The event of Pentecost, as recounted in the book of Acts, which involves people from all nations miraculously hearing the disciples speak in their own language, creates a double take moment in the experience of the listener: Did I really just hear that right? I don't understand; that seemed to make sense.
At Pentecost, the expectation of an alien tongue, a babble, sounds without meaning are unexpectedly displaced with recognition and meaning. And yet in that hearing, that grasping, the listener is also taken to a strange place of collective effervescence, what the anthropologist Victor Turner called communitas, the very spirit of community, of being united with others in a taken-out-of-myself, ecstatic experience. In the miracle of the Pentecost moment we have then this strange ecstasy which simultaneously takes us by words - beyond words.
The experience of diversity in unity which lies at the heart of Pentecost is found again and again in music, and, of course, music has had an important role to play in Christian worship. Although there have of course been those Christians who have sought to submit music to didactic ends or shackle it for fear of sensuality in defiance of the Psalmist injunction to "Praise him with trumpet... lute and harp... with timbrel and dance," etc.
The desire to create music for worship "to the glory of God" has been wondrously generative, not least in the creation, by curious twists and turns of history, of the Anglican choral tradition from Tallis and Byrd to Stanford, Parry and Howells. It is difficult not to be moved at such magnificent music and the tradition of choral evensong in English cathedrals in very much alive and well. Indeed, despite the perennial instinct to praise the past, it is the present that is golden with outstanding musical standards in the best of our places of worship. Little wonder that increasing numbers of people seek out such services at the end of a working day.
But what of the unfamiliar? What of that music which does not automatically soothe, which needs a little work, music that causes us to do a double take? My recommendation for really grasping that mystical double-take moment of Pentecost is the choral music of Jonathan Harvey: Harvey, who sadly died in 2012, was one of the leading composers of the last few decades of the Twentieth century, an exponent of radical modernism, very well known for his orchestral compositions which were regularly performed across the globe.
But in church? Against the grain, in the 1970s, Winchester Cathedral had the vision to commission Jonathan Harvey (and happily others have followed). The results are in the words of leading music critic, Fiona Maddocks, choral music that is "ecstatic and richly challenging." In part this is because Harvey's music, whether it is the setting of the ancient hymn for Pentecost 'Come Holy Ghost' which 'breaks down' in the middle creating a glossolalic effect, or his delicate poignant setting of Edwin Muir's 'The Annunciation', is underpinned by a rich seam of intellectual and spiritual exploration.
For in addition to being an accomplished and renown composer, Harvey was a deeply spiritual man who knew the Christian (and other) mystical traditions well from his own experience, a lifelong engagement sparked by reading Evelyn Underhill's book, Mysticism.
One of the members of my congregation hearing Harvey's music in evensong for the first time caught me as she left the Chapel: "It made all my cells come alive," she said. What more could one possibly hope when we evoke the Spirit?