Drop, Drop Slow Tears

The mysterious allure of praise.

Orlando Gibbons

It’s a bit of a departure, this one. A lot of a departure, in fact. Musically, lyrically, thematically, and in age too, it’s unlike anything I’ve written about before. But more than any other song, this is what’s been turning over in my head these past few weeks.

I don’t know much about classical music, I must admit, and I regret that. Which is how this song came to reach me. A generous acquaintance compiled a playlist, earlier this year, of classical music she thought I might like, from the early seventeenth century up to the present day.

That playlist has been on repeat in our house ever since, and among the many highlights is this, with words by Phineas Fletcher (1582–1650) and music by Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625), performed here by VOCES8.

It’s a peculiar thing to feel moved by religious music when one is, like me, a non-believer. Ordinarily, I experience a certain flinch of resistance at the sound of hymns, and other songs of praise. I have not a hint of nostalgia for the years I spent attending church as a child. My memories of those occasions are of boredom and distraction, certainly not of musical rapture.

But my resistance has cracks – and now and then, something gets through.

I feel somewhat sheepish admitting that, among my favourite of Bob Dylan’s albums is Saved, the most fervent of his ‘born again’ era work, from the late 1970s. While some of his onstage pronouncements at the time were ugly and offensive, to me he has never sounded so passionate or sincere as he did then. Songs like ‘Pressing On’ and ‘What Can I Do For You?’ have a touching humility to them, and a gospel sound that I adore.

It doesn’t matter that I don’t share the faith that Dylan had then. The expression of that faith is what matters. Religious certainty has been the inspiration for a lot of music, over the centuries. And even a heathen like me can be moved by some of it.

Unlike Dylan’s Christian songs, there is nothing sanctimonious about ‘Drop, Drop Slow Tears’. The G-word is never mentioned in its three short verses, nor even the J-word. Jesus is certainly present – the song refers to a biblical story in which a woman washes his feet with tears – but he is referred to only as the ‘Prince of Peace’, who was ‘brought from Heaven’. (‘Heaven’, incidentally, can be an awkward old word to sing, and here, as so often, it is shortened to the near-unrecognisable ‘he’an’.)

If you’re anything like me, though, it isn’t the words of this hymn that will strike you first of all. It is the sound. It’s the sound of human voices woven together so perfectly that one can hardly be prised apart from the others. They form a unified whole, a harmony, that is beautiful, but also, I’m tempted to say, mysterious, sublime. There is something spiritual about the sound of these voices, even if one pays no attention to the words. Even if one is sceptical, like me, of the very notion.

What is being expressed here is not one person’s relationship with God. There is not an ‘I’ to be found in these lyrics. Only a single instance of the word ‘my’ suggests the existence of an individual at all. Instead, this is communal faith that we’re hearing; it is a shared praise, offered in harmony.

It’s notable that ‘praise’, in this sense, is something that is largely absent from popular music. Sure, there’s praise of another person, but that isn’t quite the same. There’s an asymmetry to religious praise – human beings praising a supernatural being – that can have echoes in certain love songs, but which is, inevitably, rather different.

The closest that secular music gets, I think, are those songs that eulogise nature, or particular landscapes. I’ve heard Russian folk songs, for instance, about mountains and rivers, that brought both singer and audience to tears. I watched, recently, a gorgeous documentary about an elderly couple from a sparsely-populated valley in Norway. Together, they sang and recited songs about the place in which they live: praising that place, sometimes addressing it directly, as if it were . . . well, a deity.

Such unfettered celebration of landscape and place seems to me less common in folk songs from Britain (though I’m happy to be contradicted on this claim). And the only example of a song I can think of that addresses a place unambiguously as ‘you’, is ‘Caledonia’, by Dougie MacLean. ‘Let me tell you that I love you,’ the chorus begins, ‘and I think about you all the time.’ With those words, many a Scottish eye dampens at once, and voices are raised to sing along.

And that’s partly what this is about, isn’t it? Shared emotions, love directed at something bigger than oneself, bigger even that many selves joined together?

I wonder if it’s something that secular listeners like me miss, even if not consciously. Is that why I feel a lump in my throat when I hear this song, a shiver as these three verses – the meaning of which don’t resonate with me – unspool? There’s more to it, I’m certain, but I do wonder.

I never wish that I believed in any kind of God, and I never have. But there are times, for sure, when I do wish for cause to raise my voice in praise.