Michael Horsburgh: Orchestral Mass II

GOTTES ZEIT IST DIE ALLERBESTE ZEIT1
God’s Time is Best of All
A sermon preached by Associate Professor Michael Horsburgh AM in St James’
Church, King Street, Sydney, on the Third Sunday after Epiphany, 24 January 2016,
being the occasion of the orchestral performance of the Westminster Mass by Roxanna
Panufnik
I you will forgive my German pronunciation, I will tell you that this sermon is called, ‘Gottes
Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit’, which means, ‘God’s time is best of all’ and comes from the title
of J S Bach’s cantata, BWV106. Bach wrote this cantata for a funeral in about 1708, when he
was organist at the Divi Blasii Church in Mühlhausen.2 Bach suggests that, for all of us, God
determines the best time to live or to die. If our living or dying is in the hands of God, so also
are the years between.
Such a thought is appropriate for today’s Westminster Mass, composed by Roxanna Panufnik3
for the 75th birthday of the late Archbishop of Westminster, Basil Cardinal Hume4 It was first
performed, not on his actual birthday of 2 March 1998, but on the Feast of the Ascension, 21
May that year.5
In his homily on that occasion, making reference to the Ascension, Cardinal Hume said of his
cathedral, as we might say of this Parish Church of St James:
Our Cathedral of Westminster is proud of its choral tradition. It will always be a centre where
the genius of musicians and the skill of our singers will continue to sing the praises of God.
We have been well served, as you will know, by musicians of every age—and let me add—by
a new one this very day. May God richly reward her for what she has achieved, and we thank
her for enhancing our prayer. She is helping us to pierce in some manner that cloud which
separates us from Him, the Holy One to whom all glory and honour must be given.6
I want to talk to you this morning about God, time and music. As it happens, the idea of time
permeates today’s Bible readings, even if they do not refer directly to it. Nehemiah records
how his people were reminded of their historical inheritance in the law. Having just returned
from years of exile in Babylon, they sought to recover their identity. For the ancient Hebrews,
and for contemporary Australians, identity is the linking of the past to the present as a guide to
the future. The Psalmist, in Panufnik’s setting of Cardinal Hume’s choice for this mass, speaks
of his constant longing for God.7 St Paul describes a continuous interaction between the parts
of the body, an interaction that allows our ongoing life together. In the gospel reading, Jesus
brings an ancient prophecy to life in himself.
Some of you will remember a sketch by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in which a wealthy
industrialist, Peter Cook, tries to persuade an impoverished Welsh piano teacher, Dudley
1
Readings: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Psalm 63:1-8; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31; Luke 4:14-21
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottes_Zeit_ist_die_allerbeste_Zeit,_BWV_106
3
http://www.roxannapanufnik.com/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roxanna_Panufnik
4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Hume
5
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/happy-birthday-dear-cardinal-hume-1158725.html
6
The text of His Eminence’s homily was graciously given me by the composer, with the approval of the
Westminster Cathedral administration.
7
The setting of Psalm 63 was part of the Westminster Mass at Cardinal Hume’s request.
2
1
Moore, to teach him how to play Beethoven’s 5th Symphony on the piano in a week.8 The
absurdity of the proposition is resolved only when Cook buys Moore’s boasted “integrity” for
100 guineas an hour instead of Moore’s usual fee of 7/6; the equivalent of $A220 to 37 cents.
But time cannot be dispensed with at a whim nor purchased in this way.
Rowan Williams makes a similar suggestion in an address to the Three Choirs Festival:
Imagine, if you will, an advertisement for a new recording of the St Matthew Passion, or the
Magic Flute or Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony that ran something like this: ‘We all love the
great classics, but think how much of your busy life you can waste listening to slow recordings!
At last, thanks to the latest technology, we can offer you a recording that takes 10% less time
than any other on the market, with no reduction in musical quality …’
Would you rush out and buy it?9
Music, Williams suggests, takes time. We must stop and listen, just as the musicians must play
for the necessary time, not for the time the listener has available or is willing to expend.
Most of the contemporary masses that have been featured in our series have been written for
secular concert performances. Panufnik’s mass is the first in our series composed by a woman
but it is also unusual in that it was written specifically for the liturgy. Most of the composers
of our contemporary masses have not professed a direct Christian faith, even though their
spirituality comes through clearly in their compositions. Panufnik is a professed believer, who
says that she gives time to God. In an interview for the newsletter of the Basilica of St Anthony
of Padua in 2014, she said, in response to the question:
Do you find time to meet God in your busy days?
I always set aside time for God. I talk to God all the time, and my life is wonderful, but
sometimes I do experience difficulties; for instance, if one of my children is unhappy at school
or a close friend or relative is ill. However, I never stop praying.10
Not only that, Panufnik tells us that she composed the Westminster Mass only after theological
discussion and reflection and retreats with the Benedictine sisters of Stanbrook Abbey.11 This
is an important question for this morning. We, as worshippers, are encouraged not only to hear,
understand and appreciate the music but also to commit ourselves to the meaning of the text.
Such behaviours and not mutually exclusive but neither are they necessarily concurrent. For
them to occur, we need to devote time, not merely by being here, but by an intentional
mindfulness. Significantly, the Westminster Mass was composed without a setting for the
Creed. Roxanna Panufnik told me that this was to allow the congregation to make their own
declaration of faith, as we will shortly do ourselves.12
8
The sketch, originally for television, survives only in an audio version:
http://stabbers.truth.posiweb.net/stabbers/audio/disco/Peter_Cook_%2B_The_Clean_NOBA_Tapes_%2B_The_
Music_Teacher_%2B_wwwDOTstabbersDOTorg.mp3
9
Rowan Williams, ‘Keeping Time’, in Open to Judgement: Sermons and Addresses, London, Darton, Longman
and Todd, 1994, p. 247.
10
http://www.messengersaintanthony.com/messaggero/pagina_articolo.asp?IDX=693IDRX=184
11
Roxanna Panufnik, “Westminster Mass”, sleeve notes to Teldec recording 3984-28069-2, 1999
http://www.stanbrookabbey.org.uk/
12
Personal communication, 13 December 2015
2
On the other hand, we who believe should not presume a superiority when it comes to music.
As George Steiner suggests,
Music has long been, and continues to be, the unwritten theology of those who lack or reject
any formal creed.13
In that sense, music makes a bridge between those who believe and those who don’t. Maeve
Heaney, commenting further on this, suggests that “lived Christianity can and should create for
its time music that expresses and transmits the experience it is born of.”14 Thus she endorses
the importance of including a contemporary mass in each of our series. As if to complete this
argument, Panufnik’s Mass is in English and is thus contemporary in both text and
composition. We cannot retreat behind historically familiar cadences and behind the unknown
language of the past to avoid its content. We cannot, this morning, avoid the present time.
That’s all very well, but how does music help us to find God; in Cardinal Hume’s words, to
‘pierce the cloud’? If we think in terms of time: the time taken to compose, perform, listen to
and appreciate the music of, specifically, today’s Mass, how do we reach a God who is beyond
time? St Augustine of Hippo, in Book XI of his Confessions, argues in some detail that time
is itself a creation and that God exists outside it.15 It is only by accepting this that we can, for
example understand the Creed when it says that the Son is “begotten, not made”. Making is an
action in time and would result in a son who was a creature. The “begotten” one is before and
outside of time, which is the intended meaning of the Nicene Creed.
Can such a God be reached? Not without some initiating action from that God. God has
provided means, of which music is one, by which time can be breached. As Cardinal Hume
said in his homily,
Is there any excuse for failing to see or hear in what is good and beautiful something of God
who is Goodness and Beauty? Maybe there is. I do not know. It is clear to me, however, that
God is the prototype of all that is good and beautiful. He is the Artist who has created and
fashioned beauty in nature. He is the artist who has shared his skills and talents with sculptors,
painters, musicians. They create beauty and thus help us to contemplate in their work, the
beauty of God. Their works are hints of his glory. … Music is a message from the beauty which
God is, to delight the ear and mind of the listener.
In the Westminster Mass, the use of bells and harps lifts today’s music to another height, almost
transcending time itself. In the composer’s words to me, they give a “luminosity to the
sound”.16 Yet, to appreciate this, we must still take the necessary time. Paradoxically,
therefore, we must use time to transcend time. We must use time to reach the timeless. I began
with the thought that God’s time is best of all. It follows from this that time spent in knowing
God is time well spent. Knowing God is the invitation of this Eucharist, of this orchestral mass,
of this present time.
The last words belong to the two archbishops from whom I have already quoted. First, Basil
Hume:
13
14
15
16
George Steiner, Real Presences, Faber and Faber, 2010, p. 218
Maeve Heaney, Music as Theology: What Music Says about the Word, Pickwick Publications, 2012, p. 8
http://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confessions.xiv.html
Personal communication, 15 December 2015
3
Music carries hearts and minds, as if borne on eagle’s wings, to rise above the immediate and
its concerns to another and different experience, a holy one.
Second, Rowan Williams:
To listen seriously to music and to perform it are among our most potent ways of learning what
it is to live with and before God, learning a service that is perfect freedom. …
The authority of music, what silences and holds us, is, then, one of the fullest parables we have
of the authority of God; not in commanding and imposing from outside, but in asking for our
time, so that it can become a time of mending and building.17
Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit.
Roxanna Panufnik
17
Basil Cardinal Hume OSB
Williams, pp. 249-250
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