mons. Marco Frisina | Official Website

The beginning of all this is in the Bible. The songs, which punctuate the entire biblical story, express amazement before the great events of salvation. The Song of the Sea of Exodus 15 epically and lyrically interprets the foundamental episode of the history of Israel: the passage of the Red Sea. We can call it one of the first examples of sacred music because it is the purest expression of how life and faith come together to become a praise, indeed, a veritable liturgy sung by the people to their God the Savior. In Psalms we find, collected in one single book, all the expressive possibilities of this hymn to God "that works wonders." There are psalms of praise and prayer, penitential and psalms of thanksgiving, psalms of lamention and those of epics; in a word, there is the entire man singing his relationship with God. In the New Testament, the Magnificat becomes the most beautiful archetype of every Christian hymn. Mary’s hymn to God, who is her mighty Saviour and who makes "great things" for the poor realizing its promise, becomes part of the Church that, at sunset, sings to her Redeemer. Every sacred music depends, in some way, from these biblical models and in the history of the Christian music every generation has wanted to continue the composition of these songs and these psalms, singing a myriad of hymns and songs to the Lord of beauty. The traditional Gregorian melodies seem a wonderful synthesis of the first Christian millennium. In their simplicity and sublime expressiveness they show us the perfect combination of melody and sacred text.The music brings out the light contained in the words and inspires a yearning nostalgia for the sky both in the singer and in the listener. From the monasteries to the people of God, the Gregorian music produced wonderful effects creating, in the Christian West, a common language and, with its spread, giving birth both to classical and popular music thus marking the beginning of the real history of music. Through the years man felt the need to combine different tones, thus obtaining a song made up of different songs, a "polyphony." From the thirteenth century on, a new musical genre comes to life;it is a genre in which harmony can be enjoyed as a union of different voices such as "concordia discors", a choir for three voices which then become four, five, eight, twelve, up to thirty-six and more. It becomes a symbol of a higher harmony reminiscent of the heady and celestial spheres, the angelic choirs. However and gradually something was missing: the sacred text, suffocated among the polyphonic plots, was not understandable anymore. The text should revert to being a protagonist: the Scripture should be sung and polyphony had to place itself at its service. Thus the wonderful musical period of the Renaissance polyphony was born . Among the many great music-writers of the sixteenth century we cannot forget Pierluigi da Palestrina, who was able to synthesize the great contrapuntal achievements of the previous centuries purifying them with a perfect balance between text, music and poetic expressiveness. This period is the culmination of a musical culture and not its end. It can, indeed, be described as the beginning of a new feeling. The Counter-Reformation, in fact, led the Church to express the Gospel with greater vigor and enthusiasm. It gave rise to many holy witnesses to a minded and "modern faith." The missionary enthusiasm prompted many Christians to look beyond Europe, seeing in the new world new receivers of the Gospel. In addition, it was discovered that the human voice and instruments could be used as a vehicle for man's deepest emotions, and thus for his faith. The Birth of Opera and Sacred Oratorio at the same time, show us the emergence of this new musical sensibility. The dramatization of the experience of faith, as it happens in the great baroque speakers, becomes a way to express their participation to the mystery of salvation, giving space to the heart and to the human feelings. Already in the seventeenth century Carissimi had brought the Oratorio to the highest levels of art, but it was in the next century that this sacred music reached its highest expression. The Protestant Reformation had replaced the traditional songs of the medieval tradition with new and easier ones to facilitate the participation of the believer: the choir. These compositions became the means for the education of ordinary people who could learn, along with simple melodies, whole pieces of the Scripture singing them each in their own language. From these chorals, musicians drew the material for their great compositions. Bach wrote hundreds of cantatas simply by covering those splendid chorals with songs and arias. The emotion and participation to the mystery of the Redemption that he was able to convey, marked the history of music forever. The sacred art took him as its arrival point as well as its starting one. During the following period, the sacred music continued its baroque splendor with the great writers of the eighteenth century. In Italy in his short life Pergolesi was able to give us a masterpiece such as the Stabat Mater. At the end of the century, however, a new sensibility makes its way dragging with itself the sacred music. Mozart and Haydn open the doors to a new, more complex and symphonic conception of sacred music. Beethoven and Schubert will collect their intentions, leading them to romantic themes. Sacred music becomes an occasion to express the conflict of the human heart before pain and God Himself. Verdi masterfully summes up this conflict in the Requiem Mass in which the contemplation of the "last things" becomes the synthesis of the same human drama. The twentieth century inherited this conflictual belief and, aboveall, adopted the doubt and, sometimes, even the modern 'atheism' But at the same time a new longing for the sky arose among the composers of the twentieth century.Let’s think to the sacred music of Stravinsky in which the author refers to the models of Orthodox music, to Rachmaninov, to Poulenc, to Petrassi, and Penderecki and others up to the contemporary ones as Part. The Sacred Music continues its journey by expressing the beauty of God and exploring the human heart in search of that light which, through music, is able to give everyone a glimpse of paradise.