Anybody who has had but the slightest involvement with the musical life of his church, be he so high as music director, master of all he surveys (in theory, at least), or but a lowly bass, propping up the sopranos’ antics, will be keenly cognisant of the key question: what on earth do we perform next?
The active repertoire of parish churches across this country is limited to 50, perhaps 100 at a push, Mass settings and anthems. Depending on your priest’s proclivities you will, if lucky, be fed a steady diet of Palestrina, Monteverdi, Byrd and Tallis, with iridescent splashes of Haydn and Mozart on feast days. Should you be exceptionally lucky, which in this instance means being possessed of a fine organ, finer choir and yet finer still attention span, one of Bruckner’s sublime Masses will enter your liturgical life and become embedded firmly. There is, it must be admitted, a sigh-making inevitability to our musical accompaniment each Sunday morning. As my colleague Damian Thompson has noted before, it can be yet another reason for one’s heartiest response being to Ite, missa est.
