Charles Cole is an organist and conductor who leads the Brompton Oratory Choir in the UK. We were constantly in touch during the COVID-19 years because the government did not want the boys’ choir to sing for fear that they would spread the virus. The claim was always ridiculous, but Charles went to great lengths to figure out some way of making it possible, including the installation of air filters and social distancing. It was all quite absurd.
It matters for boys’ choirs because their voices are always in the process of changing from soprano to alto to tenor and bass. A great leader has to follow each and position them well in the choir. They simply cannot decline to practice and perform for a full year or more while the authorities decide what to do. He did his best, and the choir is now back in full force.
They are on a U.S. tour, which is an amazing opportunity. I made the trek to Manhattan to hear them sing in a liturgical context. I don’t know what else to say but “perfection.” I’ve never heard a choir this polished, this balanced, this disciplined, this virtuosic, in a live performance.
There seems to be no difference in quality between their famous recordings and what they sound like live. But there is a huge difference in drama and authenticity. The real performance bores deep into one’s soul.
The opening piece they performed was the Kyrie and then Gloria from “Tu Es Petrus” by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525–1594). He emerged as the leading composer in Italy during a time of enormous upheaval in religion and in art. This piece and his “Missa Papae Marcelli” are often said to be the music that saved the whole of Western music.
Yes, of course the legend is an exaggeration. But as with most stories such as this, there is a strong element of truth in it.
Following the Reformation that rocked Europe, the Catholic Church organized the Council of Trent, which organized in three sessions between 1545 and 1563. The purpose was to shore up the teaching of the Roman Church to survive the onslaught and save the faith. This profoundly affected art and liturgy.
The Council took place during the most extraordinary period of artistic progress in Western history. You can tell just by listening to anything from 1450 and comparing it with 100 years later. It’s a world of difference. However, the Reformation threatened serious disruption.
The new Protestant churches favored services in the national vernacular and hymn singing by the people. Meanwhile, music in the Catholic Church not only was in Latin but also had become so melismatic and complex that the words, even if you could understand them, were lost in the soaring and layered polyphony that had come to characterize worship. The people and the didactic mission of the faith seemed to be lost.
There were several pushes within Catholic circles that threatened musical traditions from London to Paris. There was a move to eliminate local forms of liturgical expression on grounds that Rome needed a unified front to fight the rise of Protestant rationalism and Bible-centered teaching.
In addition, there was a major push to make some concessions to the teaching mission via the art and music one would experience in worship. The chant books—which had a tradition dating back to the earliest centuries—came to be revised (really botched) under a new theory that everyone should be able understand the text. The tradition of a thousand years was buried.
This also affected the development of polyphony. This style of music piled many different parts on top of each other and began the modern structures of voicing music into high, middle, and low. Such music in the West began to develop in the 12th century—effectively writing out the sounds one would hear in a space with long echoes—and grew ever more elaborate as the centuries went on. There was growing competition between composers to see how many parts they could add, effectively creating towers of sounds to inspire and sweep listeners into an eternal space.
The fathers of the Council of Trent—certainly not musicians!—had their doubts about the whole project. Shouldn’t Catholics be more like the Protestants and push music that instructs the faithful on what they are supposed to believe? If so, this requires cognition of the text. In that case, all this fancy stuff has to go.
There was a real moment during that council when it was rumored that the whole of polyphony music would need to change. Already in England, composers had made the switch from Latin to English and from fancy to plain. Many people in Rome believed that the Catholics needed to get ahead of the curve and force clear and more didactic forms without abandoning Latin.
Spain was pretty much in a panic at this point. It had probably the most developed polyphonic tradition, and everyone loved it. Protestantism was not much of a threat there, and there was no need for a change in anything. It was such a danger to the music of Spain that the king actually intervened with a letter to the pope, pleading that he not disrupt the greatness of the music that was the artistic corollary to its mighty cathedrals.
Legend has it that it was Palestrina who came up with a suitable compromise. He would write complex polyphony in which listeners could actually understand the words. He would not pile text upon text but rather lay it out in a linear fashion, placing all complexity in sound and not in lyrics. The result was the “Missa Papae Marcelli,” which also happened to flatter the sitting pope.
You see, musicians have to be political too! The pope heartily approved of the results, thus saving great music from bowdlerization.
In that same tradition comes the “Tu Es Petrus” mass, the Kyrie and Gloria of which I heard performed. It was so fantastic. The choir sang another motet by Palestrina plus one by Thomas Tallis.
Also, keep in mind that Tallis somehow managed to be the court composer for Queen Elizabeth, even though he was known to be a Catholic. That surely took some impressive political maneuvering. His successor, William Byrd, managed the same feat.
What strikes me most about this tradition of art is its enduring power. It doesn’t sound old or new but rather simply eternal. The Brompton Oratory choir specializes in its performance. They do so without assistance of organ accompaniment or any kind of rhythm instruments to keep the beat. As someone who conducted quite a lot of this music in the past, I learned that keeping the tempo correct is as difficult as keeping the tuning and pitch right. It requires mastery.
I’m so grateful that there are choir schools (the United States has a few also) that keep this tradition alive despite all the changes in fashion and politics. This is why music of the 16th century strikes me more than any other as the perfect soundtrack to civilization itself. If Palestrina did indeed save this tradition in his time, he deserves every praise. So too do Charles Cole and the Brompton choir for keeping performance alive and perfecting it in a way that elevates and inspires.
