Why Church music is back in vogue – and squeaky-gate music has had its day

One of the growth areas of contemporary music is in setting sacred texts. It might be thought that I had a special interest in claiming this, but in fact what I am about to describe represents a sea change in recent practice. Where there was once ‘squeaky gate’ (or ‘dripping tap’) music — as very dissonant writing used to be called — many leading composers are now writing in a style that is at least tonal and can occasionally seem almost naïve.

There was a time when the first performance of a recent commission struck fear into the most broad-minded listener. We used to brace ourselves for horror and were rarely disappointed. In those days, the struggle to write more atonally than the next man was palpable. No self-respecting composer would pen a concord if he wanted to be taken seriously by his peers: to do so was to be compared to those who made soft-harmony arrangements of famous melodies.