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Radio 4 opening announcement:Ìý91Èȱ¬ Radio 4.Ìý It’s ten past eight and time to go live to the chapel of Oundle School in Northamptonshire for Sunday Worship.Ìý ÌýAs part of the Oundle International Festival, Canon Chris Chivers explores how music takes us to the heart of divine revelation. The service is led by the Revd Ian Browne and it begins with Herbert Howells’ ‘Hymn for St Cecilia.’

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Music: A Hymn for St Cecilia (Howells)

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Ian Browne:

‘Sing for the morning's joy, Cecilia, sing,
in words of youth and praises of the Spring.’

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Welcome to the chapel of Oundle School for this service from the Oundle International Festival - a festival which grew from the installation of the organ here in 1984.Ìý It was built by the Danish firm Frobenius and it’s given countless young organists an opportunity to develop their skills in a summer school now called Oundle for Organists.

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There are many languages by which God's saving work is known. The Christian tradition uses words for example - not least the sacred words of scripture - as a means for us to encounter the revelation of Divine love. ÌýBut the Word is made flesh and dwells among us in Jesus Christ. ÌýSo we discover that words are a first not a final language.

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In this chapel the beauty of glass by John Piper, Patrick Reytiens and Mark Angus, reminds us, in St Paul's image, that we are not only to speak sacred words, we are actually to be icons of God - literally, as the bearers of the divine image, the art of a God whose light is to be revealed, to shine through us. But as several of the chapel's stained glass artists knew well - for their glass makes reference to specific musical classics, Bach's B minor mass and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony among them - of all the arts the one that perhaps most enables us to experience the journey towards the fullness of life Jesus promises us, is music. ÌýMusic, that most narrative of arts, enabling us not only to experience the sound of salvation but actually to sense what it will feel like one day to beÌý brought home to God and in those famous words of T S Eliot to 'know the place for the first time'. Angel voices ever singing round thy throne of light!

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Hymn: Angel voices ever singing (Angel Voices)

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Ian Browne:

We hear now words from the first book of Samuel Chapter 16about the impact of music, to which James Macmillan's setting of words from Psalm 96, O sing unto the Lord, makes response.

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Reader:Ìý

Now the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord tormented him. And Saul’sÌýservants said to him, ‘See now, an evil spirit from God is tormenting you. Let our lord now command the servants who attend you to look for someone who is skilful in playing the lyre; and when the evil spirit from God is upon you, he will play it, and you will feel better.’ÌýSo Saul said to his servants, ‘Provide for me someone who can play well, and bring him to me.’ÌýOne of the young men answered, ‘IÌýhave seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite who is skilful in playing, a man of valour, a warrior, prudent in speech, and a man of good presence; and the Lord is with him.’ÌýSo Saul sent messengers to Jesse, and said, ‘Send me your son David who is with the sheep.’ÌýJesse took a donkey loaded with bread, a skin of wine, and a kid, and sent them by his son David to Saul. And David came to Saul, and entered his service. Saul loved him greatly, and he became his armour-bearer. Saul sent to Jesse, saying, ‘Let David remain in my service, for he has found favour in my sight.’ÌýAnd whenever the evil spirit from God came upon Saul, David took the lyre and played it with his hand, and Saul would be relieved and feel better, and the evil spirit would depart from him.ÌýÌýÌýÌý (1 Samuel 16:14-23)

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Music: O sing unto the Lord (MacMillan)

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Chris Chivers:

I'm sitting in my study one evening at King's College School in Cambridge. The year's 1992, and sunshine bathes the room with a warm, orange glow that's characteristic of fenland light in October. Perhaps the hardest week of my time as the school's chaplain and as tutor to its famous choristers is coming to an end. I'm trying to summon some energy to face another evening of boarding duties with a group of children who are pretty hyper to say the least. They are confused, angry, tired and emotional. And with good reason. Since earlier in the week the devastating news came through that the mother of one of the eleven year old choristers had been killed in the Katmandu air disaster.

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I'm exhausted by the attentiveness that has been required of me over the past days and the sheer intensity of the emotions with which all of us are wrestling. I switch on the radio and to my relief discover music. I don't know what it is but as its rich sonorities wash over me I realise that boarders, attracted by the sound, are wandering through my open study door one by one or in small groups, and perching, silently on chairs or window sills, to listen. Within a few minutes there are twenty or more children sitting in the room transfixed, as am I, by music which seems somehow to be soothing the pain, reshaping its contours into something more manageable, and transcending the dark clouds of bewilderment and misery that have been hanging around us all.

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Organ: Chorale Prelude - Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein, BWV641 from Das Orgelbüchlein (Bach)

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Chris Chivers:

It would be easy to destroy the power of the narrative in words that I offered as a prelude to Bach's narrative from the Orgelbuchlein. Both my training as a musician - at a time when a certain musical analyst Mr Schenker with all his ghastly reductionist graphs was all the rage - and as a theologian - when narrative theology was making something of a comeback - persuade me against such over-analysis. Poor little talkative Christianity, EM Forster used to remark, for as another writer, Edwin Muir, reminds us, the dangers of the word made flesh made word again are a Christian perennial.

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As any of us who's ever been in love would acknowledge, there's a point where words simply aren't enough. They can't say what we want them to say.

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They're very tangible of course. They are able to concretise. But this is their danger for once spoken they can't be retracted - and this reality can be very costly for all of us. They've a habit of lodging in the memory, and people have a habit of filling shelves with them in a way that solidifies them, that seeks to eternalise them as it makes them almost monumental. Contrast this with the transience of music. For though in the words of the poet R S Thomas the echoes may return slowly there's no doubting there initial death. Music sounds and gives way to silence. It dies. But what remains? ÌýÌýÌýYet as Barry Smith, for forty-two years organist at the cathedral in Cape Town, South Africa, reminded me in a conversation the other day, music is paradoxically both the most ephemeral and eternal of the arts. He expresses this well when he says in a poem:

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Reader:

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Chris Chivers:

As bad-tempered Saul discovered, we may all put out a hand and touch the tears - often rolling down our own cheeks - if we allow music's power to do its work and to evoke, encapsulate and even reshape emotion - as it did so powerfully in that study in Cambridge for a group of us twenty one years ago. But if Aristotle knew music's power emotionally, Plato and Pythagoras knew that the music of the spheres - the eternal music to which all earthly music is linked - represented an ordering and reordering of reality that was thoroughly redemptive and that could be internalised though so fleetingly, as Barry Smith's words acknowledge, incarnate in sound.

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In the windows of this chapel there's a representation of a snatch from Beethoven's choral symphony and in that monumental work when we reach the final movement - as that most sensitive of politicians and diplomats Dag Hammarskold once pointed out in a speech to the United Nations - we experience an amazing sense of return. We aren't surprised by what might seem the invasion of singers into the orchestral world of the symphony. They belong. The ode to Joy makes sense. It's where we most expect to be in fact, because everything in it has been implicit in the journey before it.

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All music, like all life, is about such departure and return. It takes us out from Eden and - as even the short Bach prelude we heard enabled is to experience - it invariably narrates a journey where competing forces, melodic and harmonic, are brought into tension one with another along the way. The tensions in music, as in our world, may indeed be violently conflictual. The essence of both life and music concern this complex relationship between the concordant and the discordant, in a pattern where tension - both scientists and philosophers acknowledge this - gives way to resolution. And as we listen to music, as we feel its journey being narrated deep within us, so - if we have ears to hear and hearts to feel - we are addressed and reshaped by the God who brings order out of chaos and whose desire is to return us to that paradisal space - both within the human soul and within the fabric of human communities - which is the heavenly city of our calling.

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That word calling is key. Because music is not simply something performers do. Nor is it something that simply addresses us. It doesn't, as itÌýwere, put us through some process by which we're magically changed. No, it actually invites us - performers or listeners - to be part of the change it narrates. So it invites a response and perhaps we should go so far as to say that truly to be itself it's dependent on such response.

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Like the wonderful glass of this chapel through which light radiates so strongly, music is to sound through us for the transformation of the world. Aesthetics must always be turned into ethics. And as that great age of aesthetics in music from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth centuries would illustrate when aesthetics becomes a self-serving obsession divorced from ethics, when music is simply a beautiful background to life, we're led to the barbarism of the Third Reich, where Mozart sounds through the loud-speakers as human beings are lined up for the gas chambers. ÌýA connection suggested much more gently on a grave at Eton College where it says of a former Precentor, 'this perpetual fellow led an honest life at Eton: a moderate man whose food was beans, among the virtues in which he shone, he relieved the misery of the poor, and he cultivated music - a truth perhaps more tellingly made in a prayer of the Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel:

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Reader:

Through song we climb to the highest palace. From that palace we can influence the universe and its prisons. Song is Jacob's ladder forgotten on earth by the angels. Sing and we defeat death; sing and we disarm the foe.

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Chris Chivers:

Help us, O Lord, so to sing your praises that our hearts will turn to the oppressed in their misery and our actions will win them liberation. Amen.

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Music: Let the people praise thee O God (William Matthias)

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Ian Browne:

Let us pray

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As we hear the psalmist's call for the nations to rejoice and to be glad so we recognise that it is our duty and joy to praise God for his creation and our presence within it.

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We give thanks to God the Father for the world in which we live and for the gift of Love in creation.

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We give thanks to God the Son Jesus whose life and self-giving among us has brought us the grace of salvation.

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We give thanks to God the Holy Spirit whose presence among us promises heaven restored.

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Lord of creation and harmony,
All: graciously hear and renew us.

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The Psalmist calls us to sing a new song and to seek salvation.

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We pray for people of those parts of the world who at this time cry out for justice and seek truth.

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We pray for those who have power or who lead factions in civil strife that they may act for the welfare of all their people.

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Lord of creation and harmony,
All: graciously hear and renew us.

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This morning we have celebrated the Christian Gospel through the media of art, music and words.

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The chorale prelude heard in the address reminds us that when we are in deepest need and know not what to do, we may turn to you to help us in our affliction.

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We pray for those who are in trouble, in body, mind or spirit for whom words have failed and are in deepest need. May music speak for them and to them.

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Lord of creation and harmony,
All: graciously hear and renew us.

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We pray that creative arts may flourish and be a source of joy and expression of full experience of human life.

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In creativity may we be pilgrims on a journey beyond the written word, the played note or created work to engage with the Spirit behind it.

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May we be enabled to use colour, sound and silence in all its mystery to come closer to you.

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Lord of creation and harmony,
All: graciously hear and renew us.

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Our prayers we sum up in the words our Lord taught us:

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Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses,

as we forgive those who trespass against us,

and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory,

for ever and ever. Amen.

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So as we seek to bring in the kingdom in all its fullness we renew ourselves in our calling to praise and worship God, the sound and source of our salvation. ‘O praise ye the Lord, praise him in the height.’

Hymn: O praise ye the Lord (Laudate Dominum)

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Ian Browne:

As we pour out thanksgiving and song for God's love in creation so we pray that the same God will bless us with the grace of salvation, this day and evermore. Amen.

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Organ Voluntary: Herr Gott, dich linen alle wir (Iain Farrington)

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