There’s a full account of the launch event for the Tavener Centre for Music and Spirituality on 11 November 2016 at www.livingspirit.org.uk/articles/tavener-centre-study-day.

John Newton, our Journeying Together musician, attended this on behalf of LSC.

This wide-ranging book aims to deconstruct the musical liturgical tradition in a way that is both holistic and analytical. As Professor of Applied Music at Winchester University, Anglican priest, and drum-playing singer, June is well qualified to undertake both sides of this study. The title of her book is a reference to In Tune with Heaven: Report of the Archbishops’ Commission on Church Music (1992).

The root issue which June takes from the work of Michael Kirwan (Discovering Girard, 2004) is the lack of a transcendent myth, an emotionally satisfying narrative and shared purpose that speaks to our humanity. In this book June aims to look at how liturgical music needs to be reworked in order that we arrive at such a myth. Part of the secret is to examine the many subjugated ways of knowing of the different groups whose different ways of knowing have been suppressed, as well as the wisdom of the earth itself.

Women’s musical creativity is one of those subjugated approaches. Challenging musical patriarchy involves more than making women’s musical achievements visible. June believes it also involves a fundamental rethinking of the nature of musical meaning and identity.

There is a very interesting section based on Margaret Lindley’s 1995 article Competing Trinities: The Great Mother and the Formation of the Christian Trinity. In this study, the construction of the male Trinity went hand in hand with the exclusion of women form the musical ministry of the Church. As June puts it “The history of Christianity has been, until the end of the twentieth century, that of the systematic exclusion of women from both the central mysteries of bread and wine and from the central mystery of music.”

With the gradual adoption of more inclusive language, our present time is the first in which there is a combination of a belief in the God who is partly of wholly feminine and having women in positions of authority in the church – so a vital moment to apply ourselves to broadening the range of liturgical music.

Hildegard of Bingen is given as an example of a composer who successfully resolved the divisions of everyday life in a “transcendent relationality” through which people often experience a luminous cosmic connection in listening to her music. Oppositions such as dark/light, body/soul and good/evil were integrated, with the dark sides of life always being brought into relationship with the life-giving aspects.

The chapter on our present period Inning and Outing: Contemporary Practices contains much good information about myriad informal liturgical groups who have been working with the re-integration of the feminine and the earth. It lists much valuable music and songs suitable for use by such groups.

However the book isn’t sanguine about the ease of bringing the Wisdom tradition into formal liturgical music contexts The chapter Hymns or hers: Hymnody Past and Present goes through a list of issues and ways people have found in getting their voices heard.

The cost of this book (£49) will be a barrier to it getting the attention it deserves. I can only hope that groups can get together to purchase it and use the inspiration it provides for the creation of liturgies for our times.

Petra Griffiths