A voice that moved angels to tears

Do not interrupt the music.

Ecclesiastes 32:3

I don’t like to brag, but when I was young I was a member of my school’s award-winning choir. I sang alto and bass, although admittedly, due to puberty, I usually sang the same note. Sr. Thibeault, our choir director, asked me to… join any other club but hers. I thought she would only play the hard-to-reach one. She had famously claimed she could teach anyone to sing, and after hearing me, she tearfully admitted she was wrong.

Perhaps because of this traumatic past, I have always had a conflicted relationship with choirs and the music of the spheres. I became interested in the concept of the perfect tone or angelic voice as described in music theory. This is a category of vocal register often reserved for the most heavenly music – the hymns we have come to know as typically liturgical and sacred. There is one frequency – 444 Hz – that is considered the frequency of the angels. It is a register that is said to open our hearts to peaceful thoughts and divine inspiration. (I have also been told that 888 Hz, 999 Hz and 1111 Hz are heavenly frequencies.)

A young singer, Malakai Bayoh, performs Britain’s Got Talentreceived a golden buzzer for his performance of Pie Jesusung at the frequency of 963 Hz, which produces a sound that is emblematic of the voices of famous boys’ choirs. Like other frequencies, 963 Hz is also called the divine register, a frequency so pure that it can move listeners to tears. It is the register that the Baroque period tried to preserve by creating eunuchs – Castrati — whose voices were secured through barbaric castration practices that kept their voices perpetually young. The operation was usually performed on boys under 10 years old to preserve a child’s voice in those who would later have the lung capacity of an adult. The last of these singers, Alessandro Moreschi, who sang in the Sistine Chapel, was deliberately “retired” by Pope Pius X in 1912, in a successful attempt to end the practice.

Regardless of the frequency assigned or how complicated the practices that brought this music to life, there is no doubt that music plays an important role in most world religions and has always had a strong place in the Christian liturgy. We can all remember a mass in which Beethoven’s ode to Joyor more precisely Van Dyke’s modification of it as Joyfully, joyfully we worship you. Is anyone untouched by Handel’s Messiahespecially the 12th movement: For to us a child is born? And is there a work more effective than that of Bach-Gounod? Ave Mariaespecially when it is sung in these registers?

Surely we can all remember a moment in a cathedral or a concert hall when the sounds lifted our souls above the mundane, so that we felt carried beyond the mundane and the ordinary. Thomas Carlyle was right when he observed: “Music is the speech of angels, as is rightly said; indeed, of all the utterances permitted to man, nothing is felt so divine. It brings us near to the infinite.”

I think it is fair to say that music is similar to prayer, the notes and spirituality are glorified. Was it not St Augustine who said: “He who sings prays twice?” Pope Benedict put it even more succinctly: “Music can become prayer.” In an address to young people, Pope Francis made this connection, reminding them that singing “is an act of love, and when we sing we pray with words and music, with heart and voice, with devotion and with art.” He particularly acknowledged the importance of choirs, drawing a parallel between the art of singing together and the power of social harmony. A choir, he said, “is a school of humility,” with the goal of creating something “that is bigger than himself or herself and in which all serve all… Singing well together requires effort, just as living well together requires effort.” He concluded, “Your singing expresses true friendship with God, with others and with each other… the glow of your faces and the beauty of your voices help us to understand that it is worth it.”

Although I don’t have the voice of an angel, perhaps that’s why Sister Thibeault kept me in the choir: because everyone’s voice counts – in singing and, by extension, in prayer. If we look at it that way, I can even be credited with hitting the right note on occasion.