Protestants are prone to being artistically challenged because they grow up in an environment that sees the arts as a luxury. I can hear my uncle Knute wandering around the Sistine Chapel, muttering things like, “Oh, the Pope loves luxury, you know.” But those with Jewish and Catholic upbringings tend to see art as a source of inspiration; “great spiritual art pulls you on to sacred ground,” as the scholar Wilson Yates has said. Bach is the dividing line for my people, the Lutherans, because he was a Lutheran organist, and anything before him smacks of Popery—smells and bells and other fancy stuff. Bach, especially his choral and choir music, is certified in the Lutheran church canon like stained glass windows and the theology from Luther’s notebooks: if you can’t find what you need in those three media, you can probably get along without it.
But now, having lived for more than a half-century, I am pulled into an ecumenical appreciation for the beauty of other faiths. The Greek Orthodox have icons that project us to a sacred place, in a traditional painting technique as old as Jesus; the Russians have fantastic architecture, like the onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square; and the Catholics’ record in painting and sculpture can’t be beat. For all the things I disagree with in the theology of these religions, and there are many, there is one argument that sticks: the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches have a continuity to the art of the ages that the Protestants, by nature, bad luck, and design, will never have. That’s because the Protestant’s faith tradition cannot be more than five hundred years old, and its origins include the smashing of icons in the Catholic Church (“iconoclast” comes from this); all other religious art, too, was considered suspect. I think stained glass windows survived as an art form because they kept out the cold.
I’m not the only Protestant who is rediscovering more sumptuous traditions. Famous theologians like Marcus Borg (The Heart of Christianity) are telling about growing up Lutheran, attending Presbyterian churches, and joining in the relatively highfalutin ceremonies of the Episcopalians. Even Harvey Cox, a Northern Baptist and progressive iconoclast critic of an unthinking church, who worked with the Rev. Martin Luther King, currently attends an Episcopal service. In secular terms, this is like B.B King making a point of taking high tea at the Mayfair, as opposed to ribs at Famous Dave’s. In a recent book, Common Prayers, Cox describes the rediscovery of the connection of meaning to ceremony through his Jewish wife, who maintains the ancient practice of weekly Shabbat; it opened a door for him. “Rediscovering Shabbat was a step on the way to rediscovering the Eucharist,” he said recently, describing his newfound attachment to taking communion every week. “One brings one’s own symbolism to it; but to me it is the ultimate symbol of the human community. Rich and poor, black and white are all gathered around the table. It is equalitarian distribution, and that is a basis for an equalitarian society.”
Cox and Borg are groundbreakers in modern theology, finding new meaning in the old faiths, so it comes as a bit of a surprise that these innovators are drawn to the more traditional ceremonial aspects of the church. God, in this case, is in the details; a spiritual experience can arise through participation in a complex ritual in the same way that good sacred art can draw the viewer or listener on to sacred ground.
Which is why this recovering Lutheran is swept away by the Rose Ensemble. This twelve-member choral group, based in St. Paul, is devoted to early music—music that connects with ideas and aesthetics that have been tested over centuries of audience trials, but is being remade for people who live and who listen now.
The latest thing in archaeological musicology, early music is more traditional than “neo-trad.” It goes back past the bulk of classical music to the Baroque, Renaissance, and Medieval eras. It’s the ultimate in non-electronic, non-materialistic music. Where Billy Bragg and Wilco dug up unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics and set them to new music, scholars of sacred music like Jordan Sramek, the Rose Ensemble’s founder and director, are poring through vocal music catalogs in Europe (especially newly liberated treasure troves in Eastern countries like Poland and the Czech Republic), and bringing back to daylight sounds that voices gave life to as much as a millennium ago.
You don’t have to believe in any faith to be awestruck by the melodies, harmonies, and tonalities that pour from Sramek’s Rose Ensemble. Among practitioners of early music, it is quickly becoming nationally recognized. A recent performance on the national early-music radio program “Harmonia” led to an avalanche of orders for its five recordings. Sales of between two thousand and twenty-five hundred copies for its newest, Fire of the Soul: Choral Virtuosity in 17th-century Russia & Poland, may not sound like much, until you consider that the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra has stopped recording altogether.
The manuscript for the Rose Ensemble’s latest project, Visitatio Sepulchri: The Dublin Mystery Play (to be performed April 7–10 at the Southern Theater in Minneapolis; 612-340-1725), came to light almost accidentally. A couple of years ago, Sramek was studying fifteenth-century chants for the feasts of St. Patrick, St. Killian, and St. Bridgit at Trinity College in Dublin. “Once I got there,” he said, “I found that there was this network of manuscript libraries. Once you went to one, they kind of pointed you to the next one, saying, ‘You really should see this.’ I was sent to a private one, Marsh’s Library, located in the back of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. One of the oldest manuscripts there contained the Dublin Mystery Play.”
Mystery plays (also called Miracle plays) are the birthplace of Western theater as we know it, developing out of feast-day celebrations of the medieval church. Just as stained glass windows could help tell the stories of the Catholic faith to the illiterate, feast days offered a supplemental education in those same stories, outside the Sunday service. Feast days began to gain in importance in the mid-eleventh century, as the monolithic grip of the church on the populace started to loosen. Not only was the economic influence of guilds expanding, but universities were also breaking the church’s monopoly on education. By focusing on feast days, the church could keep both individuals (including tradesmen) and new institutions involved in the church. Bakers might sponsor a performance centered around the tale of the loaves and fishes, for instance, supplying performers, props, costumes, and staging. At the same time, these performances brought religious education out of the church and into the streets. The audience was bound by a shared experience, lasting for months in its planning, rehearsal, execution, and discussion.
Mystery plays were an all-inclusive form of participation, a medieval form of what some today call “edutainment.” They were community-builders, a chance for everyone to get in the act, but also to share in a moral universe, a tradition that reached back into an ancient past, and into the foreseeable future.
The Visitatio Sepulchri is the most popular theme of the mystery plays, telling the story of the three Marys—Mary Magdalene, Mary Salome, and Mary Jacobin (or “mother of James”)—who go to the tomb to anoint Jesus’ body with spices, only to find that he has disappeared. While it’s difficult to date the version that Sramek unearthed in Dublin, best guess places it between 1100 and 1300.
While the Rose Ensemble’s version sticks closely to the original manuscript, it also expands on the one-act musical drama with narration (from Minnesota Public Radio’s Tom Crann), a new work by Minnesota composer Abbie Betinis, lighting design by Jeff Bartlett, and danc
e from Matt Jenson’s New and Slightly Used Dance. Sramek even took the liberty of adding the character of the Virgin Mary. “A lot of the traditional Irish ‘keens,’ or laments, were written in the voice of Mary lamenting the death of Jesus,” he said. “And I thought, what a wonderful opportunity to add these keens, with Mary lamenting the death of her son in Irish—Gaelic religious music is like Irish folk music, it has twists and turns in it and it’s very lyrical—and the rest happening in Latin. It will be like two worlds colliding.”
At their best, the secular arts and religious ceremonies bring some meaning to this often meaningless existence; with a sense of dedication, craft, and sheer reverence, the Rose Ensemble makes tangible the best of both worlds.
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