Christian Liturgy and the Music of the Page

Lucinda Mosher

It would seem that, for most practitioners, scribing of sacred texts is a devotional act—a discipline, not of self-expression, but of ambassadorship for the text. So too for most composers of Christian liturgical music. Literally, calligraphy is “beautiful writing;” but so is the penning of a music score. When the text involved is “sacred,” both are instances of writing the sublime. As a theologian who embraces a notion that beauty is God’s very essence, I see beauty and ethics as a two-sided coin: beauty is the good that claims us by its attractiveness. The beautiful draws us toward itself; “thus it serves as both inspiration and guide.” Accordingly, Beauty Itself expects humanity to do the beautiful.

Whereas prettiness is ephemeral, beauty has staying power. Beauty, as Aristotle says in his Metaphysics, is characterized by “orderly arrangement, proportion, and definiteness”—which are as much attributes of musical compositions as of works of calligraphy. Just as tonal recitation of sacred scripture can underscore its transcendent source, so can the text’s inherent beauty amplified by elegant scribing, on the one hand, and on the other, by choral anthems masterfully composed and performed. To be clear, great composers of yore often scrawled. The music of the page may be quite messy visually. Its beauty resides in what it makes possible: audible performance of the text.

Over the centuries, the Ordinary of the Mass (the texts of the Eucharistic liturgy that stay constant: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Agnus Dei), the Psalter, biblical canticles, and various hymns have been paired with plainsong, other chanting styles, homophonic choral writing, and intricate polyphony. A single text may inspire a consonant treatment by one composer, a bitingly dissonant rendering by another. Symbols on a page indicate pitch, rhythm, meter, tempo, and dynamics. When we classically trained musicians gaze upon a page of music notation, we hear it. But as well, because of our deep experience with musical renditions of ecclesial texts, when we church-musicians even glance at a page bearing a text in common liturgical use, we hear it. We hear it being sung! The text actually points beyond itself—in some cases, to a specific tune to which time and tradition has wedded it; in others, to a library of compositions it has inspired.

All of this is prelude to my sharing that, when I look at Martin Wenham’s Magnificat, Susan Hufton’s And Tie My Life Within This Band triptych, and Peter Halliday’s Holy Communion, I hear singing: actually, singing—sometimes with, other times without instrumental accompaniment! In fact, for me, each of these three calligraphs evokes multiple recollections of musical expressions of the text at hand.

In the first example, Magnificat, Martin Wenham has scribed the opening of a beloved New Testament canticle. As its genre-name implies, the Magnificat falls into a category of texts that are intended to be chanted or sung. In the Anglican Christian tradition, it is one of two canticles (the other being the Nunc Dimittis—“Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace….”) appointed for regular use in the Daily Office of Evening Prayer. (The entirety of that liturgy may be chanted; when it is, the service is called Evensong.)  Having been set to music more often than any other Latin liturgical text, choral settings of the Magnificat abound and often are quite elaborate and dramatic. When intended for use in Anglican Evensong, the composition will use all eleven verses of the text, with little or no repetition. The result will be an anthem of some four to seven minutes’ duration.

In some streams of Christian practice, there is also a centuries-old custom of setting the Magnificat in a multi-movement, cantata-like fashion, for use in a festival liturgy. Calligrapher Martin Wenham was inspired by such a treatment by a Monteverdi composition. When I confronted (or was confronted by) Wenham’s work, the sound his scribing of Magnificat provoked in my head was the more broadly known multi-movement composition by Johann Sebastian Bach.

Its first movement, in triple meter, is three minutes (ninety measures) of exuberant sound! For the first thirty measures (one-third of the movement), the orchestra (three trumpets, timpani, two flutes, two oboes, strings, and organ continuo) provides an extended fanfare. The trumpets sparkle! In bar 31, the five-part choir makes its entrance, passing the single word magnificat from voice to voice in the same fanfare-like manner. Only at the end of the seventh measure of singing does the listener hear a hint of the remainder of the verse’s text. For the next eight measures, “anima mea” is carried contrapuntally from voice to voice—but the uttering of magnificat never stops. In bars 44–45, the choir cadences on “Dominum,” thus completing the verse; but this is scarcely a pause. Immediately, the opening motif returns—the altos leading the way. For 24 measures of increasingly complex counterpoint, the choir’s only word is “magnificat”. In measure 67, we hear the first return of “anima mea,” again tossed from voice to voice; after six measures, “Dominum” slips in—but again, exclamation of “magnificat” is constant until the choir comes to a full stop on the final syllable of “Dominum” in bar 75. The 16-bar orchestral coda reiterates the movement’s opening. Again, the trumpets add luster; the timpani, emphasis.

There are other settings of the Magnificat of which I am quite fond. For use in the small parish church I serve, I prefer one composed by Betty Carr Pulkingham, which is S 247 in The Hymnal 1982 of the Episcopal Church. It features an angular, hauntingly modal, three-part a cappella antiphon, for which the text is “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior; for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.” The remaining verses are sung to a simplified Anglican chant supported by sustained chords from the organ. I use this setting several times a year, so it is always in my head.

Yet Wenham’s scribing of Magnificat, through his choice to center on the single opening word, rendered boldly and brightly upon a background exuding motion, drew me—not to Pulkingham—but rather, straight to Bach!

In great contrast to Wenham’s work, Sue Hufton’s And Tie My Life Within This Band is serene, yet rich. Hufton renders, in the original Latin above and in English translation below, the first, second, and fifth, of the nine stanzas of a didactic poem by Aurelius Prudentius (born 348 CE), known as Corde natus (the first words of Stanza 1). According to a popular aphorism attributed to St Augustine, the one who sings prays twice. I don’t disagree; but I would suggest that in this case the one who sings may be rehearsing doctrinal lessons. Numerous composers have set this text as a choral anthem. However, it remains firmly attached to the 11th-century plainsong known as Divinum mysterium. In his choral arrangement of it, Sir David Willcocks preserves the simplicity of the original chant, giving responsibility for embellishing it to the organ accompaniment, and adding a grand descant to the final stanza. Where this melody was once associated with the Sanctus—one of the fixed texts of the Eucharistic liturgy—it is now most likely to be found in the Christmastide section of a hymnal.

An aphorism from the Islamic tradition declares that calligraphy is “music for the eyes.” The use of space is important, explains renowned Muslim scribe Mohamed Zakariya. It guides the eyes, so the text has a temporal element. Hufton offers us a good example with her tryptich. Her decision to scribe the Latin in upper case and the English in sentence case (or perhaps better to say “poetry case”), helps to guide the eyes, propelling the reader on to the next panel.

In a completely different category is Peter Halliday’s Holy Communion—a single broadsheet on which the Church of England’s Eucharistic rite has been scribed. The text (which includes detailed instructions for performing the rite, what the priest says, and what the congregation says) requires many pages in the 1662 version of the Book of Common Prayer. Halliday has squeezed it into six columns tightly packed columns. Not surprisingly, those columns are difficult to read. I hear the music of this page, not because I engage the text, word by word, but rather, of my long experience with Anglican rites of Holy Communion.

In the Anglican Christian tradition, the Eucharistic liturgy may be “said” (i.e. spoken—with no music involved); or it may be chanted or sung almost in its entirety. The Creed and the Lord’s Prayer may be chanted—on a single pitch, like as not. A middle way might limit singing to the Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, and fraction anthem. Regular attendees will quickly commit to memory the tunes used customarily where they worship. The text alone can trigger the recall of the music of the page. When gazing on the text in broadsheet rather than book mode, I hear the sort of music I anticipate (or have facilitated myself) when attending worship in this tradition.

The challenge for the US viewer of Halliday’s “Holy Communion” is lack of familiarity with the 1662 prayer book. Its language is beautiful, but strange—since the Episcopal Church uses a revision of the Book of Common Prayer authorized in 1979. Notably, some of the key elements of the rite of Holy Communion now hold a different position in the liturgy. For example, in the 1662 liturgy, the Gloria is positioned near the end of the rite—whereas, in the 1979 version, it comes near the beginning.

If, in viewing Halliday’s opus, one has particular interest in locating the most commonly sung parts of the Eucharistic liturgy, here is where to look. The Lord’s Prayer (“Our Father which art in heaven“) and the Sursum Corda (“Lift up your hearts”) have been placed in the second column from the left; the Sanctus (“Holy, holy holy“) at the top of the center-left column; the Nicene Creed at the top of the center right column; the Lord’s Prayer (a second iteration) and the Gloria (“Glory be to God“) in the second column from the right. Cleaving the broadside, thus commanding the viewer’s attention to a degree that the above-mentioned elements of the rite have not—are the arms of a cross bearing two of the “Comfortable Words”—passages of scripture that the celebrant may recite when inviting the people to receive Communion. Interesting to the musician’s eye and ear is that the two Halliday chose—John 3:16 and Matthew 11:28—are sung with some frequency. The turns of phrase in the 1662 translation are a bit different from that of the King James Version (upon which the composers in my mind’s ear have dawn); but it is similar enough to conjure music from this page.

Calligraphy is a multi-sensory experience for scribe and viewer alike. Ancient and modern philosophers alike have suggested that a beautiful object has the power to draw us toward deeper knowledge. The works of Wenham, Huftin, and Halliday have that capacity. What their works demonstrate in three very different ways is that the rhythm of elegant scribing can encourage our hearing of the text—our hearing of the music of the page. Indeed, calligraphy has the ability to make words audible.

Lucinda Mosher, ThD (General Theological Seminary, New York City), a moral theologian in the Anglican tradition, is Faculty Associate in Chaplaincy and Interreligious Studies at Hartford Seminary, with specialization in comparative theology as well. Her publications include the The Georgetown Companion to Interreligious Studies (forthcoming 2022); the award-winning Hindu Approaches to Spiritual Care: Chaplaincy in Theory and Practice (co-edited with Vineet Chander, 2020); Personhood, Illness, and Death in America’s Multifaith Neighborhoods: A Practical Guide (2018); and Toward Our Mutual Flourishing: The Episcopal Church, Interreligious Relations, and Theologies of Religious Manyness (2012); plus many edited volumes, articles, and chapters on multifaith matters. She often takes on projects that combine her expertise in theology, interreligious concerns, and the arts.

An accomplished multi-instrumentalist and music educator with a master's degree in music, Dr. Mosher also serves as Music Director at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Green Cove Springs, FL. She has served as organist, choir-director, or supply musician for congregations in the Baptist, Congregational, Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist, Reformed, and Unitarian traditions in the USA, Canada, France, Germany, and Italy; and, in the 1980s and 1990s, took choral ensembles on concert tours in the US, East & West Germany, the USSR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and England. Having lectured in the US, Europe, and Uganda, on liturgy, hymnody, and choral music, her essays on these and related topics have appeared in the journals of the Choristers Guild and the American Choral Directors Association. A skilled performer on bassoon, recorder, and a few other instruments, Lucinda performs (when the pandemic allows) with the Civic Orchestra of Jacksonville, RareSong Renaissance Ensemble, and the Mosher Double Reed Duo.

Further Reading:

The notion that “Beauty Itself expects humanity to do the beautiful” comes from William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), 268–69. See also Lucinda Allen Mosher, “Writing the Sublime: Visual Hagiography and the Promotion of Interreligious Understanding,” CrossCurrents 68.3 (2018): 383–93.