Â鶹Éç

We have a little café at our church and sometimes we have events there like a quiz night or what we call ‘Me and My Music’ which is a bit like Desert Island Discs but with food and an audience - much better! – and I was recently asked to share my favourite tracks over lasagne and apricot sponge.

My biggest problem was choosing the music. Best rock record ever? No contest! – ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’, of course; or the tune from my youth – ‘Monday, Monday’; I had to pick an ‘our tune’ to celebrate Christopher and me so Elton John’s ‘I guess that’s why they call it the blues’ came top out of a number of possibilities and then, because it was church, I thought I’d better have something a bit religious so Bach’s St Matthew Passion, the last chorale, was beautiful and just right.

But then, since musicals have always been very important in my life, there just had to be a film track – but which one? For my money, you can’t beat West Side Story with Leonard Bernstein’s fabulous score and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics – I could watch it every day. I’m instantly transported back to the excitement and turmoil and fervour of those teenage years  when Tony sings ‘Something’s Coming’ and how powerfully songs like ‘Tonight’ or ‘Maria’ can recall the white hot passion of first love. We might laugh at ‘Gee Officer Krupke’ but really it’s a music hall tune with very wise and witty words – and I can’t keep still when they sing ‘I’d like to be in America’?

Leonard Bernstein, who was born this day in 1918, said that music names the unnameable and communicates the unknowable and I think that, in hearing my favourites, my supper companions found out more about me than they would hearing several of my sermons. And I think too that’s why music is used in Christian worship – there is much that is unnamed and unknown and so we find out more about God through the Heavenly gift of music.

Pop or plainsong, they’re all songs of praise to me.