A few times on my old website I wrote about Tenebrae services I’ve put on. The office of Tenebrae is an adaptation of a service that was used in the early church. It’s a meditation on the shadowy moments in the final days of Jesus’ life as he made his journey towards the Cross, each shadow gradually growing darker until he was finally enveloped in the darkness of death. The Tenebrae service is therefore in a restrained and solemn mood. Readings from scripture are interspersed with music and periods of silence.

We have kept the office of Tenebrae on the last Sunday of our university Term, in weeks when Easter falls early. But it’s traditionally kept in Holy Week – commonly Maundy Thursday, sometimes Good Friday or Holy Saturday

In our “alternative”, contemporary interpretations of Tenebrae, each of the eight movements through the shadows of anguish, humiliation, separation and death were played out through scripture readings, music, dramatic action and silence. We married together the richness of our choral music with the alt*worship tradition – taking ancient ideas and re-engaging with them by putting them into contemporary clothes.  We put New Testament readings, Isaac Newton and Gesualdo side by side with Taize, Brian Eno, Craig Armstrong, barbed wire and candles, fairy lights and red paint …

As in the traditional service, with each reading one more candle is put out as the sign of the darkness closing in on Jesus. The last candles remain burning until Good Friday as a sign of Jesus’ death.
In retracing the steps of Jesus towards the Cross, themes to meditate on include his obedience to God, and his calling, and the way in which our lives might mirror the sacrifices Christ made.
“If any person will come after me, let him deny himself and take up the cross and follow me. Whoever loses his life for my sake and the Gospel’s will save it.”

MUSIC

In one of our Tenebrae services, I was torn between Craig Armstrong, Ennio Morricone and Jocelyn Pook. Partly because I’m fascinated with the relationship between music and other art forms (like film, for instance) and partly because, while I’m no Luddite when it comes to technology, I like technology to be used for its own sake, not as a convenient way of replacing something we had before. That is to say, why try to produce a violin sound on a synthesiser? Play a violin, dammit. But computers/synthesisers can create sound that acoustic instruments can’t, and when the two mediums are mixed together, some really interesting stuff emerges. Brian Eno, of course, must be added to the list of innovators here. Other names too. But in the end I picked Craig Armstrong from the list of luminaries, partly because I find I turn to him more than most, and partly because one of his most haunting pieces ended in the same key as one of the movements from Gesualdo’s Tenebrae responses that the Choir was going to sing. By eliding the two pieces together we slid seamlessly from 21st century recorded music to 16th century live choral music. It’s a kind of appropriation of the idea of “mixing” that still engages with “real” or live music, something I think we should pursue much more than we do.  (Ruthless Gravity, the first track from As If to Nothing was the track we used.)

Andy and Hannah Goodliff came to one of our early Tenebraes, and then went home and created one of their own, Andy generously put the script up on his website