by C J Strachan, The Daily Sceptic
Metropolitan Cathedral of the Most Precious Blood, informally known as Westminster Cathedral, is the largest Catholic church in England and Wales. It is dedicated to the Blood of Jesus Christ and is the seat of the Archbishop of Westminster.
There are times when the argument for Western civilisation does not require another book, another political speech or another furious exchange on social media; sometimes two minutes and twenty-three seconds of music can make the case rather better.
This is Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Exsultate Deo, sung by Westminster Cathedral Choir under Stephen Cleobury in 1982.
I have listened to many recordings of this piece over the years, including performances which are technically immaculate, but this remains my favourite. There is something about the Westminster Cathedral recording which seems to gather together several different strands of the European inheritance and make them momentarily audible as one thing; Hebrew poetry, Roman Christianity, Renaissance Italy, the ancient plainsong tradition of the Western Church and the peculiar genius of the English choral tradition all meet in a recording made in a Catholic cathedral in London by a choir whose history itself reaches backwards through the great cultural rupture of the English Reformation.
Palestrina was born Giovanni Pierluigi, probably in the 1520s, in the town of Palestrina near Rome, from which we derive the name by which he is now universally known. He lived through one of the great convulsions in European religious history – the Reformation and Catholic Reformation – and became perhaps the composer most closely associated with the musical culture of 16th-century Rome. He served at some of the greatest churches of the city, including St Peter’s, St John Lateran and Santa Maria Maggiore, and his enormous body of sacred music became one of the defining expressions of Renaissance Catholicism.
Exsultate Deo was published in 1584 in Palestrina’s fifth book of motets and is written for five voices. Its words come from Psalm 80 in the Vulgate numbering, Psalm 81 in most modern Bibles:
Exsultate Deo adiutori nostro; jubilate Deo Jacob. Sumite psalmum et date tympanum; psalterium jucundum cum cithara. Buccinate in neomenia tuba, insigni die solemnitatis vestrae.
Rejoice in God our helper; sing aloud to the God of Jacob. Take up the psalm and sound the timbrel; the pleasant psaltery with the harp. Blow the trumpet at the new moon, on the appointed day of your solemn feast.
That history is worth contemplating for a moment because it tells us something about what Western civilisation actually is. The words were already ancient when Christianity began; they emerged from the religious culture of Israel, were translated into Greek and Latin, became part of the prayer of the Christian Church, were sung for centuries in monasteries and churches across Europe and were then taken by an Italian Renaissance composer and transformed into polyphony of astonishing sophistication and beauty. Four centuries later that music was being sung in London by English boys and men inside a cathedral finally completed in 1906 by a Catholic community which had itself survived centuries of persecution, suppression and exclusion. Civilisation is cumulative in precisely this sense: each generation receives things which it did not create and could not recreate by itself, preserving some of them, changing others, and handing them onwards.