John Masefield Exercises the Prerogative of his Office

The Associated Press and British Movietone News have both recently uploaded, onto YouTube, more or less their entire film archive.  They had previously been available electronically via a more convoluted route, but this development makes them freely available.  (And they can now be embedded in blogs!).

It has certainly added a lot of fascinating material to the Internet.  For example, in a clip from a reel of (I think) 1930, here is John Masefield, then Poet Laureate, reciting from one of his poems (or, as the subtitle puts it, ‘exercising the prerogative of his office’).  The poem is one of his better-known lyrics, ‘The West Wind’.

The subtitle is not all that strikes me as unusual about this film.  I wonder if any reader is surprised by Masefield’s voice and diction?  I actually found it more difficult to enjoy than I had expected, for all that Masefield is probably my favourite poet, and I have not come across any recording of his voice before.  Marvellous though it was to hear him speak, there is no hint from this son of Ledbury of any Herefordshire accent, nor, really, the slow gentleness that I think dwells in most of his poems, even if surreptitiously.  He is declaiming, really, rather than speaking.  At the 1.20 mark, for instance, he might even have been singing.

Yet, if I struggle with this recitation, several factors enforce the conclusion that the problem lies with me and not with Masefield.  His highly readable biography describes his conviction that poetry is best met read aloud, a conviction that led him to involve himself in setting up and running the Oxford Recitations, competitions in verse-speaking held annually from 1923.  His keen ear is also borne out by the very ease with which his poems run off the tongue.  

Moreover, this way of speaking is precisely how poets and verse-lovers recited poetry.  For example, in this recording of Alfred, Lord Tennyson himself reading ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, the poet’s recitation takes almost no heed of the sense of the words.  (Incidentally, the original wax cylinder survived being left for a time next to a radiator… we are lucky to have it!).  That it has been something of a surprise to discover this is a reflection on the disappearance of poetry and verse-speaking from everyday life.

Even with gentler poems this declamatory approach was taken.  For instance, John Drinkwater’s dreamy Moonlit Apples is a poem I always imagine being read as if in the very attic described, and would have said that nobody could read the line ‘in the corridors under there is nothing but sleep’ any louder than a whisper!  Yet the poet himself declaims this poem like this:

Again I struggle to enjoy it, and yet again I must acknowledge that, as an actor and playwright it was John Drinkwater’s business, too, to know how to speak verse.  Indeed, there is a lecture by him, entitled ‘The Speaking of Verse’, uploaded by the same YouTube user (It is in two halves: one here; the other here).  What is the problem, then?  Why are my modern ears thus tone-deaf?  

A simple reason might be the disappearance of poetry from everyday life in England, and also from everyday speech.  Most of us, even poetry-lovers, are simply unused to words of this weight at all.  Masefield’s poetry was once read in pubs: these days it is almost inconceivable to use those two words in the same sentence.  Then, among the new poetry that is being written, there has been the abandonment of traditional metre and rhyme, which has lifted any musical quality from much modern poetry.  When it is read aloud, it is intoned, rather than declaimed.

Almost as significant, I think, is the development of the microphone, a revolutionary invention that is surprisingly seldom discussed in those terms.  It has completely transformed public speech and speaking, so that clear vowels and meticulous enunciation are no longer indispensable to make oneself heard.  Indeed, such things survive now only in a few places, such as in the loudspeakerless chapel of King’s College, Cambridge, where the modern ear is again surprised by unaccustomed speech like this (though I must say that I enjoy this reading tremendously):

How do I think poetry ought to be read, then, if I’m so clever?  The aim I would say is not really in question: to bring out the beauty the poet has put there.  And I don’t think my view about going about this, in theory, actually differs much from Masefield’s or Drinkwater’s.  For example, most of what Drinkwater says in his lecture above makes sense to me:

Nine-tenths of the great poetry of the world is perfectly clear in its meaning, and we do not want the speaker to explain it to us […] In speaking a poem, let us first get the rhythmic movement clearly fixed in our minds.  By following this, we shall give to each word the exact emphasis intended by the poet, and so avoid those inflections that are designed to brace up the nerveless speech of conversation.  The right pace of a poem will suggest itself quite readily to any sensitive mind […] Let us say the poem without feeling ourselves called upon to interpret it, and we shall do all that is necessary.

In other words, the speaker should be content to be a vessel through which a well-built and well-scanned poem — and thus indeed the poet — should literally speak for itself.  All I wish to add to Drinkwater’s view is that this ought to resemble more closely the playing of music. Composers count upon the musician’s skill to play their music beautifully, and not merely neutrally.  Likewise, there ought to be some room for intonation and shape in the speech.  I think the voice should sound somewhere between ease and effort, as if it is shouldering a light burden, just like a musician.  I also believe that in place of declamation (one voice speaks to a multitude) the impression ought to be given — and microphones can help with this — that in fact one heart speaks to another, as Cardinal Newman might say.  This lady’s rendition of ‘Moonlit Apples’ more or less hits the mark for me:

The idea that the poet still speaks when his verse is read also reminds me of another powerful aspect of poetry, and that is memory.  Poetry does not really work in the ear but in the heart, and often has its greatest beauty when words that have lingered there lighten up unexpectedly.  Just as ‘blue remembered hills’ are dearer than plain ordinary hills, old remembered words can overwhelm the heart.  Hence the above lady’s ‘treasury of remembered verse’.  Or, for instance, out on an autumn Sunday woodland walk, with undiminished aptness, into the mind might drop the words ‘And the Sabbath rang slowly / In the pebbles of the holy streams.’  This can also work, mysteriously, with new and unfamiliar poems: Robert Frost actually describes the delight of reading a poem and finding himself ‘remembering something I didn’t know I knew […] there is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows’ (The Figure a Poem Makes, 1939).  So, to paraphrase Robert Bridges, the audience’s impression, with time-hallowed poetry at least, will be that old words have come to them by the riches of time.  Verse-speaking cannot really respond to this, I don’t think: it all works in the heart, too mysteriously and too intimately to be for any pretentious blog-post to deal with!

Ten Poems for National Poetry Day

Since it is National Poetry Day, there is no excuse not to compile a list (though inexhaustive) of some favourite poems that I think are worth sharing.  I think they might also appeal to any readers who consider themselves new to, or unfamiliar with poetry… or even ‘averse to verse’!  If they can be read online, I have given links to them.  Here they are:

1. ‘Moonlit Apples’ — John Drinkwater.  A poem to be whispered at midnight… ‘And quiet is the steep stair under.’
2. ‘Paddington: Mother and Son’ — John Masefield.  Perhaps the simplest and the greatest war poem I know; its whole weight rests on the slow and remorseless beat of the four final words.  It is not online but is included in this anthology; a good local library ought to have a copy.
3. ‘The Trees’ — Philip Larkin.  Why is it that only Larkin’s sour poetry ever seems to be quoted?  He was capable of sincerely beautiful poetic utterances: this is an example.
4. ‘In Memoriam: Easter, 1915’. — Edward Thomas.  Another war poem whose weight rests upon a few words, ‘left’, ‘should’ and ‘never’, and whose meaning drops into the mind slowly but catastrophically.  I have written about it more here.
5. ‘A Chorus’ — Elizabeth Jennings.  This poem sets off with great momentum and soaring majesty but gradually lowers its voice until, in the last lines, both its subject matter and its register are intimate and almost confessional.
6. ‘The Old Liberals’ — John Betjeman.  It can be read about half-way down this page.  I find this poem very moving, even though I still don’t completely understand it and am not sure how seriously to take it.  ‘Sad as an English autumn, heavy and still’ is one of the truest lines of poetry I have ever come across.  And there is something about the easy conversational glibness of saying ‘Ask at the fish and chips in the Market Square’ that is also powerfully sorrowful.
7. ‘Pilgrimages’ — R.S. Thomas.  It is about Bardsey Island, the ‘island of twenty thousand saints’, just off the edge of the Lleyn Peninsula at the tip of N. Wales.
8. ‘Love bade me welcome’ — George Herbert.  Another intimate poem: its gentleness has survived intact for nearly four centuries.  ‘But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack / From my first entrance in […]’ is a line so light and so even that its gentle beauty could easily go unnoticed.  And neither has time diminished the anguished remorse and disbelief in the protest ‘I, the unkinde, ungratefull?’.  Ralph Vaughan Williams also set it to music.
9. ‘Woolgathering’ — Wilfrid Wilson Gibson.  It can be read halfway down this page.  A whimsical utterance in plain English which can easily be learnt by heart.
10. ‘A Gable Wall’ — Maolsheachlann O Ceallaigh.  This poem, full of movement, lifts up ordinary life in order to celebrate it, as does most of his poetry.  I always enjoy, and strongly recommend, the rest of his blog as well.

There are many other poems that I could have mentioned… doubtless I will find an excuse to post them in the future!

Observations rhônalpines

It was wonderful to go away to France again the other week.  It had been two years since my previous trip, and I had been missing it!  A friend from school and I cooked up a plan to split a week between Grenoble and Lyon, and to take the new Eurostar service which runs directly from St Pancras station in London to Lyon Part-Dieu (Or did we go to Lyon just in order to use the new Eurostar service?).

Grenoble depuis la Bastille

We looked down on Grenoble from the Bastille fortress to see how the city is set among the Alps ; in Lyon we saw the cathedral, took the funicular up to the basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière (an old devotion re-invigorated after Lyon was spared violence in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870), wandered at will around the Roman ruins and met a friend who is just beginning a year teaching at the ENS.  We also made a day trip to Pérouges, a remarkable medieval village perched neatly on a hill-top like a board-game.  (It even sounds like a board-game — ‘who fancies a game of Pérouges?’).

Your turn… up the stairs or down the street?

As well as great monuments there were also smaller things to see: lesser elements of ordinary French life which struck me as being (sadly) absent from Britain.  There was the quite calm, quite relaxed, quite sensible, quite self-unconscious group of young Grenoblois, about twelve or thirteen years old, on their way somewhere on a warm afternoon; there was the six- or seven-year-old boy perched on a climbing-frame in the Jardin Public, reading a bande déssinée (comic book).  There was the game of boules in progress in the same garden.  There was the man carrying six baguettes home on the funicular from Vieux-Lyon.  There was the children’s library in Grenoble which, though adjacent to the main library, is advertised as a distinct bibliothèque de jeunesse with its own clientèle.   

Another aspect of French life unavailable in Britain…

This reverie might have been brought to an abrupt halt by the concession to pragmatism of new automatic checkouts in the local Monoprix, but then I saw an assistant directing the customers to the nearest free machine, steadfastly observing the old custom by which about shopkeepers and “chers clients” greet each other in shops with a “Bonjour, Monsieur” and – more significantly still – part with a “Merci, Monsieur, bonne soirée, au revoir.”  I went on to see quiet but sincere patriotism in the Musée des Troupes de montagne (Museum of French Alpine troops), where the explanatory notes refer to these troops’ defence of ‘notre patrie’ (‘our homeland’).  And sincere faith, too: I found out about the ‘pari sur une confiance totale’ made by the bishop of Grenoble, Guy de Kerimel, who has put a great effort into revamping his diocesan youth service.  Isèreanybody (a pun on Isère, Grenoble’s département, and a slightly literal English translation of the French ‘il y a quelqu’un?’, ‘is anybody there?’), provides students and young professionals with their own chaplain and parish church, and maintains a vibrant presence on the new media, exactly as Benedict XVI asked.

There was the language too, of course: though they miss out on hearty Anglo-Saxon words like ‘stealthier’, ‘brought’ or ‘haven’, it is almost music.  Here are the beginnings of a list of some of my favourite French words:

1. gourmandise (f) – greed, gluttony, a plump and well-fed word.
2. orgueilleux – proud (in the sinful sense), a word that is puffed out like the chest!
3. fierté (f) – pride (not sinful!), a dignified, defiant word.
4. grenouille (f) – a frog.
5. plouf – splash (a different sound, but you end up just as wet)
6. pamplemousse – grapefruit… a luscious, juicy word.  Letters will run down your chin if you are not careful!
7. moelleux – no translation!  Soft, gooey, dark, molten, mellifluous.  The best definition is the moelleux au chocolat (not to be clicked on during Lent).
8. mie (f) – no translation here either!   Bread’s doughier interior, which in France contrasts with the crumbling golden crust…
9. veiller – to keep watch.  A lovely, quiet, unobtrusive but steady word.  There is a beautiful concision to the reply given by Frédéric Langlais, the hero of Paul Berna’s Le Carrefour de la Pie (‘Magpie Junction’), to his father when asked what he is doing up in the middle of the night: ‘Je veillais, chuchota Frédéric’ (“I was keeping watch,” whispered Frédéric).  That is more poetry than prose.  Paul Berna, a French children’s author who wove befriendable characters into realistic and beautifully-written books, ought to be much better known.
10. lugubre – bleak, dim, gloomy, dismal.
11. s’introduire (dans) – simply ‘to enter’, ‘to let oneself into’, but the French has a deliciously surreptitious and stealthy undertone.  The subject of the sentence is definitely up to no good… ‘S’introduire dans les lieux’… to let oneself into the premises…

Do any French or Francophile readers have favourite French words of their own?  You are welcome, as always, to comment…

Un individu s’est introduit dans les lieux…

‘Queen indeed over a Kingdom worthy, the World's wonder.’

Today our Queen Elizabeth becomes the British throne’s longest-reigning monarch,  surpassing her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria’s reign of sixty-three years and two hundred and sixteen days.  With John Masefield’s Laureate Coronation lines in my mind, I wonder whether we have deserved her, for all that this country might, as I still believe quietly, be in with a shout of being the ‘World’s wonder’.

May God save the Queen, and bring forth Masefield’s hoped-for 

‘…season of the springing seed

Of all a People one in an endeavour

To make our Sovereign lady Queen indeed

Over a Kingdom worthy, the World’s wonder.’

Lux aeterna

Today (6th September) is the eightieth anniversary of the death, at the age of nine, of Michael Kendrick Howells.  A form of polio or meningitis felled him in only three days; his father Herbert Howells, in the nearly fifty years by which he outlived his son, never overcame this loss.  

Herbert Howells had been, before the Great War, a promising young composer of mainly orchestral work; he was Stanford’s favourite at the Royal College of Music and shone among the brightest in that fascinating constellation, darkened forever by the 1914-1918 war, of Edwardian and Georgian composers and writers with some connection to Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire or the Marches.  He was a close friend of Ivor Gurney and the poet F.W. Harvey; all three had Gloucester connections.  During the war he had narrowly avoided death not in the trenches but from Graves’ disease, and become the first person in the country to undergo radium treatment.  Afterwards his career had flagged rather, especially after the unfavourable reception of his (sublime!) second piano concerto, about which more here.  His son’s death in 1935 silenced him utterly.

Only his daughter Ursula was able to persuade him to compose again; she suggested that he ‘write something for Michael’.  The work that resulted remained untouched for thirty years, before Herbert Sumsion and Ralph Vaughan Williams found out about it and persuaded him to allow it to be performed at the Three Choirs Festival.  Hymnus Paradisi is a monumental work, a Requiem with various additions from the Psalms and the Sarum Book of Hours.  It is performed rarely mainly because it calls for two soloists, an enormous orchestra, two choirs and organ, but these were mustered during the Proms in 2012, and I was very fortunate indeed to be there in the Royal Albert Hall to hear it.  I will never forget looking up from the arena to see a wall of singers rise up to sing, nor feeling the organ’s low bellow through my feet, nor indeed the thirty seconds of silence before Martyn Brabbins lowered the baton and unfettered the applause, during which he held the score aloft for us to applaud.

Howells is one of those composers whose work, listened to the first time, often seems to be thoroughly difficult and complex but for a few striking moments which demand a second listen, and then a third, and so on, until its beauty can be heard properly.  This might be said of Hymnus Paradisi, but even a first hearing cannot miss the crescendo of grief just before the three minute mark, nor the audible light which brightens and brightens until it fills the whole work from the Sanctus (22 min) onwards: 

The loss of his son is generally regarded as a clear rupture in Howells’ compositional career as well as in his life.  The music he wrote after 1935 was almost all intended for the Anglican choral tradition (in all he wrote twenty settings of the Evening Canticles), more melismatic and often more searing.  However, Howells did occasionally return to the past for material.  The Hymnus Paradisi itself draws heavily on the Requiem that he had already written.  And I have an idea that the final movement (Holy is the True Light, and passing wonderful…), which begins like this:

…might be a more magnificent, a heavier, yet also a more luminous version, in which wistfulness has hardened into grief, of the opening of the old Howells’ Piano Quartet of 1916 (itself perhaps a response to death, since Howells himself was gravely ill at this point)?

While I am on the subject, I wonder if the second theme of the Shropshire Lad rhapsody of George Butterworth (killed in action in 1916)…

… is quoted in the 1925 piano concerto, by the clarinet once only, at the point below?

To return to this post’s original subject, I would like to record another thought about Hymnus Paradisi: all the luminous chords, the massed choirs and the thundering organ were summoned all for the sake of a child of nine years.  It is too easy to forget, not least in a Britain which I find hardly heeds children, that this is entirely fitting; that is a lesson for us all.

Further reading and listening: 

• B.B.C. Radio 3’s ‘Composer of the Week’ programme on Herbert Howells.
• An article by Simon Heffer about Hymnus Paradisi

Reading ‘Pope Francis: Untying the Knots’ by Paul Vallely

Some time ago a friend kindly lent me ‘Pope Francis: Untying the Knots’, a biography of the Holy Father by Paul Vallely.  It is an absorbing and pacy book: I remember its being published remarkably soon after the election, and read it bearing in mind that speed had been of the essence when was being researched and written.

From www.paulvallely.com

Vallely works through the run of Jorge Bergoglio’s life with methodical detail and also sprinkles it with some wonderful vignettes.  For instance, he discovered his vocation in a confessional which he had only entered on second thoughts on his way to make a proposal of marriage.  His mother used to gather the children around radio to hear broadcasts of whole operas.  Then there is the nickname of El Chabon that he is given in villa 31, a slum of Buenos Aires, which apparently translates as ‘The Dude’.

Paul Vallely’s contention throughout the book is that Pope Francis’ characteristic humility, simplicity, authenticity and concern for the downtrodden pour forth now so startlingly only because of difficult trials he underwent in the past.  For instance, Vallely paints a picture of his time as superior of the Jesuit province in Argentina, soon after the Second Vatican Council, in which he apparently reacted fiercely against new movements and ideas (such as Liberation Theology or modern ecclesiastical architecture) and thus divided Argentinian Jesuits into supporters and adversaries.  Then there were the difficulties of the Argentinian ‘Dirty War’ of 1976—1983 in which a military regime, trying to stamp out any hint of Communism, included in its long list of political enemies priests who seemed too attached to the cause of workers or slum-dwellers.  Moreover, Vallely describes various examples of collusion between representatives of the Church and the regime; even within the Church, it was difficult for Jorge Bergoglio to know where and with whom he stood.  Vallely also dwells at length upon an incident involving two priests from whom, because they had expressly disobeyed his request to stop working in the slums for their safety, Jorge Bergoglio removed the licence to say Mass and therefore, in the military’s eyes, the Church’s protection.  These priests were kidnapped shortly afterwards and, it seems, were fortunate to avoid death, let alone to be released. 

It was against this background, Vallely tells us, that Jorge Bergoglio was sent to Bavaria in 1986 to research a Ph.D.  Here, in the church of St. Peter am Perlach in Augsburg, he encountered a painting of Our Lady entitled ‘Mary, Untier of Knots’.  This image resonated with him precisely because of the troubles he had faced in Argentina, and he took back copies of the painting on his return.  Vallely’s belief is that this picture played no small part in a conversion, or something like it, that the future Pope underwent.  After this change of heart and mind, we read that he came to believe that poverty could not be eradicated without a conversion of society; he became less opposed to Liberation Theology and he set himself the challenge of adopting humility as a ‘religious decision’.  It was the experience of division and disunity in the Church, of murkiness with regard to the 1976-1983 regime and the unassuaged plight of the Argentinian poor that forged the Pope Francis who now unsettles us and challenges us with his humility and directness.

It is a tale compellingly told.  I have misgivings about one aspect of its telling, however.  This portrait of Pope Francis often reads as if meant to be considered in contrast to, even in rupture with the recent history of the Church and indeed Pope Benedict in particular.  Vallely’s use of the word ‘conservative’ (a word which I think ought particularly to be avoided in Church affairs) might justly be described as liberal, and he does not mean it as a compliment.  How thinly Vallely has veiled his disapproval of the Church’s administration can be told by his use of phrases like ‘Vatican crackdown’ or ‘conservative hierarchy’; see also his description of Benedict XVI’s liturgical formality as a ‘predilection for lace and Latin’.  It seems fair enough for Vallely to pit Francis against the Curia, since the Curia has certainly been in need of reform, but the assumption is made that the Curia’s problems come from attachment to tradition, or antipathy towards modernity, rather than from nepotism, insularity or, come to that, from sin.  There is even the implication that, before his ‘conversion’, in his antipathy towards revolution, readiness to assert authority and decision to decorate a bare modernist chapel interior, Jorge Bergoglio had resembled Joseph Ratzinger, and that the new version is an improvement precisely because he apparently no longer does so.

In the first instance I find this unfair to Benedict, whose character and mission might have been different from Francis’, but was far from deficient (I have sung B16’s praises here).  It is certainly true that Benedict was a man of words and thoughts where Francis is more obviously a man of action and gesture, but a contemplative approach does not necessarily lead to a ‘Church turned in on its inner spirituality’.  As I see it, Benedict knew his strengths and their limits — a deep understanding of Europe, along with the intelligence to grapple with it.  So, in his seven years, although he never forgot that he was Pope for all the world’s Catholics, he laid down the intellectual and spiritual foundations of the New Evangelisation in Europe in particular.  He confronted the dictatorship of relativism on the very fronts on which it had declared war on the Church, and did not waver when the Western media retaliated.  He provided European Christians with the intellectual equipment to engage with the New Atheism, gender theory, the dictatorship of relativism and consumerism, and fought sin’s particular footholds in Western society.  Simply by insisting that we can speak of such a thing as absolute truth, truth that comes from God, he did a great service for hope.

If he revived Papal fashions and invited the European faithful to a careful consideration of the liturgy, it was not to flee from the plight of the world’s poor.  Rather, it dealt with one of the greatest threats to Western Christianity, namely the wholesale abolition of an awareness of its past.  How tempting it is to believe that this is the greatest of ages simply by virtue of our living in it, and consequently that our ancestors’ way of life is entirely obsolete (how often do we hear this or that idea hastened along ‘because it’s the twenty-first century’?).  By reviving traditions in the Church, Benedict reminded us that wisdom is gained not by rejecting the past solely on the grounds of its mistakes, but by sifting carefully through the ages, avoiding its errors and, better still, embracing its triumphs.  It was a way of asking the New Evangelisation’s great question to Europe: ‘Do you remember that we believed because it is true?’.  

Benedict was aware that Europe carries ever less weight in the Christian world.  I think it is reasonable to suppose that one reason for his resignation was to open the way for someone more knowledgeable about the non-European Church.  So in the end, he allowed himself seven years to lay the foundations of the New Evangelisation in the West (foundations that we are to build upon with his legacy), which in turn allowed Pope Francis to concentrate on his own strengths.

This does not mean that we can afford to pay less attention to Pope Francis (who himself has said that ‘every age has but a meagre awareness of its own limitations’).  I simply think that Pope Benedict had a particular mission, as Pope Francis has his.  Modern Europe is not like the rest of the world: the challenge of building the Church is very different, even to the extent of needing two different kinds of Pope at different times.  This is illustrated by Vallely’s own description of Argentinean popular piety and the informal, exuberant mood at Mass in the slums of Buenos Aires.  Coming from a place where the Christian faith has life like that, Pope Francis could be excused if he were baffled by European cynicism and sulky reticence towards any discussion of faith, though Laudato Si shows that he understands it very well indeed.  I see these two Popes in continuity with each other; they may have different characters and gifts, but both put these at the service of the servants of God.

Vallely’s (and others’) frame of thought, in which two apparently distinct halves vie for supremacy — liturgically and morally doctrinaire ‘conservatives’ versus energetic upholders of social justice —  is not only over-simplistic, but also produces a thoroughly disillusioning vision of the Church, which at any moment might be lost to the wrong side.  Of course there exist within the Church divisions, disagreements and (fundamentally) sin, but I do not think that these align themselves along battle-lines in the way that Vallely describes.  Vallely says, for instance: ‘For all his growing sense of the need for social justice, Jorge Mario Bergoglio was doctrinally orthodox and mainstream’, as if the two were incompatible.  Yet concern for social justice is a pillar of Catholic doctrine, set out clearly in Catholic Social Teaching, and social justice is achieved precisely by a universal, willing adherence to the Church’s teachings.  It may be that some of the faithful are overly concerned by liturgy and rubrics, and that others have an excessively political and secular conception of social injustice, but the ideal is a combination of both spirituality and action, two things which do not contradict each other but go together in the same direction, just as Benedict’s and Francis’ papacies do.  All are called to the harvest (which, we are told, is rich, and the labourers few); each must bring what he can.

‘His Music Lives. It was his own, and drawn from vital fountains’

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (picture from Wikipedia.org)

Today is the 140th anniversary of the birth, in Holborn in London, of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the late nineteenth-century composer (as distinct from the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge!).  Coleridge-Taylor never knew his father, a doctor from Sierra Leone, who for his part had returned there without knowing he had a son.  His mother Alice moved to Croydon; there Samuel was brought up and lived for the rest of his life.

He learnt the violin and sang in two church choirs, and polished his talent diligently enough that, in 1890, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music.  Here he was taught by Stanford, knew Holst and Vaughan Williams, and had his first publications.  A few years later he received a commission for the Three Choirs Festival on the recommendation of Sir Edward Elgar, who called him ‘the cleverest fellow going amongst the young men’.  

Not long afterwards came his greatest success.  This was ‘Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast’, the first of a trilogy of cantatas, which catapulted him to his greatest fame, but, alas, not to riches.  He had sold the rights outright for a trifling fee, and all his life had to work hard for a living, and to provide for his wife Jessie Walmisley, his son Hiawatha and daughter Gwendolyn.  

Here is the first movement of his violin concerto in G minor (the second movement and the third movement are also available to listen to):

His African background led him to take a deep interest in African and African-American culture and history; he collaborated with the American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and travelled to the U.S.A. on conducting tours.  He also made haunting arrangements of spiritual melodies, and saw himself as doing much the same work as Dvořák and Grieg had for the folk-music of their own cultures:

Coleridge-Taylor died, having collapsed at West Croydon railway station and succumbed a few days later to pneumonia, at the catastrophically early age of thirty-seven, and so never wore, as he might deservedly have done, the laurels of a great twentieth-century British composer.  He is buried within a few miles of his home in the cemetery at Bandon Hill in Wallington.  His life seems under-remembered today in his own south London, but all the same ‘his music lives’, as the epitaph on his grave, by his friend Alfred Noyes, proclaims: ‘It was his own, and drawn from vital fountains.  It pulsed with his own life, but now it is his immortality.  He lives while music lives.’

Further reading and listening:

• A biography on the British Library’s website: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/blackeuro/coleridgebackground.html
• A facsimile of ‘Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: His Life and Letters’ (1916): https://archive.org/stream/samuelcoleridget002424mbp#page/n7/mode/2up
• A photograph of Coleridge-Taylor at work in his room in 1901: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/blackeuro/sctpiano1lge.html
• Article about Coleridge-Taylor on the website of the London Borough of Sutton: https://www.sutton.gov.uk/info/200554/heritage_and_culture/1359/local_people/2
• ‘Composer of the Week’ programme on B.B.C. Radio 3: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0219x03

Fear in the Modern Age

Crossing a fog-enveloped West Country camp-site in the early hours of the morning and seeing nothing in the thick damp darkness, I was recently surprised by a sudden sheer aversion to — even fear of — the night around me.  Any city-dweller might be unused to the utterness of country darkness, but I had not expected the dread seeping into me as intangibly as the fog.  I realised what an ordeal such a night presented to lighthouse-keepers (let alone to seafarers).  All they had about them were ears, the imagination (and its tricks), and the taunting tingling of dampness on their cheeks.  How greatly they must have feared a shipwreck, and how they must have longed for dawn.

Since in such circumstances it is suddenly very easy to believe wholeheartedly in God, and every residue of supercilious rationalism crumbles away, I wonder whether one of the reasons for secularism’s rise might well be our attempted abolition of night, and of fear with it.  Most of us live in towns or suburbs which we are content to have drenched in bronze light, so as to make us think that our senses’ dominion over our surroundings is absolute.  I had no particular reason to feel much more at ease inside my torch-lit tent — the same night was only on the other side of the canvas — but I did, and could quench my unease at the touch of a button.  Robert Macfarlane, at the other end of the country, has much of interest to say on the subject in this video:

Afterwards I had second thoughts, and became less sure that twenty-first century Britain has quite seen off fear.  I think that many people are still afraid of various things, but fear privately, and also seek consolation elsewhere than in church.  People are afraid of permanence; they are afraid of marriage; they are afraid of their own weaknesses.  This is borne out, I think, by the way in which the National Health Service, for instance, is regarded in public life.  Somewhere, somebody has said that the N.H.S. is now really the national religion.  Certainly it makes sense, since people have always worried about physical health, that the nation should turn to a national service, and that there should be fierce opposition to any attempt by the Government to prune it back, and that politicians tend consequently to speak reverently of ‘our N.H.S.’ in order to win their audience over.  The N.H.S. also has direct involvement in many people’s lives, either as employer or physician.  Then there are the reports that come out from time to time suggesting that medication is consumed by the British at a staggering rate.  (I should make it clear that this is not to say that people do not necessarily need such medication).  It makes sense, in a secular mind, that health in this world should take the place of salvation in the next.

It has also occurred to me that the lack of self-restraint in modern British culture actually conceals a fear in its very swagger; this time the inward fear of feelings and conscience.  The famous British restraint once subdued feelings for the sake of politeness.  The louder tone of conversation and behaviour that replaced it is still, however, a kind of discipline, since it still finds a disclosure of the inmost heart embarrassing, and indeed has much less patience for it.  This also goes some way to explain the roughness of our culture.  Once steeped in a televisual culture of violence, swearing and ungentleness, as night-time city streets are in fake light, nobody has any need to worry about others’ behaviour, to be afraid of causing undue offence or the bonds of civility between human beings.  Any suggestion otherwise is to be fled from.

Modern fear, it seems to me, is worth bearing in mind for the New Evangelisation, not so that we should frighten people into church attendance, but because people really do, in spite of appearances and in spite of themselves, still have their fears.  We can remind them, and ourselves, where they can be sure of safety.

Conversation with a Grandmother

Several weeks ago, at Sunday morning Mass, a newborn parishioner was baptised in our church.  Afterwards we were invited to dinner with the family, who are Nigerian — the child’s grandmother had travelled from Nigeria to be present.  We fell into conversation with her, and the subject came round to churchgoing in her home country.  In her parish, she told us, there are four Masses on Sundays (6 a.m., 8 a.m., 10 a.m. and an evening Mass).  She laughed as she told us that the morning Masses all overrun, so that the 8 and 10 o’clock services begin hopelessly late, even to the order of hours!  This is not least due to the fact that the parish church, which holds two thousand worshippers, is actually overflowing on Sundays.  This is not in a particularly large urban area, but in a town between Abuja and the coast.

Nigeria is a country which bears, and has borne, much suffering.  There is still material poverty and political instability.  It is well known that much of the north-east of the country is threatened by Boko Haram, which is convulsed with hatred for Christianity and has had bombs set off in full churches.  Martyrdom is real and even familiar.  I had been aware that the Church in Nigeria was growing nevertheless, but this vignette seems to me to give startling hope.  The new grandmother herself radiated a kind of forthright joy which gave rise to outbursts of “To God be the glory!”… her more reserved British interlocutors struggled to supply the hearty echoes required!

This hope is not only for Nigeria; it overflows into other lands, I think, much as the churches overflow.  This is what the Church is like outside Europe.  Surely this flourishing will beget many vocations — I am thinking of the priesthood in particular.  Among Nigeria’s sons, perhaps among those being baptised even now, will surely be counted a great number of priests.  Many of them might well relish the challenge of the New Evangelisation in the West.  Their confident and joyful faith would make them tremendous missionaries in our sulky, disillusioned culture.

Update, 28th July, 2020.  I have had the sad news that that this lady died last week in Nigeria.  Please pray for her soul; may she see Paradise, and the glory of God in whom she had such joy.

Postlude

Last month a musical era drew quietly to a close.  The death on June the twelfth of the Lancastrian composer and conductor Ernest Tomlinson also represents the loss of the last great figure of British orchestral light music, that is, of the kind that so flourished before the musical revolution of the 1960s.  

Ernest Tomlinson (1924-2015);
picture from the Lancashire Telegraph’s website)

His long life of ninety years seems, in fact, a very short time for musical life in this country to have changed as profoundly as it has.  In his youth, all music-lovers, who generally had also to be music-makers, really did read from a common hymn-sheet.  I think it is fair to say that secular music existed on a scale between the classical or ‘high' and the ‘light' (for want of two better words!), and that it was all composed upon broadly similar musical principles; certainly for the same instruments.  Where ‘high' art music charted the deep waters of the human spirit, the ‘light' programme offered a simple tonic and some relief from daily care, as most people are grateful for from time to time.  The technical differences might be boiled down still further.  Light music, according to the definition suggested by Andrew Gold (head of the B.B.C.’s Light Music Unit music from 1965 to 1969) and generally agreed upon, is ‘music where the tune is more important than what you do with it’.   Serious music took a theme and spun it out into a great sustained utterance; light music encouraged simple joy in one or two simple themes.

All this meant that it was sometimes unclear where the ‘high’ began and the ‘light’ ended: Ralph Vaughan Williams’ English Folk Song Suite might be said to be a light work by a ‘serious’ composer.  Likewise, Eric Coates, a classically-trained violist, could devote his career to light music of immediate appeal, and the towering figure of Edward Elgar could so enjoy this same music that he arranged to be supplied with new records by Coates as they came out, and in fact then wore out their grooves.

The onrush of modernity — which has left us two separate universes we call ‘pop’ and ‘classical’, each divided into barely-related groups, both with their backs turned on each other — has been so complete that a reader might now reasonably ask to be told what Light Music is.  I think the best answer is that it is known when heard, and can hardly do better than to supply something of Ernest Tomlinson’s as an example:

along with something more vigorous for good measure, from a piece of music named after a telephone-exchange in north-east London!:

The modern listener’s first reaction might be that it is very much of its time, and that it is ludicrously gentle in comparison both to modern pop and modern ‘serious’ music.  But there is no intrinsic reason why this should be so.  Light music’s tunefulness made it the natural modern successor to the folk-song:

‘As a composer my inspiration always comes in the form of melody.  I write tunes! — singable tunes, I like to think, with normal harmonies, and if you write concert music which has got tunes, the only outlet is in light music… Everything I wrote was based on the traditional values, normal harmonies, Everyman language, and so on.’  Interview with Ernest Tomlinson, Archive on 4, B.B.C. Radio 4, 2011.

In that sense it was generous music, meant to delight and uplift anybody who listened to it.  This was of course why light music was gulped down in seaside resorts where people sought even a day’s refuge from mill or mine, and for this reason that the B.B.C. broadcast and commissioned it almost industrially during and after the last war.  It was the latter world that Ernest Tomlinson joined, and indeed he said frankly that ‘no composer owes as much as I do to the B.B.C.’.  He formed his own orchestra and his works were broadcast regularly on the Light Programme during the 1950s.

The later years of the following decade, however, brought changes nothing short of revolutionary.  The rise of beat or pop music became deafening.  The B.B.C., modernising with speed that seems dizzying even from this distance, rapidly decided that it had no use for light music, which all of a sudden sounded old-hat.  Still less had it any use for light music composers.  Ernest Tomlinson saw all these threats and took up a courageous fight against them which he was never to leave off.  He saw that, although there were many worthy pop songs, especially in the early stages, the new music was generally in rupture with the old.  Post-1950s ‘pop’ music relies on beat rather than melody, and — a subtler distinction— upon beat rather than rhythm.  Rather than using the bars as a structure on which a melody can flow along and take wing, pop music simply hangs a melody on the bars that could be disposed of more readily than the beat.  

[…] Worst of all for the health of music has been the increasingly drug-like dependency on sheer volume of sound hammered in by head-crunching drumbeats.  For all the enterprise of the best of pop/rock and the enormous followings such manifestations command, the only items which graduate to standard repertoire […] are those which can be accepted into music’s universal language.’  Ernest Tomlinson: Foreword to Scowcroft, Philip: British Light Music: a personal gallery of composers, 1992.

He saw that, without new commissions, there would be no encouragement for new light music composers and that the whole genre would very rapidly wither.  (In arguing his case here, he found an adversary in William Glock, just as Ruth Gipps did on the ‘high’ side).  Tomlinson was right: as a national movement, it seemed very nearly to die out in a breathtakingly short time.  For all that many listeners’ tastes had not changed at all, the B.B.C. abandoned them wholesale.   Especially after 1967, when the B.B.C.’s radio stations were reassigned, light music had no place on the air and, as Tomlinson’s obituary in the Telegraph says, the B.B.C. now felt entitled to consider his music ‘too lowbrow for Radio 3 but too highbrow for Radio 2’:

Anything like it had been in the fifties and sixties was gone.  The rock bottom was about 1979.  There was nothing on Radio 3, nothing on Radio 2, except more or less the pop side.  Interview with Ernest Tomlinson, Archive on 4.

Tomlinson also saw that the B.B.C. had begun simply to throw away light music scores en masse.  Here, again, he refused to accept defeat and established, in the barn at his own farm, the Library of Light Music, in order to provide them with a home.  There it stands, on Chipping Lane at Longridge in Lancashire, to this day, holding many pieces of music that would otherwise have been lost.

Ernest Tomlinson saw that the pop revolution was likely to end with the conquest of melody by beat, and defended light music untiringly, insisting that it was a viable music-form.  There was and remains no artistic reason why light music, and British melodic traditions, could not have carried on and even thrived after the emergence of new ideas in music, as proven by Tomlinson with his tropical, saxophonic ‘Miranda’…

…and also by something irresistible from Eric Coates, and by an intriguing piece of music played during a Proms Plus programme in 2013.  

If he had not been so tenacious, his music might not have been available online for me to happen onto while I was preparing for my final university exams.  His suites and interludes were just the thing in the circumstances.  After I graduated – for it worked! – I wrote to him to say so, and he immediately sent a very kind reply which I shall always treasure.

There has in any case been in recent years a revival of interest in light music, or at least music that surely fits the bill.  Classic FM may play relatively little light music proper, but its remit matches the original Light Programme’s very closely.  Much music for film and television is also ‘light’ in character.  Surely it is the ‘lightness’ in much of John Rutter’s music that appeals to so many?  The Light Music Society, of which Tomlinson was Chairman and latterly President, thrives still.  It is largely by Ernest Tomlinson’s efforts that the flame of light music has been kept burning.  Now the torch is passed to us, the music-lovers of today and tomorrow.

Update:
I ought to have added some further reading and listening:

Scowcroft, Philip L. British Light Music — a personal gallery of 20th-C composers. London: Thames Publishing, 1997.
The Story of Light Music — programme on Radio 2 presented by Michael Parkinson.  A clip including a good brief history of the B.B.C.’s abolition of light music in the 1960s, along with an interview with Ernest Tomlinson, is audible here.
Archive on 4: The Light Music Festival.  Audible here.
A Little Light Music:  B.B.C. 4 television programme, watchable for the moment here.
(I should say that the B.B.C. goes a long way to redeem itself with these programmes!)

Discography:
British Light Music: Ernest Tomlinson, vol. 1 (Marco Polo 8223413)
British Light Music: Ernest Tomlinson, vol. 2 (Marco Polo 8223513)
Some of Tomlinson’s music can also be heard via a Youtube channel here.

A detailed obituary has been published in issue 68 (Summer 2015) of the Light Music Society Magazine.