Requiem aeternum dona eis Domine
Et lux perpetua luceat eis.Rest eternal grant them, O Lord,
and let light perpetual shine upon them.
There was a melody – established, but with no metre or rhythm. There was timing, but not a tempo. Nothing to pin down the singing of these lines at all. The lines come from the Requiem mass or mass for the dead in the Roman Catholic tradition and are centuries old; they would have been sung in unaccompanied unison by monks when committing one of their number to the earth, in the same way that they would sing the ordinary mass and all the offices, day after day, from their joining the order until their last breath.
For us, secular, modern, unhabituated, it was a remarkable undertaking. The two lines take only half a minute to sing, yet it is a spacious, weaving unison that uses up and down, fast and slow to create emphasis. We were given not a modern musical notation but the old Gregorian chant notation, indecipherable to most of us. You can make out places where the line goes up or down, and gain some sense of the relative length of different notes and pauses, but there was none of the concrete data we expect today such as dynamics or speed or whether staccato or legato. So it was a matter of learning the melody from our musical director, basically memorising it (and one of us in fact found a modern notation online somewhere).
Not just learning the ‘tune’, however, but what we needed was to grasp the timing – unwritten, unspoken, undefined. The timing that emerges from the music in the act of making it. That is unique to each instance. That is informed from the sentiment of the lyric, particularly in this case, invoking the divine rest on the worthy departed and that eternal light shine upon them. So we began by following the leader, obeying gestures to go up or down, to move or to hold back. Our unison was uncertain, not always in tune, not a homogenous texture.
Hesitant, we were encouraged to… take more initiative. It is a collaboration in fact. Our director formed us – the male voices of our choir – into a circle, so that we could listen to each other. We sang now with greater confidence. To me, however, something was lacking. Given that this was a secular choir that sings sacred music purely for pleasure, there was not an overt devotional element to the chanting. Yet for words of such primordial import as those here, such an attitude would seem of the essence. For the monks of yore this would have been the sole purpose. It was never a concert piece, never a ‘performance’, but rather a plain yet well-honed utterance of the heart, directed not to a public but to God. Their days were formed on and from chant. To them, chanting – and prayer in the divine presence – were as solid and immediate as the stonework of their church and cloister and were no less structural. Our imitation thus felt thin and hollow. Still, the musical dimension stood on its own, and we too could sense these bald braided notes resonating in our chests, and perhaps we could also be informed from them something of meaning.
Finally our director started us singing the lines and walked out of the circle, away from us, leaving us to rely on each other – to pick up the infinite variability of this line of Gregorian chant, to reach instantaneous consensus and to sing it out with certainty. After several attempts, it began to assume a shape. I felt a breath, as if joined with the holy men of the past, even an alignment, somehow, with their lives steeped in chant, their relationships knitted from it, the texture of their voices rough and hard-wearing and encouraging as a monk’s habit. They, of course, would have very quickly learnt the chant by heart, and the act of singing together in this way would already be second nature. And we too, to have much hope of a unified result, would do well to learn it by heart.
What is it that binds us in this action, that diaphanous mortar that brings voices to consensus, that allows, like a murmuration of starlings, if a little more ponderous, to shift and remake itself in the instant, that guides and holds the singing? If anyone loses concentration, it unravels. It was exciting, inspiring. It took us beyond time signatures, tempo markings and all the excess baggage of so-called classical music. I did not know these men, beyond a quick hello, close-knit members of a choir in a village in Occitanie, to which I was a newcomer. Yet to participate in this minute of singing, bringing an intention to it, felt like coming to know them closely and, for the duration, being quintessentially a part.
It quickly evaporated afterwards, of course, in a lot of blokish banter. Still, someone joked: ‘Le Saint esprit est déscendu!’ (‘The Holy Spirit has come down!’)
I don’t think he was necessarily joking.
Be_flummoxed 