Discussions of the Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan (b. 1959) inevitably include recognition of his devout Catholicism and its impact on his musical oeuvre. Yet, the very frequency with which this acknowledgement appears belies the often cursory treatment of MacMillan’s intertwining of music and Catholic theology – even in a case where the commentator claims, ‘It is as a composer of sacred music that James MacMillan […] deserves serious consideration.’Footnote 1 In some respects this situation is mirrored in struggles to establish a consistent relationship between Christian theology and music. Despite well-known pronouncements such as George Steiner’s characterization of music as ‘unwritten theology’ and efforts by scholars such as Jon Michael Spencer (who advocates a ‘theomusicology’) and Jeremy Begbie (who positions music as a unique framework for understanding Christian doctrine), theology and musicology often exist only uncomfortably together in contemporary Anglophone scholarship.Footnote 2 The relative lack of theologically orientated scholarship within musicology results in a distorted view of theologically informed composers and musical practices. In contrast, this article considers the theological foundations of MacMillan’s work as a means of enriching musicological interpretation.
The mixture of copious citation with little deeper engagement evident in commentary on MacMillan’s religiosity also extends to some of the more unusual expressions MacMillan uses to communicate his musical goals. These include one of the composer’s most striking descriptions of his compositional process, relating it to the theologically charged concept of transubstantiation. In Catholic theology, transubstantiation refers to the moment when the sacramental bread and wine of the Eucharist are changed into the real body and blood of Christ. To use it as a description of compositional practice, as MacMillan does, is to align the poietic process of composition with the sacrament of the Eucharist, and thus with a distinctively eucharistic logic and practice. Together with other signifiers of religious experience in both the promotion and the reception of MacMillan’s work, this primes audiences to experience MacMillan’s music as theologically significant by positioning both composer and music in a distinctively religious sphere. A lack of critical engagement with this specifically Catholic theological term thus hampers the broader interpretation of the composer’s work; beyond a richer understanding of MacMillan’s compositions and their reception, resolving the connections between theological and musical transubstantiation points towards a reconsideration of Denys Turner’s claim that music is ‘proto-typically “Eucharistic”’.Footnote 3 Moreover, if transubstantiation is seen as a conceptual metaphor – something we think with and through – rather than a heightened synonym for change, detailing the term’s eucharistic implications will shed light on how music and theology are mutually disclosive.
Accordingly, I trace aspects of transubstantiation through three distinct levels: religious rituals, musical materials and the spaces, sounds and paratexts of performance. I position MacMillan’s musical transubstantiation both as a facet of reworking compositional traditions via the deliberate resituating of borrowed musical materials and as a redescription and extension of the liturgy within the secular space of the concert hall.Footnote 4 Throughout I focus on MacMillan’s 2009 choral composition Miserere – and especially on its associations with the seventeenth-century composition of the same title by Gregorio Allegri – as an example of how this process is worked out in (and beyond) sound.Footnote 5 By lifting the scriptural text from the liturgy and refashioning it for extraliturgical performance, MacMillan invokes religious traditions, while his engagement with Allegri’s Miserere reinterprets the tradition of confessional performance for a secular space. This in turn illuminates how sacred music ‘carries the liturgy and theology behind [it]’ even as it takes on new layers of meaning in contemporary performance.Footnote 6 In the case of MacMillan, Miserere might be said to transubstantiate music and rituals drawn from the past and to reinscribe them for the present.
Transubstantiation and transformation in the Eucharist
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Eucharist was instituted by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper as a memorial of his death and resurrection. Biblical accounts of the institution are found in 1 Corinthians and in the synoptic Gospels, while the second-century writer Justin Martyr describes an early Mass as including elements familiar from eucharistic celebrations today.Footnote 7 It is ‘the source and summit of all Christian life’ and the church’s pre-eminent sacrament (itself a term meaning a rite endowed with particular significance as a sign that brings about spiritual grace). In this context, transubstantiation describes the Catholic understanding about what happens during the celebration of the Eucharist, namely ‘the change of the whole substance of bread into the substance of the Body of Christ and of the whole substance of wine into the substance of his Blood’.Footnote 8 Although there have been subsequent alterations, the doctrine of transubstantiation was fleshed out by Thomas Aquinas, who drew on an Aristotelian metaphysics that conceives of everything as a composite of matter and form (hylomorphism).Footnote 9 This allowed Aquinas to distinguish between the ordinary transformation of one substance into another, in which the matter remains while its form changes (for example, flour and water become bread), and transubstantiation, in which the entire matter–form composite becomes another being. In other words, transubstantiation signifies that the substance changes while its accidents (‘incidental’ features such as appearance and chemical composition) are unchanged.
In the Eucharist, transubstantiation is effected by divine action via the intercession of the priest. By partaking of the eucharistic bread and wine transubstantiated into body and blood, communicants participate in the life and death of Christ in such a way as to make real, lasting change in their lives. The mystical process of transubstantiation leads to a personal transformation that is at once spiritual and yet anchored in the material processes of eating and drinking.Footnote 10 This is, according to Adam Glover, evidence of a distinctively sacramental logic in which ‘the spiritual reveals itself in the material [… and] the material, in its turn, functions as a symbol or sacrament of the spiritual’.Footnote 11
Furthermore, this generation of spiritual life through the materiality of the Eucharist is predicated on its ability to disrupt the temporality of ordinary life by transforming the past: it is
the memorial of Christ’s Passover, the making present and the sacramental offering of his unique sacrifice […] In the sense of Sacred Scripture the memorial is not merely the recollection of past events [… but] in the liturgical celebration of these events they become in a certain way present and real … [The Eucharist] … re-presents (makes present) the sacrifice of the cross.Footnote 12
As this short excerpt from the Catechism suggests, the Eucharist is a repeated process of making the past (once-and-for-all) event of Christ’s Passover newly present to participants. For the communicant, entry into the liturgical time marked out by the eucharistic ritual is not only a moment of remembering the past historical moment of Christ’s death but also of recognition of his resurrected and continuing life in the present. This is made explicit in the emphasis on the presence of Christ in the transubstantiated bread and wine and the widespread acknowledgement that each celebration of the Eucharist is linked to every other such celebration – or, as Matthew Ward quotes Cardinal Josef Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI): ‘The celebration of the Eucharist is not just a meeting of heaven and earth; rather it is also a meeting of the Church then and now and a meeting of the Church here and there.’Footnote 13 This collapsing of time and space imparts to the Eucharist a transcendental quality of timelessness that emphasizes the conjunction of past, present and future within its sacrificial narrative.
Transubstantiation is thus the driving force behind the transformational aspects of the Eucharist. Through its intimate association with a ritual in which the physical and spiritual co-inhere and Christ’s Passion is reinscribed in liturgical time, transubstantiation transforms time and space at the point where divine action and priestly intercession meet.Footnote 14 Glover further extends the importance of eucharistic transubstantiation by arguing that through the event of transubstantiation the sign of the Eucharist comes to be identical with its meaning: ‘In the case of the Eucharist […] the material signifier is the meaning and does not merely point to it.’Footnote 15 In Glover’s argument, this semiotic convergence provides a connection with music’s own coincidence of signifier and signified. While I will not take up the intricacies of Glover’s case here, the multiple points of connection he traces between musical practice and the Eucharist nonetheless suggest that the importation of the concept of transubstantiation into music signifies more than simply a descriptive flourish. Thinking of transubstantiation as a metaphor that provides a necessary theological and conceptual backdrop for MacMillan’s music suggests a new perspective on how his music comes to share in the term’s theological connotations.
The Eucharist in music
As the Catechism makes clear, transubstantiation lies at the heart of the Eucharist’s sacramental anamnesis (recollection) of the Passion, and for MacMillan its theological implications are intertwined with his understanding of musical value. In a 1997 interview with Julian Johnson and Catherine Sutton, MacMillan situates transubstantiation within his compositional practice by claiming:
The reason I write music has a lot to do with extra-musical stimulus and the big struggle is to bring about a transubstantiation of that stimulus into music, without diminishing either. The two substances, the music and the extra-musical, are still quite clearly what they are but have in some way become each other, have merged, or have a much more integral relationship than they had before the music was written.Footnote 16
More recently, he has connected his use of the language of transubstantiation with a ‘mystical concept of reality’ and the ‘very clear connections, analogies and parallels’ between composition and spiritual language.Footnote 17 This suggests that for MacMillan there are multiple layers to transubstantiation – at once a theological concept that describes a mystery at the centre of Catholic life and an example of a customary pattern of thinking that allows for transference between processes of artistic creation and mystical reality.
The importance of eucharistic transubstantiation in MacMillan’s work has not gone unnoticed in recent years: Ward has written on how the composer invokes in his Symphony no. 4 the ‘out of time’ quality of the Eucharist to compress multiple timescapes into a single, quasi-liturgical musical moment, while Séan Doherty has analysed the same work in terms of a transubstantiation of the Mass liturgy via quotation and allusion.Footnote 18 On a more abstract level, Richard McGregor has deconstructed the ‘corporality’ of the Veni, veni, Emmanuel plainchant as the inspiration for MacMillan’s percussion concerto of the same title.Footnote 19 All of these interpretations recognize the connections between MacMillan’s music and Catholic sacramental theology, although they do not unfold music’s relationship to sacrament in any detail. Yet understanding how music might participate in this theology seems critical for understanding the ‘connections, analogies and parallels’ between MacMillan’s music and the religious language in which it is caught up.Footnote 20 One convincing avenue for exploration is through the relationship between music and the liturgy. Edward Foley and Judith Kubicki both argue that liturgical music’s function as a symbol for the liturgy’s theological realities means that the music is properly understood as sacramental itself.Footnote 21 Whether extraliturgical music could be considered sacramental in precisely the same way seems doubtful, but as the analyses by Doherty, McGregor and Ward suggest, the relationship between liturgical and non-liturgical (or sacramental and non-sacramental) in MacMillan’s music may be less clear-cut than initially presumed. This is particularly evident in the case of his Miserere, as a composition that engages deeply with liturgical traditions, indicating that Turner’s claim that music is ‘proto-typically “Eucharistic”’ must be fleshed out with a contextual analysis of these components in MacMillan’s thinking.
Arising from this, transubstantiation within MacMillan’s compositional practice signifies three distinct practices of integrating the musical and the extramusical. First, it refers to music’s invocation of the timelessness of eucharistic ritual and formal liturgical structures through its re-presentation of older materials. Peeling back the layers of signification that underlie MacMillan’s persistent return to the central points of Christian belief reveals a productive juxtaposition of past and present that ‘bring[s] together the timeless and the contemporary’.Footnote 22 Secondly, and most audibly, it is grounded in his characteristic weaving together of musical materials and influences from diverse sources such that ‘within the body of music, within the “stuff” of music there is this continual transformation […] of materials beginning to turn into, not something else but maybe a heightened version of themselves’.Footnote 23 This transformational change of physical materials is such that they acquire significance beyond that of their original forms in a process that might be seen as analogous to the transubstantiation of bread and wine. Thirdly, by foregrounding specific rituals and theological positions within a spiritual narrative, musical transubstantiation reinforces the potential for music to effect transformational change in its audiences.Footnote 24 This last point is the most abstract, and bears a strong resemblance to the positioning of art as a replacement religion (or, indeed, Steiner’s unwritten theology);Footnote 25 yet, in this case it makes a claim for the reinvigoration of both religious and aesthetic sensibilities rather than a replacement of one by the other. More importantly, connecting the language of musical transubstantiation and artistic transformation shapes the perception of MacMillan as distinctively theologically attuned and his work as especially spiritually efficacious – at least for certain segments of his audience.
MacMillan’s metaphorical use of transubstantiation as a term to describe his compositions indicates that his music serves as eucharistic practice in the sense that it bodies forth something of the role of the Eucharist in the church, even as it may be seen as practice for the Eucharist in that its performance is preparation for the ritual experience of transcendence and transformation that the Eucharist implies. Taken together, this suggests that both the poietic and performative aspects of music can be seen as enacting something of the eucharistic mystery. The equivocation of this wording reflects the challenges attending this analysis. The eucharistic understanding of transubstantiation relies on a distinction between the apparent features of bread and wine and their true nature in the eucharistic moment as Christ’s body and blood. It is this change that allows those who fully participate in the ritual to be changed in their turn.Footnote 26 Applying this eucharistic model to music runs into difficulty almost immediately: how is matter distinguished from form? What is music’s substance? How might consuming music change an audience? Is the composer analogous to the priest? Such a literal approach seems both overly constrained and prone to serious theological misadventure; instead, musical transubstantiation illuminates how the Eucharist serves as a foundational interpretative image for MacMillan. MacMillan’s music can bring together the formal ritual structures and musical materials of the Catholic Church and re-present them in ways that interpret music alongside theological concepts.
This understanding of a musical transubstantiation fits with the commentary offered by the Dominican friar Gilbert Márkus on the nature of art:
It’s about how art transforms, taking the substance of daily life and offering a symbol which transforms and transubstantiates the patterns of human toil and loss. That’s very much what goes on in the Eucharist. The bread and wine continue to be white and crumbly and alcoholic, but what is present is something new, a radical new creation. People are still unemployed and their marriages are breaking up and people are dying and everything is the same, and yet everything is different through this ritual transformation, or artistic transformation.Footnote 27
There is evident slippage here (also present in MacMillan’s various formulations) between ideas of transformation and transubstantiation that reflect a broader understanding of transubstantiation as making something new, different and – crucially – efficacious. These strong and weak senses of transubstantiation are folded into one another, and keeping these mutually constitutive aspects in view is key for a full understanding of MacMillan’s terminology.
Márkus suggests that transubstantiation is part of a general aestheticizing or edifying function of art, but MacMillan’s compositions aim to be more than a means of material transformation or an aesthetic experience that offers temporary relief from or reinterpretation of human suffering. The liturgical and theological references they carry assert the composition and performance of music as a moment in which the spiritually efficacious rituals and traditions of the Christian church are reinterpreted and reinscribed within contemporary listening practices. In the remainder of this article I demonstrate how MacMillan’s Miserere offers a particularly powerful example of how extraliturgical music might participate in quasi-sacramental transubstantiation by bringing the time, rituals, spaces and musical practices of Catholic Christianity into being in new and importantly displaced ways.Footnote 28 This displacement offers a deeper understanding of MacMillan’s curious theological terminology and its musical import.
Performing rituals and MacMillan’s Miserere
In his programme note accompanying the percussion concerto Veni, veni, Emmanuel (1992), MacMillan sets out two potential avenues for interpretation: ‘On one level it is a purely abstract work in which all the musical material is drawn from the 15th century French Advent plainchant. On another level it is a musical exploration of the theology behind the Advent message.’Footnote 29 Like this earlier work, his Miserere is interpretable on different levels, but separating the musical material and the theology behind it is not as easy as MacMillan seems to suggest, nor are the divisions between interpretations quite so neat. In particular, MacMillan’s invocation of the Eucharist as part of his compositional process demands further exploration of the relationship between Catholic theology, liturgy and music. Tracing Miserere’s heritage through its choice of text, musical allusions and performance traditions reveals how it is anchored in the musico-liturgical context of Good Friday, and thus participates in its sacramental and theological character.
Psalm-setting and the liturgy
The ritual role of text is of particular significance to MacMillan: Patrick Russill considers him to use text ‘not as half-understood symbols of some dimly remembered religious cultural phenomenon, but as powerful theological statements whose resonance is increased by their life in continuing ritual activity’.Footnote 30 Miserere sets the text of Psalm 51 (50), also known from its incipit as the ‘Miserere mei’.Footnote 31 Together with Psalm 130 (129) (‘De profundis’), Psalm 51 (50) is the most famous of the seven psalms known since at least the sixth century as the Penitential Psalms or Psalms of Confession.Footnote 32 Traditionally attributed to King David, the psalm’s superscription notes that he composed this psalm ‘when Nathan the prophet came unto him after he had gone into Bathsheba’, but the text does not depict this incident directly, instead presenting a sophisticated and affecting plea for divine forgiveness.Footnote 33 Although Psalm 51 (50) shares its first-person perspective with a number of other psalms, it is the only penitential psalm that explicitly portrays the psalmist in the act of confession, giving it a remarkably intimate character.
The psalm can be roughly divided into two sections, with verses 3–14 representing the psalmist’s confessions of sin and pleas for pardon (see Table 1).Footnote 34 The remaining seven verses evince a distinct change in attitude, with the speaker joyfully anticipating forgiveness. This latter section can be further subdivided into an assured expectation of personal deliverance in verses 15–19 and the collective or national deliverance anticipated in verses 20 and 21. The passion of this supplication gives the psalm a keen edge, often achieved through successive chiastic parallelisms that compound the emotional character of the text. For example, in verse 3 the psalmist reinforces his request for God’s intervention: first, ‘Have mercy on me, O God’, and then ‘blot out my iniquity’. This is immediately followed by a twofold entreaty for purification in verse 4. The depth and range of the poetic text have led to the psalm being a frequent part of Christian services centred on penance and forgiveness, and it is especially associated in the Roman Catholic tradition with Ash Wednesday and the Lenten season of preparation that follows. It is centrally embedded in Christian narratives of confession and redemption; any musical setting of this iconic text necessarily partakes in the palimpsest of meanings that have accrued to it.
TABLE 1 PSALM 51 (50), VERSES 3–21 IN LATIN AND ENGLISH (DOUAY-RHEIMS TRANSLATION)
| SECTION 1: CONFESSION OF SIN | |
|---|---|
| 3 Miserere mei, Deus, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam: et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum, dele iniquitatem meam. | 3 Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy great mercy. And according to the multitude of thy tender mercies blot out my iniquity. |
| 4 Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea: et a peccato meo munda me. | 4 Wash me yet more from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. |
| 5 Quoniam iniquitatem meam ego cognosco: et peccatum meum contra me est semper. | 5 For l know my iniquity, and my sin is ever before me. |
| 6 Tibi soli peccavi, et malum coram te feci: ut justificeris in sermonibus tuis, et vincas cum judicaris. | 6 Against thee only have l sinned, and have done evil before thee: that thou mayst be justified in thy words, and mayst overcome when thou art judged. |
| 7 Ecce enim in iniquitatibus conceptus sum: et in peccatis concepit me mater mea. | 7 For behold, l was conceived in iniquities; and in sins did my mother conceive me. |
| 8 Ecce enim veritatem dilexisti: incerta et occulta sapientiae tuae manifestasti mihi. | 8 For behold, thou hast loved truth: the uncertain and hidden things of thy wisdom thou hast made manifest to me. |
| 9 Asperges me hyssopo, et mundabor:lavabis me, et super nivem dealbabor. | 9 Thou shalt sprinkle me with hyssop, and I shall be cleansed: thou shalt wash me, and I shall be made whiter than snow. |
| 10 Auditui meo dabis gaudium et laetitiam: et exsultabunt ossa humiliata. | 10 To my hearing thou shalt give joy and gladness: and the bones that have been humbled shall rejoice. |
| 11 Averte faciem tuam a peccatis meis: et omnes iniquitates meas dele. | 11 Turn away thy face from my sins, and blot out all my iniquities. |
| 12 Cor mundum crea in me, Deus: Et spiritum rectum innova in visceribus meis. | 12 Create a clean heart in me, O God: and renew a right spirit within my bowels. |
| 13 Ne projicias me a facie tua: et spiritum sanctum tuum ne auferas a me. | 13 Cast me not away from thy face; and take not thy holy spirit from me. |
| 14 Redde mihi laetitiam salutaris tui: et spiritu principali confirma me. | 14 Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation, and strengthen me with a perfect spirit. |
| SECTION 2A: EXPECTATION OF DELIVERANCE | |
| 15 Docebo iniquos vias tuas: et impii ad te convertentur. | 15 I will teach the unjust thy ways; and the wicked shall be converted to thee. |
| 16 Libera me de sanguinibus, Deus, Deus salutis meae: et exsultabit lingua mea justitiam tuam. | 16 Deliver me from blood, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall extol thy justice. |
| 17 Domine, labia mea aperies: et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam. | 17 O Lord, thou wilt open my lips, and my mouth shall declare thy praise. |
| 18 Quoniam si voluisses sacrificium, dedissem utique: holocaustis non delectaberis. | 18 For if thou hadst desired sacrifice, l would indeed have given it: with burnt offerings thou wilt not be delighted. |
| 19 Sacrificium Deo spiritus contribulatus: cor contritum, et humiliatum, Deus, non despicies. | 19 A sacrifice to God is an afflicted spirit: a contrite and humbled heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. |
| SECTION 2B: NATIONAL REDEMPTION | |
| 20 Benigne fac, Domine, in bona voluntate tua Sion: ut aedificentur muri Jerusalem. | 20 Deal favourably, O Lord, in thy good will with Sion; that the walls of Jerusalem may be built up. |
| 21 Tunc acceptabis sacrificium justitiae, oblationes, et holocausta: tunc imponent super altare tuum vitulos. | 21 Then shalt thou accept the sacrifice of justice, oblations and whole burnt offerings; then shall they lay calves upon thine altar. |
In addition to the multiple resonances of the text, we must consider the long tradition of musical settings when evaluating the background of Psalm 51 (50). MacMillan’s composition exists within a group of settings of this text that includes influential works by Josquin des Prez, Orlando de Lassus, Jean-Baptiste Lully, Wolfgang Mozart, Charles Gounod and Arvo Pärt. These efforts notwithstanding, the musical subgenre of ‘Miserere mei’ settings is dominated by that of Allegri. Allegri, a singer in the papal choir from 1629 until his death in 1652, would probably have been relegated to a minor footnote in musical history were it not for the pervasive influence of the work that made him a one-hit wonder. He composed his Miserere in or before 1638 and it swiftly became a part of the regular rotation within the Sistine Chapel, eventually gaining a semi-permanent place in Holy Week services, especially the Lauds Tenebrae services on Holy Wednesday and Good Friday.Footnote 35 The Allegri Miserere remains one of the most popular sacred choral works – far outstripping those of other composers in numbers of performances and recordingsFootnote 36 – and, as we shall see, it serves as a direct model for MacMillan’s composition. This means that it is neither solely the Psalm 51 (50) text itself nor the rituals with which the text is associated that MacMillan might be said to transubstantiate: it is also the accumulated traditions drawn from Allegri and the Sistine Chapel that surround Miserere as a musical and liturgical work.
Over the past three centuries, the fame of Allegri’s Miserere has been sustained in part by one of the great moments of musical mythology: the story of Mozart’s allegedly illegal transcription of the piece after hearing it in the Sistine Chapel during the Holy Week services of 1770. Scholars have suggested that some of the rhetoric surrounding this feat has been exaggerated, but its place within the wider narrative of Mozart as child prodigy means the composition retains a certain mystique.Footnote 37 Beyond its association with Mozart, other potential explanations for its popularity include the delicate improvised ornamentation (abbellimenti) created by the singers in the papal choir and the emotional impact of the soaring high C6 in the treble of the familiar modern version (itself probably the result of a mistake in handling Mendelssohn’s transcription in the nineteenth century). Against such musico-structural suggestions, Peter Gillgren has argued that Miserere’s fame stems from its position within the Good Friday liturgy as celebrated in the Sistine Chapel.Footnote 38 In other words, even though the Allegri Miserere may be best known today in extraliturgical contexts, it became so owing to its specifically liturgical history.
Gillgren points in particular to the extraordinary multimedia effect of hearing Allegri’s Miserere performed for Tenebrae services during Holy Week, in which the lights in the chapel were extinguished one by one as the events surrounding Christ’s crucifixion were remembered. As an example of its effect, he quotes the French neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s account from the first decade of the nineteenth century:
Finally, at nightfall […] a perfect silence prepares and announces the celestial beginning of those voices that begin the Miserere. Everything, at that moment, is in harmony with this music; it is getting dark, and the twilight scarcely permits one to glimpse the terrifying painting of the Last Judgment, whose prodigious effect impresses a kind of terror on the soul. Finally, finally, I don’t know what more to say to you; telling you this overwhelms me, if it can be told at all, for it must be seen and heard to be believed.Footnote 39
Ingres was not the only one to be so moved: 75 years later, the Swedish composer Gunnar Wennerberg described a similar experience thus: ‘A minute of holy silence follows; And then, as a cry from the depths rises Miserere. Never shall I forget this moment, so moving and solemn. I was ecstatic … and beside myself.’Footnote 40 As Richard Boursy has shown, Wennerberg and Ingres are part of a tourist tradition of visiting the Sistine Chapel to experience Allegri’s Miserere in situ; nevertheless, each points to it as a blend of devotional and aesthetic experience.Footnote 41
More than a century after Wennerberg, hearing Allegri’s Miserere in the Sistine Chapel is still popular with both tourists and worshippers, but far more are likely to hear the work in film scores, choral concerts and via numerous extant recordings. Yet many listeners continue to note its peculiar power with descriptive language that relies on religious connotation. Hearing a snippet on the radio, one listener is ‘transfixed’ by its ‘limpid, spiritual loveliness with an undertow of passion’, while another connects its spiritual purpose to its musical construction, praising the ‘sombre and searching spirituality that permeates the music’ and suggesting that ‘the high piercing notes [recall] the piercing guilt and the pierced Christ’.Footnote 42 Even though each of these commentators is describing the experience of listening to Miserere in the uniquely modern medium of the recording, the echoes of Wennerberg and Ingres are clearly heard in this twenty-first-century language. It seems that even when performed in a secular context the Allegri Miserere retains some proportion of that mystery that occasioned such strong reactions in centuries past.
Of course, the use of spiritual language does not mean that contemporary listeners experience the Allegri Miserere as liturgical or potentially sacramental. In the same way, even though MacMillan may see his composition of Miserere as a quasi-liturgical act, he did not intend it to be performed as part of a liturgy, and the majority of listeners are unlikely to perceive it as such.Footnote 43 Nonetheless, it participates in a similar constellation of connotation that is reinforced by its connection with Allegri’s composition. MacMillan’s Miserere was commissioned as a response to Allegri’s Miserere by AMUZ (Festival van Vlaanderen Antwerpen) and premièred by the choral group The Sixteen at the Laus Polyphoniae festival in 2009.Footnote 44 That year’s theme was the Sistine Chapel, and the concert programme set MacMillan as a foil to a panoply of sacred music from Renaissance composers including Felice Anerio, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and – of course – Allegri.Footnote 45 The material accompanying the festival underlined this, declaring: ‘The tradition of the papacy and the musical aspects surrounding it are still a quasi-continuous line […] It was an imperative for us to integrate this aspect and to assign it to a contemporary master’; later, it describes MacMillan’s setting as a ‘contemporary counterpart’ to the Allegri in which the composer ‘take[s] on a real challenge’ in maintaining a referential relationship with ‘the famous (or infamous) Miserere’ while also forging a new direction.Footnote 46 Despite the non-liturgical character of the première concert, the surroundings of Antwerp’s Sint-Carolus Borromeuskerk, the thematic thread of the Sistine Chapel and the liturgical character of other pieces on the programme suggest that MacMillan’s Miserere was initially heard in the context of Renaissance liturgical music and – specifically – the Allegri Miserere as it might have been heard as part of a liturgy in the Sistine Chapel during Holy Week. Thus, MacMillan’s deep engagement with Allegri as an inspiration and a compositional model is augmented and complicated by the ritual traditions that the two compositions share.
Although MacMillan’s Miserere is not logogenic in the sense of textual structure generating musical structure (as is the case, for example, in Pärt’s Miserere), neither is it a case of choosing a text for its straightforwardly sonic qualities (as is the case in MacMillan’s Symphony no. 5).Footnote 47 In setting the text of Psalm 51 (50), MacMillan explicitly draws upon its theological significance as ritually and musically mediated through Allegri’s Miserere and the performance traditions of Good Friday. The text and musical connections set the foundations, while the continual renewal of these associations through subsequent programming, reception and marketing indicates that even when framed by performance in a concert (hall), Miserere brings Christian sacramental traditions to bear on the contemporary world.Footnote 48 This is not a return to the liturgical setting of Allegri and the Sistine Chapel; rather, MacMillan transubstantiates these traditions in such a way as to suggest that his work may be considered sacramental in character (though not in function). Understanding the composer’s invocation of these liturgical moments as well as the way this orientation has been taken up by performers and audiences clarifies the position of Miserere as a particular kind of aesthetic experience that is at the same time a reinterpretation of religious ritual and belief.
Words and music: intertextuality in Miserere
Integrating music with this extramusical liturgical tradition relies on a series of transformational changes in musical materials which come together to reinterpret the liturgical experience of Miserere. Having established the significance of the relationship between Allegri, MacMillan and the liturgy, I now turn to the textual and sonic components of MacMillan’s composition to discover how abstract spiritual concepts and rituals become concrete within its musical structures, thereby coming to embody the eucharistic logic and sense of time that are key characteristics of transubstantiation. This leads in the next section to a consideration of the spiritual narrativization of Miserere and of MacMillan in general in the wider setting of performance and recording.
From a text-setting perspective, the idea of transubstantiation as signifying thoroughgoing transformational change does not seem to provide any immediate insight into the relationship between the two compositions: both Allegri’s and MacMillan’s pieces set Psalm 51 (50) in full. Allegri’s verse-setting alternates between plainchant and falsobordone sections for four- and five-voice choirs, and in many modern performances this pattern is maintained throughout. The constraints of this structure minimize the connection between the text and the musical drama; in the place of a teleological musical structure, the compositional drama is woven into the individual sections in the form of suspensions, unexpected dissonances and the graceful leaps and runs that set off the polyphonic choral sections. In contrast, MacMillan sets the Latin psalm text for eight mixed voices a cappella. His sound world encompasses a wider range of harmonic colours and rhythmic variety than Allegri’s, yet despite occasional elisions of the breaks between verses, the lack of repetition and graceful lyricism grant the text and its formal structure a peculiar transparency that mirrors the older composition.
More significant for the musical transformational processes underlying this transubstantiation is MacMillan’s frequent recycling and borrowing of compositional material. This is congruent with his eclectic style, which, according to the critic Stephen Johnson, encompasses influences from Celtic folk music, Harrison Birtwistle, Ives, Messiaen, Schnittke, Shostakovich and Wagner. These influences, supplemented by occasional quotations, are unified by a ‘deeply ingrained feeling for musical storytelling’.Footnote 49 MacMillan’s embrace of quotation (auto- or otherwise) and allusion is motivated in part by a theological stance that considers the recombination and recovery of musical fragments part of an ‘eternally regenerative creative process’ analogous (if subsidiary) to the act of divine creation.Footnote 50 In Miserere, the attempt to bring the rituals of confession and the text of the ‘Miserere mei’ to full expression in the music means that by the time the piece reaches its close MacMillan has layered a series of musical fragments – each with its own sets of connotations – that richly intertwine to transform the material from the opening phrase through to the final chord.
There are six key melodic elements that make up Miserere; all except one are borrowed from other works and some have appeared in many instances throughout MacMillan’s oeuvre. For example, Miserere’s opening phrase sets a mood of reflective quietude with the piano entrance of all tenor and bass parts sounding ‘desolate and cold’ as the familiar plea of ‘miserere mei’ rises from the depths (see Example 1). Listeners closely acquainted with MacMillan’s compositions might recognize this theme as a minor-key version of the melody from a Scottish folk ballad that he wrote in 1984. The ballad, which sets William Soutar’s love poem The Tryst, appeared in different guises in MacMillan’s works throughout the 1980s and 1990s, including the congregational portion of the Sanctus in St Anne’s Mass (1985), the violin-and-piano miniature After the Tryst (1988), the ‘Credo’ section of Búsqueda (1988) and both orchestral and chamber ensemble settings of the ballad entitled Tryst (1989) and Scots Song (1991) respectively. The multiple contexts in which this melody occurs lend it a richness of inference evident in MacMillan’s claim (in describing it as the ‘emotional core’ of Tryst) that, ‘Its melodic characteristics […] seem to imply many very strong associations – commitment, sanctity, intimacy, faith […], love, but it is also saturated with a sadness as if all these things are about to expire.’Footnote 51 Far from the ‘Tryst’ melody becoming muddied by this multiplicity, it is the ‘transformation of tradition, religion and heritage’, as Phillip Cooke notes, that gives it such ‘longevity’ within MacMillan’s compositional practice.Footnote 52
Example 1 ‘Tryst’ theme from James MacMillan’s Miserere (2009).
More recently, the same melody has appeared in the final – instrumental – movement of the St John Passion (2008). This appearance is particularly resonant for this discussion because, as Hugh Pyper suggests, a concert performance of the Passion re-presents ‘not only the text of the Gospel but the liturgical experience of the Good Friday liturgy’, and is thus a model for Miserere. Footnote 53 Despite having no sung text, this movement is the apotheosis of the Passion’s sacrificial narrative, leading Cooke to suggest that the melody serves to ‘ameliorate previous transgressions’.Footnote 54 If this were not a clear enough indication of the Passion’s winding together of musical and religious implications, the last movement is subtitled ‘Sanctus immortalis, miserere nobis’ (‘Holy Immortal One, have mercy on us’). This fragmentary title is itself the closing line of the Trisagion prayer, sung in the Catholic Good Friday liturgy during the Adoration of the Cross. The movement of this love-song melody through these musical contexts thus culminates in Good Friday: re-emphasizing the role of ritual practices in informing MacMillan’s compositions, but also offering a glimpse into how Soutar’s love poem is transubstantiated into a love song between Christ and the church.Footnote 55
The next compositional borrowing is much better known: the opening four notes of the Prelude to Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, or what has come to be known as the ‘Tristan’ or ‘Longing’ leitmotif (see Example 2).Footnote 56 This is another of MacMillan’s frequent borrowings; like the ‘Tryst’ melody, it connotes both human love and sacrifice.Footnote 57 In Miserere, the alto’s ascending minor sixth followed by a chromatic descent disrupts the previously third-orientated melodic movement, but before the implications of the appearance of ‘Tristan’ can be fully absorbed, it is replaced by a rhythmically complex soprano line marked ‘keening, crying’. This description immediately suggests comparisons with the ancient Gaelic practice of mourning, but Dominic Wells notes that this particular melody also has a history within MacMillan’s oeuvre, highlighting its appearances in the final movement of the St John Passion, at the close of The Birds of Rhiannon (2001) and in Act 3 of MacMillan’s opera The Sacrifice (2005–6).Footnote 58 With respect to the opera, Wells comments that the web of connotations ‘is by no means arbitrary […] The resemblance between the psalm’s penitential text and the General’s pleading for forgiveness [in The Sacrifice] is clearly evident: in each case, the sinner is aware of his guilt and wants to be washed clean of his fault.’Footnote 59
Example 2 Alto theme with interpolated reference to ‘Tristan’ or ‘Longing’ leitmotif. MacMillan, Miserere (2009).
The final three melodic themes appear between verses 7 and 10, beginning in verses 7 and 8 with a forceful descending subject also heard in both the St John Passion and Act 3 of The Sacrifice. This leads up to a turning point at the opening of verse 9 (‘Asperges me’), when for the first time we have a melody that seems to be unique to Miserere. This verse opens after a single rest, with the choir entering on a B major chord, before pushing forward into resolution onto the tonic of E minor. Marked ‘pleading’ in the score, the ascending semitone resolutions in the tenor and soprano sound particularly plangent. MacMillan follows this with a series of dominant-function chords built on top of a descending scalar pattern. As the voices steadily descend in range they also decrescendo until the dynamic and harmonic structures come to rest at piano on two ambiguous chords anchored on E3 in the bass.
This harmonic ambiguity allows MacMillan to make an astonishing textural, tonal and temporal shift from four-part harmony on E to responsorial chant in the key of B minor. It is here that the final and most significant musical borrowing appears: namely, a plainchant used in the liturgies of both Holy Thursday and Good Friday (see Example 3). This is in fact a double reference, first to the general tradition of plainchant and second to the use of this specific chant in many modern versions of Allegri’s Miserere, though MacMillan here disguises the reciting tone within lush four-part harmonization reminiscent of Allegri’s own falsobordone style.Footnote 60 The alternating phrases of the chant are passed between the basses/tenors and the altos/sopranos, ending with the psalmist’s near-desperate request, ‘Cast me not away from thy face; and take not thy holy spirit from me.’ The full bar of silence that follows is both the longest period of silence in the entire work and an apt representation of the divine silence in the face of human sin that punctuates the biblical narrative both in the psalm and – most dramatically – at the point in the Passion narrative where Jesus cries out, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ This audible break in the flow of the work marks the point at which all of the main themes have appeared, often in quick succession. When the voices do return, it is in an echo of the opening, although this time MacMillan employs the alto and tenor voices in place of the earlier tenor and bass, and the tonal centre has shifted from E minor to A minor. Just as the music seems to confirm that we have arrived at the beginning of the A' section in a large ABA' ternary form, the voices drive forward into a full-throated cry for deliverance using the ‘keening, crying’ motif from the first section to exclaim, ‘Deliver me from blood, O God, thou God of my salvation.’ Marked ‘eruptive’ in the score, the punchy vocals of the tutti ensemble generate a moment of high drama and tension before dissolving once more into the plainchant – this time as a succession of unison entrances by each voice part that break off into decorative flourishes over a static hummed harmony.
Example 3 Psalm tone used in Miserere (transcription).
The four verses MacMillan sets in this unmeasured style close on a harmonically rich chord consisting of C♯3 in the basses, A3 in the tenors, B3 and D♯4 in the altos, and G♯4 in the sopranos. From this shimmering harmony, the altos’ downwards resolution leads into the re-entrance of the others on a radiant E major chord heralding the transformation of the ‘Tryst’ melody into a chorale overflowing with warmth. The exaltation of mood thus engendered hinges on the promise of the text: ‘Then shalt thou accept the sacrifice of justice.’ A repetition of this fragment, accompanied by a conventional dominant–tonic cadential gesture, unites music and text in representing the psalmist’s assurance of forgiveness at the piece’s close. Thus, from the initial desolation prompted by sin the psalmist/choir is brought back to divine favour, ending with the full chorus singing ‘with devotion’ of redemption.
From the perspective of music as evidencing eucharistic practice, MacMillan’s Miserere demonstrates two kinds of transubstantiation. The first, already indicated, is that the complex interweaving of melodic material from a variety of sources imbues both text and music with additional layers of signification – illustrating a peculiarly eucharistic fusion of the spiritual and the material. These compositional borrowings take in a host of influences, but they nonetheless circulate around distinctively spiritual ideas of the transformational power of love and forgiveness. To return to the opening ‘Tryst’ melody: from a ballad extolling the delights of human love, the melody is progressively reinscribed as signifying praise (‘Sanctus’), belief (‘Credo’) and a wordless plea for absolution (St John Passion) before its appearance as a further, voiced cry for mercy in Miserere. Footnote 61 It is an excellent example of how MacMillan – here using the biblical image of the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib – ‘take[s] fragments of material, consciously or unconsciously, from elsewhere and breathe[s] new life into them, creating new forms, new avenues and structures of expression’.Footnote 62 Likewise, the erotically charged ‘Tristan’ or ‘Longing’ motif is resituated as a longing for redemption and, implicitly, a restored union with the divine that is only achievable through penitence and absolution. Even though the origins of some of these sonic fragments are unlikely to be evident to the listener, the piling up of associations is a significant factor in considering how MacMillan’s compositional practice might be said to work in Miserere. Against Wells’s dismissive claim that Miserere can be interpreted as ‘essentially a choral arrangement of the purely orchestral conclusion of the St John Passion (with additional plainchant)’, the inclusion of the plainchant frames the themes drawn from Soutar (via The Sacrifice and the St John Passion) and Wagner within the ritual, liturgical and theological context of Good Friday.Footnote 63
The second point of sacramental logic in this composition is the collapsing of different temporalities occasioned by the entrance of the plainchant into an otherwise twenty-first-century choral style. For listeners familiar with the Allegri, these few notes offer an undeniable link between the two compositions and beyond them to the rituals of Good Friday music at the Sistine Chapel; however, even if the reference to Allegri goes unnoticed, the appearance of unadorned plainchant is an unambiguous signal that a past historical moment has intruded into the present. That the chant is unmeasured further disrupts or suspends the music’s (and the listener’s) sense of time. Begbie suggests not that this kind of temporal disruption is equivalent to pure timelessness or to eternity, but rather that such moments in music demonstrate a combination of present, past and future that reshapes our experience of ordinary lived time.Footnote 64 Extending this argument, Alistair Hardie argues that, ‘Chant, as a musically borrowed artifact within music of a clearly defined key and metre, may therefore provide a symbol for God’s transcendence.’Footnote 65 There are clear parallels between these arguments regarding music and the discourse of the Eucharist as a temporally ecstatic ritual with its own sense of time. Thus, the sudden shift in Miserere’s audible timescape reveals the interpenetration of layers of (musical and liturgical) history that lie behind MacMillan’s compositional surface.
One of MacMillan’s most evocative depictions of compositional practice (apart from the metaphor of transubstantiation itself) is found in his description of the Soutar love song as ‘provid[ing] me with a cantus firmus around which I wrapped another layer of musical flesh’.Footnote 66 This image of continual transformation gives weight to the argument that connects thematic transformation with a deeper transubstantiation that weaves MacMillan’s compositions into the musico-liturgical tradition. Although transubstantiation in MacMillan’s work is intimately associated with the recycling of musical materials, its function as a conceptual metaphor places such borrowings within a theological frame that in turn changes how audiences perceive musical experience and MacMillan’s compositional identity.
Spaces and texts of transformation
So far we have seen how the structural complexity of Miserere illuminates one facet of what musical transubstantiation might signify, and how the careful positioning of MacMillan’s composition as both partner and successor to the Allegri Miserere demonstrates how specific rituals and a sense of the interpenetration of eucharistic time contribute to the transformative aspects of performance. Yet, the framing of the work as connected to eucharistic transubstantiation and practice or as more broadly transformative must acknowledge the contexts in which Miserere is performed and perceived by listeners: how the layering of spiritual and ritual signification within seemingly prosaic matters such as concert programmes, recording styles and marketing choices conditions the interpretation of Miserere and of MacMillan himself.
Since the 2009 première, the connections between the Miserere settings have continued to accumulate, especially through the work of The Sixteen, who toured the two works together in 2013 and 2019.Footnote 67 Within the concert format, performance choices can have a strong impact on critical interpretation. Alexandra Coghlan notes in her review of a 2017 performance by The Sixteen in the Temple Church, London, that it began with a procession by members of the choir chanting Regina caeli laetare: an act that ‘transformed their audience into a congregation, inviting us into music that may have evolved into artful choral sophistication, but which began as a shared, corporate musical gesture’.Footnote 68 Even in other settings, Miserere seems to incline reviewers towards religiously inflected language, whether by invoking supernatural forces in describing a performance by the Exultate Singers at St George’s Bristol as ‘nothing short of a revelation’ or by portraying The Sixteen’s voices as ‘seraphic’ or as ‘shrouded in a halo of incense-laden atmosphere’.Footnote 69 This enthusiasm at times extends towards granting the composer himself special status: Coghlan ends her review by suggesting that Palestrina’s ‘mantle of “Saviour of Church Music” [sits] firmly on fresh shoulders’ in MacMillan’s music.Footnote 70 These reviews and the performances they describe reinforce the implicit connections not only between Allegri and MacMillan, but also between the experience of religious ritual and MacMillan’s music.
This sacred sensibility is equally evident in the recording and distribution of the MacMillan Miserere. In 2011, The Sixteen recorded Miserere for an all-MacMillan collection entitled James MacMillan: Miserere in the London church of St Giles Cripplegate.Footnote 71 While the use of churches as recording studios is common to both sacred and secular vocal music, the choice of venue indicates an aesthetic that prioritizes resonance and its accompanying sense of aural space. In its creation of a soundscape far removed from the average listener’s physical surroundings, this recording style deliberately conjures up the very particular and religiously inflected spaces of large churches and cathedrals within the secular spaces of private listening. Additional religious narrativization of Miserere and its listening experience is amply provided in the CD’s liner notes, where Roderic Dunnett describes the work as ‘a steady progression from guilt and sin to hope and optimism’ with a ‘sensational’ or even ‘miraculous’ effect of a ‘redemptive spiritual journey’.Footnote 72
Finally, the album cover offers yet another possibility for a sacralized interpretative frame. Underneath the names of the composer and performers and the titles of pieces (written in blood-red text), the album cover depicts an oil painting by the Scottish artist Willie Rodger (1930–2018) entitled Easter Weekend (see Figure 1). In the painting’s foreground, a group of stylized figures mill about in an art gallery, while in the background, extending off the frame, a painting shows Christ’s crucifixion. As a piece of art, the painting-within-a-painting is at once the centre of focus and ignored by the crowd. Here, Rodger seems to highlight the idea of art as religion; after all, on the most important day of the Christian calendar his onlookers have come to a gallery rather than to a church, yet the art still draws our attention. Whether intentionally or not, this painting suggests the intersection of the religious and the aesthetic even as it provides a suitable backdrop for accomplishing the cover’s central purpose of selling the recording.
Figure 1 Cover of James MacMillan: Miserere (2011), Coro Records, CD COR16096. Image used by permission.
These juxtapositions of art and music, or of sacred recorded space and private listening, are not necessarily immediately noticeable to MacMillan’s audience, but they nonetheless shape the reception and interpretation of the work just as do the repeated associations between MacMillan’s work and religious content, rituals and spaces. The links created between the piece’s spiritual character and its affective power construct listening to MacMillan’s Miserere in terms redolent of spiritual experience. Miserere itself might be seen as a theoretical work in the sense that it analyses and interprets religious tradition, presenting it in coherent, intelligible and importantly displaced ways in performance. The cumulation of sacred connotations results in what Victor Turner describes as a ‘condensation of meaning’ such that Miserere might stand at once as a symbol of specifically Christian rituals of confession and absolution on Good Friday, and of a more general sense of penitence and transformation, and indeed as an aesthetic experience that reaches for secular transcendence.Footnote 73
Conclusion: aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of transubstantiation
There are three necessary caveats to the preceding discussion. First is the concern that thinking through the theological implications of MacMillan’s descriptive language might lead inexorably to what Jeremy Begbie and Steven Guthrie have termed the ‘double hazard’ of either ‘theological instrumentalisation’ or ‘theological aestheticism’.Footnote 74 Second is the extent to which this experience of musical transubstantiation is available to a diverse audience, and third is whether this analysis is limited to Miserere. To begin with the first, the initial hazard identified by Begbie and Guthrie is that of an ‘over-bearing theology’ that appropriates music as a vehicle for theological meanings or sees music as ‘secondary and colourful wrapping’ for ideas; the alternative counteracts such demands by insisting on music’s autonomy such that it may come to offer a ‘normative platform to relativize and critique other theological claims’.Footnote 75 As they suggest, neither of these approaches preserves the distinctive capacities of music or theology, yet to insist on interpreting MacMillan’s compositions through only one suppresses the reality of their interaction in music. Sacred music is in itself a particular ‘medium of disclosure’; despite its religious involvement it is not reducible to a kind of propaganda fidei. Footnote 76 The polysemic relationship between music and theology is key for interpreting sacred music in secular contexts, particularly when ‘quasi-liturgic, quasi-theological language or terms of definition’ come to encapsulate music’s transformative impact.Footnote 77 For MacMillan, the conjunction of a eucharistic logic of composition and a ritual sensibility in performance signalled by the theological language of transubstantiation signifies that the theological and musicological frameworks shed light on each other.
The second concern is essentially that of audience enculturation. Although this article focuses on how MacMillan’s composition and theology intertwine rather than on this complex issue, a few brief points can be made. Miserere stands at the crux of aesthetic and religious frames and an ample interpretation is rooted in a historical Western discourse or imagining of religion, art and their intersections that is not straightforwardly transferable to a global audience. There are those familiar with the psalms, traditions of confession or Catholic eucharistic doctrine for whom Miserere may be a profoundly communal and historically situated act; others with an in-depth knowledge of Macmillan’s oeuvre and the capacity to recognize references to Wagner and Allegri might delight in identification.Footnote 78 MacMillan’s rhetorical question in a blog post on his Third Piano Concerto (2011) summarizes the issue: ‘Who got more out of the concerto then? The guys who knew their Rosary, or the musicologist who knew nothing about it?’Footnote 79
Of course, audiences are under no obligation to see themselves implicated in the music’s narrative. Thus Andrew Clark writes, ‘You don’t need to be a Catholic to get something from Miserere’, while Kathy Evans goes a step further in asserting: ‘You don’t have to be religious to be spiritually uplifted by The Sixteen’s soaring version of Miserere.’Footnote 80 One response to Harry Christophers’s claim to ‘defy even the strongest atheist not to be moved by James’s Miserere’ is simply to recognize that music’s meanings are multivalent and that being moved is not equivalent to having a spiritual epiphany.Footnote 81 To speak of musical transubstantiation of experience is thus to acknowledge its potentiality rather than its instantiation.
Finally, extending the framework of transubstantiation would introduce further possibilities; for example, applying this analysis to other MacMillan compositions. Indeed McGregor has alluded to the role of the liturgy in describing The Confession of Isobel Gowdie (1990), Cantos sagrados (1989) and Búsqueda (1988), all of which interweave religiously inflected elements with political statements, and Cooke notes the eucharistic language MacMillan applies to Triduum as being ‘of utmost importance’.Footnote 82 Doherty’s analysis of the Fourth Symphony demonstrates another perspective on transubstantiation that might be productively extended. Looking beyond MacMillan, musico-theological transubstantiation suggests a new perspective on the displacement of quasi-sacramental music from a sacred context as well as on the ever-shifting boundaries between religious and aesthetic experiences.
MacMillan’s Miserere offers audiences a musically transubstantiated ritual mediated through the musico-liturgical tradition of Allegri’s own Miserere and surrounded by a discourse that argues for the religious character of both composer and music. The music’s appropriation and extension of ritual action beyond its ordinary boundaries prefigures the eucharistic moment of transubstantiation even though it takes place in what Jeffers Engelhardt and Philip Bohlman have characterized as the ‘unexceptional, ambiguous zone between religion and the secular’.Footnote 83 The interpretative instability of this liminal space means that it is full of uncertainty (‘nothing is being demanded of you, you’re not being told to think of anything in a concert’), but also potentiality (‘yet you may well have a fantastic experience of a religious nature’).Footnote 84 This highlights the extent to which the meanings of musical transubstantiation are at once emergent, in that they ‘ride on the already existing grids of symbolic and indexical meanings, while also displaying new resonances’, and palimpsestic, alternating between transubstantiation as metaphor and as metonym.Footnote 85 Through the interpenetration of music and liturgy, performance of the MacMillan Miserere can become in itself practice for the Eucharist.
The music critic Wilfrid Mellers defines the function of great art as analogous to the function of scripture, in which ‘in being uttered, the Word becomes a life-giving force to men’.Footnote 86 In other words, giving voice to the sacred is to allow for the possibility of its becoming spiritually efficacious. The dynamism of Mellers’s description suggests a necessary corrective to any analysis that does not allow for the animating and explanatory force of religious language in describing aesthetic transformation. Through Miserere, MacMillan reinscribes the rituals of the sacred within the concert hall and the private home. In doing so, he transubstantiates liturgical traditions and reasserts the role of music in refashioning the contemporary imagining of religion.
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