If music be the food of love

I read somewhere that music is the last thing to be erased from human memory and that Alzheimer patients can still actually identify pieces even when the disease is so far advanced that tragically they fail to recognise their nearest and dearest.

What powerful emotions music evokes! Ever since some caveman sorted out a rhythmic pattern while he idly knocked some kindling sticks together, man has thrived on the sounds that are produced from the various instruments he has devised. Possibly so delighted was our caveman with his tattoo for sticks and stones that as he crowed with delight he echoed its rhythm and discovered the song!

After that there was no turning back. There is something divine about the quality of good music that uplifts the listener out of the humdrum workaday world to one that is as impalpable as the air we breathe.

Of the arts, music is the most alluring and the most elusive. We are never without it. In Tolkien's Silmarillion we are told that the Ainu created the world through their music while those who believe await an afterlife filled with the ineffable sound of angelic choirs and harps.

In the scriptures King David was undoubtedly the greatest musician; this giant-killer, indelibly immortalised in marble by Michelangelo, had no qualms about breaking into song and dance whenever the mood took him. Most successful organisations and movements throughout history have used music to further their cause.

I was zapping moodily through my 56 cable channels the other day when I came across a documentary about the life of Albert Speer, the architect whose vision for a Greater Germany mirrored Hitler's in the positive sense.

We were shown footage of the great Nuremberg rallies of the 1930s and what were they playing? Wagner, of course; the most passionately gorgeous passages of Parsifal and Gotterdammerung. Even if one knows absolutely nothing about music, or cannot identify Wagner from the Rolling Stones, the emotion stirred up by Wagner's magnificent music cannot but move a nation to fever pitch!

The music drove the message home. The German people had overcome the tribulations of defeat in The Great War and would lead Europe and the world to a Valhalla. Tragically the message got distorted and the result was World War Two and the tainting of Wagner's music for decades after that.

Religion also uses music to underscore its messages. Composers have been writing Masses, Requiems, Magnificats, Te Deums, Sequences and Hymns for centuries for Church use.

The greatest of all religious composers was a Lutheran, Johan Sebastian Bach. What music can outdo the sheer pathos of a well executed Bach Chorale? The Bachian legacy is prodigious and unsurpassed. This is why it is such a pity that, by and large, Church music in Malta is so mediocre. Not for lack of composers mind you, but because so few of our parishes bother about it.

A screechy old biddy accompanying herself on a wheezy harmonium occasionally joined by a tone-deaf celebrant on his ubiquitous microphone is certainly not my idea of a spiritual uplift.

To get somewhere close to that one must either go to St John's Co-Cathedral for 9 a.m. Mass on Sunday to listen to Dion Buhagiar's choir or traipse off to St George's Basilica, in Victoria for 11 a.m. Mass to be enchanted by the Laudate Pueri choir led by Maria Frendo.

St Julian's parish church is the only other church I know of which once had a thriving huge choir and, most beautiful of all, a children's choir, Cantori Sancti Juliani. Their performance of Faure's Messe Basse for voce bianche was unforgettable.

I clearly remember my prep years at St Aloysius' College when during our daily Mass we sung hymns like Soul of My Saviour and Sweet Sacrament Divine; the melodies of which still can bring tears to my eyes; not only because of the ethereal quality of the music but also because of the beauty of the lyrics.

All this has been replaced by a great deal of mournful dirges and nasal folk-Masses accompanied by children strumming four or five endlessly repetitive chords on suffering guitars. Is this all that Vatican Two has brought to our forsaken island?

It is high time that the Maltese Church set up a sort of culture ministry within the Curia to look after these things. The Church still owns the most precious and irreplaceable collection of sacred music in Malta at the Cathedral Museum.

Works by Azopardo, Balsani and Abos, to name but a few, vie with those of their most renowned contemporaries on the continent. Most of our wonderful organs lie silent in their ornate baroque sarcophagi in many churches in Malta and Gozo; neglected and deteriorating to a point of no return. All this while the only singing to be had is the aforementioned pathetic caterwauling that is supposed to enhance and beautify the service.

The only time parishes in Malta make an effort is at festa time when a quartet of singers accompanied by a chamber orchestra of varying size is recruited to play during the various vespers and Masses that are an integral part of a village feast. That most of the village seems to prefer the stirring marches played by the band outside while indulging in a bacchanalia of rugby-like scrums and beer swilling is another matter altogether but does say a lot about the quality of the "serious" music that is on offer. It is all so pedestrian.

One of the "musts" every time I am in London is Mass at Brompton Oratory. The service is in Latin and the music absolutely celestial.

The last time I was there they performed Mozart's Coronation Mass! Can one beat that? If only there were a serious move to promote religious music that is utilised as it should be in Malta. Sadly whenever such music is performed it is not part of the service that it was originally destined as being part and parcel of but performed as an abstract entity. Nothing wrong with that; however, can you just imagine how wonderful it would be to one day go to a Sunday Mass in any church and experience some Bach chorales at the very least? A Haydn or Mozart Mass? A Vivaldi Gloria? I suppose I would have to be in Heaven before a dream like that can become reality.

kzt@onvol.net