Words, words, words ...

I've been reading. Of course, there's never a time when I don't have a book on the go, but that's fiction. As it's Lent I've tried to be a tad more disciplined, and to that end saved up a book that I bought some months ago. At the time, I posted online that it had been a bargain - and it was: it cost me about £70 less than its published price.

Saturday's Silence is an academic study of my favourite poet's work with reference to Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter Day. And when I embarked on the introduction, I found myself nodding in agreement with much that the author had to say, about poetry in general and Thomas in particular. And it's not that I've stopped agreeing as I move through the body of the argument - quite the reverse.

I'm struck by how intense, line-by-line scrutiny of a poem kills that poem stone dead. This isn't a new thing floating into my consciousness - it's something I was terribly aware of when I was teaching English lit, and especially teaching poetry. But in my latter, more experienced days, I had learned the trick of teaching the "how" rather than the "what" - teaching the basics of poetic understanding* via snippets of examination so that the individual pupils could do it for themselves, and reach the point where it would be in the first instance instinctive, even if further study produced deeper and more detailed appreciation. It was that approach, I believe, that had S4 boys (15-16 years old) learning and loving poems by not only Thomas but also John Donne, reciting them off by heart and lovingly examining what it was that had so attracted them.

I've never really stated all this on paper before. Perhaps it's struck me as blindingly obvious without my labouring the point. But why I'm doing it now is because I've linked it in my mind, thanks to Richard McLauchlan, with religion, with faith itself and the nature of faith.

Think of all the tedious sermons you've listened to in your day. (Obviously, I'm addressing a somewhat targeted audience here - you know who you are...) Do you ever consider, perhaps when you give up actually paying attention, what's wrong with them? I bet some of them at least were lectures, telling you what words in the bible signify in terms of what you, the punter, ought to believe.  Lectures, instead of actual communication, kill faith as dead as academic study kills a poem.

I'm not going to chase this further. I want to emerge with today's little epiphany which is probably more of a realisation of something I've known for decades.

Prose can kill.

Which is why poetry is important, why the practice needs to be done to acquire the eyes with which to grasp it.
Which is why I approach faith as the poet, or as the lover of poetry who spots symbolism at a hundred paces.
Which is why music is so important.
Which is why it was a combination of music and poetry that brought me to faith.

I'll finish the book. It's had the merit of taking me to revisit some dearly loved poems, to feel once again the sudden stab of recognition that Thomas's last lines can so often create. But it's the poetry that matters.

Always.


*I'm talking here about such technical features as caesura, enjambement - all the stuff you make a part of your perception so that you don't need to think about it.

Hoolies I have known ...

This startling photo was taken by Karen Brodie last Saturday as the participants in the Festal Evensong that had just celebrated 140 years of the Cathedral of The Isles poured out in a swish of red and gold onto the steps and stopped to pose. Small people to the front, they said, and some of us obliged. Far be it from me to lurk in the shadow of a mitre ...

It's been a long time since my first posing on these steps as part of an ecclesiastical extravaganza - the picture below was taken in the summer of 1973, when I have to say I felt as if I had a bit part in a Fellini film. It wasn't long after that that I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, and another 6 months would see me uprooting myself from Glasgow and moving to Dunoon on the back of an invitation from the priest whose institution as priest-in-charge of Cumbrae as well as of Holy Trinity Dunoon was the occasion for that bit of finery. You can see that in those days we were soberly dressed in black (I think they were our MA gowns, and cassocks for the boys) whereas nowadays we are more Whoopie Goldbergish in red (donated by an American church). The red gowns used to have dreadful white polyester scarves, but we managed over time to lose these ...

And if you look closely at the two photos, you should recognise one constant - or rather, four constants: the four members of the St Maura Singers, a relatively new group back then; a somewhat older one now. Two men, two women. We (the women) were both pregnant in the first photo; decidedly not so last weekend. So it's been a while, and we've seen a great many hoolies in this lovely place.

There's nothing quite like a full house to boost the spirits; nothing quite like a good choir to sing with to make the spirits soar. I reckon I've been lucky to have my faith journey as well as a chunk of my musical life linked into the Cathedral on Cumbrae - or the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, or the Cathedral of The Isles, if you prefer - for it remains special, full of benevolent spirits and still numinous in the incense-remembering silence of an evening alone in the Butterfield building. I've shared it with musicians, with retreat groups, with a Cursillo weekend, with a preaching workshop, and simply with our friend Alastair who is the organist there. But no matter when I go or with whom, this is my place* - which may explain why I look so pleased with myself in Saturday's photo.

That said, it was a crazy weekend. Many of us who made up the choir had arrived on the Friday for dinner and had rehearsed until 10pm; the following day we began at 10am and went on till 1pm with a 15 minute break; the Evensong - an enormous sing - took up the afternoon; we rehearsed till 10pm in the evening. On Sunday, we began at 9.45am to practise for the Eucharist (a Mass setting we'd never seen before); when that was over and we'd grabbed a salad it was back to get ready for a concert at 3pm. I haven't worked so hard in years, and neither has my voice.

I attribute its surprising resilience to a summer spent singing along to Leonard Cohen, actually - it's fair ironed out the break around Middle C that used to cause me such bother, and in a summer of builders and no choir it's been good to have something to sing with. How long, O Lord ...?

A final thought: I have no idea what anyone not involved in this kind of thing makes of it. It's clearly formed a big part of my life, and I've had a lot of fun. But normal? I don't think so ...


*This is not strictly true, you understand: there are probably hundreds of people who'd say the same, but ...

Cross-Pollination

I haven't posted for a bit. It's not that I haven't been sitting at my desktop: far from it. But from being someone who rarely uses earphones (they were so uncomfortable) and hasn't listened to much of what might loosely be termed popular music since the age of 18 (a while, then) I've spent most of the time doing just these two things. I always did love a good love song, back in the day, and I've always preferred what might be termed music to slit your wrists to ... And now I've rediscovered both, and as Facebook friends will hardly have failed to realise, I've been listening to Leonard Cohen.

I specified a sort of cut-off date for my interest in pop; it coincided with the rise of the Beatles and my discovery of Palestrina and Byrd and these two geniuses shaped my musical tastes for the rest of my life, I thought. Yes, there were other passions - Tippet, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius, to name the composers on some of my early LPs - but the music I loved to sing, and to sing along with, belonged to the Renaissance. I developed a voice as similar to the counter tenor as I could, and my reading abilities flourished as I sang in an octet (The New Consort of Voices, for anyone who was around Glasgow Uni circles in the late 60s/early 70s) and the quartet that still performs today with only a change in the soprano line, the St Maura Singers. We started a larger choir when we moved to Dunoon - The Hesperians, from the women of which group the current 8+1 choir was born. There was a church choir, intermittently - it tended to suffer from church politics and eventually vanished.

All this was made easier, of course, by the fact that I'd married a musician who works magic with choirs. But living with a musician also tends to influence some - not all - of the music played at home. Because of that influence, I've learned almost all I know. But because the current choir, 8+1, sings everything from Ah Robyn to Mamma Mia, there's been a shift in my earworm availability, and one of our repertoire got stuck that way: Leonard Cohen's Halleluia. And it was seeing a video on Facebook/YouTube of a live performance by him, a recent live performance, that started me on the online trawl for other songs of this performer who was in his mid-70s at the time the recordings were made - and that's what I've been singing along with for the last two months.

So what made me want to reflect on this? Here's a thing. For the whole of July until today, we've had work going on in our dining room. The painter finished only this morning. The floor is varnished, the room is clean - and empty. It has a wonderful acoustic. So yesterday the two of us, Mr B and I, sang and recorded St Magnus' Hymn - the two-part 12th Century piece that begins "nobilis, humilis...". And after the first go, when I was singing at my usual mezzo pitch and straining slightly on the high E, I went down an octave and immediately sounded - and felt - better. This is an area of my voice that I've been unhappy with recently; helping out on the second soprano part has led to the neglect of the lower end of my voice, with the break at Middle C becoming more troublesome than it has been since I was in my early 20s. But yesterday it was fine, with an equal resonance taking me down to F.

Why? Presumably because the ageing voice of Leonard Cohen means he now sings in his boots, and that's what I've been singing along with. I've not been belting it out, just crooning, but that gentle exercise has been enough to make the difference. I feel somehow vindicated - that I've not wasted the tradesmen-minding hours listening on headphones, but have done something my laziness has too often stopped me doing when I've not practised vocal exercises. And I've learned some cracking new songs ...

All we go down ...

I was at a funeral yesterday, not as a mourner but as a provider of music, one of a quartet singing the Kontakion for the Departed at the end of a service in the Cathedral of The Isles on Cumbrae. This was significant for me personally in one important feature: it was doing exactly that at my very first funeral in that same cathedral 42 years ago that convinced me of all that I now believe in, as a consequence of which I was confirmed 9 months later and as a further consequence of which I came to live in Dunoon. There were differences, of course - that first funeral was of a friend, it was a requiem mass, the coffin was between the choir stalls and therefore right on front of me.

So I'd actually have gone a long way to sing this music again in that place and with these same musicians. But another truth dawned on me yesterday as I sang, and after the plainsong Nunc Dimittis with which we finished. It was a truth about music - that kind of music, timeless and beautiful and still. For after all the words, the telling to God of the deceased's character (thou knowest, Lord, the secret of our hearts ... ) and the hymns that were deemed suitable, this was the moment when it seemed to me that the otherness of death came close, that the life of the world was dimmed and the life of heaven opened, and the possibilities of eternity were real and endless.

And weeping o'er the grave, we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia.

I would like to think that this music will be present for my end.

The Road to Siem Reap

Listening to Vaughan Williams as I am borne along 

a Cambodian highway

the red dust billowing at our passing

I hear the cool, silver tones

of choristers in the echoing chill of

vaulted stone and know

as never before

the music rooted in the land

of its gestation.  A white ox

wanders over dusty grass

as the road beneath our wheels

Turns to dry, rutted mud

and the red cloud envelops

two small determined girls

emerging from a school

as crisply clad as if they too 

could sing qui tollis peccata

with the boys whose voices sound

a million lives away.

C.M.M. 03/15

I actually wrote this on a bus - an air-conditioned coach - on a six-hour journey over roads of varying degrees of completion through Cambodia. I scribbled it on the back of a daily bulletin in handwriting that I could barely decipher and transcribed it onto my phone notes when we stopped. I was listening at the time to Vaughan Williams' Mass in G minor, consumed by the strangeness of the contrast between what I heard and what I was seeing.

Churchgoing, anyone?

I came across this post in my 'drafts' folder, and had a sudden memory of a Blogger failure which prevented me from posting it. Never one to let a bit of writing slide into oblivion ...

I had cause a few days ago to think, not for the first time, about what it is that makes people go to church. I mentioned the question in a recent issue of the SEC magazine Inspires, when I wrote about a young child's reaction to services full of colour, music and exotic scents, but I'm not going to think about young children today. Indeed, when people talk about the need to have children in church, I often think rather of the need to have their parents there, especially in a town that young people tend to leave for further education and not return to until they are parents themselves. So what is it that a forty-something finds to draw them to a church? Or someone in their 50s, or a pensioner who suddenly discovers in himself a hunger to be more serious?* And what keeps them there? And why should they bother at all?

People who know me - or indeed who have read this blog over the years - know that I came to church through music. That sounds simple, but it's misleading. Music was the vehicle, yes - but I was singing the music, not listening to it. So am I still in church forty years on because of music? Not really. I am fortunate in that when I go to my own church I know that I can rely on the organist to meet my standards and supply the conditions under which worship is possible - but I'm married to him, and this isn't possible for the rest of the congregation. Not all at once anyway. I still like to sing - preferably plainsong or music of the Renaissance - but I'm not in a church choir on a regular basis. And I do not care to have to listen to a choir as part of my participation in the Eucharist - I long ago decided that the fun there is in the doing rather than the passive listening. It becomes positively painful when the choir isn't up to the music they sing, just as it is trying to have to listen to a poor organist.

So music can't be the whole story, can it? Time to stop thinking about myself, to consider the people among whom I worship and the church where I have been a member for the whole 40 years since I fell off my donkey. The institution, the people and the atmosphere have changed enormously in that time, and give me hope for the future. So what is it that trails us up that trying hill, to the not-very-easy carpark, to the church-that-could-be-warmer, at the very back of the town where it peters out into the hills?

Here's a list of attributes that I perceive as being the reason for people to come to a church - and to come back again. For a start, the atmosphere should be welcoming. Not just on the part of the official person at the door giving out the books, but of everyone else too - not intrusively, not oppressively, but welcoming so that the visitor can decide how much of herself to commit in conversation afterwards, feels able to ask questions. And it should be a safe place - safe to be sad, joyful, mad; safe to weep or to laugh; safe to ask for help. Ideally, the human nastiness that lurks in us all should be kept well out of the public arena: no bitching in the pews, no glares or sniffs because someone forgot their place in the rota or sat in the wrong seat. And there needs to be no self-importance on view - an inflated ego in the wrong place in a church setting can put the fragile enquirer right off their scone.

Do we come to church because we are always sure we shall be entertained or swayed emotionally? It might be pleasant to say 'yes' to that, but it wouldn't be true. What would be true, however, is that people come to church to be loved, loved for themselves and as themselves; that the people of God will reflect the love of the God they are there to worship; that in that setting, be it never so chilly or lacking in adornment, the combination of liturgy, music, prayerfulness and mystery will open a door to the bright places beyond. When that happens, it is no longer a question of why people come to church.

No. When that has happened, the question - one that is asked if for any reason someone is missing on a Sunday - that question will be a different one: why are they not there? Is something wrong?

And I believe I am fortunate, for after all these years in one church, I believe we are becoming that place.

*Philip Larkin: Churchgoing

A requiem for Philip II

As dawn breaks and church bells toll slowly all over Toledo, an elaborate funeral procession winds its way through the city's streets. Clad in black vestments of mourning, the Archbishop leads the procession, followed by the upper echelons of ecclesiastics and then the nobility, each in turn, according to his rank. The cortège stops at several pre-determined locations where the choir sings a responsory, each station representing a stage in the journey of the soul of the deceased towards eternal salvation. As the dignitaries enter the Cathedral, usually dark and sombre, they are overwhelmed by the light of thousands of candles covering the funeral monument, or catafalque, a vast construction as hight as the cathedral itself, engraved with Latin tributes in honour of the deceased. Silence descends upon the church, and the solemn invitatory Circumdederunt me gemitus mortis begins the Matins of the Dead.

On a wet Friday evening in Glasgow we experienced a wonderful performance of A Requiem for Philip II by Cristobal de Morales *(c.1500 - 1553) in the acoustically fantastic central hall of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. The above comes from the programme note, and Paul McCreesh, directing the Gabrieli Consort, set the scene before the singing began. We were told the performance would last about 70 minutes without a break, and would be liturgical in feel. As you can see from the photo of the performers' waiting seats (and bottles of water!), taken from my seat, we were at the front, very close to the singers.

The seventy minutes passed without my noticing them. I have never been so immersed in a performance, so swept along on a tide of plainsong and polyphony that I never once looked at my watch. The singing was peerless - four countertenors, two tenors, four baritones, two basses and, doubling the bass part, the muted bajon (dulcian) - with solo groups and tutti ensembles, solo plainsong prayers and readings  and the full-bodied singing of the mass. I felt I was a part of it; it's the kind of music I love to sing and I felt every cadence, every nuance, every false relation in such a way that when it was finished I was exhausted in the same exhilarated way that I feel after singing myself. The moment when the singers turned and walked off the stage and away in a long, singing procession round two of the adjoining galleries was electrifying. I also realise how privileged I am in that my education and subsequent experience in choirs mean that I can understand Latin well enough to participate in what is being sung without constantly referring to the programme, and that I was sufficiently familiar with the words of the mass and the plainsong customarily used for, say, the Sursum Corda to be immersed in the liturgy and to delight in the resonant tones of the bass singing the priest's part.

I realise as I write this that I'm doing a very inadequate job of conveying a very special occasion. The sizeable audience, completely silent and still for the whole performance, didn't erupt in applause; rather this began slowly, gently, as people shook themselves from their absorption, and grew to a sustained crescendo as the choir returned for several bows, only dying when the conductor had disappeared down the stairs away from the hall. We hurtled down the road to the ferry in a whirl of exuberance with our heads full of polyphony and caught a ferry within an hour of the last notes being sung.

The kind of evening I don't get very often, the kind of music that makes me glad to be alive...

*You can hear bits of the performance here, as well as buy it!

A trip worth making

I've been doing a bit of gadding this week. Two visits in three days to the Edinburgh Festival leaves this west coast resident a tad shattered, but before the madness of Cowal Games takes over (we usually escape, but that's another story) I felt the need to mention the concerts we attended. They were teatime affairs, an hour or so in the Kirk of the Greyfriars leaving the city-dwellers time to get to another concert and the migrants to catch the last ferry home. One was chosen on the basis of my preferences, the other for Mr B. The first was the wonderful Ricercar Consort performing Purcell and Blow, with the most stunning countertenor singing I've heard from Robin Blaze and Carlos Mena. I think I had a silly grin on my face for most of the hour, and the packed audience erupted in applause and foot-stamping at the end.

I was less sure I would enjoy the next concert, the world premiere of James MacMillan's Since it was the day of Preparation, performed by the Hebrides Ensemble and Synergy Vocals, but I need not have worried. You can find out about the piece itself through the video link above, but I'm interested right now in my own reaction to it. For a start, I wondered how much it mattered to me that not only the story but also the actual words were so familiar to me - and not just familiar, but important. John's Gospel account of the burial and resurrection of Christ triggers a movie in my head, one that ran gratefully with the music as accompaniment - would a piece based on Hindu scriptures have had the same impact? Throughout, I enjoyed the plainsong-like line of the narration - and then, during the final of several instrumental meditations, I was electrified to realise that the solo horn was playing fragments of the Exultet - this in a prolonged conclusion to the story that ends with the words "were every one of (the other things that Jesus did) to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written." The horn music kept disintegrating into incoherent burblings, even into barely audible puffs of air over the mouthpiece, so for someone who has sung the Exultet several times these phrases threw up an interesting train of thought - something along the lines that the Resurrection is a mystery that defies definition, but that nevertheless produces exultation.

The performance was wonderful. The singing was flawless, the instrumental music likewise. I loved the handbells (tapped, not rung, for the most part) as Christus sang, and the staging that had the tenor open the piece from halfway down the church. I'd have to hear it again to know how far it works for me as a purely musical experience - would I even hear the horn sighing, or the pianissimo cello, or would I wonder if something had gone wrong? - but I joined with everyone else in that (again) packed audience in rapturous applause at the end.

It had been worth the effort - even if we did have to wait 45 minutes for the last ferry.

I and me and chord sequences

Oh bother. I'm feeling a grump coming on. Having spent longer than is sensible reading old green Penguins - see past entries - I buy a couple of books at the church coffee morning. One, the first Simon Serrailler thriller by Susan Hill, I enjoy immensely and am glad to discover there are many more - though a chance conversation with a pal who has most of them leads me to guess at the dénouement earlier than I would have liked (deduction based, if you're old enough to recall it, on memories of the TV series The Virginian).

There is, however, one fly in that particular ointment - a solitary grammatical howler that stabs me to the heart in the middle of such a well-written book. As it's about two-thirds of the way through, I find I'm slightly on edge for the rest of it. Will it happen again? But it doesn't, and I'm glad.

And now I'm onto an American murder story - just started it. The Faces of Angels by Lucretia Grindle. Follow the link and read the reviews - sounds good, eh? Set in Florence, interesting perspective on a murderous attack near the beginning - all very promising. And then the glaring errors slip in, one after another. "I" instead of "me" - that sort of thing. I don't know if I can go on reading it, for I suddenly find myself becoming critical of descriptions, names (Kirk. I ask you...), vocabulary. I develop a sudden loathing for the word "gotten".

I used to get irritated when Mr B didn't like some piece of music because of some poor chord progression or somesuch (many a modern hymn suffers from this). But I shall not be irritated again. Not by that, anyway. Because I am just as bad, and right now I'm sufficiently irritated at myself, let alone at writers who should know better or composers who didn't do enough harmony at school.

As I said: bother.

Peirles Paramour...A journey into our past

Fragment from text of document 

I've been singing again. Back to where, in a way, it all began - and the time when the text on the left was at once wondrously strange and increasingly familiar. If you sat Higher Music in Scotland in 1964, it may well seem familiar to you too - for that year one of our set works for study was a group of pieces from Musica Britannica Vol XV - Music of Scotland 1500-1700, edited by Kenneth Elliott. I have a clear memory of standing round the piano in the Music Room (Room 16) of Hillhead High School with a group of friends, singing our way through this particular song as best we could, the sight-reading of music and language taxing our brains and leading to much hilarity - before we started again, determined to get it right.

After I left school I met Kenneth Elliott at Glasgow University, not because I studied music (though I did, for one year, to make up the so-called "science" subject in an Arts degree) but because I sang with a small group who actually performed this music he'd spent so much work on. We were invited to his house for evenings of singing and wine; we stiffened the ranks of various University choirs as they struggled to meet his demands. I've been singing it, on and off, ever since.

And this is why, a couple of days ago, I found myself singing this music of a Scotland that few really know about - singing it with the St Maura Singers, the quartet that has been a thread through my life since the late 60s, rehearsing for a memorial concert for Kenneth Elliott which will take place in the original home of the St Mauras, The Cathedral of The Isles on Cumbrae. We're doing a whole programme of this music, almost all of it for four voices, and one of the pieces is Support Your Servand - which in fact we've never performed. I was eighteen again, suddenly - and it was as if we were seeing it for the first time.

Read the words again. Read them aloud. How are you pronouncing them? How, gentle reader, will we pronounce them? This is a discussion we have every time we perform any of these pieces. Are the "oi" sounds as in "hoy!" or simply the modern "sore"? And we listen to recorded performances - much lauded - in which the accent is so ... Scottish? ancient? ... as to be incomprehensible, and we wonder if anyone in the audience will have a clue. And then we found what Kenneth himself had to say about it, and it was wonderful.

I would once again urge singers to pronounce the Scots texts as naturally as possible, without recourse to the extremes of local dialect: these text are related to the courtly tradition of Scots poetry, written by sophisticated Scots of burgh, song- or Grammar-school and university, in touch with, if not even part of castle and, ultimately, court culture, rather than the rustic precursors of bothy balladeers, kailyard confectioners or Doric dropouts.

I can hear Kenneth's voice here - and a degree of exasperation (I would once again urge..) Obviously he's had this conversation before. So we will not roll our 'r's more than normally, nor will we sound like The Corries on a culture trip. The music - in all its complexity or its deceptive simplicity - will speak as well as we can achieve. And despite all the people who have sung it since, we will know that we were there very early on in the performing of it.

And somewhere, I think Kenneth will be smiling.

Haydn sets me off again ...

It happened again. That sudden tide of memory washing over and through, this time triggered by four notes: the opening of Hadyn's Symphony No. 104, The London Symphony. I opened the door to the room where the radio was on - Radio 3 - and the D minor introduction coincided with my arrival. That was all it took to whisk me back to another spring - yes, spring again - and the earnest preparation for the Glasgow Music Festival. I played second violin in this symphony, and if memory serves me correctly it was the last time our school orchestra competed and failed to win the senior class. The following year - when I was in S5 - we played Beethoven, and we won, and long after I had left my successors won again and again.

But that's not the point. What this memory took me to was a reminder of what a privileged education I had. I attended Hillhead High School in the days when it was a Glasgow Corporation grant-aided school: we paid minimal fees (£3.19.0 a term in secondary) and bought our own books and jotters. The classes were big - 40 was normal - and the classrooms bizarre because the corridors were open to the weather, with partitions that could be slid back to cool the room. Rumour had it that the school was designed for Kuala Lumpur and had somehow ended up in Glasgow. The music department had begun to grow when I was in P6, and by the time I reached The Big School and the Secondary orchestra there were two orchestras. By the time I left there were also several choirs and chamber music groups, and it was possible to forget that anything else actually went on in Hillhead. We played Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, Schubert, we sang madrigals and Parry, the chamber music groups tackled Gibbons. We did Haydn's "The Heavens are telling", complete with orchestra, choir and soloists. We were given no quarter when it came to repertoire, and we were expected to work till we could cope. We performed at the school concert in December - and after the St Andrews Halls burned down, we had three nights of these in the school hall to accommodate all who wished to attend them  - and at the Festival in May.

We took these performances very seriously. I never did learn how to deal with circles in Co-ordinate Geometry because the class did that bit when I was at an extra orchestra practice, and I would take the bus into Hillhead every afternoon of exam leave during my Highers because the Festival was always just after the exams ended. I had my first ever migraine during Festival week when I was in S6, brought on, I'm sure, by the stress of the occasion on my adolescent brain; it vanished the moment the results were announced (we won). I remember Herbert Howells, who was adjudicating one of the chamber music competitions, asking if this school covered the whole of Glasgow; there seemed to be at least one entry from Hillhead in every competition he judged. And I remember walking home with friends, all carrying our instruments, over Gilmorehill through the quiet May evenings, quite convinced that this was the best life would ever have to offer.

When I left school, it was the music that I was most distraught to leave behind. My experiences at school were certainly responsible for more of what happened in later life than any of the subjects I actually pursued formally, though I did study for a Higher Music in S6 and have Ordinary Music as a subject in my MA. But it is this time of year that brings it all back to me, Haydn and all.

Lucky. Pure, dead lucky. As my younger self would say..

Deeply satisfying

A couple of weeks ago now I finished reading Vikram Seth's An Equal Music - though if I'd read the review published on the Amazon page to which that link takes you, I don't know that I'd have bothered. This book is another of several lent to me by a good friend who knows my taste to such an extent that if she thinks I'd enjoy one I tend to give it a go, and so came to this book cold, as it were, with very little handle on what it was going to turn out to be.

It's a story of music, of love and of loss. The hero, Michael, plays second violin in a string quartet, and though he has a girlfriend - who is a less than satisfactory pupil on the violin - he is filled with regret and longing for the girl he loved when he himself was a student. So in that respect it is a love story, in which I felt he involved himself almost without will, as if he was unable to prevent any of the actions he took after seeing Julia on a London bus. It is significant that it is not the bus he is on at the time - they are bound in different directions and the tension of the situation builds gently but inexorably through the story.

The main player in this novel, however, is music. The tension between the members of the Maggiore quartet rings true, their individual temperaments as taut as the strings of their instruments, the differences between them sublimated in their combined music or - occasionally - wrecking it. I felt I knew these musicians and their constant preoccupation with their art, the way everything is seen in terms of how it will affect their music. When Michael is threatened with the loss of his violin, it is like an impending death; when a fridge in the house where they rehearse makes a noise somewhere between two notes it is identified and it disturbs. Bells sound a perfect G and music enters dreams. And when the Maggiore decide to play Bach's The Art of Fugue it takes over their lives.

The sense of loss permeates the story from the start, although at first I was not sure whose loss it was going to turn out to be. I'm not about to give away this most telling feature, but it works. Seth has brought off the feat of writing about music in such a way as to convince someone who is involved in music-making. And that is where I'll leave this deeply satisfying book.

Words, words, words...

I've made a belated discovery about the potency - or otherwise - of words. Words of carols, to be specific, and words of other choral music. Yes, words have always been my business, so you'd think I might have found this out sooner, but there you are.

It began, I think, with a phone call from the organist at the Cathedral of The Isles, Cumbrae. Old friend that he is, he wanted to share with us the success at their Advent Carol service of a piece John had written years ago - Advent Invocation - to words that I had first scribbled down on the back of a bill as we drove over the moor road from the Claonaig ferry, years ago. He told us how he'd put the words into the order of service, and how he felt that had helped people's appreciation of the whole.

A short while after that, I found myself typing out the words of familiar Christmas carols and hymns (for a congregational booklet, since you ask - and yes, we have the licence!) in the corporate rush to get everything done on time. Even words that I had sung for the past half century suddenly had to be checked, punctuation put in the right places - and suddenly I began to see the words as if for the first time. Many of them are not what I would write for now, but I kept having sudden glimpses into the minds and imaginations of the original authors - and it was startling in its newness.

And then there was my own Advent Song. Following our friend's example, we asked for the words to go into the Order for Evensong, so that people could follow them as we sang. And for the first time I've had people talking about the words of the piece almost as much as they do about the music. Now, I feel that the music is by far the greater accomplishment, for I know how much goes into it as opposed to the sudden rush of blood to the head that produces the words - I'm not a hard worker when it comes to that sort of thing - so I feel slightly guilty. But I'm glad to have the piece taken as a whole, and appreciated as a whole, and thrilled that it seems to be doing so well on YouTube.

In a way, my Advent this year has been shaped by this piece. But I don't think that's a bad thing.

Mortal thoughts

I was at the funeral today of someone we've known all the time we've lived here, a stalwart of the kirk. The church was packed. And it got me thinking mortal thoughts, and that it's probably a lot easier for everyone if, as this friend did, you make a few stipulations before you pop off. So here we go:

First of all, if I'm still worshipping at Holy T, and if the building is still standing, that's where I want things to happen. Whoever takes the service must be known to do a good job with funerals - the present incumbent will do nicely, thank you, if I take my leave sooner rather than later - and be prepared to use the Liturgy (I kinda like 1987 or the Scottish Prayer Book, and I'd really like a Requiem Mass). If there is still an organ in church, it should be played by a good organist, and if neither is to hand I think I'll settle for a CD or two played over a decent speaker at a bold volume. (Purcell's Funeral Music for Queen Mary and the Kontakion for the departed come to mind ...)

If there are good singers around, I'd like to think of them singing - Be still my soul, There is a Redeemer, that sort of thing - but if everyone is ancient/tone-deaf I think it'd be better if there was no communal singing at all.

But most of all, I don't want anyone to stand up and tell God about me. God knows all there is to know about me, and there is no need to labour the point. If someone wants to tell other people about me, that's fine, as long as it's someone who actually knew me. And I don't want to be wheeled out on a trolley, and I have a horror of crematoria.

I might even get round to writing this all down properly, somewhere - but for now, this is me letting off a small puff of steam while I'm still here. 'Nuff said, eh?

The silver linings

Though today I'm feeling rather less sunny than I have the past two days, I need to record that a couple of silver linings exist in the cancellation of our holiday. The first became evident on Sunday afternoon, when Holy Trinity was filled with regulars and visitors from all over the place - including Hungary - for a marriage blessing and a baptism. After a dreadful accident at work, the effects of which are still very obvious after four months, Csaba thrilled us all by reading Psalm 139  in an electrifying manner, and was able to stand alongside Melinda as their marriage was blessed. It was joyous and moving, and the music for the occasion - Hungarian and Scottish -  could be live rather than on the iPod because I hadn't hauled the organist off to Sicily. As for the Hungarian dancing at the bunfight afterwards - there will be photos, and a wee movie, once I finish retrieving the important things on my convalescent computer - it was as unexpected as it was wonderful.

The second plus for me was being able to attend the funeral of Kenneth Elliot. One of the discoveries of my time at university was the pleasure to be found in singing the music of 16th and 17th century Scotland, a tiny portion of which I had studied for my Higher Music. At that time, Mr B and I were founder members of a vocal ensemble - The New Consort of Voices - and a fond memory is of an evening when the eight of us were invited to Kenneth's house to drink wine, eat olives and sing the music he had been working on. Later in his life, he too looked back to that particular bunch of students - because we were enthusiastic, young, sang without wobbles and sang his stuff the way he wanted it. At least, we did before the wine had flowed too freely ...

Yesterday, five of that Consort were at the funeral in St Mary's Cathedral in Great Western Road, Glasgow. Yes, there were other people too, but we were remembering a particular era, a time of discovery and handwritten manuscripts, of late nights and laughter, of traumas involving delicate harpsichords and wayward visiting counter-tenors. We marvelled at how old we were becoming, and how some people looked just like their fathers (these tended to be people we hadn't seen since uni). The funeral service was beautifully put together; a scratch choir under Alan Tavener sang just as they should have, and George McPhee was the perfect organist.  I was particularly struck by Kelvin Holdsworth's words - as he told us, he had only met Kenneth at the very end of his life, but he struck exactly the right note in a manner we all appreciated. (And no, there was no pun intended - I never think of good puns when I need them). Kenneth would have approved of the whole thing.

Today I'm paying for the fact that I couldn't spend ten minutes in every hour lying on my face in the last two days - but to compensate I realise even more forcibly that I couldn't have survived a walking holiday such as we had planned. We shall go another time - but these silver linings were one-off affairs. Etna can wait.

I hope ...

Later: I was waiting to retrieve a photo for this post, and somehow it's arrived here after midnight. I've not gone crazy - just think Tuesday rather than Wednesday for the posting date!

Grey day transfigured

Holy Trinity church
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

It's a grey morning. I'm already damp because my umbrella was in the car and I had to fight my way down the drooping garden so my legs are uncomfortable and I'm already chilled. As we swish up the back streets of Dunoon to church, I wonder what I'm doing. My mood matches the day; most of my summer activities are over; the sun has gone. I'd have been better staying in bed with a book. The organist seems in no better fettle, and I forgot to tell him we are supposed to be keeping the Transfiguration, so we don't really speak. Besides, we're a bit late.

There is no heating in church - it is, after all, summer - as I sort out hymnbook and liturgy (thank God - not the Grey Book). There are also no children, as the Rector is on holiday and has taken Mrs Rector who does the Godly play at the back of the church. Apart from some scraping and banging from the rear, later revealed as "sorting the electrics for the coffee", it is relatively quiet as the organ music begins. I recognise the music after the opening, drifting notes: the organist is improvising on a modern/traditional scottish folk tune. It is absolutely, heart-rendingly beautiful.

I am plainly not alone in thinking this. I hear a whisper from somewhere behind me: Ohhh - that's lovely. And a stillness falls on the people, even those who are still arriving. Prayer is suddenly possible, distraction and restlessness quietened by the lilting line, and I am glad I have come. Even when the music enters a dark, sombre place it seems entirely appropriate (I subsequently learn that the organist was distracted by the thundering down the aisle of Someone on A Mission and had to go where a wrong note took him) and the melody emerges, intact and serene, just in time for the final quiet cadence.

I am now in a place where anything can happen; the gloom has been dispelled and the transfiguration is possible. And reflecting on the experience, and the prayers and farewells and greeting of long-missed friends that took place when the Mass was over, I note that we need this variety. We need joy and noise and exuberance, and we need silence and mystery.

And somehow, in the profound silence, there is music at the very heart of things.

All Souls celebrated

It can take an unaccustomed service, something out of the ordinary, perhaps, to remind me what it is I love and value in my church. All Souls was such an occasion. A strange time to celebrate the Eucharist, at 5.30pm in the early dark of the beginning of winter; a stroke of genius to use the lighting on only one side of the church, supplemented by the red glow of the infra-red heaters and the flickering of candles - not just the altar candles, but an extra cluster in the choir. This was added to during the reading of names: as we remembered those we have loved and see no more we lit candles and left them there.

The names were underpinned by the quiet playing of the organ - the Kontakion for the Departed, and a further musical meditation on the In Paradisum - and there was also silence, a silence far more complete than we ever experience on a Sunday morning. And this is what I love: music and silence; singing and prayer; dignity and simplicity; words to recall and to heal; and at the heart of it all the Eucharist.

Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine.

Pipe to the spirit ...

Thought I'd join the hymn fray before it's all over bar the singing ...

It's harder these days to find hymns that I can bear to sing, actually. The big, ponderous hymns that we used to bash out regardless leave me cold, even if they have wonderful tunes, as some of them do. Maybe too much exposure to them is part of the problem - they're boring after the nth repetition. So even Come Down O Love Divine (to Down Ampney) feels like a drag these days, and in a way that makes me sad. Part of the problem could be that it's not the same sung by half a dozen people with the rest a gentle murmuring in the rear - a proper choir at least gave me the pleasure of balanced harmony and colour as we sang.

I used to be thrilled by Let all mortal flesh keep silence (Picardy). This hymn was completely new to me when I first encountered the Episcopal church, in the cathedral on Cumbrae, and is forever associated for me with firsts - incense, communion, the sense of the holy. I can still feel the hairs rise when we get to the alleluias, and the imagery is so poetic that there is little sense of the banal or the absurd. The same could be said for Lo he comes at Advent - I'd never heard it until I had moved to Dunoon, and it bowled me over.

Otherwise, I still find plainsong powerful. Ancient words tend to be timeless, somehow - the imagery so obviously not to be taken literally that I can just enjoy the poetry of it. I love Be still my soul and Lead kindly light, just as I love There is a Redeemer. I find the Taizé stuff we do a true vehicle for meditation and a way out of the ordinary, and I get the hair-on-end moments when we do Ubi Caritas with the solo verses as found in HON - especially if it's Bishop Martin or Mr B singing them.

But I'm at once fussy and fortunate. I rarely have to listen to inadequate organ playing, and I expect a high standard of harmonisation of last verses. If there isn't a decent musician around, I'd rather have said services than fight against flaccid rhythms or duff harmonies, and I've had enough Victorian bombast to last me an eternity. In the end heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter ... no?

Perfect music

Let's have an encore!
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

Must be the fact that after another drowned day the sun has come out - too late to do more than lift the spirits, but welcome for all that - which has me wanting to write something about the joyous concert I attended last week at the Edinburgh Festival. Jordi Savall and Hesperion XXI performed music from the Golden Age of viol music, between 1500 & 1700, in a concert which fulfilled all my criteria for perfection. As the programme note put it,

the process of group music-making mimicked the construction of Renaissance societies: each player performed a distinct role in the consort, and the group came together to explore the range of human emotion and experience. The consort was thus a microcosm of society.

I found this fascinating, for to me the experience of the morning was total: as they played, there was nothing else - no thought, no physical awareness - that was outwith the music. It was only when they finished a set of pieces and the audience burst into applause that I realised I had a smile on my face, and I could no more have prevented that smile than I could have stopped listening. The music was played to perfection - the light, lifting rhythm, the total absorption of each player, the intonation, the wonderful flourishes of improvisation...

It doesn't work, putting it in words, any more than it does with any other total experience. But the kind of unity of purpose and spirit that was palpable at this concert is something we find only rarely - and something that we dream of finding again.

Gone is that music...

How strange to realise that in the past couple of hours I've heard more Michael Jackson songs than at any other time in my life. I recognise the strange figure of the recent court case against him, and the cheerful child with the prodigious talent and the absurd costumes - so where did the other appearances go? And now, of course, I realise that the cheerfulness on stage was the product of a deprived childhood - deprived of childhood itself.

And in between? All the other stuff that filled my life, I suppose - other music, performing, bringing up a family, teaching, demonstrating, public speaking - and very little room for anything that wasn't my kind of music. But I can remember the effect the star had on the kids I taught - and their amusement at my not knowing why anyone would wear only one glove.

And I suppose what I think of is Elvis, whom I loved from the first movie I was allowed to go to on my own, with friends, without an adult. The movie was King Creole, and I was eleven. I moved on when Elvis changed into the fat freak of the rhinestone suits, but when he died, also too early, I remembered the young singer in denims who first showed my generation what sexy meant. I can still sing all the words of some Elvis numbers, but tonight I realised I couldn't have identified a single song of Michael Jackson's.

Interesting.