Omnes Generationes

The rather pretentious title is Latin for “all generations”. It is a quote from the prayer of Mary in Luke’s gospel known as the Magnificat, a prayer that inspired much music over the years. And Omnes Generationes is the title and the entire text of my favourite movement of perhaps my favourite piece of music of all, Bach’s Magnificat.

And last week I was blessed with the chance of singing that movement again and again, in a fantastic choir with a great director, and then to perform it in Princeton along with another wonderful piece, the Requiem of Herbert Howells. Each time I am part of the Westminster Choir College summer choral festival I come away in awe and refreshed, somehow feeling like I have gate-crashed a really cool party.

Bach’s writing is always brilliant but also always meaningful in a religious sense. In this movement he is, as usual, glorifying the wonder of God and His endurance across all human generations. The movement is an exciting cacophony of choir and instrument parts running up and down in harmony, anchored by a phrase of four repeated notes that call out from within the texture.

Bach makes two separate points about God’s endurance. First, the repeated notes appear in different voice parts, but always on the keynote or important note of the scale, like a fanfare. Here he is announcing God’s endurance across the generations. After having established this, he then writes the repeating notes progressing up a scale, so each voice part is part of a mounting story. His message here is one of progress. Under God’s guidance, each subsequent generation can rise to greater heights than the one before. Musically, it is as exhilarating a piece as any I know.

So JS Bach is making precisely the same point as Steven Pinker. In Bach’s case it is inspired by God, and in his thoughts overseen by God. In Pinker’s case God only gets in the way. But both see the progression of humanity and glory in it.

Where better for me to better understand this optimism that at Princeton at the Choral Festival? For me the enduring memory of the week is the wonder of the emerging generations. In a choir of 60, there are usually only about four of us over 40 and the median age might be 28. And these folk are simply impressive.

I try to compare them to my peers at the same age and I see progress before my eyes. They are generally at ease in their own skin, they relate very easily with each other, but are respectful and curious. Increasingly they are proud individuals, pursuing their own tastes and passions without being overly concerned with what others may be thinking. And they are usually happy. This cohort is not representative; it is a rather privileged elite observed at an ideal time. But I can see similar features in all the groups of young people I find, and my comparator group is a privileged elite from an earlier generation.

One little exercise this year was to see if I could spot differences even within the short period of four years since I first visited the festival. I had to be careful, because often I was just noticing things that were always there but obscure to me before I had more familiarity of the group.

I think I see an improvement in musicianship even within four years. More of them are more natural musicians and conductors. Concepts that took a while to embed before now seem to be accepted immediately.

For sure, I see more originality. Each festival, we are asked to introduce ourselves via a short anecdote. I often fail to pick these up owing to my less than perfect hearing. But this year the stories I did hear well were remarkable for the variety of passions within the group, and the willingness of everyone to follow their own passion without heed of any societal expectation. This generation is specialising like none before it. You can even see it in how they dress – remember it was just 20 years ago that anyone not wearing identikit jeans was considered weird.

Linked to the originality, I see even more sexual freedom. There was always plenty of variety within the group; what is new is its growing openness and acceptance. On a less positive note, I observed an increase in obesity.

While it is hard and may be unreliable to look for change over four years, a longer timescale shows undeniable progress. Take the field of choral music.

Perhaps fifty years ago, there was little quality choral singing outside English cathedrals and Oxbridge colleges. The people leading the sound in these places had either inherited positions, or were posh kids who could sing. Usually they could not really conduct or teach. Kings Cambridge became a bit of an exception. But recordings were few and far between, and few took the trouble to develop practices or learn. It was a posh boys club.

In the USA and elsewhere, slowly people started travelling and realising there were different ways of doing things. In the USA, one man, Robert Shaw, brought discipline and practice to choir singing. He gathered a few disciples, but many of these lacked his talent or were poor conductors or coaches, so things developed, but slowly. Still, a qualification to conduct a choir was usually an ability to sing or conduct an orchestra or research music, none of which are particularly relevant.

At the same time, there was the explosion in communication and in research. We learned how Bach’s choirs and instruments might have sounded. It was instructive in Princeton; we were played a recording of Bach from the 1980’s that would be unimaginably staid today, even from a community choir. It was by Leonard Bernstein, so the problem was not raw talent but knowledge and choral practice.

Only in the last twenty years has the exploration of musical styles flourished, together with the development of professionally run courses, all spread by extensive communication. Students can record themselves now, on audio and video, and learn from thousands of examples from many countries. As a result, quality has exploded. I would go so far as to say that generally the most inspiring choir directors I work with nowadays are the younger ones; immediate training has overtaken experience in value.

This must be typical of many specialist fields, and it shows progress in action and accelerating. I can only be excited by how brilliant the students of the people I was at Princeton will become.

Yet progress can accelerate still further. Looking around me at Princeton, it was obvious how. As an arts specialism and one requiring some training at high school, white kids with rich parents dominated the Princeton choir, plus a few Asians. The faculty were all white and taught rather rigid methods in a similar style. Imagine if accessibility to education would develop so that in 20 years time the class would reflect society more evenly? Imagine the opportunity to create new styles by fusion with existing methods. We have moved beyond the posh kids of Oxbridge, but we haven’t reached full potential yet, far from it.

I will make one prediction though. No matter how fast progress accelerates, no matter what wonderful new compositions become available to us, Omnes Generationes will remain peerless. There will only ever be one Johann Sebastian Bach.