The Sound of Old England

Often I wish that everyone could be invited onto Desert Island Discs.  I could listen all day to people’s lists of favourite music (not to mention the reasons for their choices and the records themselves), regardless of the guest’s prominence – regardless even of whether I have ever heard of them.

Assuming that any readers feel similarly, this scratchy recording, barely thirty seconds long, of an old man rattling out an even older song, is a strong candidate for my island:

This is the voice of a man who was born around 1832, and the song he is singing was very old even when he had been taught it as a boy.  He sings only two verses because that is all he can recall, but there is no doubt about the tune.  He has borne it in his heart for threescore years and fifteen (the recording was taken in 1906), but the August morning of his song has lost none of its freshness.  And this goes for us who hear him more than a lifetime later still.

The singer is Mr. Joseph Taylor of Saxby All Saints in Lincolnshire, a bailiff, aged seventy-five.  In many respects he was an ordinary Englishman, which of course is what is so interesting about him.  His plain north Lincolnshire voice proclaims that ordinary Englishmen of those days really did inherit tradition from the past, and not only in the self-conscious sense of a revival, but within a home-made culture alive and authentic.

Now of course this recording could not have come about without theatrics of one sort of another.  Even in those days before the Great War the traditions were endangered: the Industrial Revolution had of course stirred the kingdom up and people could suddenly move around the country with great ease.  The new and vivid geographical horizons, though a wonderful development, were also distractions from the local consciousness of history, which had to be learnt and understood.  For these and many other reasons, the folk-songs were beginning to fall not only out of use but out of mind.

We owe a great deal, then, to musicians such as Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, who at the eleventh hour (the turn of the twentieth century) cycled around the countryside with sheaves of manuscript paper in search of folk-songs and their singers.  (Cecil Sharp alone collected nearly five thousand songs from Britain and North America).  Percy Grainger, though Australian by birth, was another of these.  It was to him that Joseph Taylor sang in Lincolnshire, and he who notated ‘Brigg Fair’ and other songs and recorded them — for our sake — on a cylinder phonograph.

Grainger did not see himself as a curator only, but even entered into the tradition himself.  He wrote his own arrangement of ‘Brigg Fair’, in which a faithful reprisal of the tune is underlain with his rich harmonies.  I think the best recording is sung by the inimitable King’s Singers here, but it can also be heard here and on the cello here.  (Frederick Delius’ rhapsody is also worth hearing!).

To my post-millennial ears, Grainger’s characteristic mistiness  does to his arrangement what the crackle of the phonograph does to the recording.  That is to permit the listener to hear distance (about which more here).  We ‘only just’ have the sound of Joseph Taylor’s voice, which in any case is heard across the gulf of the twentieth century, a gulf whose breadth sometimes seems unfathomable.   Out on that desert island I would not be any further away from Britain in space than we already are in time from Joseph Taylor’s England, so perhaps it is not such an odd choice after all.

Have you clipped your church today?

Ash Wednesday is tomorrow: a forty-day fast is nearly upon us, and we gulp at the prospect.  In the Middle Ages, the gulp was so palpable that they really made something of it:  in a last outburst of frivolity and feasting before Lent’s wilderness, down went all the food that would otherwise waste.  Hence Carnival — carne vale — farewell to meat.

For centuries, several English towns saw no reason not to mark Shrove Tuesday by transforming the entire parish into a football-pitch and the whole population into two opposing teams.  Shrovetide Football lasts for at least an afternoon, is played between two goals several miles apart and is otherwise entirely devoid of rules.  Here it is being played in Chester-le-Street in 1927:

Sad to say, the various drawbacks to this tradition (as portrayed in the reel!) became obvious in the end even to the furthest-turned blind eye.  The game in Chester-le-Street was banned in 1932.  It survives, however, in Ashbourne in Derbyshire, whose townsfolk remain resolutely boisterous.

Depending on where you live, Shrove Tuesday is also the day on which to ‘clip’ or clasp the parish church — joining hands in a great ring around church and singing hymns.  This is still done in several parishes.  Still, there is the sad thought that in many places the shrunken congregation must struggle to compass the girth of their church.

I see in this tradition an instinctive and affectionate gravitation to the natural heart of a village or town?  Surely there is a hearty rightness about it.  A church may of course be a ‘serious house on serious earth’ as Philip Larkin put it, but it is also a place of vigour and life, somewhere we are glad to be.  Why shouldn’t we, in the right spirit and at the right time, turn the church into a kind of toy, as children play with their fathers?  This is why I rejoice in the ornamentation and decoration of churches, and the continual additions and alterations of paintings and engravings — even if apparently needless or useless — even if roughly done!  And why I rejoice in the sound of bell-ringing and in terrific and uplifting streams of notes pouring from belfries.  It proves that a church, far from the austere and artificial stereotype in many a modern mind’s eye, is  to be lived in, to be loved, and to be as much mankind’s house for God as it is God’s house for mankind. 

‘Clipping the church’ — St Lawrence, Rode, by W.W. Wheatley.  (from the Wikimedia Commons)

Pope Benedict, and our duty to him

Pope Benedict announces his resignation (from the B.B.C. Website).

Two years ago today, Pope Benedict XVI announced his resignation.  What a shock and a blow that felt.  I don’t think I was alone in wondering why this steadiest of shepherds would uproot history with only a fortnight’s warning.  Was something wrong?  Was the Successor of St Peter’s task so urgent that only a younger and fitter man could perform it?  Was the Church so threatened that not only holiness but also haleness were demanded of a Pope?  What were we to see in the juxtaposed examples of St John Paul II on the one hand (staying at his post in spite of grave suffering, unyielding to the bitter end), and Benedict on the other (acknowledging his age, understanding the limit of his gifts, aware of the Church’s mission in history)?  All there was for us was to trust that he and the Holy Spirit knew what they were doing.

Well, I don’t regret that approach, because now we are on a remarkable journey with Pope Francis.  Christ is looking after His Church.  Certainly, the urgency in Pope Francis’ approach suggests that he, like Benedict, believes that time is short and labourers few for a rich harvest.  Pope Francis is a safe pair of hands, however, and even if he is a taker of risks, his recklessness is to be trusted.  

And there are still many riches to be mined from Benedict’s pontificate.  I have been wondering whether he decided, actually from the beginning, to concentrate his powers in certain areas rather than to stretch them too widely, and thereby to sow seed for the future even in a relatively short pontificate.  The Pope Emeritus is an expert on Europe and the Church in Europe, where the New Evangelisation is most sorely needed.  So he decided, without abandoning the world-wide Church, to build up an intellectual, articulate and clear defence of the faith, fit to withstand raucous Western modernity in particular.  Hence, then, the rebuttals of the dictatorship of relativism, the pulling at the plug of secularism, the watertight encyclicals, and the homilies to savour. And hence the name ‘Benedict’, after the patron of Europe.  

We — the ‘Benedict generation’ and other church-goers in this off-hand and secular land — have been given a responsibility and a mission; indeed, a ‘definite service’.   We need to be New Evangelists.  The New Evangelisation needs to be new because our culture, already having heard the Gospel, has nevertheless forgotten it.  Pope Benedict’s efforts were directed at us who already believe and practise for precisely this reason.  He equipped us with the tools of the New Evangelisation, and we have a duty to use them.

This does not mean that we don’t jolly well listen to Pope Francis.  It means that we rummage through the riches of the Church’s tradition too, and share all we find abroad.  All the same, it is worth observing that Pope Francis, because of his predecessor’s work, is free to concentrate on his own strengths.  For instance, he can seek those on Church’s peripheries and summon them with, as I see it, his great unspoken message ‘You’d better come in for now’.  Then he can leave us, to some extent, to make them properly at home, with catechesis and example.  Our duty, then becomes twofold: to Pope Francis’s current pontificate as well as to Pope Benedict’s legacy, and ultimately, of course to Christ.

Here’s to the Pope Emeritus.  ‘Prost!’ as they say in Bavaria!

From St Peter’s List.com

Fitting Lines for Today

Sunshine on de medders,
Greenness on de way;
Dat’s de blessed reason
I sing all de day.
Look hyeah! Whut you axin’?
Whut meks me so merry?
‘Spect to see me sighin’
W’en hit ‘s wa’m in Febawary?

from ‘A Warm Day in Winter’ (in full here) by Paul Laurence Dunbar. 

The Queen vs. Marconi Minor (1960) ?

From the Schoolboy’s Science Pocket Book (Evan Brothers, 1960), p.95:

‘Nobody is allowed to operate an amateur transmitting station in Britain without a licence issued by the Postmaster-General.  An applicant has to show that he has the necessary technical knowledge of radio and that he can transmit Morse at 12 words per minute before a licence will be granted.’

I wonder if this law is still in force?  Wouldn’t a modern walkie-talkie set, for instance, or indeed a wireless Internet router, fall under the category of ‘amateur transmitting station’?  To whom would one apply, in any case, given that the office of Postmaster-General has been effectively abolished?  How many people know Morse code at all, let alone fluently?  How many schoolboys, lacking a Science Pocket Book, have come a cropper of this law?

Ruth Gipps: Undaunted Music

I thought it would be good to have some music on this blog.   Not least because it seems to be such an innovative way (to me — probably old hat to everyone else!) to share music I have heard with others who might also enjoy it.  In any case, there are very few things that music (rightly used) does not enrich, and I don’t see why this blog should be an exception.

In music as in all the arts, I can never resist rummaging around to find the characters and lives behind composers’ names and their works.  Ruth Gipps (1921-1999) was a name unknown to me before I came across her via Corentin Boissier’s remarkable collection of orchestral music.  Yet what a discovery to find a composer of music like this:

Now this (Piano Concerto in G Minor, 1948) is my kind of music, with rippling keys and soaring orchestra; with some parts light and airy, and others to be played with furrowed brow!  Here is the quieter second movement, with delicious oboe, which is perhaps more immediately appealing:

Finally, here is the really pacy third movement, in which Gipps reminds us that the piano is a percussion instrument: 

I have the impression that Ruth Gipps’ career was encumbered above all by its timing.  When young, she was patronised and overlooked because she was a woman, in spite of her evident competence; the apparently brusque personality described in her biography not helping matters.  Later, when her career should have been flourishing, her work was disparaged and left unbroadcast because she rejected musical modernism and held steadfastly to tonal music.  She endured first the prejudices of the old culture, and then those of the new culture which replaced it.  Thank goodness that she remained ultimately undaunted, and her music untainted, by such head-winds.

Further reading:

Halstead, Jill. Ruth Gipps: Anti-Modernism, Nationalism And Difference in English Music. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).  (Preliminary extracts are available via Google Books here.)

Obituary by David Wright: 

http://www.concertino-goettingen.de/Programme/ruth_gipps.html.

Interesting article by Pamela Blevins: 

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2005/Feb05/Gipps_Bliss.htm.