If you’re living in the 1630s then you’re most likely a big fan of god, and cockfighting, and maypole dancing and public executions, you also have a favorite sickle and your fire-making skills are top-notch, but your meals are soup and your desserts are bread and you have six boils on your taint that might be the plague but are probably just scabies because you wear burlap underwear and your bed sheets are an upside-down rowboat
But now it’s spring break 1635 and for some reason your family has decided that this year you’re going to chaucer it up and go on pilgrimage to the motherfucking Vatican, sweet! It was quite a walk but you made it to Rome and you’re finally inside the outrageous Sistine Chapel, which to your 17th-century eyes is unimaginably dope.
Most of the music you have heard up to this point in your life has been total amateur hour; at your local tavern it’s open mic night every goddamn night and by far the biggest genre is songs about fart puns. But now the Vatican church choir enters the room to sing a song, and they’re pretty good at singing, which makes sense because they have really only one priority in life, which is to avoid infinite agony in the unquenchable flames of hell by being the best band in the world. And if from time to time that requires a little light castration to keep the voice angelic, well shoot, at least you’re tithing like you mean it
For Easter they even have a very special song: The only time all year this song is allowed to be performed is during Holy Week, and the only place in the world the song can be heard is the Sistine Chapel. Which is possible because nobody’s invented a recording device.
And then they start singing. Now, I happen to be an atheist/agnostic person. But would 1630s Me have been an atheist if I was standing precisely there, in the Sistine Chapel, when my grueling life and the deep easter silence was broken by this unfamiliar unearthly music that began filling the room straight up to Michelangelo’s freakshow masterpiece on the ceiling? I just don’t know.
M is for the Miserere, composed in the 1630s by Gregorio Allegri
–my favorite version
–a live version
epilogue: people liked the song so much it began to get a mystical reputation, which made the pope guard it even more closely, and the Vatican successfully kept it a secret for almost 150 years.
But then the secret got out. How? Because in 1770, freaking Mozart went to the Sistine Chapel and heard it performed. He heard it on a Wednesday, then went back to his hotel and wrote the whole thing out from memory, then went back to hear it again on Friday to make tweaks.
He was fourteen years old at the time! And the news of what he had done spread quickly, and he came very close to getting excommunicated, but the Pope had an eleventh hour change of heart and decided instead to embrace Mozart and his genius. So, after 150 years the Miserere was finally free to leave the Vatican, and Mozart had invented music piracy.