No doubt on the morning of December 30th, 1170, as the news of murder in the Cathedral circulated through the market-place and taverns of Canterbury, heads would nod to the tune of ‘There’s no respect these days’ and ‘Personally, I blame the parents’. There may even have been some who said ‘Well, he had it coming, didn’t he?’. One thing about our own violent times, at least we have not had the Archbishop of Canterbury cut down in his own cathedral. And of course it is usually to escape from such newspaper matters, to ‘get away from it all’ that people take to Gregorian chant. As with other ‘liberators’ from rational consciousness, it enables a certain kind of addict to achieve a sense of timelessness or, in the literal sense of the word, an ecstasy. Here, however, time and the timeless intersect, and, as with Keats in his Ode to the Nightingale, it is a bell that tolls us back to this world where violence was perpetrated while the monks were at Vespers and ordinary folk probably settling down to bits and pieces left over from Christmas.
The record is partly a celebration of St Thomas the Martyr and partly a re-enactment of the hour of his death. His exile “as a stranger in the Egypt of France” is first recalled. Then the Unfinished Vespers of the day take their timeless course till at the reading from Hebrews I the cantor’s voice falters and stops. The great bell of St Dunstan tolls the death knell, taken up then in a four-note chime, and singing resumes with the Subvenite. It is an impressive piece of music drama, and unique, I imagine, in the history of Gregorian chant on record.
The Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge sing under the expert direction of Mary Berry, in finely achieved unison, the tone impersonal but not inhuman. The nine singers comprise a wide range of voices and a sufficient variety of soloists. Their manner is not severe or insistently formal, and they respond well (as, at a guess, in the “Redemptionem” and “Apud Dominum”) to the suggestion of “a subtle rhythmic lilt” noted by Mary Berry in her introduction. The Company of Change-ringers make a valuable contribution, and more would have been welcome. The commemoration is well recorded, and the multilingual booklet is generously illustrated.'