Transforming Sacred Music Into A Secular Art

To accompany an exhibit of Spanish Renaissance art at the National Gallery in DC, Stephen Hough took portions of Victoria’s Requiem “and transcribed, translated, transformed them for a string sextet. Stripping the piece of its texts, and thus of its specifically religious context, was a thoughtful echo of the secularizing process of displaying religious art works in a museum show: their aesthetic value, rather than their religious value, being in this context of primary importance to most of the show’s viewers.”