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Good morning. Music is back. Singing legal once more. The Proms restored and “Cinderella” instruments to be celebrated. Last week our house rang with a joyful Mozart Horn Concerto – which I didn’t realise was a Cinders instrument; along with my own, the harp – as our son learnt it for a wedding… also permitted again. Faith and music haven’t always been happy bedfellows. Our dear, devout friend Abdul was brought up without music, and reduced to tearful awe by Handel’s Harp Concerto. In the Book of Samuel, Michal looked down from her window at her husband King David, dancing before the Lord to the sound of horns… and was filled with contempt. Some Protestant Reformers taught life must be entirely sola scriptura, eschewing all but the words of the Bible. Just yesterday, a clergyman friend prided himself on his lack of association with a certain cathedral, because of its fine choir. I came to faith through the love of my parents, enriched by the beauty of music. My father was employed by King’s College Cambridge and in my teens I sat beneath that breathtaking late-medieval fan-vaulting, bolstered by the resonant language of Cranmer and stirred by the songs of centuries, feeling closer to Heaven than ever before or since. When my clergyman husband took charge of his own parish we invited all, including children, to take part in the music, and at least one family found lifelong faith because of it. Of course music can’t prove God, any more than my lover can prove he loves me with red roses. But how bereft we are when denied such evocative expression! A Cambridge philosophy paper is reputed to have asked examinees to consider a typo from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline – that instead of playing the strumpet, thy mistress hath played the trumpet in my bed – and argue which is better grounds for divorce. The psalmist might have had little sympathy. Praise the Lord, with trumpet; with lute and harp; tambourine and dance; with strings and pipe; and my favourite… with loud, clashing cymbals. One of my fondest memories is of my father’s hundredth birthday, when we performed the baroque Toy Symphony, with its full complement of Cinderella instruments: quail, cuckoo, and triangle; my two-year-old niece on toy drum, a well-known conductor on the football rattle and a professional singer topping up his trilling plastic nightingale with champagne in the middle of a movement. Seldom have I laughed so much. And such surely will Heaven be: a trumpet sounding; a voice loud as rushing waters; like harpists on many harps; all shouting a new song unto the Lord. Weddings. Singing. Gatherings. All foretastes of heaven. All denied us during lockdown. And all now allowed again!