The creative impulse To write music is an exercise in humility, as Matthew Schellhorn explains

Earlier this year, in July, the musical world lost one of its brightest composers – Ennio Morricone (1928–2020) – and this sad event has led me to reflect on what might lie, in spiritual terms, behind the impetus to create music for others to hear and to perform.

With soundtracks ranging from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) to The Mission (1986), Morricone’s musical voice both communicated to the world the important universal appeal of art music and also inspired many composers to engage with modern audiences. But notably, Morricone avoided writing a Mass until towards the end of his life, having previously said he did not “feel the need” to approach the genre. In fact, the issue might well have been the unfortunate turn taken by composers in response to the supposed needs of liturgical reform in the mid-twentieth century: “Today, the Church has made a big mistake, turning the clock back 500 years with guitars and popular songs. I don’t like it at all.”

In noting the trajectory of Morricone’s creative life, I would contribute that there are three main aspects to a composer’s work. First, the composer creates because he can. Following experience as a performer or at least as an audience, often allied with formal study over many years, a musician will write down inner thoughts. To be a musician is to some extent to be a composer, but in making a record of the creative impulse fresh ideas will simultaneously be put to the test. A composer will, as Robert Schumann (1810-1856) said, “remember a tune that nobody else has thought of”. In this, my belief is that a composer participates, albeit with human limitations, in the very properties of a creative Father as first mentioned in Sacred Scripture: “In the beginning God created…” (Genesis 1: 1).

The late Ennio Morricone

To affect the soul

The composer is, secondly, always at the service of others – the audience, the performer, the student. Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) wrote that “the end of all good music is to affect the soul”. The composer knows that he must reach out to the listener, to achieve some effect, to “move” others. To write music is, again with human limitations, an oblation. It is a self-offering, a sacrifice, and that is why it is – as so many composer colleagues have told me – an exercise in humility.

Having not only oneself but also the listener in mind involves the cardinal virtue of Temperance: the creative impulse submits to the presumed or actual preferences of others –“submitting to one's superior” in the words of St Thomas Aquinas. The composer, again in the words of St Thomas, keeps “within one’s own bounds”. By willingly constraining his own abilities, I believe he moves closer to an understanding of the Son, the Word who was made flesh (John 1: 15) and was obedient unto death (Philippians 2:8).

To inspire

A composer, thirdly, writes to inspire. A new creative work inspires the audience, the performer, the student to further acts of creativity. Music becomes the interface between the disparate intentions of so many individual impulses and intentions. A creative impulse that began in one place is mediated to another: it speaks “with divers tongues” but we hear within “our own tongue wherein we were born” (cf. Acts 2).

In offering these brief reflections, it is my deepest hope that the Church will offer every opportunity to composers to explore their unique creative gifts and their particular ways of more closely knowing God. By “turning back the clock” again, to use Morricone’s phrase, fostering of the arts can inspire future generations. Certainly, the composition prize I have set up and support, whereby young composers can have a new work performed in the Sacred Liturgy – this year on Christmas Eve at St Mary Moorfields –gives an incentive to put aside distractions, particularly at this difficult time for musicians, and focus on the special facets of a composer’s vocation. Please share the news of this opportunity, which can be found at www.cantusmagnus.com, and which is fortunate to benefit from the support of the Latin Mass Society. Matthew Schellhorn is the Latin Mass Society’s Director of Music for London. He has had a deep love of Sacred Music since his childhood and continues to campaign for the raising of musical standards in the life of the Catholic Church. He can be contactedatdirmusic@lms.org.uk.