Recently I received one of those “customers who bought X probably also will be _Rinterested in Y” emails from a popular internet retailer. Y was titled Gregorian Chant. Although I’m not really into the whole “new-agey chant thing,” I clicked on the link because X was a mélange of Bach choral words, and I was curious to see what the connection between such ostensibly disparate repertories was. Several legitimate connections might be made, although not the sort that I would expect to be programmed into the marketing databases that generated this automated email. In fact, the email was prompted by the ensemble common to both discs, the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, directed by Stephen Cleobury. The matter-of-fact title and the out-of-focus, shimmering stained glass cover photo demonstrated that the marketers of this new disc visualized it as another in the lucrative Chant phenom.

A glance at the track listing, however, made it clear that—despite what the marketers had made of it—the artistic conception of the disc had a certain integrity of its own. What I saw in the twenty-seven tracks were complete liturgies for Mass and Vespers. This should not be altogether unexpected. Mr. Cleobury is a professional church musician, and the very raison d’être of King’s College choir is the singing of daily services. More than that, this choir leads what I suppose must be the most “widely-attended” worship service in the world—namely the annual Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, broadcast live around the globe every Christmas Eve. Over the last several decades, this premiere choir has released a wide catalogue of recordings not only of standard and new choral literature, but also reflecting the repertory performed every day in King’s College chapel (anthems, hymns, Anglican chant, canticles, service music). In 1992, the choir even released a fly-on-the-wall “Live Evensong” disc, complete with whispers and shuffling of feet as the congregation gathers. Plainchant is sung daily at King’s, and this disc is in a sense just a part of this living tradition.

And yet, not quite. For this disc, Mr. Cleobury has pieced together two services as they were sung in England—and more specifically at the King’s College chapel—in the decades immediately preceding the Protestant Reformation. The disc follows the so-called “Sarum Rite,” an elaborate local variant of Roman liturgy that had become established at Salisbury, but that by the late middle ages had come to dominate the church all across England. Cleobury has opted to record the First Vespers for the Eve of the Nativity of the Virgin (September 8), and the Mass for the Octave of the Nativity of the Virgin a week later. As John Milsom explains in his album notes, the Virgin Mary was one of the saints to whom King’s College Chapel was dedicated (the other being St. Nicholas). “Days associated with those saints stood out as special ones in the college’s calendar, and on them we can imagine the college’s community of scholars, students, and servants attending chapel services with special diligence.”

This recording is a “liturgical reconstruction,” an outgrowth of the “historically informed performance movement” that brought us “authenticity” and “original instruments.” The products of painstaking research into worship practices, musical sources, performance practice, and pronunciation, liturgical reconstructions set today’s listener down in a bygone era of Christian worship. As a musicologist, it thrills me to see so many aspects of my profession come together in such a tangible way. There are dozens of liturgical reconstruction recordings on the market today—an impressive fact considering the beleaguered nature of the classical recording industry generally. Not surprisingly, discs of medieval plainchant have long relied on this sort of reconstruction as a marketing gimmick, because nothing from that repertory could be said to sustain itself in the established repertory of “old favorites” (See: Weber 1991, 29–37). I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who has looked at the track listing of a chant CD and said “Oh, I can’t wait to hear the fifth mode ‘Christus Factus Est!”

Probably the most intrepid reconstructionist of the last two decades is the English conductor Paul McCreesh. His ensembles, the Gabrieli Consort and Players, first gained wide acclaim through performances and recordings of the elaborate repertory associated with the Basilica San Marco in Venice at the end of the Renaissance—particularly the impressive polychoral works of Giovanni Gabrieli and his circle. In an important 1998 release, McCreesh (with assistance from the liturgical scholar Robin Leaver) gives modern listeners a sense of the environment for which Bach composed his Leipzig liturgical music. In two discs we hear organ preludes, congregational chorales, two cantatas, a missa, readings, and the Eucharist celebrations, not to mention a five-minute excerpt of a Martin Luther sermon. Having become so accustomed to Bach’s works as single items on concert programs or service lists, hearing this recording underscores anew both the variety and the consummate quality of Bach’s oeuvre.

Perhaps the most striking example of fly-on-the-wall liturgical reconstructions yet released on disc is McCreesh’s reconstruction of a sixteenth-century Sarum rite Christmas mass. The centerpiece of this disc is the Missa “Cantate” for six voices by John Sheppard. Sheppard’s career spanned the turbulent years from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I, and this setting was presumably composed during the brief re-establishment of the Catholic church—and with it the Sarum rite—in England under Queen Mary (r. 1553–1558). By approximating its original liturgical environment, McCreesh allows the listener a chance to experience anew the power of polyphony. It is impossible to capture in words the explosion of Sheppard’s Gloria after twenty minutes of monophonic chant. Of the total seventy-five minutes for the reconstructed service, Sheppard’s polyphony lasts under half an hour.

But just as the action of an opera often happens in the recitatives, the dynamic parts of a service are the prayers and readings. In the Sarum rite, monophony cannot be confused with monotony. The album notes contain stage directions which chart the singers’ movements and a diagram of the floor plan of the Salisbury Cathedral complex.

The procession leaves the quire by the west quire door, turns right and goes clockwise round the outside of the quire (that is around the ambulatory). It passes down the south side of the church and enters the cloisters by the nearest available door, circuits the cloisters and re-enters the church by a door at the western end of the nave. It returns along the central aisle of the nave and makes a station before the choir screen…. Three clerks of the highest form, wearing silken copes and walking in the middle of the procession together sing the following proses, and the choir sings the verses and partial repetitions of the responsory. Note that the procession halts whenever the three clerks sing and resumes its progress whenever the choir sings.

“Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them,” Shakespeare instructs his audience. Such explanatory notes to situate the listener never have been more essential in a recording. Although I doubt that McCreesh’s singers donned silken copes for the recording sessions, the notes rescue what might otherwise become a bewildering experience for those of us not thoroughly versed in this liturgical practice. The Secret, for example, is the prayer offered at the consecration of the elements. The text of the Secret is printed in the album notes, but the recording yields only indistinct distant mumbling. The notes explain: After the Offertory says the Secret quietly, terminating it aloud as follows [“per omnia secula seculorum”]. The Preface then follows and leads directly into the Sanctus… The Gabrieli Consort reenact the mass right down to the sanctus bells and the clinking of the thuribles. McCreesh has jested that such recordings might be issued with scratch-and-sniff incense.

There is certainly great value in these reconstructed snapshots of Christian worship, and different listeners may experience them as educational, devotional, or ultra-aesthetic entities. In all due deference to Wagner, the liturgy is potentially the most powerful Gesamtkunstwerk [total work of art] ever realized, and as Dorothy Sayers insisted, the dogma is the drama. For McCreesh, an attraction to the music has prompted a desire to perform it in a creative program. It would be difficult—and perhaps even wrong—to sustain an anthology-style program of short liturgical works. A reconstructed service respects the integrity of each constituent item, while amounting to a whole rather greater than the sum of its parts. As McCreesh himself has said,“it’s a sort of artistic program-planning tool and sometimes even a marketing tool, and we’re absolutely completely happy at accepting that.” But he goes on to say that “the point is not to try and pretend that we are creating services, because services will always feel very, very different, and the whole concept of recording a service for posterity is of course absolute rubbish”( McCreesh 1997).

Well, yes and no. Indeed, services and concerts will feel different, for despite their sometimes similar means, their disparate ends are not close enough even to be compared. But is this issue really that simple? To the secular mind, perhaps so, but it strikes me as much more ambiguous.

We might, for example, try to imagine a continuum of recorded “services.” At one end is the weekly tape of the Sunday service distributed to the shut-ins—a common practice in many American churches nowadays. The fact of the recording has little or no effect on the mechanics of the liturgy itself, save for the necessity of speaking into the microphone. If an electrical surge rendered the recording equipment inoperative, no doubt the service would go on regardless. The reason for the service is not the making of a recording but is fellowship, communion, and worship. God as both Author and Object is truly invoked. The recording serves to convey a sense of the corporate worship to those who are not physically present for it, and the fact that they will take part in the service at a later time does not compromise their position as a participant in the service.

In the middle of the hypothetical continuum would be services recorded “for posterity,” because they document some important historical event. This might be just a local or congregational anniversary, which sometimes are commemorated with a return to an older form of worship—for example, the Latin Mass, or a Dutch-language service in a community with Dutch heritage, or perhaps lining-out Psalms in the Presbyterian tradition. Or this service might be as significant as the coronation of a monarch. More than fifty years after the fact, you can still walk into a music store and buy a live recording of the 1953 coronation of Elizabeth II.

At the other extreme of the continuum would be the “service” concert that is a commodity produced for the microphone, and—in turn—for sale to a wide market, aimed not at the devout but rather at anyone who will buy it. If the recording equipment ceased to function, the only reason the performance (for such it is) would continue is the sheer joy of making music. God is not invoked, but rather his name is quoted as part of a meticulously-prepared “script.” And here it becomes clear that the continuum doesn’t really work, because at some point we cross a line between services and “services.”

A few years ago I attended a performance in which the Gabrieli Consort & Player re-enacted a Lutheran Christmas mass in a form that Michael Praetorious would have recognized in 1620. The concert took place in the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in Manhattan. Although after settling into my assigned pew I was in the place where the congregation might sit, my role was that of audience member—to sit back and enjoy the show. The role of “congregation” was given to a specially-prepared choir sitting in a transept. Luther would have been appalled. Despite this obstacle, I decided to treat the concert as an opportunity to worship, even if not in my customary worship environment.

As the concert proceeded, I became increasingly uncomfortable by the thought that, regardless of whatever religious persuasions the performers might have had, this was for them just a “gig.” I am cynical enough to believe that this is true even in some Sunday worship services, too, but this was different. Here, people were paying to go through the motions, for the sake of the motions. The Celebrant—for so the singer was credited—intoned the Words of Institution. We heard Christ’s instructions at the Breaking of the Bread: “Nehmet hin und esset. Das ist mein Leib, der für euch gegeben wird…. Dieser Kelch is das Neue Testament in meinem Blut, das für euch vergossen wird zur Vergebung der Sünden. Solchs tut, sooft ihr’s trinket zu meinem Gedächtnis.” And yet there was no bread nor cup of which we could partake; nor was there spiritual fellowship. Isn’t this part of the liturgical environment that Praetorius would have counted on? I figured that the best I could do was worship as an individual, comforted by the line from the Westminster Shorter Catechism that “the sacraments become effectual means of salvation not from any virtue in them, or in him that doth administer them, but only by the blessing of Christ, and the working of his Spirit in them that by faith receive them.” McCreesh is right that a service will feel “very, very different,” but perhaps he should consider that some may approach his work as a means for worship.

Of course, I would have been even more upset if they had offered the communion elements, but who gets to say where the line is drawn in recreating the multi-sensory artwork of the liturgy? Many liturgical reconstruction recordings aim so fervently at recapturing the aural experience of a given worship service that we are given all the extramusical sound effects as well. The sounds of thuribles are the most frequent example, but why has it stopped there? In our secular age, what is to stop the next reconstructionist from donning cassocks and immersing “congregants”—and perhaps even taking up a collection—all in pursuit of this great Gesamtkunstwerk? Given the jealous God who commands that His name not be taken in vain, this would be worse than Civil War re-enactors firing real cannonballs at each other.

There always can be wrong reasons to go to church. Jesus himself spoke of those who went to the temple to be seen. Because I feel it myself, I am very suspicious of the “urge to liturge”—which turns the aesthetic beauty of the liturgy into the end rather than the means of worship. It seems particularly prevalent in our post-Christian society. The continuing wide popularity of the King’s College Lessons and Carols broadcast as a token “sacred” moment in an otherwise secularized Christmas holiday suggests to me the attempt to use an aesthetic food to satisfy a spiritual craving. I have friends who have faith in nothing beyond the material of this world who nonetheless love high church services that allow them to pretend, if only for a moment, that there is something transcendent somewhere. They know “better” of course, but it is a fun game to play, and it gives them a warm, fuzzy feeling. And there’s nothing like a sweet, meek baby Jesus and a candlelit “Away in a Manger” to provide that. Just as there are “aesthetic celebrants,” presenting only the aesthetic service-as-concert experience, there are also “aesthetic communicants,” coming to receive only the beauty.

Who can say how the Holy Spirit might use such an opportunity to speak to the unsuspecting participant? The apostle Paul managed to look past selfish reasons that had prompted rival evangelists: “But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice” (Phil. 1:18). The carefully wrought liturgies of old hardly could be said to take the Lord’s name in vain, and I suppose they at least make for more wholesome entertainment than many other recordings readily available to the American consumer today. And I must remind myself too that there was grave concern over the propriety of Handel’s sacred oratorio Messiah in its early years. This letter, signed Philalethes, appeared in the Universal Spectator on 19 March 1743:

An Oratorio either is an Act of Religion, or it is not; if it is, I ask if the Playhouse is a fit Temple to perform it in or a Company of Players fit Ministers of God’s Word….

…if it is not perform’d as an Act of Religion, but for Diversion and Amusement only (and indeed I believe few or none go to an Oratorio out of Devotion), what a Prophenation of God’s Name and Word is this, to make so light Use of them? I wish every one would consider whether, at the same Time they are diverting themselves, they are not accessory to the breaking [of] the Third Commandment….

But it seems the Old Testament is not to be prophan’d alone, nor God by the Name of Jehovah only, but the New must be join’d with it, and God by the most sacred the most merciful Name of Messiah; for I’m inform’d that an Oratorio call’d by that Name has already been perform’d in Ireland, and is soon to be perform’d here: What the Piece itself is, I know not, and therefore shall say nothing about it; but I must again ask, If the Place and Performers are fit?

Today, Messiah generally is recognized as one of the great works of sacred music in the Western classical tradition. Despite its scriptural text, Messiah was not “church music” and (unlike Bach’s passion settings) would have found no place in the liturgy. Messiah was a concert piece, intended to be performed in the theater in exactly the same manner as Handel’s other sacred and secular oratorios. I expect that even today Messiah is more often performed in a concert setting than in a church.

I understand Philalethes’s concern: hallowed be Thy name. How can we recognize the holiness of God when at the same time we turn salvation history (in the case of Messiah) or divine worship (in the liturgical reconstructions) into a commodity, easily bought and sold, to be reverently used or casually abused? Do we damage our understanding of the transcendence of God if we can press a button and partake of whatever “service” we like, and press another button to skip through the boring bits? Composer and philosopher Julian Johnson has railed against our society’s tendency to reduce everything to mere property—a process he describes as “pornographic”:

[T]he central category of pornography is perhaps not sex but the process by which the humane is reduced to the status of things. The theoretical term for this is “reification.” Pornography is reification employed in the sexual arena and displays all of its hallmarks: the reproducibility and interchangeability of all commodities, the reduction to an object, the importance of packaging, the reduction to pure surface, the simulacrum of desire, the formulaic sameness of posture, the domination of nature…. While society publicly deplores the objectification of the humane in pornography, it is busy colluding with it elsewhere through advertising, commodity fetishism, and music. (Johnson 2002, 59)

Johnson worries about the debasement of the arts. My concern is the debasement of the spiritual. The liturgical reconstruction phenomenon, despite the fascinating and even illuminating fruits it has yielded, seems to me indicative of the much bigger problem which pits the superficial culture we live in against the reality of the Christian faith which we are called to live. The mere recognition of this, I hope, may help to prepare us for our battle in the world. A

James Brooks Kuykendall is Associate Professor of music at Erskine College, Due West, South Carolina.

Works Cited

Johnson, Julian. Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

McCreesh, Paul. Interviewed by Lindsay Kemp. Gramophone Editor’s Choice CD (December 1997).

Weber, Jerome W. “Liturgical Reconstruction as Reflected in Recordings,” Historical Perfomance 4:1 (Spring, 1991), 29-37.

Audio Recordings

Cleobury, Stephen, dir. Gregorian Chant. Choir of King’s College, Cambridge. EMI Classics 5579832 (2005).

_____. Choral Evensong Live from King’s College, Cambridge. Choir of King’s College, Cambridge. EMI Classics 7544122 (1992).

McCreesh, Paul, dir. Missa Cantate, by John Sheppard. Salisbury Cathedral Boy Choristers, Gabrieli Consort,. DG Archiv 4576582, (2000).

_____. Epiphany Mass, by J. S. Bach. Gabrieli Consort Players. DG Archiv 4576312 (1998).

_____. Mass for Christmas Morning, by Praetorius. DG Archiv 4470952 (1994)