It’s the 450th anniversary this year of Thomas Tallis’s great work Spem in Alium. This was the inspiration for me to commission Sir James MacMillan, one of the greatest composers of our time, to write a 40-part piece in response to the work. It’s an extraordinary, life-changing piece of music.

This Macmillan masterpiece is the central commission of my work as artistic director and founder of ORA Singers. Our ensemble performs not just the great choral works of the Renaissance, but pieces inspired by those works by modern composers, whom we commission. Fifty so far, with another 50 to come.

Our latest set of commissions, in progress now, is inspired by art from Tate Modern. But the core of what we do presents a kind of antiphony between the past and present: between the great choral works of the Tudor Golden Age and what I believe is a second Golden Age of choral music now, half a millennium later.

It’s not, I think, an accident that Sir James’s own faith is luminous and that his response to Tallis is so immediate. I’ve long felt that the really great composers are writing, in a sense, through their access to a higher power, the divine.

Interestingly, responding to religious works isn’t a problem for the modern composers I work with. Many composers have their own relationship with God. The challenge of understanding a Renaissance work is one they meet, without exception, very positively.

For instance, the composer Harry Escott has written for us a stunning piece in response to Tallis’s O Nata Lux. He understood the context of Tallis’s work, that of a Catholic writing within what you might call Protestant norms. Tallis set a Latin text but treated it in a simple, uncluttered, “Protestant” style. The imperative for Tallis with this piece was to present non-polyphonic, simple music, to facilitate communication of the text.

Tallis and his contemporaries had to conform to a strict and complex set of compositional rules. Over time, these rules were stretched and challenged by the great composers. The additional challenge for a composer such as Tallis, who lived through five monarchs and the bloody tussle between Catholics and Protestants, was to provide sacred music that conformed to the expectations of the day.

The stakes were high. For the Protestant Church, former complexities of music were stripped back. The result was the musical equivalent of white walls, direct communication in the vernacular with the minister facing the congregation.

The purpose of Catholic polyphony, on the other hand, was to create the conditions for contemplation and access to God. The role of music in reinforcing these different religious principles was fundamentally important.

Tallis himself, as Harry Escott understood, was brilliantly able to negotiate these shifting religious sands without falling foul of the authorities. He remained a committed Catholic but also a successful jobbing musician over several turbulent decades, under both Catholic and Protestant monarchs. He kept his job and he kept safe.

William Byrd, by contrast, sailed far closer to the wind. Dangerously so. He composed for the underground community of Catholics; he kept the Catholic flame alive. In a way, he became the “house composer” for the recusant community.

Our latest album presents works connected to Nonsuch Palace. This was originally a Tudor hunting lodge, long demolished, where religious works were performed, including, almost certainly, one of the first performances of Spem in Alium.

Many of our concert audiences are people who are “unchurched” or without religion. Others are committed Christians. But there is a commonality between them: there will be a powerful aesthetic response to the music. And the response to beauty and power is not wholly rational. Our concerts are not just a sequence of pieces with sacred texts. You could compare the structure of a good choral concert to the structure of a church service.

I bring my own religious formation to bear upon what I do. I am a churchgoer, albeit inspired by good choral music above all. The Anglo-Catholic tradition is where I feel most at home. My father and I sang together in a church choir; it was the root of my musical development. But my first truly seminal experience was singing Bach’s St Matthew Passion, in German, when I was 12. I had no idea what the words meant and the performance was in a concert hall. I did not even know it was a sacred work. But it changed my world.

Most of our greatest choral repertoire is sacred. And, for many, experiencing it can be transfigurative. Indeed, music may bring God with it.

The ORA Singers’ CD box set, including Sir James MacMillan’s 40-part piece, is available on the Harmonia Mundi label

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