ABSTRACT
Drawing together the threads of this study of Rubbra’s music, this chapter begins by reviewing the many ways in which Rubbra expressed his spirituality in his music. ‘Relatedness’ was a central musical and spiritual concept for Rubbra: relatedness of notes in a line, harmonic relatedness and relatedness as essential to the onward flow of musical form. Rubbra’s use of Golden Section proportions connects his music to natural patterns and divine immanence, to evolution on both human and cosmic scales and to the transforming power of resurrection. Amongst his contemporaries, Rubbra’s consistent focus on spiritual concerns in his music seems to link him more closely to Olivier Messiaen than to his compatriots. Although in the 1950s, Rubbra considered his own aesthetic and spiritual beliefs to be ‘old-fashioned’, since his death in 1986 neither seem so strange. Parallels can be made with Arvo Pärt and James MacMillan, for example, and Rubbra has much in common with Jonathan Harvey. Harvey emphasised ambiguity as an attribute of spiritual music. Ambiguity pervades Rubbra’s music too, within his treatment of the musical elements and musical form, in his approach to composition and in his ambitious integration of conflicting beliefs within a single work.
