Sabbatical art pilgrimage: St Martin-in-the-Fields

The Revd. Dr. Sam Wells, Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, spoke about ‘Art and the renewal of St Martins’ at the beginning of July as part of the International Conference organised by Art & Christianity Enquiry (ACE).

After initial remarks on the theme of art as a plurality of possibility showing what could be by using form, media and idea for creation, appreciation and interpretation, he took John Calvin’s threefold office of Christ as a frame for speaking about art, St Martins and Art at St Martins.

Art:

·        Prophet – Art holds up a mirror to society and asks, ‘Are you proud of what you see?’ Art can create a dream of society fulfilled and thereby the painful gap between the ideal and reality. Prophets often shock and some prophetic acts are shocking.

·        Priest – We can “heaven espie” through art (e.g. icons). Art enables us to see beyond the stars. It can, therefore, be a sacrament.  Through the arts the ordinary stuff of life speaks or sings of the divine. Artists are the high priests of creation.

·        King – Art shows what humanity can be when we reach our full potential.  Kingly art stretches us and is about glory, as with the roadsweeper Wells encountered who spoke of his love of opera as being “his glory.” Artists construct acts of worship. God is the great artist and each human life is an interpretation and improvisation on the creativity of God.

St Martins:

·        Prophetic – Advocacy on social issues.

·        Kingly – St Martins is a premier parish church which affirms national culture and identity.

·        Priestly – The priestly role is central to St Martins.

Art at St Martins:

·        Prophetic – Homage to Soweto by Chaim Stephenson is a memorial to those who suffered during the Apartheid regime in South Africa. Hector Pieterson was a 13-year-old killed in the Soweto uprising in 1976. In the sculpture he is being carried in the arms of a fellow student. The sculpture is a tribute, lament and prayer for victims of injustice and violence. Mike Chapman’s Millennium sculpture on the portico depicts the scandal of particularity found in the incarnation.

·        Priestly – Brian Catling’s Processional Cross has been cast in a strong yet lightweight aluminium and is gilded in white gold. In Jesus, God came face-to-face with humanity and vice versa. Jesus is, therefore, the crossroads. Wood went adrift when it was used as a cross. Here drift wood has been attached to the cross; two pieces of wood have been tied humbly together by a length of string – an allusion to St Martin tearing his cloak in two and giving half to a beggar.

·        Kingly – James Gibbs’ building signified a new era of church building. Shirazeh Houshiary’s East Window has no direct representation of conventional imagery. The oval is a prophetic image of interruption. It can also be seen as an egg about to burst (a Kingly image). The window governs all it surveys. This cross is a vortex of renewal, a whirlpool of holiness. 

St Martin’s has an Arts Advisory Panel for the Art Programme that began under the church’s Renewal Project. The panel is chaired by Sir Nicholas Goodison and also includes Vivien Lovell, Director of Modus Operandi. Other members of the advisory panel include Revd Dr Sam Wells, vicar of St Martin’s; Rod Beadles and Ali Lyon, Churchwardens; Eric Parry, architect of the Renewal Project; art historians Wendy Baron and MaryYule; and Alister Warman, curator.

As part of the renewal of St Martin-in-the-Fields by Eric Parry Architects, Modus Operandi was appointed to create an Art Startegy for the Grade I listed church.  As a result of a competitive interview process, overseen by the Art Selection Panel, five major new artworks were commissioned: Tomoaki Suzuki’s Christmas Crib, Shirazeh Houshiary’s East Window, a poem by Andrew Motion which was realised by letterer Tom Perkins and set into the balustrade of the Light Well, a new Altar by Shirazeh Houshiary and the new Processional Cross by Brian Catling.

The building won a RIBA London Award in 2009, an ACE/RIBA Award for Religious Architecture, A Civic trust Award and the Europa Nostra EU Prize for Cultural Heritage.  It also received a British Construction Industry Award and was highly commended in the Regeneration and Renewal Awards.

In addition to the commissions through the Art Programme, the visual arts also feature in the renewed building in the Crypt Gallery. The Gallery in the Crypt’s dramatic 18th Century architecture makes a stunning backdrop to display modern art and photography.

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Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble.

The Million Dollar Quartet and the Godmother of Rock 'n' Roll

Yesterday's Independent had a feature on the Million Dollar Quartet, in the light of the new musical of that name which opens at the Noel Coward Theatre on 28th February.

The musical is inspired by the fabled Million Dollar Quartet of 4 December 1956, when Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins, all enjoying the first flushes of success, found themselves in the same studio. The show imagines these fathers of rock'n'roll and country bashing out hits including "Blue Suede Shoes", "Folsom Prison Blues", "That's All Right", "I Walk the Line", "Great Balls of Fire", "Hound Dog", "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" and many more.

But as the article points out that wasn't what happened at all. The truth is less immediately satisfying but much more interesting. There is no evidence that they played any of these songs – none are on the tapes. Instead, there are fragments of gospel and standards, with a smattering of rock'n'roll.

What this demonstrates is the extent to which rock and pop music emerged out of the Church. The early stars of Rock 'n' Roll, like Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley, drew on a shared background of Spirituals, Gospel, the charismata of Southern Pentecostalism and all faced anxiety over their decision to substitute secular words and movements for sacred songs and mannerisms.


This influence formed the centrepiece of Mick Csaky's BBC biopic, The Godmother of Rock & Roll: Sister Rosetta Tharpe. During the 40s, 50s and 60s Sister Rosetta Tharpe played a highly significant role in the creation of rock and roll, inspiring musicians like Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. She may not be a household name, but this flamboyant African-American gospel singing superstar, with her spectacular virtuosity on the newly-electrified guitar, was one of the most influential popular musicians of the 20th century.

Tharpe was born in 1915, close to the Mississippi in Cotton Plant, Arkansas. At the age of six she was taken by her evangelist mother Katie Bell to Chicago to join Roberts Temple, Church of God in Christ, where she developed her distinctive style of singing and guitar playing. At the age of 23 she left the church and went to New York to join the world of show business, signing with Decca Records. For the following 30 years she performed extensively to packed houses in the USA and subsequently Europe, before her death in 1973.

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The Million Dollar Quartet - Just A Little Talk With Jesus.

God Gave Rock 'N' Roll To You (1)

Rock and pop music, in large part, emerged out of the Church. Its early stars, like the ‘Million Dollar Quartet’ of Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley, drew on a shared background of Spirituals, Gospel, the charismata of Southern Pentecostalism and all faced anxiety over their decision to substitute secular words and movements for sacred songs and mannerisms.

This beginning, which was felt as a betrayal of sacred music by those involved and by the Churches that judged them has meant that, for the most part, Christian churches have been hostile to the music that young people choose to listen to, and the music industry has responded with equal hostility, believing that any song with 'Jesus' in the title will sink without trace. Robert Beckford made that argument in a Channel 4 programme shown a couple of Christmasses ago and to ground his argument pointed to the drug culture and Eastern religions that characterised Flower Power in the 60s, the influence of Satanism in Heavy Metal, Black Metal and Shock Rock, the commitment of many hip hop artists to the Nation of Islam and the way in which the Christian Right in the US has sought to censor many such artists since the 1980s.

That programme ended with Beckford giving an impassioned plea for the Church to effectively engage with popular culture. That is something I endorse at the same time as being amazed by the extent to which Beckford’s argument overlooked many significant figures in Rock and Pop who have sought to express their faith through their music. If you watched God Gave Rock And Roll To You you would have come away with the impression that apart from Cliff Richard, Kanye West, and Matisyahu, the Hasidic reggae star, no one else in the history of Rock and Pop has ever dared to challenge the concensus that Religion and Rock and Roll do not mix.

The reality is far more complicated and in this series of posts I'm going to highlight some of the people that Beckford overlooked in order to think about ways in which the good news of Christianity has been expressed in popular culture by musicians drawing on the influence of musical traditions from the American South.

But first, here are two stories that would seem to back up Beckford’s thesis. The soul star Al Green is one of those who has felt the tension between flesh and Spirit, secular and sacred. He left a multi-million dollar career to sing Gospel and, in the film The Gospel According To Al Green, explains that he was moved by the Spirit to do so.

When Al Green is moved by the Spirit it leads him to leave his so-called ‘secular’ recording career to sing Gospel and to pastor a Church. His decision frees him to sing exclusively about the light that he has found in Jesus Christ and to preach the Gospel as he does so. Because of his past career and because he continues to sing his old hits he is able to continue to sing to people outside the church as well as to those in the Church but for many who, like Al Green, want to sing exclusively about the light that they have found in Jesus that opportunity is not extended and they make their living in Christian Contemporary Music (CCM) singing mainly to the already converted.

Larry Norman is often thought of as one of the founding figures of CCM but actually began his career recording for mainstream record labels and singing songs that named the name of Jesus and critiqued the society in which he lived. As a pioneer in writing Rock music explicitly from the perspective of a Christian, he attracted criticism from the Church and from the record industry with critics claiming that he was “too rock and roll for the Church and too religious for the rock and rollers.”

Eventually, the pressure from the record companies became too much and he launched his own record label which played an important role in establishing the separate strand of music that we now know as CCM. However, while he was recording for mainstream labels he wrote many songs that were not simply about the light of Christ but also about what you can see by the light. An example is the song Nightmare#71 from So Long Ago The Garden which uses a dream format to speak a prophetic warning to Western society that is still relevant even though it was first released in 1973.

Is the sacred/secular divide found in these two stories inevitable? Why/Why not?

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Al Green - I Love You.