.
But at the same time, we have moved quite a long way from what music was doing before that. And there came different moments where gregorian chant makes a comeback because it is so much simpler and so much more reverent. And then the church, at different times, I think near the end of the 19th century and again in the 20th, was saying, we need to get back to the chant, because we sort of started getting lost in styles that were high music but more copied from the secular.
The problem with today, though, is when you got to the beginning of the 20th century, classical music collapsed because they got so adventurous with their harmony and everything else. They actually thought, you can't do anything else. They actually thought that exhausted it. So they thought, well, we can try and copy Mozart, but we're always going to be cheap copies. No, none of us are actually Mozart. Look at these great geniuses before us. We're not that guy.
So let's just be more and more experimental. Let's be novel, let's be new, rather than let's be beautiful.
And you got crazy things happening in early 20th century classical music. So it kind of became the area of university snobs, because they would sit and listen to something ugly and go, oh, yes, that's an interesting effect.
[01:38:58] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like the beat part, right.
[01:38:59] Speaker B: Of the 60s, but most people aren't going to. So what took over in the populace? Fear.
[01:39:05] Speaker A: Is this where you start to get.
Interestingly enough, this has always been a bit of a struggle between the elites who want to progress, and they look down on the common man because they often don't want to go with them. Is this when you start seeing that happening, like, musically, where classical gets captured by that sort of unhelpful snobbery and the common man draws away from it?
[01:39:24] Speaker B: Well, there was always probably a snobbery because it was the stuff of the upper class, because music was always commissioned either by church or palace. And composers worked for one of those, or sometimes they changed around, but basically they had their brief, we need music for our church liturgy, or we need music for the court. They weren't free to write whatever.
And it was the first guy to try and be completely detached from that was when Mozart left that system. He was first with an archbishop and then he freelanced a bit, but he died a pauper and was thrown in a pauper's grave because there was no money in being a freelancer. And Beethoven was the first full freelancer. And he was also struggled. He was kicked out of 51 houses because he couldn't pay his rent.
They didn't have the security anymore, but they had to work on having either some rich friends that thought it was cool that they supported a composer, or they had one or two hits every now and then. Yeah, but of an opera that did well, or something like that.
When you got the french revolution and then all the revolutions in Europe in the 19th century, the middle class suddenly emerged as the new upper class. So the bankers and the merchants and those guys were suddenly ruling the world instead of people have been brought up properly.
[01:40:49] Speaker A: No offense to any finance who's listening.
[01:40:51] Speaker B: Yeah, no offense to you globalists.
[01:40:54] Speaker A: Right, back to the music, Robert Masons, back to the music.
[01:40:57] Speaker B: But anyway, point being, that changed music even in the classical sphere, because those people turned up at concerts going, what did the rich used to do? What did the upper class do? Oh, they did concerts. Oh, we should go to concerts. And then they go along and you can't play them. Delicate scarletti and beautiful baroque music. They'll just start talking through it. So they need to hear very flash open. That's really fast, or list going all over the piano, or paganini going all over the violin, or the opera singers singing really loudly, the orchestra being really big. So the romantic period is like hugely like that, because it's a whole middle.
[01:41:33] Speaker A: Class, rambunctious to lower class thinking.
[01:41:36] Speaker B: They're being cultured now, but they haven't really got their upbringing. Be patient and shut up and listen.
That's one thing. It's still great music. It's very great music. The 19th century, we have a fizzle out, though, when we decide we can't really write in a key anymore, because we've kind of written everything that could be written and almost oppression. So then what takes over is the pop world emerges through jazz, blue, interesting jazz, everything like that. And then finally you rock. And all of that is that journey.
[01:42:11] Speaker A: Then, in a sense, a reflection, too, of the cultural collapse, because the western culture has collapsed now into this just mess of subjective confusion and silos and ideologies. And the music mirrors that.
[01:42:22] Speaker B: Yeah, music always mirrors.
I'm not sure what comes first, they reckon. I think philosophy comes first. Is it? Your ideology tends to come a little bit ahead and the arts follow that. So what you got majorly at the beginning of the 20th century was relativism hit music. So they literally said, like, if you go to Schoenberg and Berg of this german school of thought in the 1930s, they literally said, it's wrong to play the note c and play it again before you've played all eleven other notes, like C sharp, D, D sharp, e. It's wrong for you to favor certain notes more than others.
[01:43:11] Speaker A: Wow.
[01:43:12] Speaker B: So we will complain.
[01:43:14] Speaker A: Equity and inclusion.
[01:43:15] Speaker B: Yeah, they needed perfect equity. So what they did was they made up a tone row, which meant, of the twelve notes that there are on a piano, before you repeat yourself, put them in any order you want. Any order. Completely random. You could do it by pulling them out of a hat. That's the order you have to keep them in, in this piece, either forwards or backwards.
Or you could invert. Meaning if I went up a fifth, I could go down a fifth. So upside down, forwards and upside down, and backwards and upside down, backwards. And every single chord they made, they just take, say the first three notes were da da ping. They put those three notes together if they wanted a chord, if it was time for those three notes. So you get the ugliest music. Dissonance. Ugly, ugly, ugly music. It's called serial music. Like a serial killer.
And it killed music.
I think even today people say that was a failed experiment, but there were people doing that for 20 or 30 years, going to Germany for specialist training and believing that school of thought. But that's complete relativism. And the idea there was, well, you think the fifth bomb is nice together because of your. It's just social conditioning. Yeah.
If you heard the 7th over and over in the supermarket, you'd think that was nice. It's actually not true, because the reason we find certain intervals harmonic and beautiful is because of the way it's actually the maths behind it.
[01:44:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:44:47] Speaker B: There is a law, the natural ratios of the vibrations. We are picking up that the octave is every two sounds.
Sine waves are coinciding and the fifth is.
[01:44:57] Speaker A: So all of this is a forerunner. And I'm sure our listeners are starting to get this to what we live in today. Now, this is just a social construct. Your morality is a social construct.
[01:45:09] Speaker B: Who's to say that chord, C-E-G sounds nice? And yet, if you take a trumpet with no valves, the old trumpet, if you blow through a brass thing and then you change the pressure on your lips and change it again, guess what comes out? The chord comes out. CGCE.
It's all there in nature in lots of different ways. It's the harmonic series.
[01:45:34] Speaker A: So there is an abandonment of natural law, and that's what we see in morale.
[01:45:38] Speaker B: Natural law was thrown out of music.
Who didn't do that was the pop side of it. They kept the chords and they became the new folk music. So they were accessible, they were nice, they were entertaining, they were pleasant, could unwind to it, and that's cool as long as you are doing a thing that is unwinding. So come home from work and unwind. Sure. But you don't go to church to unwind. It's funny.
It's bigger than unwinding. So it's not toe tapping. If you're toe tapping, you're probably doing it wrong.
It's where the charismatics come into a funny clash with everybody else. Because sometimes they used basically pop songs with Jesus words for their mainstay of their songs.
And there's something in those songs that's actually just the relaxing of the mind, down to not thinking just in the music, which is not to criticize it, it's just to say that's what a pop song does.
[01:46:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:46:51] Speaker B: So when you're suddenly using it as prayer, it can be working against the spirit of the prayer, which is to lift mind. God.
[01:47:00] Speaker A: Yeah, that's interesting.
[01:47:02] Speaker C: Right.
[01:47:02] Speaker A: It's time for our final little musical interlude for this episode. And this snippet is one of my personal favorites, actually. It's a piece of music written by Robert Loretz. It's set to an 11th century gregorian chant, and it is called a wonderful exchange. And it's based on sort of the mystery of the divine human exchange that Christ enters into through the incarnation by taking on human form. And the words that Robert has written here are inspired by Saint Athanasius as he wonders at the miraculous love of Christ and his emptying so that we might actually be filled. So this is called o wonderful exchange by Robert Loretz.
[01:47:49] Speaker C: You ever born of the son of your daughter, that we first born of the flesh may be reborn by your spirit and water master. You became a slave that was enslaved. Be free now ever son of man.
All that the sons of God, man may be for life and death. I have thought by her own heart that is overcome.
Your love is stronger than death. A love that flows from the father and son, the sinless one became sin. You print of life, work, healed yourself through flesh that by your holy breath we be feel wonderful. Exchange. We bring to you that which you have first given.
Let you made earthly goods, make them to be your own body from heaven.
And by that body we are fed and soul that body become joined to our savior, and we as your holy.
[01:49:46] Speaker A: When you step outside of, say, a more structured sacred liturgy and you have a prayer meeting or a prayer gathering, it could be entirely appropriate to use that camp.
[01:49:57] Speaker B: And you want to unwind in the evenings or a big rally, and you.
[01:50:02] Speaker A: Want to appeal to young people.
[01:50:04] Speaker B: The speaker is going to speak.
It's like singing the fun music of Montserrat.
So they didn't sing it in their main liturgy because they want to be very serious about that. But they sang it to love God when they wanted to be happy.
[01:50:18] Speaker A: It's an authentic festival in a sense, because God is still at the heart of it. But there's a festival around, and that's.
[01:50:24] Speaker B: Why I think, when I used to start explaining to people what was wrong with certain hymns, the main hymns I attack actually aren't the ones based around, like, hillsong, which can still be quite nice. Yeah, they've written some beautiful stuff, but actually, the ones I don't like are the ones that sound like Disney tracks. The music that sounds like it's written for Aladdin.
Just that cheesy.
[01:50:48] Speaker A: Will you come and worship with me?
[01:50:53] Speaker B: Seven men with seven troubles, seven verses to my song. I am the dwarf who never knows the answer. I am the dwarf who always gets it wrong. I am the dwarf the others called Opie. I'm always mucking up the song. That's a Benedict Ferrell hymn, but she doesn't use those words.
[01:51:15] Speaker A: But it's that same tune.
[01:51:17] Speaker B: Is it his? Goes, praise to you, o Christ our savior word of the Father, calling us to life son of God who leads us to freedom glory to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
[01:51:32] Speaker A: What is that? I want to be charitable. I want to be charitable here. Is this someone who's really well meaning, but just lacks the skill to.
[01:51:40] Speaker B: Yeah, I think she hasn't made the discernment.
She come up with a cool melody. Yeah, it is a nice, folky melody, actually. Cool.
[01:51:49] Speaker A: And it has a place.
[01:51:50] Speaker B: It would work very well in the seven dwarfs, which is why I gave it the seven dwarfs words to show how well it works.
[01:51:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I think you're right, because you know what I think I feel is lacking? I feel there's a worshiper's sincerity that's lacking. Yeah, I see worshipful sincerity in a lot of Hillsong music.
[01:52:08] Speaker B: Yeah, there is sincerity. But part of that sincerity, unfortunately, has been picked up.
Because you do sing pop songs in a very sincere way. You could say in one level, because if you don't put your heart into a pop song, you're not doing it well.
And actually, why pop songs often need a good singer. The normal people in a church all trying to sing like that can't, because they haven't got that kind of. You actually need a bit of force and a bit of.
[01:52:36] Speaker A: But I don't know if there's a worship of sincerity. Do you know what I mean? It's like there is a sincerity, but it seems to me that worshipful sincerity.
[01:52:44] Speaker B: Is looking a concept of prayer, too. Because that's where the hillsong and all of that came from. Protestant, but more pentecostal style background, isn't it?
[01:52:55] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.
[01:52:56] Speaker B: Because their worship is based around what they create through their music.
Like, a lot of their thing is singing a lot of songs. And then maybe a little bit of intercessory prayer, perhaps some prayer for healing.
In a way, they want to create an atmosphere.
And sometimes they're calling one praise because it's upbeat and worship because it's more mellow. And they often have a formula like, oh, we get some crazy ones out first, and then we'll mellow out the.
[01:53:28] Speaker A: Evening, usually have a bridging song, bring.
[01:53:30] Speaker B: Ourselves down to this nicer mode of praying, and then we'll buz it out at the end.
It's not completely wrong. You do do it in everything, like your entrance song and your last song at mass is probably more beefy than your communion song because you want it to be more intimate.
But you're not seeking to control the mood of people.
You don't create the prayer by controlling the mood, but at the same time, because in the liturgy, you've got a prayer that's already set. You could say the prayer is always that dynamic of offering Christ to the Father. And then you think, well, what music would have suited that if you stood at the cross with Mary and, like, what does it mean to lift your heart and mind up with the sacrifice of Christ being offered to the father? It actually is something quite solemn.
[01:54:25] Speaker A: Yeah. It's funny because I remember there was a period where you had. I don't think it lasted long, but people who are claiming they had christian worship. Trance music.
[01:54:33] Speaker B: Yeah. Trance is dangerous.
[01:54:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Why do you say that? Tell me why you say that.
[01:54:37] Speaker B: Because trance is the shutdown of the mind. It's a bit like hypnotism. And trance goes well with Buddhism. It doesn't really go without well.
[01:54:46] Speaker A: It's interesting. You go to a trance party or a dance party where they use that, and what do you do? Most people are taking some kind of drug that takes them out and it's pure euphoria.
[01:54:55] Speaker B: I was going to mention that before because it's something Pope Benedict does mention, too. Like the worship of Dionysus goes very well with drugs. It is that whole thing of let's forget how hard life is and zone out into some other sphere for now, escapism.
And there's a certain element of that tucked away in a lot of pop music. It's a kind of relaxing escapism, which is not wrong. It's like playing a game because you've had a stressful day. Let's sit down and play code names or something. Or something silly, even. And it's fun.
So there's a place for that in life. But then is that ever going to be what you want to bring to God for the best of your worship? No, it's not going to be.
[01:55:39] Speaker A: And should you stay in that place? No. Right.
[01:55:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Something's wrong if you remain past it.
[01:55:44] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:55:45] Speaker B: And that's the thing with catholic life, and especially the way life was so integrated before.
There was always a place for the festival. There was always a place for the fun. There was always a place for even the sarcastic parody song. But you didn't mix them all together and say, they're all the same if we just change that word to Jesus.
[01:56:01] Speaker A: It becomes a know last topic of conversation. I don't know if you've given much thought to this, but we're starting to see now the emergence of AI, artificial intelligence music.
[01:56:11] Speaker B: Right.
[01:56:13] Speaker A: Philosophically, we talked about soulless music before, earlier on. We're talking about the soul. I mean, that is the pinnacle of soulless music, isn't it?
[01:56:20] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, what that is is clever imitation of some kind of average, if you like, of what everyone else has done. Yes, I teach harmony and that kind of thing.
And a lot of it can be codified.
There's a rule for writing the cadence or whatever once I got that down, because you start to learn by following little rules, often till you've got the skill. And when you've got the skill, you're free. It's like learning how to paint. And you might learn that if I mix that color with that, I'll get there. And you learn some techniques after these techniques have been learned. If you only stayed at the level of technique, you're never an artist. But when you've got that toolbox of techniques and you can go somewhere creative.
[01:57:14] Speaker A: The technique should be the vehicle for something beautiful, right? And good and true.
[01:57:18] Speaker B: They help your intuition for the beauty be realized because you've got the technique to realize. Yeah, I don't know. I personally don't think AI, I think you can imitate. I mean, you can imitate as a good technician any style of music.
You can go, we do it all the time actually, when you're teaching people to compose or whatever. So we can do this thing in the style of blues, this thing in the style of jazz, this thing in the style of Mozart, this thing in the style of Chapin.
A kid I was tutoring online has been given an assignment at a school, theme and variation. So he writes a theme and then he has to write the first variation in the style of Renaissance and then baroque and then classical and then romantic. So go through the music periods.
Presents this to me like, well, how do we do?
Well, I don't know either. So I just go, well, let's have a look. Mozart's classical. Let's just go online randomly, look at one piece of Mozart. Oh look, he's got that funny little shape. Dunge, we could put a bit of that in there for your chords this time.
And then we can do this kind of thing with the melody because he often does that. Chopin will do these twists and turns around wrong notes and right notes. And if you start doing those, you might sound a bit like Chopin. But you're not really sounding like Chopin, because Chopin's a genius and you're just a guy copying some techniques.
[01:58:44] Speaker A: You're an imitator.
[01:58:45] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's what AI is. It's never going to be a genius. It's always going to be a good counterfeiter.
For most people, I suppose, who aren't geniuses either, it'll still be better than them.
So a lot of people will use it for writing. But I hate it. I don't hate it, but I tried it out a few times.
I was impressed. When I went, I typed in, give me an explanation of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas. Good for a ten year old, using three examples from daily life for each one, and quoting Pope John Paul and Mother Teresa and St. Augustine. And it did it and instantly it's done.
But when I read it still, it's like it hasn't got the right meaning of wisdom because it's gone everywhere on.
[01:59:36] Speaker A: The net and just collated.
[01:59:39] Speaker B: It doesn't know which one is really right, but then you refine it, go rewrite this, emphasizing that wisdom is the right ordering of loves, and then it fixes it.
It's good if you're in a hurry, but it can't. For example, I've been writing rap lately for a rap opera. I'm writing as you do.
No, I'm only just learning how to do rap. I'm the AI guy. I'm going, how do rappers do it? And you look for the best stuff and you try and copy, and then there's a good rap guy, malachi.
[02:00:09] Speaker A: Tamapo malachi.
[02:00:11] Speaker B: So he's helping me lay down tracks and then he refines a lot of the stuff. Then I realized, oh, it's actually more like that than it is. I realize all rappers is. I used to think it was all about the words and the rhyme, but it's actually all about the drumbeat. It's all about if you're a good, amazing improviser or percussion and you come out with a whole amazing rhythm, then you got to find the words that have that exact rhythm and you'll have a great thing.
[02:00:36] Speaker A: It's lyrical jazz, right?
[02:00:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it's lyrical rhythm.
Anyway, I tried to get the AI to write me when I'm an AI. Rap terrible, was it?
[02:00:48] Speaker A: Yeah, because my name is Robert, I'm not a hobit.
[02:00:51] Speaker B: Yeah, it's like that. It comes out like a clever poem, but only a poem that stops at each line. You're never going to get a Hamilton rap where it's got all the internal. You can say, do it again with internal rhyme and this and that. But that might be maybe in two years time it can, but all it will be doing is imitating a style that someone else created without the inspiration.
[02:01:13] Speaker A: Is this then, in a sense, the ultimate embodiment of the diabolical, where it can only ever imitate, it can never create for itself.
And all it's ever doing is taking what has gone before and producing an imitation.
[02:01:31] Speaker B: I'd say it becomes diabolical if we substitute ourselves for it.
So it's a fake. In other words, life becomes more fake if it replaces our efforts because it's faster than us.
Not everyone who tries to write music is going to be truly inspired. And not every piece is truly inspired, you could say, but even if you go back to Plato and he writes about inspiration and it's a mystery because when you come up with something really good for once in your life or something, or maybe every ten times or whatever, and you know, wow, I've hit it that time. You feel like I didn't really do that all me. I got that from somewhere, like that fell out of heaven somehow for me, or that was in the air. Like you get the feeling with Mozart, it's so perfect that that piece has always been out there.
[02:02:27] Speaker A: He discovered it and he found it.
[02:02:30] Speaker B: Perfectly proportioned and everything like that. That combination was waiting to be found, but he found it. Yeah.
Obviously the creator creates, the creative person creates, but they're always in that sense of living in a deep gratitude that they're somehow there's divine element in inspiration. Now that's never going to be, obviously.
[02:02:53] Speaker A: An AI, it's a zombie, right? Yeah.
Well, you haven't created anything and therefore philosophically you can't live on in your art either, because you didn't actually invest yourself in it.
[02:03:05] Speaker B: I think it might risk killing a lot of people being able to write or do all sorts of things. But it could be very useful if you are writing a wedding speech and you don't know the person very well, but somehow you got asked to be the best man and you haven't got time, and then you suddenly get her a whole lot of jokes and they're.
[02:03:24] Speaker A: All five minutes clean. Jokes must mention happy things about the bride.
[02:03:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[02:03:29] Speaker A: Wow.
[02:03:31] Speaker B: But I always think it's a sad world, even when kids think, computers can think.
[02:03:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[02:03:38] Speaker B: And you know that they're all just little combos of zero and one.
When I was young, I tried know with the Seager computer and this basic thing with about six commands, I managed to make a little poker game and a little monopoly game, which I gave to my brother for Christmas.
[02:03:57] Speaker A: Probably took you about 20 weeks to write it too.
[02:03:59] Speaker B: I only knew how to go if that. Then that. Go to that line, repeat that thing three times based on about five commands I knew. I managed to get a simulation of a poker game and a monopoly game. So that was cool. I was only twelve, but of course I knew the computer is not playing poker or monopoly.
I've made it look like it is, right?
Surely everybody who works with computers knows the computer is not never doing any of the things it looks like.
[02:04:32] Speaker A: Well, no. Well, no. Look, I read an article really, the other day, this is a true story. I read an article the other day about a guy who was literally now dating an AI woman. And he says it's the most rewarding relationship.
[02:04:45] Speaker B: Oh, gosh. Because I used to say, for a joke in talks in that, I could write I love you on the board and then say, oh, look at that. I love you.
It loves me.
How can you get fooled by your own.
[02:05:00] Speaker A: I know.
[02:05:00] Speaker B: Type in say something nice to me today.
Oh my gosh.
[02:05:09] Speaker A: But that's what I'm saying. It's the ultimate, in a sense, the diabolical dehumanization. And you think you're self giving, but you're not. It's a zombie. It's soulless. There's nothing in it.
[02:05:21] Speaker B: Well, everything's degraded through technology. Should be a good tool. But what does it end up doing? Often we just live in our imagination instead of in the real. We don't have presence with our friends, we just flick them or this or that.
[02:05:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I have an online community.
[02:05:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[02:05:42] Speaker A: It's just online communication.
[02:05:44] Speaker B: Yeah. Now I know you've got a good and faithful protestant audience, but I would say that the great thing in the catholic church, that's a good presence. So if you want friendship to be realistic and true, you've got to spend a lot of time with a person.
And any distance relationship never achieves the same thing. While it's at a distance, you keep up what contact you can because you have to be apart, but you've already made the basis in presence and you want it to be presence again.
And I think the Protestant Reformation turned the Eucharist into a Facebook relationship rather than a true friendship.
[02:06:32] Speaker A: Right. To the remaining my beautiful protestant friends that are still listening, I love you. And on that happy note, in a.
[02:06:39] Speaker B: Way, you can sing what you like.
[02:06:42] Speaker A: Robert, as you've probably got the gist now Robert is a man who does not mind a bit of sardonic wit. Time to time Robert, I've thoroughly enjoyed this.
[02:06:52] Speaker B: Me too. In 2 hours hopefully we're not the only two because I have a feeling like we opened a bunch of topics never got to the thing but hey it's all out there and it's all true.
[02:07:02] Speaker A: Well you know what I was thinking just as we're wrapping I was thinking I was going to ask the audience what do you think? But I think we should probably have conversations with Robert. Come back a couple of times Robert and talk about some other stuff as well because I know you are highly qualified in philosophy as well and there's a lot to talk about.
[02:07:18] Speaker B: I love the ramble but I don't know if anyone else follows it.
[02:07:21] Speaker A: No it was good mate. Well thank you Robert.
[02:07:23] Speaker B: Thanks Brendan.
[02:07:24] Speaker A: Bless you mate.
[02:07:24] Speaker B: Good fun.
