Western Civilisation is Worth Saving

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.

We have become strangely accustomed to talking about Western civilisation principally through its failures, as though the civilisation which produced the modern Western world were essentially an indictment awaiting prosecution. There are failures enough, certainly; human beings are involved, and therefore there always will be. Yet this relentless excavation of guilt has produced a peculiar inability to recognise inheritance, and the things we inherit include languages, institutions, law, music, architecture, literature, philosophy, customs and moral assumptions which are the accumulated product of people separated from us by centuries, most of whose names we will never know.

A cathedral choir is a particularly wonderful example because it cannot really be invented overnight. Westminster Cathedral Choir was founded at the beginning of the 20th Century, but the tradition upon which it drew was vastly older. Its first Master of Music, Sir Richard Terry, devoted himself to recovering the neglected music of the English Renaissance, bringing composers such as Tallis, Byrd and Sheppard back into the living liturgical tradition alongside Gregorian chant and the continental polyphonists. George Malcolm subsequently developed the extraordinary, brilliant Westminster sound of the boys’ voices; later came Colin Mawby, Stephen Cleobury, David Hill, James O’Donnell and others. The choir exists because knowledge is transmitted: one generation teaches another how to breathe, how to phrase, how to pronounce, how to listen, how to stand, how to read music, how to shape a line and, above all, how to subordinate the individual voice sufficiently that something greater can emerge from all of them.

That principle becomes audible from the beginning of the recording. Exsultate Deo adiutori nostro. The individual voices are perfectly distinguishable and yet none is attempting to dominate; Palestrina constructs the music through their relationship with one another, as a phrase appears in one part and is answered elsewhere and the musical argument moves between the voices until something exists which could not possibly be produced by any one of them alone. Its richness depends upon difference, discipline, relationship and order, and there is an entire theory of civilisation contained within it if we are prepared to listen.

The 1982 recording is particularly interesting because Stephen Cleobury occupied an unusual position in the history of Westminster Cathedral Choir. He was the first Anglican to become its Master of Music and had been formed within the great English collegiate choral tradition. Westminster itself possessed another inheritance, developed particularly under George Malcolm, whose more brilliant and forceful continental sound had deliberately distinguished the Cathedral from the restrained style associated with many Anglican foundations. Under Cleobury those traditions met, and the result is audible in the extraordinary attention given to the words. The consonants have weight and the Latin is never allowed simply to dissolve into a beautiful cloud of sound. Exsultate. Rejoice. Jubilate. Sing aloud. Buccinate. Blow the trumpet. The music is beautiful, certainly, but it is proclaiming something, and Cleobury allows the text to propel the music forwards; at buccinate in neomenia tuba the voices almost become the trumpet of the Psalm itself.

This is one of the characteristics I love about the English choral tradition, with its insistence that sacred music contains words and that the words mean something; diction matters because meaning matters. The continental tradition, including that associated with the great Roman and papal choirs, has often produced a different sound – smoother in its lines and less aggressive in its consonants – allowing voices to merge into an almost architectural body of sound in which the polyphony can seem to float above the listener and the individual human voices disappear into something larger and almost incorporeal. It can be extraordinarily beautiful. Westminster has a different quality; there is light in it, but also bone, and perhaps that is why this particular recording has stayed with me for so long.

There is another historical irony here. Much of what we now think of as the English cathedral choral tradition had to be recovered and rebuilt. The religious upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries shattered an enormous amount of musical continuity; medieval English Catholicism had possessed an extraordinarily sophisticated musical culture, and the Reformation destroyed institutions, dispersed libraries, ended foundations and rendered vast quantities of sacred music unusable. Yet fragments survived, manuscripts survived and traditions survived in altered form. The Anglican choral foundations preserved and subsequently developed elements of the older English inheritance, while the Catholic revival of the 19th Century and the foundation of Westminster Cathedral created the circumstances in which Catholic England could begin consciously recovering what had been lost.

By 1982, therefore, we arrive at something rather wonderful: Palestrina, the supreme composer of the Roman Catholic Renaissance, being sung in Westminster Cathedral by a Catholic choir under an Anglican Master of Music, using musical disciplines shaped by traditions which had spent centuries developing separately after having originated in the same medieval Christian civilisation. There is something of Western civilisation itself in that convergence – an inheritance formed through Greek philosophy and Roman law, Jerusalem and Athens, Christianity and classical learning, medieval monasteries and Renaissance workshops, universities and parliaments, painters, masons, philosophers, scientists and composers; it has been accumulated over centuries by innumerable men and women who received things from those who came before them, added something of their own and handed them onwards because they understood that inheritance carries obligations as well as benefits.

Preservation has never required cultural embalming. Palestrina was himself an innovator working within an inherited tradition; Terry recovered forgotten music, Malcolm changed the sound of Westminster Cathedral Choir and Cleobury brought another musical inheritance into it. Tradition survives because each generation receives something, inhabits it and then passes it onwards, while the failure of that process produces cultural amnesia rather than liberation from the past.

That is what worries me about our present moment. We have become exceptionally good at teaching people how to interrogate their inheritance and remarkably bad at teaching them how to love it. Children can leave education knowing a great deal about the sins committed by Western societies while knowing almost nothing about the civilisation in which those sins were recognised as sins; they can discuss empire without knowing Augustine, inequality without knowing Aquinas, patriarchy without knowing Dante, power without knowing Shakespeare, religious conflict without knowing Bach, Byrd or Palestrina. We are producing generations equipped with a prosecutor’s brief against their ancestors but increasingly unable to recognise what their ancestors actually gave them.

It is worth listening again to those two minutes and twenty-three seconds and considering what had to happen for that recording to exist. An ancient people had to compose the Psalm; Christianity had to carry it into Europe; Latin had to become the common language of the Western Church; musical notation had to develop sufficiently for increasingly complex compositions to be preserved; monastic and cathedral institutions had to sustain generations of professional musicians; Renaissance Italy had to possess the prosperity, education and religious culture capable of supporting a man like Palestrina, and his music then had to survive the centuries which followed. The English choral tradition had to survive Reformation, civil war, religious persecution, industrialisation and two world wars; English Catholicism had to emerge from the catacombs and build Westminster Cathedral; Cardinal Vaughan had to decide that his new cathedral required a great choir; Richard Terry had to recover forgotten Renaissance music; George Malcolm had to reinvent the sound of that choir; a succession of teachers had to train generation after generation of boys, parents had to entrust their children to the discipline of a choir school, and musicians had to devote their lives to mastering a craft which cannot be learned in an afternoon. Eventually, on June 25th 1982, some microphones were placed inside Westminster Cathedral, Cleobury raised his hands, the choir breathed and the ancient words sounded again: Exsultate Deo. Rejoice in God.

I think Westminster Cathedral Choir is the finest ecclesiastical choir in the world. That is obviously a personal judgement and there are magnificent rivals, but I return to Westminster because there is something in its sound which seems to contain the civilisation that produced it: Roman and English, Catholic and shaped through encounter with Anglican England, ancient and modern, disciplined without becoming sterile, beautiful without becoming merely decorative.

We hear a great deal today about saving Western civilisation, usually in political terms, and politics certainly matters because institutions and laws matter; civilisation, however, exists considerably deeper than politics and cannot be preserved merely by winning elections. Its survival depends upon remembering it, teaching it, maintaining it and refusing to be embarrassed by its achievements; upon saving libraries and churches, teaching children old poems, reading books whose authors have been dead for five hundred years, maintaining rituals whose origins we may no longer entirely understand, preserving beautiful buildings even when a cheaper concrete one would perform the same practical function, teaching Latin, Greek, music and history and continuing to sing Palestrina. Every civilisation eventually entrusts its inheritance to another generation, and its future depends upon whether that generation considers what it has received worth the trouble of understanding, preserving and handing onwards. When I listen to Exsultate Deo, and particularly to this extraordinary recording made at Westminster more than 40 years ago, my answer is very simple: I do.

C.J. Strachan is the pseudonym of a concerned Scot who worked for 30 years as a Human Resources executive in some of the UK’s leading organisations. Subscribe to his Substack page.