This Ash Wednesday, I returned a musical setting of Psalm 51, the Miserere. The setting wasn’t the well-known piece by Allegri, with its stratospheric top Cs and ascetic sections of plainchant. The setting I was listening to is by the contemporary composer James MacMillan. Its premiere was given in 2009 by The Sixteen, and, like the Allegri, it is a setting of the whole penitential psalm, all twenty verses. This psalm is closely associated with the season of Lent: it forms part of the Ash Wednesday liturgy and will be in daily use at Morning Prayer until we enter Passiontide. In it, the psalmist speaks of a profound need for God’s mercy and forgiveness. At times, the speaker seems to despair of ever getting free of their sinfulness, but other verses speak hopefully of the possibility of renewal and wisdom. It speaks into the human condition: that, in the words of a collect, ‘we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves’.

MacMillan’s setting of this text is dramatic and intense. One of the many techniques the composer employs to mirror the emotional range of the text is to use wide variation in the musical texture. The piece begins with the lower voices moving together and in dense harmony, before the upper voices interrupt with disconsolate, angular lines expressive of isolation. MacMillan uses chant, as in Allegri’s setting of the text, and later he also has solo voices rise above drones in wistful fantasias. The piece ends in homophony and in a major key, the haunting opening melody translated into a mood of restrained hope. Agony gives way for concord.

This tune which resolves the piece will be familiar to listeners from St Mary’s, as MacMillan also uses it in his St Anne’s Mass, the setting of the Eucharist which we often sing congregationally during Advent and Lent. Lent is a time for personal reflection and devotion, for self-examination and prayer. But as I listened to MacMillan’s Miserere, I was also thinking about the way that sin isolates and divides us, while hope can bring us together. As we sing together week by week, may we find ourselves drawing nearer to God and to each other through this holy season.