The Queen’s Birthday

A twenty-one-gun-salute from this blog for Her Majesty the Queen, who today celebrates her 92nd birthday!

The third movement of Eric Coates’ ‘Three Elizabeths’ suite, conducted by the composer.  No prizes for guessing which Elizabeth!

Benedict XVI’s 91st birthday

A quick post to note the birthday of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI!  The great man is 91 today.

Embed from Getty Images

Lines to Remember

The railway crossing the river at Bradford-on-Avon, with the fourteenth-century Tithe Barn in the middle distance.

For travellers to London by rail from Bath and Bristol, the most straightforward route is the Great Western main line of course: 125mph to Paddington, with no hesitation or deviation, engineered by Isambard Kingdom Brunel with straightforwardness uppermost in his mind.  Three times a day, however, a train arrives from the capital ‘round the back’ via Salisbury and Warminster, and three times a day there is a return journey to Waterloo.

	arr	dep
Bristol Temple Meads		1249
Keynsham	1255	1256
Oldfield Park	1302	1303
Bath Spa	1305	1307
Bradford-on-Avon	1318	1319
Trowbridge	1327	1328
Westbury	1334	1339
Warminster	1346	1346
Salisbury  (attached to the 1215 from Exeter St. Davids)	1416	1421
Andover	1437	1438
Basingstoke	1455	1457
Woking	1515	1517
Clapham Junction	1536	1537
London Waterloo	1549

The timings of the 1249 from Bristol are perfect for an unhurried afternoon run, as I found last week, joining at Bath.  It was the third day of spring’s first serious uprising against this iron Lenten winter we have been having.  All the trees were bare still, but the sun had spring’s confidence and even spring’s warmth.  Easter holidays had brought children to playgrounds and teenagers to river-banks — though nobody else seemed to need to go anywhere far, as the train was almost empty as it wound up the Avon valley.  From Bradford-on-Avon we ran with assiduous avoidance of alacrity to Trowbridge, and in the platform at the next station, Westbury, we were momentarily facing away from London, in the right direction for Penzance.  Then between there and Warminster lies the village of Dilton Marsh, and we ran non-stop through the Dilton Marsh Halt of John Betjeman’s poem.  When I re-read it on arriving home, this poem struck me anew, because I realise it shows with particular clarity the opposition between two voices that run throughout Betjeman’s poetry.  They are set against each other in this poem, and one of them is a clear victor.

On one hand there is the familiar ironic, comic and parodying voice, the ‘Come-friendly-bombs-and-fall-on-Slough’ schoolboy irreverence that reads as if scribbled in a margin, which Betjeman achieves by singing of mundane modernity in Romantic, Wordsworthian diction, and sending up both.  So, in answer to the question, “Was it worth keeping the Halt open…?” mused on with deliberate bathos ‘as we looked at the sky’, comes the carefully ironic response:

“…Yes, we said, for in summer the anglers use it,
Two and sometimes three
Will bring their catches of rods and poles and perches
To Westbury, home for tea.”

A crucial transport interchange, then!  And later, unmistakeable Betjeman:

O housewife safe in the comprehensive churning
Of the Warminster launderette!
O husband down at the depot with car in car-park!
The Halt is waiting yet.

Ha, ha, ha!  We chuckle at the incongruity of the high register and the supposedly banal subjects.  Or we smile wryly at the witty caricature of modern life.  Good old Betjeman, what a laugh!  But there, in the last line of that stanza, does the parody not fade abruptly?  Just where we might expect a punchline, the Wordsworth mimic vanishes.  No joke is cracked.   ‘The Halt is waiting yet’: the first impression is simply that this sentence is not ironic and that it does not say much, but, read again, in its very plainness there is something mysterious.

And then, proving beyond doubt that this straight face has not been pulled for the sake of rhyme or metre, there follows the extraordinary last verse, casting aside the schoolboy smirk once and for all:

And when all the horrible roads are finally done for,
And there’s no more petrol left in the world to burn,

Here to the Halt from Salisbury and from Bristol
Steam trains will return.

This is the other voice, plangent, disarming and perhaps the truer Betjeman, which appears with particular force in this poem and for which, I contend, the mischief is a front and in fact a defence mechanism.  And I can see why Betjeman needed such a defence mechanism.  The strength of his sentiment might be met with bewilderment even today, but in the 1960s, when the car was the future and anything even faintly Victorian was fair game for gleeful destruction, how much more greatly the laughs would have dwarfed those generated by the Lyrical Ballads spoofery.

Yet the outburst of this last stanza, in its audacious earnestness, shows how visceral nostalgia can be.  Nostalgia is not always an enjoyably fuzzy emotion, a melancholy to wallow in, and it cannot always be held back.  Hopeless it may be, but perhaps it must sometimes cry aloud in defiance of slick progressivists and ‘bespectacled grins’ (did not Philip Larkin too have two voices, one a foil for the other?).

Ruth Gipps: the revival gathers pace

Conductor Adam Stern, under whom the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra recently gave the United States première performance of Ruth Gipps’ symphony no. 2, was kind enough, on the very day of the concert, to send in a comment to this blog to report its success!

Ruth Gipps’ Symphony scored a decided triumph earlier today. The audience cheered it with genuine and rousing enthusiasm. I was so thankful for the orchestra’s ultra-committed performance, and especially for the incredible gift Gipps has given to us.

If this was any indication of the effect her music can have on first-time hearers, then her INEVITABLE revival (of which I fully intend to keep being a part) will bring a great deal of joy to a great many people. 

Ecstatically yours, 

Adam

This makes thoroughly pleasing reading, to say the least!  I can only repeat my thanks to the Seattle Philharmonic for going to the trouble of putting this performance on, bringing this neglected English composer out of the shadows and to an international audience.

And now more good news from East Sussex, the county of Ruth Gipps’ birth.  A concert of chamber music, with a programme mostly of her music — pieces completely unheard as far as I am concerned — is due to be given at St. John the Baptist’s church in the village of Ripe, where the composer was organist during the 1980s.  It  is part of the Villages Music Festival, and will take place at 7.30 p.m. this coming 29th June, 2018. The concert announcement, not failing to seize a golden punning opportunity, puts it most aptly: ‘The time is ripe’!

Ruth Gipps: Symphony no. 3, third movement, Scherzo

‘Let this holy building shake with joy…’

The Easter Vigil Mass in my South London parish, 2008

Exult, let them exult, the hosts of heaven,
Exult, let Angel ministers of God exult,
Let the trumpet of salvation
Sound aloud our mighty King’s triumph!

Be glad, let earth be glad, as glory floods her,
Ablaze with light from her eternal King,
Let all corners of the earth be glad,
Knowing an end to gloom and darkness.

Rejoice, let Mother Church also rejoice,
Arrayed with the lightning of his glory,
Let this holy building shake with joy,
Filled with the mighty voices of the peoples.

This is the opening (in English translation) of the Exsultet, the Church’s beautiful hymn for the Easter Vigil.  Beautiful it is in its images, its language and its theological underpinnings — which somehow make themselves felt even to those like me who do not understand every gesture or reference — and a poetic treat indeed after bitter Lent. 

It has occurred to me how full Holy Week is of paradoxes.  There is Palm Sunday and the divine, asisine entrance into Jerusalem.  There is the first Eucharist on Maundy Thursday followed by the year’s only Massless day, Good Friday.  Easter is itself, of course, the universe’s greatest paradox (life everlasting springing from where God had known death), but it encompasses other, smaller twin-truths.  At the Easter Vigil there is the candle-light which blazes all the more brightly for the darkness it has to dispel.  Thus, turning to the candle, we sing:

But now we know the praises of this pillar,
Which glowing fire ignites for God’s honour,
A fire into many flames divided,
Yet never dimmed by sharing of its light,
For it is fed by melting wax,
Drawn out by mother bees
To build a torch so precious.

It seems astonishing at first, the difference in scope between, on one hand, the praise of these bees in their tiny particularity (a passage brought back a few years ago by the new translation of the Missal) and, on the other, the praise of the massive and cosmic truth that is the burden of this prayer.   There, as the poet compasses the eternal, is the microscopic and prosaic in the same breath: another paradox for the list.  And we have already praised the ‘happy fault’, the ‘necessary sin of Adam’, ‘that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer’ (a mystery also mentioned in the fourteenth-century English carol ‘Adam lay ybounden’).

How, then, should these fine words sound when sung?  Here is a bracing Polish rendition of the Exsultet by Fr. Mateusz Łuksza, a Dominican priest of Jarosław:

Wishing a Happy Easter to one and all!

Good Friday

Now to the calendar’s zero, Good Friday.  The liturgical year grinds to a halt.  The church is stark; the altar is bare; the tabernacle is a shocking void.  

It is three o’clock.  Such intense emptiness: no distractions; no comfort; no Mass even.  Only the fact of the Cross.

Psalm 22, sung by the choir of Westminster Cathedral

Up on the Downs

Westwards along the South Downs Way, between Southease and Firle Beacon.

It was not quite the mid-March walk I had had in mind, into a penitential head-wind and in temperatures below freezing, up on an unsheltered ridge of the South Downs…  I did not reach Firle Beacon as I had hoped to.  But I don’t regret the excursion.  The Downs were bare and brazenly prehistoric, different from the wooded North Downs I know: impassively stranger than bohemian Brighton or respectable Eastbourne or even than Lewes, grey in the distance with all its tales and secrets.  There is so much of so little of England.

It has been a hard Lent this year, as if there is definitely to be no hint of Spring before Easter.  Let us hope it will turn out to have done us good!

Ruth Gipps — Seattle — Saturday

Don’t forget!  This coming Holy Saturday, 31st March, the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra will give the United States première performance of Ruth Gipps’ Symphony No. 2, amongst other works.  This might seem a long delay for a work written in 1945, but given that Gipps’ fifth symphony has still not received a single broadcast in her home country, or that no commercial recordings exist of any but the second, and that hardly any of her other music is known or performed, this is actually a very good sign that her work is receiving new attention, and deserves an international stage.  The conductor, Adam Stern, speaks of a ‘joyous journey of discovery’ in preparing the work, and says that this is ‘one of the most important premières the Philharmonic has ever done.’

I don’t know from this distance whether this performance will be broadcast, or if a recording will be available afterwards, but in a way it is exciting enough simply to know that the performance will take place.  I will be very interested to hear how it goes. Hopefully this will spur our own musical life in Britain into action!

Conductor Adam Stern explains the work:

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!

4th March, 2016: Aberystwyth and Cardigan Bay in several moods at once, as usual!

Happy Saint David’s Day to all Welsh readers and lovers of Wales!

London Snow

St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate: I failed to notice when taking this photograph that this street it stands on is Snow Hill!

Snow came to London today after a prelude of several days of freezing cold.  In the excitement I left my season ticket at home, so had to make the final part as well as the middle of my journey on foot (my eccentric route usually involves a bracing walk along the South Bank of the Thames), but I did not mind the walk of two miles in sunlight and snow.  So a rare and welcome excuse for this poem of Robert Bridges’, a favourite of mine:

London Snow

When men were all asleep the snow came flying,

In large white flakes falling on the city brown,

Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,

Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town;

Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing;

Lazily and incessantly floating down and down:

Silently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing;

Hiding difference, making unevenness even,

Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing.

All night it fell, and when full inches seven

It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,

The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven;

And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness

Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare:

The eye marvelled – marvelled at the dazzling whiteness;

The ear hearkened to the stillness of the solemn air;

No sound of wheel rumbling nor of foot falling,

And the busy morning cries came thin and spare.

Then boys I heard, as they went to school, calling,

They gathered up the crystal manna to freeze

Their tongues with tasting, their hands with snowballing;

Or rioted in a drift, plunging up to the knees;

Or peering up from under the white-mossed wonder,

‘O look at the trees!’ they cried, ‘O look at the trees!’

With lessened load a few carts creak and blunder,

Following along the white deserted way,

A country company long dispersed asunder:

When now already the sun, in pale display

Standing by Paul’s high dome, spread forth below

His sparkling beams, and awoke the stir of the day.

For now doors open, and war is waged with the snow;

And trains of sombre men, past tale of number,

Tread long brown paths, as toward their toil they go:

But even for them awhile no cares encumber

Their minds diverted; the daily word is unspoken,

The daily thoughts of labour and sorrow slumber

At the sight of the beauty that greets them, for the charm they have broken.

St. Pancras Station (left) and the British Library (right)

Lines from this poem come to me fairly often, generally à propos of nothing in particular and even in high summer; in fact, it contains some of my favourite lines of poetry.  ‘All night it fell, and when full inches seven / It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness, / The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven’, … ‘the unaccustomed brightness’… ‘past tale of number’.  ‘Paul’s high dome’ is a line that murmurs comes to me almost every time I walk to work along the South Bank.  ‘Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying’ is delicious, and notice the harmonious juxtaposition of ‘stealthily’ and ‘perpetually’, one with a Germanic root and the other derived from Latin; it is also evidence of Bridges’ efforts, for musicality’s sake, to purge his English poetry of sibilance (this is why he employed so often the older third-person singular conjugation, -eth or -th).  In general, the apparently irregular rhythm, the slight breathlessness of excitement, is one effect of Bridges’ quantitative verse, which involves measuring a line by the length of syllables, rather than the stress placed upon them.  Catherine Phillips explains all this in her interesting biography of Bridges, which I read cover-to-cover about three years ago.

Sunlight and snow become London rather well, I think, just as they did in Bridges’ time.

Regent Square

‘It is good to be here’: Hymns and belonging in a Polish park

Sławcie usta Ciało Pana — Pange Lingua (‘Of the glorious body telling’)

Good things are always going on in the world, even if out of sight or over the horizon, and these days, it seems, many of them are happening in Poland.  Here’s an example of something we should know about in Britain: enormous open-air hymn-singing concerts which every year draw great multitudes, people in their tens of thousands, to a park in the city of Rzeszów.  As the feast day of Corpus Christi draws to its close, huge numbers of ordinary folk — young and old, married and single, lay and consecrated religious, public officials and plain citizens — gather in the Sybiraków park to sing and pray.  There to lead them is a choir a hundred-and-thirty strong and an array of other musicians.  Candle-light spreads and strengthens as evening falls: the multitude joins hands and sing hymns into the night.

These are the ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ concerts (the name means ‘Of One Heart, Of One Spirit’; the ‘c' in ‘Serca’ is pronounced ‘ts’ as in ‘dance’, the ‘ch’ in ‘Ducha’ as in ‘loch’), and I can find no evidence against the claim that they are Poland’s, and Europe’s, largest regular concerts of religious music.  Last year 45,000 people were present, the greatest number since the events began in 2003.  Even those who came up with the idea — Jan Budziaszek, a drummer, Fr. Andrzej Cypryś and Fr. Mariusz Mik — might be forgiven for some surprise at what they have created.  And it is not only the high attendance that is remarkable: the concerts convey a definite and distinctive atmosphere, even over the Internet.  Something is happening which Fr. Cypryś describes as a kind of transfiguration: “There are lots of events in which a crowd enjoys itself and goes crazy, for better or worse.  But in this concert the crowd reacts differently; people are uplifted, spiritual.  A spirit rises up out of the heart and, ultimately, to the Lord God.”  Paraphrasing Simon Peter’s words at the Transfiguration of the Lord, he says, “Most likely what lies behind the phenomenon is this: ‘it is good to be here’.”

Serce wielkie nam daj — ‘Give us a great heart’

Of course, the musicianship has a great deal to do with its success.  There is no cutting of corners here.  Members of the choir must first pass an audition and, if successful, learn their parts and words by heart.  The orchestra is reinforced by players from the Rzeszów Philharmonic.  Hubert Kowalski, who conducts the orchestra and creates the orchestral arrangements of many of the hymns, is a composer and prominent figure in Polish liturgical music.  Marcin Pospieszalski, a bass guitarist, violinist and and composer of film music, also produces arrangements for the ensemble.  His wife Lidia Pospieszalska, along with Tamara Kasprzyk-Przybysz, leads the choir.  The solo singers and instrumentalists, too, tend to be prominent names in Polish music — Joachim Mencel, Poldek Twardowski, Viola Brzezińska — and some are international visitors, such as last year’s guests Levi Sakala (Zambia) and Fr. Stan Fortuna (U.S.A.).

For those of us who were struck by the quality of the music at the 2016 World Youth Day in Kraków (about which my tuppence-worth here and here), this all explains a great deal.   For at Kraków too there was this same compelling recipe of familiar or singable tunes heightened by rich and colourful orchestration.  The same musicianship, it turns out, is behind both phenomena — and by ‘musicianship’ I mean both the same individual musicians (Marcin Pospieszalski also contributed to the WYD hymn, for instance) and, more broadly, the same strong underlying musical culture.  Now I see why, when the world came to Kraków, the youth of Poland rose so splendidly to the occasion.

Even so, the evenings are not meant to be thought of simply as as an aesthetic experience, as this article (translated here) explains.  It is not for a performance that the multitudes have gathered.  In fact, the distinction between stage and audience is relaxed: the soloists, however famous, are not announced by name when they come on stage to sing; instead, the words of the hymns are projected onto screens so that everyone can join in.  There is a togetherness of music-making, itself in service of a togetherness of heart and spirit: “We believe profoundly that it is not only for an artistic event that we are gathered together,” says Hubert Kowalski; “but for deep prayer, in an expression of our belonging to God, and of our faith.”

Ciebie całą duszą pragnę — ‘For you I long with all my soul’, Psalm 63 (62)

And hymns are sung from every age and corner of the Church.  Taizé, nineteenth-century patriotic hymns, plainsong, seventeenth-century German melodies, American worship songs, the oldest known Polish hymn (the ‘Bogurodzica’) and even a rap, to whose lyrics presumably nihil obstat, performed by its author, a priest in full cassock — now I’ve seen it all!.  All sorts, then, which is another sign of a concerted effort to unity.  Perhaps not all the music will be to everyone’s taste, but everyone will like at least some of it.  I don’t think either traditionalists or innovators could complain of being left out, and I have to say I find most of it very appealing, especially with the choir’s open, unaffected, even raw way of singing.  But maybe it is the idea itself that matters more, the idea that people might willingly choose to spend some hours in each other’s company, and their Creator’s.  This is perhaps why, in 2010, when a terrific rain-storm caused flooding in the region and threatened the concert itself, those without long journeys to face decamped to a car park, hurriedly set up a new stage, and carried on singing under the deluge.

Chrystus Pan karmi nas — ‘Christ the Lord nourishes us’.

‘Serdecznie zapraszamy,’ they say —  ‘we cordially invite’ all people to join the gathering in the park.  Even from afar, watching online from here in England, it is impossible to resist being drawn into this spirit of togetherness, and to notice certain heartening things: the sheer variety of the people who are there, the roughly equal numbers of men and women, the presence of families and children, the breadth of ages, the large number of young priests and religious.  Then there are other surprising details, other refreshing sights, like natural ornaments of celebration and goodwill (as simple as flowers in the ladies’ hair, or exuberant balloons and banners among the audience), bishops’ bonhomie, John Paul II look-alikes, and people holding hands, or couples with their arms gently around each other, quite ordinarily and unshowily.  Everyone is quite obviously having a good time.  The young in particular are visibly uncynical, relaxed and actually youthful in spirit.  This is the youth that Benedict XVI knew is ‘not as superficial as some think’, and surely it is precisely because of the concert’s sincerity and authenticity — no artificial emotion, no pseudo-intellectualism, no smarminess, all those fakeries that young people can smell a mile off — that they come in such huge numbers.   Here all that is good about modern music and the modern world are taken and elevated to their highest purpose.  It is enough to make anyone ask why we are agonising and dithering over the New Evangelisation.  This is what it looks like and how it is done: some of this music could evangelise a potato.

‘A spirit that can rise up from the heart’… ‘an expression of our belonging to God’… The unison of lifted voices begets the unity of many lifted hearts and lifted spirits: one voice, one heart, one spirit.  It is what it says on the tin, then, and how sad it is that most of us in Britain can scarcely imagine it.  Yet what should be more natural than this, than gathering in a park to pray and sing?  Hymns were made to be sung anywhere, as much at home, at work, or to candlelight in the park as in church.  The concerts are astonishing to us not, then, because they are strange in themselves, but precisely because they are so completely natural that they should be commonplace, and yet are not.  Of course, the concerts are not meant as a substitute for going to church, or the sacraments, or the ordinary practice of the faith — the organisers suggest nothing of the kind — but as the natural expression of a certain moral and spiritual culture, as well as a musical one, a culture that knows the meaning of purposeful worship, it is a great sign of hope.

In other words, it is the reality of the occasion that is so startling: startling both because it is rather astounding that a gathering like this should happen in real life, and also because it is such a real, such a genuine thing to do, a thing so refreshingly free of illusion or falsehood.  There’s nothing forced or self-conscious about it.  Really, the broadcasts and videos of the occasion show for themselves what is going on.  The Holy Spirit is not very easily faked. 

Dziękuję wam, organizatorzy, muzycy i śpiewacy koncertu ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’, za takie wydarzenie, tak podnoszące na duchu!

Przykazanie miłości: ‘The Commandment of Love’

Most of the ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ concerts can be watched on Youtube:

2009: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDtfont8WE4

2010: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYYkEchNGbc

2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MizpESL97o0

2013: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR6DLJ-zcN4

2014: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kZ-Bnw-BpA

2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPGFNFa_0go

2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XprTM0meYZc

2016 (in Kraków for World Youth Day): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJKWyrUlwuM

2017: https://youtu.be/bsaA-EBdOXE?t=3h22s
2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LaVDNpPBok&t=8242
2019: www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c0M7ZrqVR0&t=6735

Ruth Gipps: anniversaries

Today, 20th February, is the ninety-seventh anniversary of the birth of the composer Ruth Gipps; Friday (23rd) will mark the nineteenth of her death.  Meanwhile, with some important exceptions, most of her music languishes in silence, unrecorded and unperformed, which was probably not the composer’s intention.

I have written already about Ruth Gipps and the strange neglect in Britain of her colourful, lyrical music during her lifetime and since. But there’s good news on the horizon — or at least somewhere beyond it!  In just over a month’s time, on the 31st March 2018, the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra under Adam Stern will give the United States première of Gipps’ Symphony No. 2.

Over in America they are showing us up rather, so we have no excuse not to follow suit.  Ruth Gipps’ centenary is swiftly approaching; 2021 lies far enough ahead that we can organise some recordings and concerts.  Of her life’s work these are the only recordings that I know of, very few of them commercially available.  Only the second of her five symphonies has been recorded; the fifth has never even been broadcast.  There is a piano concerto which would go down well at the BBC Proms, other concerti for violin, oboe and clarinet, a set of Evening Canticles, tone poems and suites for strings… and much more unchartered territory.

To strengthen interest in Ruth Gipps would simultaneously put right the injustice of her obscurity and awaken musical and cultural life, in Britain and elsewhere, to the serious and determined pursuit of beauty that is made in her musical craft.

As an example, here are the closing passages of the otherworldly, moonlit second movement of her fourth symphony; the whole movement can be heard here.

Rondel for Ash Wednesday

Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast:
Be not afraid: keep faith, keep Lent.
All grunged-up souls, all people pent
In pleasure’s prison, bravely cast

Your needless sin aside at last:
Believe the Gospel and repent.
Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast:
Be not afraid: keep faith, keep Lent:
The thirst and hunger will not last,
For by God’s Son, who underwent
the Cross, we know that we are meant
For endless life when pain is past.
Hold fast, all friends of Christ, hold fast.

(D. Newman, Shrove Tuesday, 13 February 2018)

Wishing all readers… not exactly a happy Lent, but one that will bring happiness in the end!

Handel’s Messiah at the Barbican

Before Christmas disappears entirely over the horizon, a note on a concert I attended in late Advent.  This is the time of year for Handel’s Messiah, so it was a treat to go to the Barbican Hall in London on Wednesday (20 December 2017) to hear it performed by the Academy of Ancient Music under Richard Egarr.  This glorious evening had an unsettling beginning, though — partly as intended but partly unintended — for the concert began not with old music but with new, the première of a short cantata.  Those of us who had attended a talk before the concert had had some warning of this.  ‘A Young Known Voice’ is the result of a collaboration between the composer Hannah Conway and a group of about twenty-five pupils, all aged between eleven and fifteen, from various schools in London.

The talk preceding the concert had given Hannah Conway an opportunity to explain her approach to the project.  She had wanted to find out how young people would react to the famous oratorio.  Was Handel’s Messiah still relevant today?  The participants had been presented with the libretto and asked to create a work that responded to it in some way; then the composer wove the resulting material into a single piece of music, which they performed for us on the night.  Here is a recording of the performance itself (and its libretto can be read here):

My instinct is always to encourage and wish success to any project like this that involves young people and calls on their creative powers, not least if it brings them into the company of the great works of our musical inheritance.  And indeed I thought the music itself was powerful and well-scored, and the young people’s performance, made to a full house of nearly two thousand, was startlingly confident and vivid; their voices were clear and fearless over the microphones. Yet it was a perturbing piece to listen to.

Of course, to a large extent, this was the intended effect.  Since Hannah Conway gave her collaborators the freedom to react as they wished to the Messiah, there should be no surprise in meeting the righteous anger typical of energetic, uncynical youth.  They are rightly alive to the world’s injustices; they are understandably alert to the perils of the Internet age; they are justifiably angered by the unpleasant speech we hear around us, and so on.  They know what they are against, and to some extent what they are for.  Twice the credo is sung,  ‘Discrimination, persecution, judgement!  Broken by the power to unite’  I suppose it was also to be expected that much of the anger expressed was acutely topical and openly political, rubbing the sores of some of the rawest preoccupations of our time.  I am sure the reader can guess what they were.

Thus, in the libretto: ‘People have free will, but their choices [a]ffect our whole nation.  We chose to leave the E.U.  They elected Trump.  One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.’  All of a sudden, we have politics in the concert hall; words are uttered that stop barely short of explicit criticism of those who voted for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union in our referendum the other year, implying that a word as uncompromising as ‘trash’ could be applied to their position, and furthermore lumping them in with the electorate of an entirely different country who were the authors of an unrelated political decision.  Even as the cantata declared war on ostracism, it undermined itself by a general defensiveness against ‘a cynical audience with cynical stares’ (who, us?) and ‘an unjust system breeding frustration,’ and risked conjuring in our minds precisely the thing it cried out against: the spectre of an anonymous and indistinct mass of people, possibly including parents, to be held in suspicion rather than tolerated or understood. This text should surely have undergone some editing, as any other libretto might have done, so that the young people’s ideas could have been expressed in a more measured, more precise and more coherent way without necessarily being watered down.  As it was, we were confronted with the sort of utterance from which many in the audience had presumably hoped to find, in this very concert, momentary escape.  At a time when the national conversation is so bitter, must we taint even a musical concert with political agitation?  Alexander van Ingen, the Chief Executive of the Academy of Ancient Music, explains here that the project ‘allowed self-expression amongst those participating in it’, adding that he is ‘proud that we presented it at the Barbican without self-censor, or telling the participants that they couldn’t say this or that.’  So it was the paying audience that had to put up with the rougher edges of that self-expression.  It might be unreasonable to expect the young people to perceive how weary of such things their listeners might be already, but the organisers certainly had a responsibility to take greater care in this regard.

Yet the cantata was also unsettling in other ways that were not, I think, intended by its creators, and which became plain only when we came to the Messiah itself, to the great oratorio’s old known dawn in the strings, and those familiar words, ‘Comfort ye, my people’… only then did the uneasiness gradually crystallise.  It was suddenly clear that problem lies not so much in the substance of the political views expressed in the cantata, but in the fact that politics appear at all in a composition supposedly inspired by such a work as Handel’s Messiah.  For in the Messiah we are breathing different air, the air of transcendence.  Both Handel’s music and Charles Jennens’ richly Scriptural libretto lift their hearers out of themselves, out of the narrowness of their contemporary preoccupations, however pressing they may seem, into the great drama of humanity; into the trajectory which rises from the Old Testament, culminates in the New, and then turns to look out towards the end of the world with Heaven waiting beyond.  That is how it would have been understood by the people of Handel’s time.  Are we so different to them?  We too hunger for transcendence, even if we would not care to admit it.

We will not find in the Messiah a political solution to the problems of our age.  Neither would Handel’s audience have found any for theirs, though they were equally afflicted by their own social antagonists, crises and difficulties (what is a Foundling Hospital for if not the marginalised and downtrodden?).  This was not Handel’s purpose.  The lesson that great works of art like this teach young and old alike is that, however justifiable our anger at the current state of things, our experience is not unique and there is a higher, a greater picture to be apprehended.  We treasure music like this precisely because it is timeless.

Seen in this light, this question of ‘whether the Messiah is relevant today’ seems a severe distraction.  Yet the organisers of the youth project seem to have made it the chief yardstick by which to measure their success.  The participants ‘debated gender inequality, gender discrimination, racial discrimination, social exclusion and communities rejected by society.’  Poor Handel: I am sure he would have had sensible things to say about these matters, but his oratorio was never intended to address them directly.  Thus I fear the young people were put into a frame of mind by which they would see the Messiah not as their heirloom but as an inanimate artefact, an ancient text that might as well have been written in cuneiform, useful to us only to the extent that we can scour it for the slightest glimmer of a bearing on the problems of the present moment, much as the stones of a ruined medieval monastery might be picked over for some immediate use.

The concert programme goes on to report that the project ‘reflected upon the idea of hope, exploring why and how generations have used various metaphors, images and stories to galvanise “coming together” with strength and direction’.  This is more like it, and far closer to the right order of magnitude, yet this statement, too, with its detached tone, misses the world-encompassing meaning that we are meant to find in the narrative and the figure of the Messiah.  The idea that by the words ‘thy rebuke hath broken his heart’ might indeed be meant my rebuke, or that he hath borne our grief, carried our sorrow or was bruisèd for our transgressions, would have been understood by Handel’s contemporaries.  For them, van Ingen’s assertion that ‘the central themes of the Messiah story’ are ‘persecution, isolation, rejection; but ultimately a positive message of hope’ would have seemed inexplicably watery and vague, if not missing the mark altogether; they would have described it, perhaps, as a musical exposition of the means of their redemption.  Even someone who does not hold the Christian creed can try to imagine how Handel’s Messiah would sound to someone who does, and any intelligent young person could put their mind to it.  Yet the whole work seems to have been presented to the young collaborators in brackets, as something to pick over, rather than lose oneself in.  Who can blame them, then, for going through it forensically rather than imaginatively?  The pursuit of relevance drains away transcendence.  The libretto is reduced to a string of text that sounds just poetic enough to be ‘relevant today’, as is evident from the fragmented quotations from the original which sound good but whose full meaning, out of context, is impoverished.  The vision of humanity’s origin and redemption is reduced to a symbolic yarn by which those long-ago people in olden days figured out their problems; The Messiah, Christ, is of value to us merely as another example in our collection of an individual discriminated against ‘because he believed something different’.  An opera with a religious theme can be called an oratorio just as we can buy cheese-and-onion crisps as well as ready-salted.  Thus was the heart of the Messiah’s meaning missed.

Even to ask whether the Messiah is relevant was to admit defeat.  The very question belies a fundamental lack of confidence in our cultural inheritance.  Never mind that every generation since 1742 has considered the work valuable enough to hand down to the next; let the possibility simply be raised that it might be irrelevant, and that it is how it will be considered.  It would surely have been better to begin by asking, ‘Why has the Messiah been considered so valuable for so long?’, approaching with humility if the reason is not immediately obvious.  Then we can study the composer’s craft, the matching of the music to the words, especially the word painting by which Handel actually illustrates, in his melodies, the valleys exalted, the mountains and hills made low, and the crooked made straight, and the magnitude of the work itself will gradually become real to us.  One of the difficulties of being young is that so many things simply have to be learnt, and there is no way around it.  With Handel’s Messiah it is no different: we have to go up to meet it, and cannot expect it to come down to us.  Still, Handel does give us plenty of assistance; nobody could accuse his music of inaccessibility or aloofness.

For all that so many opportunities seem to have been missed in this project, it is important to mention some of its aspects, perhaps easily-missed, that were evidently quite deeply thought through.  Certain details of the conversation before the concert revealed this.  For instance, Hannah Conway is very alert to the dignity and situation of her collaborators, whom she was careful to refer to as ‘young people’ and not as children; in other words, I think she wanted to give them some responsibility, raise their self-esteem and test their mettle.  Some pupils who were invited on stage spoke well, too.   One girl made the point that young people were not generally listened to; Conway wonders elsewhere ‘why so little trust seems to be placed in the instinctive younger generation’.   It may be an eternal truth that young people have much to learn about the world, but they often have sound instincts which are a reproach to their elders, ‘for,’ as G. K. Chesterton said, ‘children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy.’  This is indeed an age in which fairly scant attention is paid to the spiritual and moral welfare of young people.

The composer said that she thought our hearing of the Messiah would be changed by having heard A Young Known Voice beforehand.  This was certainly true in my case, not least since the young people had been invited to sit on the stage, next to the orchestra, in plain view of the audience.  I found myself wondering what would become of them and hoping that the reality of the Messiah, delight in Handel’s art and authentic beauty and truth would find their way into their hearts and spirits, to be treasured always.

‘He cam also stille’

Today is the Epiphany, and Christmas draws to a close.  I hope all readers have had a thoroughly merry feast!

All the same, while it is still in mind… does anyone else feel that Advent in general was diminished or even close to being ruined this time around?  Uglier than ever was the headlong stampede from Hallowe’en to Black Friday to Christmas-gorged-on-too-early, and, worse than this, seemingly inescapable and practically compulsory.

How wearing it all feels sometimes, the post-modern existence that is supposed to be so great, and wearing not least because so many good things are under siege, and the odds stacked so highly against their defenders.  The Church, the family, the garden of childhood, the peace of mind of the elderly, beauty in music and language, kindness in word and deed: all these are under a consistent threat.  To the castle of the mind founded on the old principles, or flying a God-fearing flag, or furnished with gentleness, is laid not a physical or explicit siege, as in other ages, but a moral siege, waged sometimes by proxy or indirectly but waged nonetheless: a war of words, a campaign of noise and the self against the old ways and manners, and laid pell-mell and piecemeal to eyes and ears and hearts.  Down it rains onto millions of houses, battering the roof-tiles, pelting at the windows, hammering at the door.  In it seeps by television and radio and smart-phone.  Every single household must now also be a self-contained stronghold if it is not to succumb to the contempt for all things old and the gormless glee in the new which surrounds it from without, or even to false allies offering short-cuts — or other threats from within, the unwonted doubt, the habit of suspicion which might easily become indiscriminate, or the ambush of envy, perceive the comfort of those for whom the twenty-first century is a warm bath.

And to those who hold her dear it is plainer than ever that England, always fragile, is indeed mortal.  Modern Britain is becoming more and more an unpleasant place, in which islands of goodness remain but are coming adrift from their moorings.  People of goodwill remain in their millions, but they are divided and conquered: the high places are not for them, the roads are hostile to them, the airwaves are closed to them.  Trivial evils compound great evils.  All looks prosperous and healthy at first glance, but by intangible signs and details it becomes clear that the mainstream lives by a different, new moral language which deliberately renders the everlasting one foreign.  We have known this for a while, but sometimes it flashes out with a new clarity and confidence.

Down rains the campaign of noise onto millions of houses, battering the roof-tiles, pelting at the windows, hammering at the door.

Does this sound gloomy?  Yes, I know it does!  Sometimes it is necessary to look squarely at the gloom, and its particular composition in our time.  The consolations, though, are the same as ever: that human nature never changes; that evil has often before foundered on the verge of triumph, and that people are as hungry as ever for the good, the true and the beautiful.  Ordinary people do in many ways seem to be bearing up quite well against all the vanities and inanities that assail them.  I am still regularly surprised by kindnesses even in London’s sullen smugness.  There are genuine smiles and unfakeable goodnesses, and children, at least, are still children.

What is the answer to a mass campaign of noise?  The same answer that once appeared in a stable no less vulnerable to its surroundings than a modern suburban terraced house is now.  For England, which in any case has been an unpleasant place before, is no more hostile now than first-century Galilee might have been.  Where all power was wielded by a bureaucratic bean-counting emperor and a power-crazed, infanticidal tyrant there appeared not armed insurrection or military force but, with shocking gentleness, the child who

[…] cam also stille
To his modres bowr
As dew in Aprylle,
That falleth on the flowr […]

and by whom the promise was made that no good or gentle thing would be lost or in vain, and indeed that to the good and the gentle would, in the end, be victory.

A carol written by Herbert Howells, the 125th anniversary of whose birth fell on the 17th October 2017.

Vows and Vocations

At three o’clock — or sometimes shortly thereafter, now that live broadcasts can be rewound — we allow the television to interrupt our merry-making on Christmas Day.  The Christmas pudding having been doused in brandy and set fire to and sung over and most assiduously devoured, we are usually just in time for one of the more unfrenetic and comforting broadcasts left on the main channels: the Queen’s Christmas message.  I find it invigoratingly traditional in spirit, and there is a rare feeling of national togetherness as the Queen invites us to look back on the year.  Gloriously heedless of the BBC’s dull secularist ethos, H.M. always makes unforceful but unambiguous (and therefore courageous) mention of her Christian faith. This year’s message was the fiftieth the Queen has made by television, so it is a well-established tradition in its own right.

But even fifty years of Christmas broadcasts struggle to shine against the seven decades of the Queen’s marriage to the Duke of Edinburgh.  There beside the Queen as she delivered her message, next to the portraits of her great-grandchildren George and Charlotte, are two photographs of Elizabeth and Prince Philip.  One was taken on their wedding day in 1947, and the other in November this year to mark their Platinum Anniversary.  Seventy years separate the pictures, but one reciprocal vow is common to both.

A post shared by The Royal Family (@theroyalfamily) on Nov 19, 2017 at 2:49pm PST

This is marriage, the real thing, and this particular marriage is special because it belongs to us in much the same way as the Queen herself belongs to us.  It is one of the last lit beacons in bleak Britain, whose marital statistics show that a third of all marriages are sooner or later put asunder, and that more and more couples move in under the same roof without entering into marriage at all.  More than three million families have been begun without the security of wedlock.  It is some decades since the State showed any understanding of its proper responsibility in this field, which is to create all the right conditions for stable family life, especially for the sake of its oldest and youngest citizens, without meddling in it.  What has happened instead is that marriage has been undermined so that, from a simply practical point of view, people can hardly be blamed for choosing to set up home in co-habitation.  The social and financial benefits that marriage once brought do not now make economic sense, and to many people the law appears to set a trap, being still just tenacious enough to protract and sour any parting, yet not firm enough to banish the very idea from people’s minds, encouraging building rather than dismantling.  By Britain’s national anticulture, by spectres of the imagination and by the reality of people’s own experiences, many have come to fear the unsunderable vows.  Yet couples who are ready to found a household should surely wish for just such a bond.  Marriage helps couples, before they ever enter into it, by serving as a test or proof: if they do not feel they trust each other enough to marry, then they cannot know whether they trust each other to start and sustain a family.  On the other hand, if their mutual trust does indeed go far enough that children seem a real possibility, then why delay in giving form to the natural truth?  Marriage is for life because children join their parents for life.  The great vow is there to protect first husband and wife, and then their children, against human weakness and the evils of the world outside.

But we have also forgotten not only the practicality and common sense of marriage, but its transcendent, spiritual dimension.  This is another casualty of the dictatorship of relativism — Benedict XVI’s phrase — the tyranny of indifference that surrounds us, unctuously bidding us do as we please but offering no railings of guidance, and certainly no healing, if our desires lead us into wrongdoing and suffering.  The idea of marriage as a calling to high friendship, as a sacrificial mission that elevates the dignity of man and woman, has vanished, and along with it a sense of motherhood and fatherhood as vocations, to be honoured far above mere career or material prosperity or political engagement.  So people no longer know what to hope for, nor what to build, are therefore afraid of commitment, and so settle for too little from themselves and others.

Yet the Church insists not only on its spiritual dimension but on recognising it as a sacrament, that is, an encounter with the explicit presence of God.  Marriage is, indeed, a minor miracle.  I don’t mean this in a facetious way.  It is one of the great paradoxes of life, this unexpected, triumphant treaty of accord by which men and women, in their rival camps with their baffling, amusing, mysterious, undefinable differences, can find not merely reconciliation, nor even simply fleeting pleasure, but actually their highest earthly adventure by pairing up with a member of the other team (the rival team!), and sealing with them an all-transfiguring, world-creating pact, each a match for the other, and each the other’s match.

The impossible union is not only a wonder, but a plausible reality.  A bride will cost a man his life, but, mirabile dictu, it can come to pass that even such a wayward creature as a man will vow to pay, and keep his vow.  The hard-won reward is generous: he finds himself the beneficiary of a vow of equal magnitude, and he finds himself in a unique position to give the gift of self.  Moreover, the happiness and security this brings him overflows into any children the marriage produces, children who encounter no pit of dread in asking two of the most important questions in growing up: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Whom can I trust?’, though many young people do encounter such a chasm.  And the Queen, who in her life has had to make some fearsome vows before God, to her bridegroom and to her realm, is one of our greatest living examples in this regard.  Her own family has not been untouched by the turmoil of marriage in late twentieth-century Britain, but she and her husband have kept their faith and their vows, and quietly encouraged the rest of us to do the same.

In marriage is found, and from marriage comes, the ‘home’ of which the Queen spoke in her Christmas message.  I think it would be a good challenge for the Church and all people of good will to make this a year of promoting marriage, simply the idea, in our tired culture.  The Coalition for Marriage is already doing an excellent job in keeping an eye on the state of things, informing public opinion and encouraging the Government to do the right thing.  But marriage ought to be an urgent topic of conversation.  It needs to be allowed to set alight the imaginations of young people (I write as one) who are hungry for a mission, and the message needs to be proclaimed that marriage is a good thing from alpha to omega and at every scale: national, local and in the innermostnesses of the soul.  It ought to be given a place near the heart of the New Evangelisation; to solve the marriage crisis would be to ease many of the other social, moral and spiritual problems that afflict us.  Along with the other sacraments of mission (Holy Orders and Confirmation), it is the antidote to the dictatorship of relativism’s shrugs of indifference, and the soundest, least wasteful vessel into which to pour, with generosity and joy, the fruit of one’s sacrifices.

Meanwhile… Merry Christmas!  Keep feasting!

(Malcolm Archer’s setting of the Linden Tree Carol)

Merry Christmas!

Just a brief note to wish all or any readers a very happy Christmas indeed!  This evening our Youth Choir sang the music for the Vigil Mass and led our parish in south London into the feast.  Now our waiting is at an end; make you merry as our ancestors did!  Pour brandy over the Christmas pudding and set it alight, put the radio on for the Nine Lessons and Carols, and don’t forget the Queen at three!   May the feast glow with the same world-surprising wonder that first brought the rough-hewn shepherds of old to their knees.  We have as much cause to kneel, and to wonder, as they did.

Here’s an ancient hymn — this isn’t our choir! — from the choristers of Ely Cathedral.

A Festival for Archivists

‘Saint Catherine. Line engraving by F. Knolle after Domenichino.’ by F. Knolle. Credit: Wellcome Collection. CC BY

Today is the feast of St Catherine of Alexandria, a patroness of archivists.  Holy and scholarly St. Catherine!  Respectress of fonds, guardian of original order, protectrix of strong-rooms, intercede for us for us poor ‘devotees of Truth’ in our work deep down at the coal-face of ignorance, our own and mankind’s in general, and our humble fortification of our memory against the attrition of time, that we may be preserved from nineteenth-century paper, twentieth-century handwriting, yellowed sellotape, rusted staples, mould, dust, soot, dust and soot indistinguishable from each other, ‘original chaos’, ‘disasters in the archives’, spillages of ink in the reading-rooms, and above all our own folly in its sobering magnitude.  May the words ‘Miscellaneous’ or ‘Other Items’ or indeed ‘?’ never pass through our fingers!  Keepers of records, compilers of cataloguers, arrangers and describers of archives and manuscripts, let us all with one voice toast our patroness.