Mesdames, messieurs, votre attention, s’il vous plaît…

Here’s yet another wonderful thing about France — this is the send-off they give engine-drivers at their retirement.  A mass of friends and family gather at the end of the line to await the cheminot’s last train, which arrives in a blaze of headlamps and flares and a deafening fanfare of horns and detonators, without a care for any unsuspecting passengers!  Here’s an example (and a chance to admire the classic, and v. French, ‘nez-cassé’ locomotive):

And another one (skip to 2:00 to see the grand finale):

… And yet another, very cinematic, film here.

I could go on… but I think you get the picture!  It is the accomplishment of boyhood at last.

Bonne retraite à tous!

Destructive criticism

Lately I have been listening my way through the podcast editions of B.B.C. Radio 3’s ‘Composer of the Week’.  They are wonderful programmes and Donald Macleod’s warm, clear and conversational voice welcomes in even those unversed in musical theory or history, bringing the composers to life in the ear.

One effect of hearing several editions in fairly quick succession is a growing sensation that this calling to write music, made as it is to people of all kinds of circumstances and characters, as ‘Composer of the Week’ shows, is felt remarkably similarly by all those who hear it.  There are outbursts of fruitfulness followed by dry patches; there are projects carried off triumphantly or abandoned in despair; there are works forged in weeks or left unfinished even after a lifetime.  And there is never any barometer: changes of scene or fallings in love sometimes produce a great harvest, and sometimes not, and of course it is the same with sorrow and despair. 

That said, there is one fairly reliable threat to a composer’s muse, and that is unfavourable criticism.  The effects of an ill-received performance seem often quite extreme, to the extent that composers have fallen into weeks, months, even years of silence or sparseness: this happened to Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky and Herbert Howells. Almost the only composer completely immune to this seems to have been Gustav Holst, who cared not a jot either way!

Howells’ second piano concerto (second movement below; here are the first and third) had been a strong candidate for my Desert Island for some time before I discovered that, at its premiere in 1925, a critic evidently forgot the second commandment and audibly thanked God that the performance was over.  For all that the man in question apparently had a reputation for this sort of conduct, Howells could not overcome the block that followed, which was to be redoubled in 1933 by the sudden and unforeseeable death of his son, aged nine, from polio.  When he did return to composing, it was not to orchestral music as before, but to the choral music for which he is now best known.  The second piano concerto — this mellow, shadowy, tender music! — was left to gather the dust of oblivion until after his death.

Does this happen because of petulance, spoiledness or childishness?  The last is closest, I think: I would say that it is a kind of childlikeness that is in fact excusable, understandable, and even essential to the artist’s calling.   G. K. Chesterton is supposed to have said (though I cannot just find where) that a composer cannot merely ‘get his music out of his head’, but has also to ‘get it into somebody else’s’.  (This is a godsend for those of us flummoxed by the question, ‘What is art?’!).  Just as a child lavishes pictures and other creations on parents, the artist’s vocation is not only to set down beauty but also to share it with others; this is what the composer does in allowing a work to be performed.  

If a performance ‘fails’, it is because the exchange of beauty is not made and something has misfired between composer, musicians and audience.  Whichever of these three is to blame, it the composer (of good will) who feels the wound most personally and most keenly.  In spite of a concert’s ceremonial and public nature, the listeners are really the composer’s guests, for whose delight he has generously provided heart-felt music.  They are gathered by the very mind’s hearth.  No wonder careless words can wreak such damage.

An Irish Easter Prayer

One of the good things about Easter’s forty days is that, even in the sixth week, it is still not too late for me to recommend this post by Maolsheachlann O Ceallaigh, the ‘Irish Papist’, though I had meant to do so much sooner than this…

‘Amen’ is my hearty response to all the prayers, but one set of petitions in particular I would like to reproduce and make my own (my own prayer, that is, as opposed to my own blog-post!):

I pray that the arts, entertainments and manners of our society will reflect more gentleness, idealism, chivalry, respect and wonder. I pray especially that childhood innocence will be protected and valued, in this era when there are so many forces ranged against it. I pray, too, that our societies will come to have a greater honour and esteem for old age.

These words particular resonate with me, and I echo them fervently.  It seems to occur to people so rarely to express a wish for such things, perhaps because they often seem so remote in our brash era, or maybe even because of fear of being shouted down by the very coarseness in question, that I sometimes feel quite alone in believing that they should be upheld.  Whenever I am reminded that in truth I am far from alone, I feel a surge of hope.

Since I am recommending that particular post, I might as well recommend the whole ‘Irish Papist’ blog (hopefully without damaging its reputation too much!).  Recommending a blog, as opposed to a book, for example, is actually more difficult than it might sound: it is surprisingly easy to misread blogs and writers, which can change in character and flavour in unforeseen ways.  Still, of all the blogs I read, even the most regular, this has been my favourite for some time, because its articles are thoughtful, uplifting and principled, though never gratuitously confrontational.  Maolsheachlann O Ceallaigh is a writer and university library assistant in Dublin, and has plenty of opportunity to observe the pageant of life — from an Irish perspective, which is interesting for me, writing in Britain — and from a Christian perspective, with misgivings about modernity, but not without a good deal of hope and joy.   It is certainly a Catholic blog, but serves less to comment specifically on matters Catholic than to house a Catholic writer’s all-purpose, all-subject journal.

What is more is that, every so often, new metrical verse is posted — a thing almost unthinkable in the twenty-first century!  Thank goodness somebody is keeping the flame alight.

‘Easter, 2015.’

The shadow of the Great War seems to have lain particularly heavy across these last few months.  Perhaps it will not clear until 2018, and probably we would be sadder and wiser if it did not.  Several things have led me to brood on it: listening to a great deal of English music from that era (Grainger, Quilter and early Howells), my ever-deepening interest in Edwardian poetry, including those who were in fact lumped together as the ‘Georgians’ (Masefield, W.W. Gibson, Edward Thomas, Bridges, Drinkwater, etc.) and also an awareness of my own age, which a hundred years ago would surely have destined me for the trenches.  All of these — music, poetry and youth — that war wounded, even where it did not stamp them quite out.

Even Easter is darkened, and though I feel reluctant to post the following poem of Edward Thomas, I think there is a duty to read it this year, and indeed to learn it by heart [1]:

IN MEMORIAM (EASTER, 1915)

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

This Eastertide call into mind the men,

Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should

Have gathered them and will do never again.

These lines need to be read twice at least, because there are at least two phases to the blows with which, one by one, they smite the reader.  The writer and journalist Peter Hitchens has on several occasions written powerfully about this poem, and about how ‘it gently takes you by the hand and then suddenly, fiercely makes you weep' [2].  Indeed it does, and in several ways.  For one thing, it seems to rest upon three wholesome English words, ‘left', ‘should' and ‘never', whose plainness seems to rarefy into gleaming rock under the poem's immense weight.  Nevertheless, the poem's full sense is hidden until ruthlessly unveiled by those very last words 'never again'.  

Then even these words let fall a second blow, as modern readers realise with Hitchens that ‘No Englishman gathers flowers for his sweethearts in the woods any more. That world is dead. Everyone who lived in it is dead, having had no time to pass on its customs to his sons and daughters’ [3].  This poem measures and records the extent of the war’s pernicious reach: into the very earth of an English woodland floor and, almost unseen, into the present day.  Most men these days, no doubt along with their girlfriends, would squirm and scoff at the idea of gathering flowers — and at the old music and old verse — and we know they would — and that war is why.

Flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood, Easter, 2015.

Everything in this poem’s vision is upside-down and back-to-front, so the unexpected presence of those flowers becomes the proof of the unnatural, indeed inhuman, absence of young men, and an encounter with a clump of flowers begets thoughts of distance, dissipation and death.  It is also worth remembering that the poem was written in Eastertide.  Thomas has not only the ordinary life of ordinary folk in mind; he surely sees a hideous inversion of Easter itself.  Where Mary Magdalene came upon an empty tomb that proclaimed the nearness of the resurrected Christ, Thomas finds a flourishing flower-bed declaring the end of England.  Where Easter was the day of Christianity’s birth, was the war the death of Christendom?  

This is Peter Hitchens’ view: he gives the Great War as the first point at which Britain, and indeed Europe, ceased as a whole to believe Christianity seriously.  He thinks it ‘safe to say that the two great victorious wars of the twentieth century did more damage to my own country than any other single force.  The churches were full before 1914, half-empty after 1919, and three-quarters empty after 1945.  And I would add that, by all but destroying British Christianity, these wars may come to destroy the spirit of the country’ [4].  I suppose there is little surprise that the British people as a whole lost their faith afterwards.  I may not praise them for it, but neither do I feel willing to blame them.

And yet, and yet… there is still a faith to uphold; the churches await us still; there is a crucifix in them all; the empty tomb remains; the old question is still asked of us.  It may be that the Great War has so changed the course of history that it will in time bring this country, even Europe, to an end.  This seems likely, for in many ways ours is a dying civilisation, and there is much sorrow in store for those of us who are fond of Britain.  Believers in God, however, must take themselves in hand.  There is plenty of hope in this country still, if sought in the right places, and the Church as a whole is alive and healthy, and forbids us to despair.  And even if all civilisations rise and fall, Easter remains undiminished.  All the sins of men were paid for on the Cross; even the Great War was paid for on the Cross, and Easter triumphs over even the Great War and even all the sins of men.  That is not said glibly by me, but plainly by Christ.  The vision of Easter remains clear, if we can manage, and have the courage, to behold it.  

-----------------

[1] Thomas, Edward.  Collected Poems. (London, Faber, 2004).  p. 63.  See also ‘The Cherry Trees’, p. 112.

[2] http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2013/01/how-shall-we-mark-the-centenary-of-the-great-war.html

[3] http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/05/how-do-you-make-grown-men-weep.html

[4] Hitchens, Peter. The Rage Against God (London: Bloomsbury, 2010). p. 57.

‘Glory be to God for dappled things…’

… and for the sight of England on Easter Sunday.

View S.W. from Rudgwick, W. Sussex.

Alleluia! He is risen! …

… He is risen indeed!  Alleluia!

Happy Easter to one and all!

They Laid Him There

They took the body of Jesus and wrapped it with the spices in linen cloths, following the Jewish burial custom.  At the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb in which no-one had yet been buried.  Since it was the Jewish Day of Preparation and the tomb was near at hand, they laid Jesus there.

John 19:40–42

Lord, do you wash my feet?

Having one’s feet washed by one’s parish priest is a cold and ticklish experience.  At the appointed moment the twelve men, having been sought out quietly before Mass, make their way into the Sacristy in a dignified fashion.  There they lurch and stumble around in a very undignified fashion, stifling cries of woe, tugging helplessly at their shoes and socks.  Nevertheless, great care is taken to dissimulate any reaction to the freezing wooden floor.  A reminder is given that both shoes and socks should be removed, since “this is the Washing of the Feet, not the Washing of the Foot’.  Then the signal is made to go back into church and find a place on the chairs arranged before the altar.  The floor of the sanctuary is marble, and this really is freezing.  Again, none must falter: the disciples might as well be walking around in their bedroom-slippers.  Then the priests (my parish has three) get slowly down on their knees and, assisted by a pair of altar-servers each, pour surprisingly warm water over their parishioners’ feet, and dry them with a white stole.  The ticklish set their jaws against giggles.

It all seems rather comical.  To Simon Peter, too, it seemed rather comical.  I think there is a laugh of disbelief in the words “Lord, do you wash my feet?”.  Likewise, when Our Lord, insisting on washing Peter’s feet, tells him that “If I do not wash you, you can have nothing in common with me,” the answer (“Then, Lord, not only my feet but my hands and my head as well!”) reveals both Peter’s characteristically impulsive missing of the point (which is always heartening for us), and also his strong suspicion that, as his feet are being washed, his leg is being pulled.

It is true that the comic often relies on ordinary things being turned upside-down, but if the supposed comedian’s face is straight as he turns to his disciples and asks them: 

Do you understand what I have done to you?  You call me Master and Lord, and rightly: so I am.  If I, then, the Lord and Master, have washed your feet, you should wash each other’s feet.  I have given you an example so that you may copy what I have done to you.

John 13:12–15

then here is a funny kind of comedian indeed, particularly if He is also God.  Well might the twenty-first century parishioner think it ridiculous for his priest to kneel down and wash his feet.   Two thousand years later the joke is not old yet: it is both indeed very ridiculous and also a serious duty, and so yet another resounding Christian paradox.

There is also something to be said about the aiming of this lesson squarely at men in particular.  I cannot quite grasp it, still less articulate it, but two thoughts occur to me.  The first is that it is more of an effort than might be imagined for men, who have always stridden around priding themselves on their strength, to let someone else serve them in this way.  The second is the particular manner of this small vocation, to have one’s feet washed on Maundy Thursday.  It may be for men only, but is not so in a jealous or triumphant way, but in the same mysterious, and mysteriously correct way that some things are for women only.  The twelve men have been taught a lesson this evening about manhood: not merely about manly forbearance of chilly tiles, but about the heeding of callings.

‘One far fierce hour and sweet…’

And so we enter Holy Week; the long pilgrimage of Lent is nearly over, but there is a hard path yet to tread, right down into the cold depths of mankind’s heart, and then a stiff climb straight towards dazzlement.

The rest of G.K. Chesterton’s Palm Sunday poem is here: such wonderfully plain words!  It is not easy to write like that.

More Ruth Gipps

I have been listening to more Ruth Gipps and can’t resist another post.  I make no apology — this music needs to be heard!

Here is her second symphony, for example, which seems to be available on disc here.  Its first performance in 1946 earned the composer at least some short-lived prominence before the advent of modernism (as mentioned in my previous post), and indeed has the very qualities that were about to be thrown out wholesale: an ear for melody, an awareness of tradition and (I dare say) an unabashed quest for beauty. 

Then there is her third symphony — rather less accessible than either her previous symphony or her piano concerto, but I think, as in this last work, that the second and third movements are the most immediately attractive, and provide the quickest way to the core of beauty running through the whole work.  Gipps still welcomes all listeners in — even those like me whose musical training is slight.  If I say that some of these passages are unlike anything I have heard before (particularly treble), that is not to suggest that Gipps had suddenly embraced modernism, but rather that she persisted in the opposite belief, mined tonal music, found it far from exhausted, wrought all kinds of moods and utterances out of it, and thereby out of her treasure-house brought both things old and things new.  

This makes it all the more frustrating that there is no commercial recording of this symphony (though an arrangement for piano of the second movement can be heard here and bought here).  Where is her music in the record-shops and on the radio?  Where is her music at the Proms?  Why is her work so universally unperformed?   I don’t think that there is any good reason for this neglect, though there are some poor reasons.  One is the strong-minded personality to which my previous post alluded, and about which I have been reading some more in Jill Halstead’s book.  Gipps’ rejection of modern musical trends was not only personal, which in those strange 1960s was alone enough to scupper a composer’s career, but all her life took the form of loud and uncompromising protest.  On the one hand, she proclaimed that ‘Amplified “pop” is evil and harms everyone who listens to it’, and on the other:

‘My music is a follow-on from Vaughan Williams, Bliss and Walton — the three giants of music since the Second World War.  All were great and inspired composers… I say straight out that I regard all so-called 12-tone music, so-called serial music, so-called electronic music and so-called avant-garde music as utter rubbish and indeed a deliberate conning of the public.’

Rather mischievously I rejoice in this sort of glorious polemic, and thank goodness that somebody, at least, took the modernists to task.  She even once accosted William Glock, the Head of Music at the B.B.C from 1959 to 1972, apostle of serialism and the main culprit for the silencing of light music (a tale for another post!):

With typical boldness she confronted Glock face to face, and in what was for her an unforgettable encounter asked him why he wanted so much power and why he felt he had the right to ostracize tonal music.  It is not clear how Glock responded, but such audacity on Gipps’s part did little to help her cause.

The cost of this outspokenness seems to have been extraordinarily high.  A narrow band deemed her music unfashionable (indeed obsolete) and her words unwelcome, and this was all it took to consign her to an obscurity from which her name is still to emerge.  Gipps herself was resigned to this state of affairs (‘I know I am a real composer, perhaps they will only realise it when I’m dead’), but in my view it remains unjust.  The bluntness of her remarks might be off-putting to some, but beyond their tone they contain something else worthier and more significant: namely, I feel, a concern for the listener.  She was angered by pop music because she believed it harmed its listeners; she railed against serialism because she thought it represented a ‘deliberate conning of the public’.  Awareness of and respect for the audience – in both ‘light’ and ‘high’ culture – have been thin on the ground ever since the 1960s, being very anti-modern and indeed very anti-post-modern.  Yet I cannot be alone in feeling that its re-awakening would do the arts – and us all – a lot of good, as would a revival of interest in Ruth Gipps and her music.

Jill Halstead’s book is called ‘Anti-Modernism, Nationalism and Difference in English Music’ (Ashgate, 2006).

Music from South Sudan

Being an ecumenical sort of chap, I am becoming rather a fan of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury.  I think that he explains himself clearly and intelligently, and speaks in complete paragraphs of measured English, which is rare in the media these days.  His sincerity and sense of humour give him an approachable, slickness-free media presence, which no doubt matches the impression he must give in person.  Above all, his faith spills out of him, qualmless and unabashed, in an invigorating and heartening way.

I mention him because the other day I listened to his appearance on ‘Desert Island Discs’ (which should be audible here).  Kirsty Young’s questions were not always easy, so he was perhaps less relaxed than I have heard him elsewhere (here, for example), but it was certainly enjoyable.  In any case, my main reason for listening was my curiosity about his taste in music (I have admitted to being nosey about this sort of thing!).  There was a broad spectrum: Tavener, Beethoven, ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, an evangelical worship-song by Matt and Beth Redman, and even ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’.

His fourth choice, however, stood right out from the others:

It is a South Sudanese folk-song called ‘Yesu Odechi’ (the translation is given as ‘Jesus Number One’, so perhaps it is more of a folk-hymn).  I was stunned by its freshness, even rawness of sound and by the soloist’s incredible voice.   Looking it up, I found that it is in fact very new, having been composed by its very singers (they are members of the Kachipo tribe).  In fact, there was apparently some trouble in transcribing the words, Kachipo culture being entirely oral.  Although the accompaniment was added later in a studio, the mood and sound seem unfakeably unchoreographed and authentic.  

This music speaks (or sings?) for itself, but I cannot resist noting the light it sheds on one of the paradoxes of our age, which is itself made up of two contradictions.  The first paradox, as Justin Welby observes, is the brightness of this music against South Sudan’s already bloodstained short history (some of which he has witnessed at first hand).  The second, on the other hand, is that we who enjoy relative peace do not write peaceful music, but instead content ourselves with sordid lyrics set to mindless beats or pride ourselves on our supposed edginess.  It is needless to say that the victims of war are little to be envied, but I think they (as opposed to the wagers of war) seem to have a firmer grasp of truth, in faith as well as in art, than we do in our indulgent age.   Perhaps this is one of the things Pope Francis meant when he said, "Certain realities in life can only be seen through eyes cleansed by tears".

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!

…or Happy Saint David’s Day!

‘Lovely the woods, waters, meadows, combes, vales,
All the air things wear that build this world of Wales…’

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. 

Broadcast

Once, at the age of eleven or so, I was asked what my favourite word was.  I replied, ‘Broadcast’.  I’m not sure how my poor interlocutor responded.  But it came to mind the other day that I would probably give the same answer now.

I think it’s a glorious word.  It is Germanic and wholesome, so you can get your teeth into it.  None of those Latinate fripperies!  And it has earthy origins: its eighteenth-century sense was agricultural and referred to the scattering of seed across a wide area (Hence the statue of a sower in the foyer of the B.B.C.’s Broadcasting House in Portland Place in London ).

Yet it fits its modern sense perfectly: it is a majestic word with a majestic meaning.  I think that this is what appealed to me at eleven: there is something magnificent about the apparatus and operation of telecommunications — particularly radio broadcasting — which is distinct from their value as scientific achievements.  Newsreaders drawing themselves up in readiness for their task; towering masts, sentinel over whole counties; and also that grave, unearthly, slightly flat voice of Big Ben — all these lend radio and television a poise and a dignity that I find delicious.  This is not least because it is all for the sake of words, and goes to show the weight they carry.

From the B.B.C. website.

Modern broadcasting has lost much of its majesty, I think.  On the one hand this has to do with the cultural change, of course: viewers and listeners are addressed less formally than before (to say the least!), and no clipped voices have reassured us that ‘This is the B.B.C. Home Service’ since 1967.  On the other, there is the improvement in the sound and picture quality of our sets at home, to the point at which the speakers might as well be in the room with us.  Undoubtedly this is for the better, but we have lost one thing, perhaps the most majestic of all, and that is the ability to hear distance.  Analogue fuzziness around a voice is proof of the journey it has made: we hear and understand in spite of all the hundreds of miles between transmitter and receiver.  And perhaps there is a sense of one’s nation as well, in hearing its length and breadth via a method common to its whole people?

You can still hear distance on long-wave radio; sometimes even further on short-wave.  For us of the digital age it is exhilarating to sense the Shipping Forecast calling across emptinesses of dark sea to trawlers and oil-rigs.  The Internet might supply French and German radio in crystal clarity, but hearing it through a warm fuzz reminds me with a thrill of the real distance between us.  I can imagine how thrilling it must have felt to pick up off-shore pirate radio.  Philip Larkin conveys this feeling wonderfully in his poem, neatly entitled ‘Broadcast’, in which a concert broadcast on the radio is rarefied by the presence of a friend in the auditorium: 

                                                            …Behind
The glowing wavebands, rabid storms of chording
By being distant overpower my mind
All the more shamelessly, their cut-off shout
Leaving me desperate to pick out
Your hands, tiny in all that air, applauding.

It must have been a strange feeling to pick up the B.B.C.’s signal in occupied France, once Parisian radio had fallen to the foe.  There is a fascinating podcast in French here (with more info. here) about the B.B.C.’s wartime broadcasts in French of defiant songs and sketches, often containing coded messages, and the General de Gaulle’s speeches.  The occupiers tried to jam the signal, with limited success.  I wonder how it must have felt — probably unpleasant and intimidating — to hear this radio warfare going on in one’s own house.  There must have been some encouragement, however, in the fellowship of many other French households, also tuned in.  Here, once again, is proof of the the power of words, not least when radio writes them in the sky.

Really?

In my first entry, I blurted out that Benedict XVI, Pope from 2005-2013, now Pope Emeritus, is ‘one of my heroes’.  But I am a young man in Britain — in the twenty-first century!  Am I mad?  What am I saying?

Well, I probably am mad, but that’s a different question from whether, of the prominent figures of the past decade — intellectual, political, certainly religious — Benedict XVI is among the greatest.  He is a man both fiercely intelligent and steadfastly good: Cardinal Joachim Meisner said of him that ‘[er ist] einerseits ein ganzes Dutzend hochstehender Theologieprofessoren, andererseits ist er so fromm wie ein Erstkommunionkind [He is worth a dozen prominent theology professors and is as pious as a child on the day of his first communion].’   A good and learned Pope was precisely what was needed in a world — particularly the Western world — laden down by secularism, by materialism, by cynicism, by impoverishment of culture, by faithlessness and by selfishness.

This goodness is all the more remarkable because of the circumstances in which it has been tested, and thereby proved.  When conscripted into the Hitler Youth at the age of fourteen, he risked serious punishment by playing truant.  More courageously still, he later deserted the German army in 1944 and made his way home — where, seeing that Mass was being said in the parish church, and wishing to avoid a commotion, he did not go in, but waited for his family to come out at the end.

His goodness has also been tested where we have all been able to witness it.  The trials and missiles came relentlessly during his pontificate, perhaps precisely because of his intelligence, perception and lucid words.  The architects of not merely secular but anti-Christian society felt threatened by him, as their equivalents had been by St John Paul II, and they responded with falsehood and rage.  Many in the media (though by no means all) treated him unsympathetically, either by action or omission.  Yet he remained patient and steadfast in the pursuit of truth.  He did not flee for fear of the wolves; he did not falter in the face of the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, and in response to the prevalent belief that the only absolute is ‘one’s own ego and desires’ he presented, again and again, ‘a different goal: the Son of God, the true man.’  He has left for us both an intellectual defence of the Catholic faith and an example, itself founded on Christ’s example, fit to shine forth in the twenty-first century. 

And he knew about young people. Which other public figure — apart now from Pope Francis —  in our era’s vain and brittle superficiality will, for example, begin an address with the simple sincerity of "Dear young friends!", and mean it?  Who else will refuse to patronise them or to water down his wisdom for them?  Who else will, as he did at World Youth Day in Madrid, decline to flee a freak thunderstorm and instead remain with the million-strong gathering of young pilgrims?  And who else knows that this works?  Who would have thought that an uncharismatic and grandfatherly gentleman could earn the cheers of 80,000 young people (and your correspondent’s) in Hyde Park, during the magnificent and unforgettable Papal Visit to Britain in 2010?  It works of course because it is not really about him: he never forgot that he was the servant of the servants of God.  And since what he was bound to teach is as true for the young as it is for the old, he could say with conviction in his introduction to the new Youth Catechism:

“Many people say to me: The youth of today are not interested in this. I disagree, and I am certain that I am right. The youth of today are not as superficial as some think. They want to know what life is really all about.”

Vigil at Hyde Park in London, 18th September 2010, on the eve of the beatification of Bl. John Henry Newman.  No relation: he is a Blessed, after all!

Why this blog and why its title?

The second question is the easier to answer!  The words are a favourite phrase of mine; they come from a prayer written by the writer, theologian, priest and cardinal John Henry Newman (1801–1890).  I think it is worth reproducing in full:

God has created me to do Him some definite service.  He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another.  I have my mission.  I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next.  I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.

He has not created me for naught. I shall do good; I shall do His work.  I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it if I do but keep His commandments.  Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away.  If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him.  If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him.  He does nothing in vain.  He knows what He is about.  He may take away my friends.  He may throw me among strangers.  He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me.  Still, He knows what He is about.

Bl. John Henry Newman: Meditations on Christian Doctrine, Meditations and Devotions, March 7, 1848.

These are wise enough words in themselves, but I have another reason to cherish them.  I heard them repeated by one of my heroes, Pope Benedict XVI (now Pope Emeritus), at the vigil held in Hyde Park before Newman’s beatification.

Here I wish to say a special word to the many young people present.  Dear young friends: only Jesus knows what “definite service” he has in mind for you.  Be open to his voice resounding in the depths of your heart: even now his heart is speaking to your heart.  Christ has need of families to remind the world of the dignity of human love and the beauty of family life.  He needs men and women who devote their lives to the noble task of education, tending the young and forming them in the ways of the Gospel.  He needs those who will consecrate their lives to the pursuit of perfect charity, following him in chastity, poverty and obedience, and serving him in the least of our brothers and sisters.  He needs the powerful love of contemplative religious, who sustain the Church’s witness and activity through their constant prayer.  And he needs priests, good and holy priests, men who are willing to lay down their lives for their sheep.  Ask our Lord what he has in mind for you!  Ask him for the generosity to say “yes!”.  Do not be afraid to give yourself totally to Jesus.  He will give you the grace you need to fulfil your vocation.

 Benedict XVI to young people at Hyde Park, in London, 18th September, 2010.

If it is good enough an idea for these two men, it is good enough for me: that even the hardest and humblest deed can be done in ‘some definite service’ (a paradox in the best tradition of Christianity, as Chesterton might have pointed out), and is never in vain.

Now I may be misguided in believing that this could apply specifically to my writing a blog about (I imagine) all sorts of things like poetry, culture, music and so on, and I may very much doubt that anyone else’s ‘definite service’ extends to having to read it, but it ought to be good writing practice and a bit of fun.

‘I too shall something make,

And joy in the making…’