Easter reminds us of the immense spiritual power of music

I love Gareth Malone. He is truly the best of British: polite, charming, enthusiastic, knowledgeable and tireless at what he does, introducing people to the utter joy that it is to sing in a choir like a sort of geeky, white British male, non-gangster version of Sister Act’s Deloris Van Cartier.

This Easter, Malone will be gracing our television screens once again as he takes a scratch group of rookie singers and turns them into a choir that will this time perform Handel’s Messiah, the epic oratorio that the composer wrote in just 24 days. As with all of Malone’s transformations, it promises to be a tear jerker.

The key to Malone’s appeal is that he manages to convey to participants and viewers something of the incredible power that music has not only to take us out of ourselves, but as a tool to communicate and to move. The Messiah is nearly 300 years old: as Malone himself has pointed out, it’s not a perfect work, but “there is a touch of divine inspiration” about it.

In an interview at the weekend, Malone told the story of how, after one of the choral participants fainted (and was quickly revived), the team went straight into the Hallelujah chorus, where he had “a kind of out-of-body experience”. Others, he says, “had a very spiritual reaction to it. That’s the great thing about singing in a choir. You feel part of something much bigger than yourself. You tap into communal emotions that make you forget your own difficulties, at least for a while.”

I know exactly what he means. Two Sundays ago I sat in Amsterdam’s serene and beautiful Westerkerk and listened to my son’s school chapel choir singing Orlando Gibbons’s Drop, Drop Slow Tears. Exactly a week before, I’d been singing the same piece myself, in a scratch choir of old girls who’d come to celebrate the centenary of my old school deep in the North Yorkshire countryside, where I’d been head chorister some 25 years ago.

It was impossible not to be moved by either occasion, or to marvel at the power of a piece of music that is 392 years old and yet makes me cry whether I’m listening to my son sing it or I’m singing it myself. As with the Messiah, it is the piece’s familiarity that shifts something deep inside me; knowing it so intimately lends every performance an extra layer of meaning. As I bore my sons silly telling them, being able to read music is like speaking another language, and like speaking another language it will give you a connection and a means of communication everywhere you go. I have joined choirs in every place I have lived as an adult; each time I have made new friends and deepened old bonds, with both music and people. “Being able to read music opens so many doors,” Malone points out, entirely correctly.

And yet the opportunity to access this new language is dwindling fast. Although music is part of the national curriculum – mandatory at Key Stage 3 (children aged between 11 and 14) – it’s treated as an optional extra by many schools and more than half of secondary schools don’t teach it. Only 5,000 students in England took A-level music in 2023, down 45 per cent since 2010, and the Independent Society of Musicians has identified a 36 per cent drop in GCSE music pupils.

This is dire. How will future generations relate to and unify over the music that soars in our churches up and down the country this Easter?

It’s especially depressing when you consider not only what music teaches but its extraordinary ability to heal. The other BBC production I have earmarked on my Easter watchlist (and have tissues at the ready for) is the extraordinary story of my friend Clemency Burton-Hill, who five years ago suffered a terrible brain haemorrhage and spent 17 days in a coma.

The entire right-hand side of her body still doesn’t work properly; she has no sensation on that side at all. And yet Clemmie, who has played the violin since she was a small child and performed in concert halls around the world, has made the most extraordinary recovery, thanks largely to music-based occupational therapy – in fact even before that, the first sign of life after her brain exploded was when she started tapping her fingers in time to the classical music her husband played to her in hospital.

Being musical increases your chance of having language transferred to the other side of your brain, which is why Clemmie can now talk again, and even play her violin. Her story is extraordinary, awe-inspiring, moving and hopeful. Just like the Messiah, like Gibbons – and like Easter itself.