Black Voices

Wow. Where to begin? I've just got home from a performance in Lichfield Cathedral by a female vocal quintet called Black Voices. Together with the specially trained Lichfield Chorus, they have given us an inspiring evening of Gospel Music, which ended in a standing ovation.

The first half of the programme was basically performed by the Chorus - a choir especially trained for the occasion, consisting almost entirely of white middle class people, aged (I guess) 7 to 70. We were told how hard many of them (including some experienced choral singers) had found it to work in the Gospel style - without written music, committing words and harmonies to memory, or improvising instinctively. It was a tribute to them that it no longer looked like hard work. It looked and sounded like a way of singing that came quite naturally. As one of the Black Voices herself put it, 'They even looked like they were enjoying it'!

But for me, the second half of the programme was even more moving. The Black Voices themselves performed a suite of Slave Songs (which is what we are now rightly encouraged to call the kind of songs which in a previous era we knew as Negro Spirituals). The sequence told a story.

The first song had no words. It was a setting of moans and hums, symbolising the way that slaves from West Africa, first captured and taken away from their tribal origins, might find themselves among people with whom they didn't even share a language, but did share a musical tradition which enabled them to communicate. I confess, I'd never really thought about the way that a single slave-ship might easily contain multiple language groups, and that occasionally slaves must have been separated from their communities and have found themselves utterly alone.

The next few songs were songs of lament and of loss, of anguish and grief and desolation - the sort of song you can easily image a person might sing, if they were wrenched away from home and family, from familiar routines and found themselves captive. I was reminded how many of the Psalms in the Bible are songs of lament, and how rare it is to find such things in church hymn books or in the repertoire of contemporary worship songs. We're good at praise these days, but much less at protest and complaint and at pouring out our sorrow to God. By and large, even in a recession, we don't know what exile feels like.

Ultimately, however, the cycle did indeed culminate in songs of praise. And there is something extraordinary about the human capacity, and maybe especially the Christian capacity, to rise above present circumstances, however disastrous and agonising they may be, and to find grounds for hope in the love and mercy of God. So the programme ended with songs of deliverance, the last of which was inevitably 'Oh happy day'. That's a song you have to sing from the inside, I suspect. At least, I can imagine that even a musician of great empathy might not get the most out of the song, without some inkling of what it means to know the forgiveness which Christians find in Christ Jesus: 'Oh happy day, when Jesus washed my sins away'.

It occured to me last night that really, fully to sing 'Oh happy day' or 'The Deliverer' from the inside it must be necessary to sing 'Nobody but me one' or 'Motherless child, long way from home' from the inside too. Fully to pour out your heart in praise to God, perhaps it's necessary to know what it is like to pour out your heart in sorrow too. Maybe truly authentic praise has that depth to it.

Lichfield Festival

I've just come home from an extraordinary performance in Lichfield Cathedral, of the Great Voices of Bulgaria: fabulous harmonies and extraordinary precision in ten female folk singers. It was a treat.

The first few items in the repertoire were explicitly religous - including a setting of the Lord's Prayer. But I found a sense of the presence of God as much in the apparently more secular items of the programme. There was just something in the intonation and collaboration which transported me to a sacred place.

It was one of those occasions when I marvel at the fact that I can access such beauty so readily. For me, it was a two-minute walk to get home at the end of the performance.

This, you see, is the ten days of the Lichfield Festival. What a wonderful opportunity. Over the next week, I am looking forward to performances by Black Voices (a wonderfully talented Gospel quintet from Birmingham), by Harry Christophers and the Sixteen, by the poet Michael Symmons Roberts and by the CBSO (City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra).

It is extraordinary to have all this on our doorstep. Today, for example, has been the Georgian Market. The Cathedral Close was - despite the wet weather - thronging with stalls and visitors. Many were in costume: in the past this has traditionally been the Medieval Market; but this year is the 300th year of the birth of Lichfield's most famous son, Samuel Johnson, so a change of emphasis was inevitable.

It is a great privilege for a Cathedral like ours to offer hospitality to so many people, looking for so many different experiences. There is a missionary challenge here that I don't yet feel we have got our heads around. Roll on 2010.