multitude of voyces

Several months ago my friend and collaborator, Dr Alison Daniell, highlighted
this special conference for which contributions were invited relating to ‘Julian
as a voice for the voiceless’ among other themes. We are delighted to be able
to be here today alongside members of Somerville College Choir, their director
Will Dawes and harpist Aoife Miralles to present a project which drew on
Julian’s life and influence to address an issue identified within the world of
church-music.
Six years ago, in Salisbury, within a community project to celebrate
International Women’s Day, our own work to investigate the voicelessness of
women’s creative gifts within the liturgy, to recover and celebrate them, led
Multitude of Voyces to create a series of anthem commissions each focussing
on text from Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love. Through this work the project
partners collectively envisioned a way in which to address women’s particular
underrepresentation and marginalisation within the sacred music canon.
While girls had increasingly found a role within liturgical music with increased
representation within high-profile choirs over recent decades in cathedrals
such as Leicester, St Mary’s, Edinburgh, Salisbury and Salford, the ‘space’ for
women’s contributions – as composers, writers and performers within the
genre – was, even six years ago, relatively little considered. Indeed, when
Multitude of Voyces’ project began, women composers were barely
acknowledged within the UK education system, and little-integrated within the
established repertoire of our parish churches and cathedrals.
It was hidden in plain sight, that, with few exceptions – mostly within the
university system – women were generally unable to fulfil their creative
potential or vocation within the androcentric structure of the church-music
tradition, a tradition which had long-provided opportunities for men to share
their creative gifts.
The opportunity to bring to a parish church a service in which every item and
aspect – written, composed, led, read, sung, played and prayed – would be
contributed by women created a bold opportunity for challenge and creativity,
and a metaphorical ‘space’ in which we could explore the privileges and
responsibilities of such rare inclusion.

In such uncharted territory we needed an authoritative voice which could
provide a ‘pivot point’ for the different commissions, not only to create some
cohesion to the project but also to provide a secure, intellectually sound point
of reference on which our own emerging voices, advocating both for ourselves
and for each other, could build and find validation.
Already accepted and valued within the world of Christian spirituality, the work
of feminist scholars through the Recovery Project has established Julian as a
central figure within a more inclusive literary canon, relevant beyond her own
time and allowing us to view her as a transformative figure, both theologically
and as one of Virginia Woolf’s ‘mothers to think back through’; the ideal
author for our own radical collaborative project. Significantly, the inclusion of
such an established figure provided the organisers with a protective ‘shield’
with which to defend ourselves from any criticism of the project.
Equally important was to reach out to one of the few nationally recognised
women composers in the field, no less than the Master of the Queen’s Music,
who with characteristic generosity and enthusiasm not only agreed to
compose one of the anthems herself, but also recommended Carol Jones,
Hilary Campbell and Gemma McGregor to us.
In her own anthem, which we shall hear first, Judith chose to set Julian’s
original text, which members of Somerville College Choir will now perform, in
the language that Julian herself spoke.
Judith Weir – We sekyn here rest
‘We search here for rest among things which will fall to dust and wherein there
is no rest to be found; and we regard not our God who is all mighty, all wise
and all good and desires us to rest in him. Nothing less than God can truly
satisfy us and no soul will be at rest until all earthly things are stripped away.’
Sealed in a room adjacent to the church of St Julian in Conesford, Norwich,
with a small window to enable her to witness the Mass, the anchoress was
considered ‘dead’ to the world; the rites surrounding her incarceration even
involved sections of the burial service. Her life revolved around prayer,
contemplation and providing counsel for the local community, and it was out
of such an ascetic and devotional context that Revelations of Divine Love
provided us with a starting point for a project which quickly found a welcome
among those willing to hear our own voices.

Writing in her native tongue, Julian’s approach in re-membering her Visions in
the vernacular challenged the status quo: to paraphrase Janina Ramirez, ‘by
using the vernacular Julian could couch her theological ruminations more as
personal encounters with the Divine, rather than presenting them as a treatise
on the nature of the Divine.’
Through Alison’s translations, each of which in our church services followed
the recitation of Julian’s original text, we wanted to underline this connection
with the personal; to explore Julian’s experiences within a more familiar
vocabulary and to present Julian’s spirited personality as a ‘living, breathing
communicant’ within our services, equally understandable by those familiar
and unfamiliar with her writings.
Julian’s approach sat outside the expected framework of her time but she
knew her Bible and quite probably other important Christian texts as well. Our
own approach also had to be innovative yet well-informed; recognisable yet
different; keeping the established rules, yet subversive; peculiar, yet relatable:
above all, to be all that it could be, the project had to be sincere and authentic
and to allow each composer to express their own personal voice and
interpretation of each text.
Gemma McGregor recounts that when she read the text she thought of the
woman living alone who had sacrificed so much because she felt compelled
to contemplate faith. The reflective music at the start of her composition
transforms into a full choral sound with a harp accompaniment that is a
salutation to Julian’s experience of divine love.
‘Love was his mening. Who shewid it the? Love. What shewid he the? Love.
Wherfore shewid it he? For love. Hold the therin and thou shalt witten
and knowen more in the same; but thou shalt never knowen ne witten therein
other thing without end. Thus was I lerid that love was our lords mening. And I
saw full sekirly in this and in all, that ere God made us he lovid us; which love
was never slakid, no never shall.’
Gemma McGregor – Love was his meaning
Julian understood her experiences as God communicating directly with her and
transformed that experience into powerful poetic structures enabling her to
communicate with us in a way that resonates down the centuries. That immediacy of communication guides us directly to the heart of Julian’s text and
allows her, a woman of the fourteenth century, to sidestep the filter of the
patriarchal Church tradition which has for so long silenced the voices of
women.
It would be wrong to suggest that the ‘Me too’ movement, and the personal
experiences of the project leaders and participants, did not have a profound
influence on the project as a whole; an intergenerational community project
needs, by definition, to include people of all ages and backgrounds; the
mothering and the mothered, each bringing the joys and challenges of their
lived experiences, to create something which all ages of listener can relate to,
and so within our project we needed to include, support and inspire women of
several generations and to be ready to embrace the light and the dark of our
own lives.
In Julian we found a figure whose voice was as active and alert in its old age as
in its youth; for whom the gift of time to reflect upon her Visions had enabled
her to bring to her writing a warmth of wisdom and an acceptance of
inevitable death, which, as Hilary Campbell writes, ‘allows our [own] grief to be
transformed into joy and certainty, through the clarity that faith, represented
as light, brings.’
Julian and her medieval audience understood darkness as a thing of danger
and in contrast the imagery of God as Light would have blazed like a beacon;
speaking of safety, knowledge and understanding; faith, like a candle, guiding
them through the gloom of earthly existence to the everlasting day of heaven.
Julian tells us that we will not see clearly until we are released from our earthly
life – or ‘woe’ as she calls it – and come to dwell in the bright light of God’s
endless day. Whilst on earth, she tells us, we cannot make out the entirety of
God’s plan. However, once we are in heaven we shall see clearly in the light
that is God’s presence.
‘And at the end of wo, sodenly our eye shall ben openyd, and in clerte of light
our sight shall be full; which light is God our maker and Holy Gost in Christ
Ihesus our savior. Thus I saw and vnderstode that our feith is our light in our
night; which light is God our endless day.’
Hilary Campbell – Our Endless Day
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© Multitude of Voyces (2022) Dr Alison Daniell and Louise Stewart www.multitudeofvoyces.co.uk
https://visionsofjulian.mml.ox.ac.uk/ ‘Julian as a voice for the voiceless’. Somerville College Chapel, 14.07.2022
members of Somerville College Choir, directed by Will Dawes, with Aoife Miralles, harp.
As well as considering Julian’s Visions and person holistically, it is important to
analyse some of the reasons why Julian’s writing lent itself so well to be the
basis for these commissions.
Even without the addition of music the shapeliness of Julian’s text appeals to
the ear, an essential element when wanting to engage the attention of a
congregation or audience!
Rhythmic and enigmatic, one could say that her words were already ‘halfway
to music’, and this feature was exploited by Carol Jones in the most original
and inspiring way.
As her starting point Carol recorded the organisers each reading aloud Alison’s
translation; the speech rhythms and natural inflections of our voices then
informed the pitches, rhythms and structure of the piece, making our voices
part of the anthem’s very construction, just as Julian made her voice heard
through the rhetorical structures she chose, through which to share her
message of love and compassion.
‘I may makyn althing wele; I can make althing wele and I wil make althyng wele
and I shall make althyng wele; and thou shal se thiself that al manner
of thyng shal be wele. [...] That is impossible to the is not impossible to me. I
shal save my worde in al things and I shal make althing wele.’
Carol J Jones – All shall be well
As work in our chosen field gathered speed after 2019, with the essential
support and encouragement of music professionals such as Will Dawes, our
Anthology series Sacred Music by Women Composers developed out of the
commissions you have heard today, breaking new ground in introducing and
re-introducing women composers to the sacred music canon. With
complementary initiatives now being developed through national and
international collaboration, is it unreasonable to expect proportionate
representation of women composers within the sacred repertoire in today’s
singers’ lifetimes?
To paraphrase poet Rachel Curzon, whose own contribution to our services can
be read in your programme, ‘One voice, plus another voice, plus as many
voices as can be persuaded to make themselves heard, combine to express a
thought anew. The performance does not end with the making of noise but
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© Multitude of Voyces (2022) Dr Alison Daniell and Louise Stewart www.multitudeofvoyces.co.uk
https://visionsofjulian.mml.ox.ac.uk/ ‘Julian as a voice for the voiceless’. Somerville College Chapel, 14.07.2022
members of Somerville College Choir, directed by Will Dawes, with Aoife Miralles, harp.
resonates beyond it.’ We hope that some of our message of hope, borrowed
from Julian, has resonated with you today.
Written by Dr Alison Daniell and Louise Stewart © Multitude of Voyces 2022
With thanks to Juliet Brain, Revd Wendy Cooper, Olivia Sparkhall and Andrew Stewart