When music is divine, why would a church bar its way?

There’s a difference between church music and music performed in church, and that’s a problem for the vicar of St Sepulchre-withoutnewgate, a church in Holborn, London. It’s a popular place for musicians to perform and rehearse all sorts of music, including pieces for the Proms – it’s the resting place of Sir Henry Wood, who founded the concerts.

But since St Sepulchre’s joined an evangelical group headed by Holy Trinity Brompton, it has said it will stop taking bookings from musicians. The church says it’s on account of “an increasingly busy programme of worship and church activities”; David Ingall, its vicar, said it had become “conscious of the challenges of using a space dedicated to worship for non-religious hiring”.

John Rutter, the composer, takes a dim view of this. He says the vicar is “betraying the community that he purports to serve”. Certainly, lots of churches play host to concerts: many in the City of London do: it’s a kind of urban outreach. In Paris, they’re a good way to experience the city’s best churches, like being in a secular congregation. For godless secularists, music in church may be the nearest they get to the numinous.

Christianity has been fundamental to the development of classical music, from musical notation itself in the monasteries, to polyphony, to the hymns that were probably the best thing, along with Bach and Handel, to come out of the Reformation. Mind you, even Handel had problems putting on oratorios in church: they were too like opera.

It would be a shame if churches weren’t hospitable to all great music, but you can see there might be a problem if the performance were downright profane. Brahms’s piano concertos, yes; stage version of Oklahoma!, nope. The Catholic Church officially is wary about music in church. Guidelines issued by the Congregation for Divine Worship in 1987 declared: “The use of the church must not offend the sacredness of the place,” which effectively prohibited secular concerts.

But the divide between secular and sacred music is pretty permeable. As Andrew Gant, music historian, makes clear in his book on carols, some of what we think of as Christmas hymns started out on the streets and only later came into the churches. He’s impatient with the idea of a secular/ sacred divide. “It’s an old argument, and should be over,” he says.

Characteristically, Pope Benedict, now retired, had no doubt about the religious character of the music he cares about. In a talk after a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth with Daniel Barenboim, he observed: “It is an ideal vision of humanity that Beethoven designs with his music: the active joy in brotherhood and reciprocal love, under the paternal gaze of God.” That doesn’t seem out of place in a church – more fitting, I rather feel, than most music performed in evangelical churches.

The Catholic pianist, Stephen Hough, often performs in churches and says “the only requirement has been that the tabernacle [where the Eucharist is kept] was empty. Although in one convent in France they asked for no applause. It was quite magical to begin and end the concert in silence.” For him, this isn’t an issue: “I don’t believe music is either sacred or not. The whole of creation is a sacred gift and nothing is ‘outside’.” He’s right. That’s the proper theology of music in church. read More at telegraph.co.uk/opinion