Easter Day 2025 (1700th Anniversary of Council of Nicaea)
The year is 1550.
For fans of Wolf Hall, we’re ten years on from the death of Thomas Cromwell, and three from Henry VIII.
There’s another season to be made, and here’s my pitch for the screenplay.
I want to explain something of the significance of 1550, connecting it with the Nicene Creed of 325 (the 1700th anniversary of which we are keeping and have been studying) and Easter Day.
England had its first Brexit in 1534, Henry’s break with Rome.
A project, like many, even contemporary, political manoeuvres -indistinguishable from the instigating protagonist’s personality.
By 1550, Edward VI still a minor, under the influence of Protector Somerset, the Church of England was 16 years distant from Roman influence. In 1549 the first Prayer Book was published. And it was quickly followed in 1550 by a musical work entitled The Book of Common Prayer Noted.
The author was John Merbecke, organist of St George’s Windsor.
Noted means set to music.
Merbecke, by then well established in one of the great choral foundations with Royal patronage, had been trained, like all church musicians of his time, in plain-chant and polyphony. It seems from court records of 1543 he was associated with Protestant radicals, and he narrowly escaped serious sanction.
With the Reformation, and particularly, as it was evolving here, something was changing in how Church Music would ornament worship in England. From the floatiness of plainchant, and the complex intertwining of phrases you find in Latin polyphony, a principle was being established in the work Merbecke as he produced a type of English chant; harmony singing with one note to one word. In terms of how he had been trained this must have felt constraining.
Some would say this move would pioneer “a native song”, which would have a direct impact not just on Church music thereafter, but a secular song tradition, of madrigals and the work of Dowland and then Purcell.
Forgive this obscure musicological rabbit hole. I will get to the Easter bunny I promise you, he is somewhere down here. Let’s burrow a bit further.
Merbecke didn’t just change the musical weather in 1550. Sir John Hawkins, friend of Dr Johnson’s, and musical historian wrote in 1776 that Merkecke was “a man to whom Church Music has greater obligations than the world is sensible of…”
In other words, we owe this man a great deal.
Let me try to tell you what I think he does, in a just a few notes, that we shall sing together after this; and how this connects with Easter Day and the 1700th anniversary of the Great Council of Nicaea, we are celebrating.
Personally, I find in Merbecke’s notation something which affects me physiologically each week.
I am no musicologist or musician. But each of us responds to music in particular ways. Certain tunes, move us even to tears, they touch the non-verbal parts of our brain, and tell stories in a matter of notes.
Merbecke’s setting of the Creed’s simple words and the third day he rose again [play the notes from the creed]
….I would suggest…is an extraordinary piece of innovative writing in 1550.
I am grateful to our own cappelmeister for giving me the technical vocabulary to explain:
A rising scale of four notes underpins the words ‘And the third day’, (the word ’third’ actually occurring on the third note of the scale). As most of the notes in the setting move in steps or small intervals the sudden upward leap spanning four full notes to arrive on a high note for the word ‘rose’ is effective ‘word-painting’ and contrasts sharply with the more predictable scale-patterns to either side.
See if it does something to you, when we sing those words in a moment and scale those notes. That rising of our voices helps our hearts and minds to respond to and participate in the Good news that Christ is risen from the dead.
St Luke is our word-painter in today’s Gospel.
His are vivid colours. His Gospel is interesting because he offers a particular place to women. He is interested in people who are disadvantaged in different ways, and in the first century, the witness of women was legally disregarded.
Luke is determined that as the first witnesses of the resurrection, whether that evidence was admissible legally or not, far from being an idle tale what the women tell, does not just change the musical weather – it up-ends the world.
The tomb is empty and Christ is risen.
And it came to pass, as they were much perplexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by them in shining garments: And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, the Angels said unto them, Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen: remember how he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee, Saying, The Son of man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again. And they remembered his words.
It is memory of those words – understanding of what was promised – that causes the women’s hearts AND OURS to soar; and the voice to sing and to span the rising scale of four notes and
know that Christ is risen from the dead. Alleluia Christ is Risen.