Music in Time of Examination

Alas, the feast of Ascension, Oak Apple Day and G. K. Chesterton’s birthday are all probably rather overshadowed in the many minds for which this is a season of examinations.  They are necessary hardships, I suppose, but I must say it would be easier to believe this if it were possible to have confidence that the exam boards knew their subjects and checked their answers…

Anyway, I thought the least I could do in solidarity would be to compile a list of music (‘Desk Island Discs’?) either to lift or calm the spirits.  In one way they are only suggestions for listening in the throes of study or an interlude of relaxation, but I also mean them to show that, in the list of things that matter in life, exams are really quite low down.  Now it is true that a good exam should offer, in the very challenge it set, some promise of the reward of learning: truth, goodness and beauty, but many exams often fail to do this, to say the least, so here are some examples from the third category that I think really are worth knowing about:

Ernest Tomlinson: a general recommendation

The music of Ernest Tomlinson (1924-2015) more or less saved my finals: I wrote to him afterwards to say so, and he was kind enough to reply!  I have written elsewhere about his valiant efforts in defence of British light music since the 1960s.  Two CDs’ worth of his music can he heard here and here, but here are some suggestions for now:

Kielder Water:

Miranda:

Lakeside Idyll:

… the second movements of the Concerto for Five and the Silverthorn Suite, and both Suites of English Folk-Dances.

Then there is Percy Grainger: Zanzibar Boat Song for piano (six hands):

Molly on the Shore:

Along with Mock Morris, Spoon River and the Lincolnshire Posy (about which more here).

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Symphony no. 5, movement III (Romanza)

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Tuba concerto, movement II (also entitled Romanza)

Handel, of course; also jazz; and for those who like both Handel and jazz:

Gerald Finzi: Eclogue for piano and strings.

Herbert Howells’ Three Dances for violin and orchestra, written in 1915 when he was still a student at the Royal College of Music:

Germaine Tailleferre: Suite bergmanesque.

Any Bach keyboard concerto:

Maurice Duruflé: Quatre motets sur des thèmes grégoriens. For example:

I hope these will help anyone who comes across them, and that they are enough…  I’m probably not meant to put this many videos on a single web-page!  All the same, if anybody has any other suggestions, I’d be glad to hear them.

Ascension Day

Happy feast of the Ascension!  I think some music is called for: here is Gerald Finzi’s anthem God is gone up (op. 27, no. 2):

Don’t forget that Easter carries on until Pentecost (Whitsun), so if you haven’t been feasting since the Triduum as energetically as you fasted in Lent, you’ve been doing it wrong!

Order at the Oval

What truer proof of peace and order than the arithmetical poetry of cricket on a sunlit afternoon?…

…Surrey vs. Hants. in broad sunshine, 14th May 2017, ten minutes before the match was rained off

Disappointing French Words

Some time ago I sang the praises of the French language (and France generally) and indulged in the compilation of a list of my favourite words in that iridescent chandelier of languages. Veiller, lugubre, orgueilleux … linguistic confectionery which can be rolled around on the tongue at leisure (though perhaps not on the bus).

Yet even as I compiled that list other words occurred to me, words that seemed to me not nearly so delicious as they ought to be, given their meaning or their English translation.  With the resources of the language to which they belong they should have been able to do justice to the former and outgun the latter.  Here are some examples of words that, I submit, fail to fulfil their promise:

1. puddle: flaque (f)
2. to sneeze: éternuer
3. to nod: acquiescer
4. rambunctious: turbulent

Now it seems to me that it is precisely in cases of damp squibs such as these that the immortels of the Académie française should be called upon for their services.  (It is in the immortels, of which there are only forty at a time and who hold their office for life, that there lies the ultimate authority on the French language).  Could they not come up with something better to describe a puddle?  How about mouillon de pluie or plouffelette or pluviule?  Or se hatchouir or pousser une éplixission for the verb to sneeze?  ‘Je me suis HATCHOUI en pleine bibliothèque’.  If I, a mere Anglo-Saxon upstart, can come up with these, surely the chosen forty can do likewise?

Anyway, perhaps I am being fussy.  English can’t really outdo French all that often: witness for example the sumptuous phrase il avait de quoi sourire — ‘he had something to smile about’ — reported by my uncle in one of Paul Berna’s excellent novels.  Il avait de quoi sourire!  A savourer…