Living Wittily

Susan Boyle dreamed a dream - bless her!

OK. So after all the hullaballoo earlier this year about Susan Boyle, the pros and cons of Britain's Got Talent, the ambiguous roles of three millionaire judges, and the impact of instantaneous celebrity status on a modest Scottish woman who seemed to be unravelling before ruthlessly voyeuristic cameras; the album is out, is selling in millions, and the woman herself much more self possessed and a pleasure to watch and hear.

I watched the repeated documentary the other morning, in which she did indeed sing with Elaine Paige - who was encouraging, supportive without a hint of patronising. We bought the CD for Christmas. And yes it's good. She has a voice that is versatile though I don't like the arrangement of several of the songs - Daydream Believer was never a slow croon.

But the overwhelming sense I had as I listened to the Cd, and watching the Documentary, was of a woman who had shown immense courage in ever going to those auditions at all. And then seeing it through, right through to a final in which she came second and ran out of places to hide. But there she is. Doing what she dreamed of doing. I don't buy into the "dream it and it will happen" approach to life. I've known too many people whose dreams just didn't happen for them. But unfulfilled dreams have never been a reason to stop dreaming; nor to depsise what we have, who we are and what is still possible. Still less to knock someone else whose dream has come true

I salute this brave woman. She should be made Scot of the Year. Her talent, her personality, her vulnerability and her sheer guts, her self effacing sense of who she is, make her the best kind of ambassador for Scotland, a country that too often blaws its own bagpipes while simultaneously letting the air out of the air bladder. Nobody can predict what will now happen for her and to her - but I wish her well, and have nothing but admiration for the way she has taken hold of her life, and walked into a different future.

We all know reality TV cans its audience responses and plays on viewers' mixture of gullibility and cynicism. The wide road that leads to exploitation is too easily taken. But now and again someone transcends the polyfoam programming. I for one will never foget that first night when she sang "I dreamed a dream" - that kind of moment transforms viewer voyeurism into a much more wholesome human solidarity, rooted in recognition of significance, beauty and the sheer triumph of immediate human gift over mediating technology.  

Sanctus! Sanctus! Sanctus! Jessye Norman on Youtube

I have a double CD of Jessye Norman (pictured). Had it for years and years - obviously so, I got it for my 40th birthday to go with my then state of the art sound system - long since superceded. On these worn but cherished CDs she sings Amazing Grace and The Holy City, both of them sung with a voice that is breathtaking in its control, passion and capacity to unsettle and then excite even the most complacent listener.

But the track I remember first hearing on this album is the Sanctus from Gounod's St Cecilia Mass. And that was for me a musical watershed moment. I'd heard some classical sacred music before, but never, never, the overwhelming power of a voice that commanded such a profound and responsive attentiveness to the music and its content that it could only be described as a call to worship. From the brief introduction of the solo flute, to the crashing climax, and then the final quiet reprise of the flute solo, Jessye Norman's voice has made it impossible for me to read Isaiah 6 ever again, without hearing that majestic soprano voice compelling adoration and urging utter surrender to the one who is called, Holy! Holy! Holy!

I've just listened to and watched the original performance (again) on YouTube. If you're jaded, complacent, anxious, living with limited horizons, feeling deprived of beauty and the energy to care about it; or if you are the opposite of all the foregoing, and life is good and getting gooder; or if today is neither up nor down and likely to be much like any other. Go listen, watch and see the world differently, and love the God who gives the gift of such music. You can find it on YouTube here.  And Amazon had 10 used copies when I checked last night.

Reflections on miraculously returned John Denver CDs!

The year before he was killed in a crash in an experimental plane, I went to John Denver's concert in Edinburgh Usher Hall, 1996. Along with the Joan Baez concert in Glasgow around the same time, it remains one of the most memorable live music experiences of my life. One singer, two guitars and the best part of three hours of song, conversation, laughter and by a process of emotional assimilation a shared love of humanity, our world and all the possibilities of a life enriched by compassion, humour and eyes open to the gift that life is. Being there was a privilege, and if he had been there for more than one evening I'd have gone for a repeat performance - because he was a consummate performer who respected, liked and connected with his audiences.

Over the years I've patiently and heedlessly endured the raised eyebrows, knowing smirks, pitying shakes of the head and general dismissiveness of many who wondered about my idiosyncratic enthusiasm for a smiling bespectacled country singer with a page boy haircut and granny glasses. Don't care. John Denver's music has been a source of serious reflection, more or less innocent fun, and humanely conceived lyrics of political protest and articulate environmentalism since I was a teenager and his music was produced on that cutting edge technology called vinyl. And anyway, who else in the 1970's was singing about overharvesting the seas, the pollution of the oceans, (the track calypso is dedicated to Jacques Cousteau), the environmental impact of forest stripping, and the irreversible loss of birds, animals and flowers due to consummate consumer greed? Some others, but not many of them so persistently. Why tell you all this?

Just recovered three CD's that I was sure had simply vanished without trace into the CD warehouses of those who borrow on a permanent basis. One of them is my favourite album which I still have on vinyl - Windsong. Just spent an hour listening to it and thinking of music as an emotional holiday, a gift that takes us out of ourselves and yet can also take us deeper into ourselves. I suppose much of this album  drew on early New Age imagery and discourse - but the wider application of lyrics about friendship as the gift that dispels loneliness, about the search for who we are and where in the world we fit in, and about that world as fragile, finite gift to be cherished. Denver was all but pantheist in his worldview; but much of what he sings calls us to a responsible cherishing of our earth, and an underlying optimism about the future that as a Christian I find more securely rooted in a doctrine of creation and a redemptive eschatology.

Denver was heavily involved in global humanitarian work, particularly on behalf of charities tackling world hunger; his song 'I want to live' became an anthem which expresses the human rights issues that underlie the economic imbalance between the developed world and the two thirds world. There isn't the hard edged rage of the prophet Amos, but there is passionate protest in the plea of the hungry as sung by Denver:

There are children raised in sorrow
on a scorched and barren plain
there are children raised beneath the golden sun
There are children of the water,
children of the sand
and they cry out through the universe
their voices raised as one

I want to live, I want to grow
I want to see, I want to know
I want to share what I can give
I want to be, I want to live

Have you gazed out on the ocean
seen the breaching of a whale?
Have you watched the dolphins frolic in the foam?
Have you heard the song the humpback hears
five hundred miles away
Telling tales of ancient history
of passages and home

I want to live, I want to grow
I want to see, I want to know
I want to share what I can give
I want to be, I want to live

For the worker and warrior, the lover and the liar
For the native and the wanderer in kind
For the maker and the user and the mother and her son

We are standing all together
face to face and arm in arm
We are standing on the treshold of a dream
No more hunger, no more killing
no more wasting life away
It is simply an idea
and I know its time has come

I want to live, I want to grow
I want to see, I want to know
I want to share what I can give
I want to be.....

Song of Songs: "the riddled journey towards mutuality...."

Recently listened to some of the tracks on this CD on Classic FM. My own copy arrived the other day. Captivating.

For myself? Not sure how to preach on Song of Songs in ways that would avoid a mass exit by those uneasy with the idea that love, physical, passionate, deliriously, intoxicatingly overwhelming love is itself a gift of God. Yes agape as indefatigable good will. And yes, phileo as faithful friendship. But eros? That too God's gift? Explicitly descriptive? Legitimate desire? Incurable infatuation with the other? The ache of delight and the joy of longing?

Yes. All of that, and here, in the love poetry of the Song of Songs, set to music by one of the finest contemporary composers and with a Welsh soprano soloist whose voice exults in the language and music of the heart's desire. No wonder this series of poems, found tucked between the gentle cynicism of Ecclesiastes and the great Isaianic trilogy of defiant trustful hope, has survived as a statement of what human love is when two people discover in each other a love that demands language at its best.

But even then language can fail. Sometimes the reality of human love doesn't live up to the language of love, while at other times our language describes fantasy in terms that make us discontented with the reality that love between fallible humans is. The truth is, human love is seldom unambiguous, unmixed blessing, pure in motive and selfless in gift. It is after all human. But where there is faithfulness and companionship, persistence as well as passion, patience as well as urgency, and giving as well as receiving, then something is being shaped that mirrors the love of God.

Christian spirituality has plundered this book for images of divine love, metaphors for the soul's love of God and Christ's love for the Church. From Bernard of Clairvaux's 86 sermons, to the intense intimacy of Samuel Rutherford's descriptions of Christ the Beloved, the Song of Songs has provided powerful descriptions of Christian devotion. But read at another level altogether, the level of human relationships in all their perplexities and passions, these poems provide a theology of human createdness and human creativity. "To the extent that [the Song of Songs] is about anything, it is especially about male and female expressions of love and intimacy, the communion of self with the other, and the riddled journey toward mutuality". (New Interpreter's Bible, Renita Weems on Song of Songs, Vol. V., page 423.

Here is a CD which is itself an exercise in biblical exegesis, and the hermeneutical principle which compels attention and invites some understanding, is the way the poems, and their musical performance, capture our all too human love and longing, for that which is beyond us, but not so far beyond that we are discouraged from reaching for it in persistent hopefulness.

Leonard Cohen and our human struggles with love, loss and limitation.

Recently been listening to Leonard Cohen. Not sure if he's a poet who sings or a singer who writes poetry, or a singer who reads poetry with musical accompaniment, or a poet who uses the range of his voice to make words sing. It's one of the great omissions of my life that I didn't try to work the miracle of getting a ticket for one of last year's concerts.

But it's hard to listen to the two disc recording of the London Concert and not want to write a review. I'm not qualified. I don't know enough about music. The range of voices in Cohen's oeuvre, from playful raconteur to contemplative poet, from lyricist of longing to apocalyptic seer, and from biblical prophet to lover and lover of words, makes any categorisation ridiculously reductionist. These two discs contain two and a half hours of the London performance and 26 tracks, and listening to them in a sitting has been a musical experience like a limited few others in my life.

One was when the Beach Boys ignited for a generation an enthusiasm for life with what I think is still one of the best tracks they ever produced, "Good Vibrations". Though my favourite Beach Boys track, as those who have lived in my orbit any time know, is "Sloop John B" - not because of its depth, but because of its sheer joie de vivre about heading home when one's vivre hasn't been much joie! Second was when I listened to the first classical LP Sheila ever bought me, Yehudi Menuhin playing "Brahms' Violin Concerto". The second movement, played with heartbreaking intensity, was for me a personal graduation from what I thought I liked to a different musical world where music is heard to serious humane purposes. A third, (and there are probably still one or two more) was the first time I heard the Ode to Joy from "Beethoven's Ninth (Choral) Symphony". It was on a TV Documentary in the early 1970's in which Jimmy Reid the Union Leader of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders strike, was interviewed. He spoke of his dad's long working life for low wages and long hours of hard graft, and the way those with money made more on a stock market deal than his dad could in several lifetimes of such hard graft. His vision, long before the EU captured the Beethoven chorus for its anthem, was of a society where humanity itself was valued, where materialism was subservient to humanism, and where money and power are means to more humane ends.

Which brings me back to Cohen, and why this recorded concert is itself a musical and humanising experience. Some of Cohen's songs are also about how joie de vivre is often ambushed by circumstance and accident. Witness the masterpiece that is "Hallelujah", at least as sung by Cohen himself - this arrangement has lost none of the intensity and affirmation of humanity and our struggles with love, loss and limitation, and it is sung by a 73 year old who still deeply, defiantly and gently cares. And some of the songs take you to those far reaches of emotional responsiveness we know we have treasured away somewhere deep inside us, but which aren't easily accessed without the right guide - and in songs like "If it be your will", Cohen knows his way there, and back - and the version here by the Webb Sisters is quite simply beautiful. And then you only have to listen to "Democracy" to sense  essential combinations of satire and seriousness, compassion and cynicism, rebellion and patriotism. So many voices in that voice.

And so on. One of the areas I'd like to spend time learning about is music as a form of biblical exegesis. Not the advanced technical stuff about aesthetics and hermeneutics - but the more straightforward use of words and music to sound the depths, to explore the options, to guage the texture of a text. Not just the obvious choices like Handel's Messiah, Bach's Matthew Passion, but lesser known texts which form the basis of musical compositions, or which are echoed in the songs that move us. I once arranged a service around the theme music for the film "2001 Space Odyssey" (Also Sprach Zarathustra) played as background to the first verses of the Gospel of John. That's the kind of hermeneutics I mean. The intentional and imaginative juxtaposition of biblical text with music which is totally unrelated, until it is brought into conversation with that specific text and we hear the words and we are affected by the music, we hear the music and we are interpreted by the words.

The brief benediction at the end of the concert comes from the book of Ruth, so the concert ends with a prayer that people of difference learn to live together, not in mere tolerance but in faithful companionship, which is the more telling gift of blessing for our times, living in the jagged fragments of a broken world.

Off to listen........ again.
 

Leonard Cohen - tell you what I think tomorrow

Not much time for the blog today. All my spare time being spent marking papers, or (note, not while), listening to this. Tonight I'll find a couple of hours to listen to it all. Tell you what I think tomorrow.

Leonard Cohen Concert review - and a beautiful song

Just been over at Faith and Theology where Ben Myers has posted on a Leonard Cohen concert he was fortunate / blessed / lucky enough to attend. Apart from a great review and a serious plug for Cohen as a prophet, there is a superb link to a clip of The Webb Sisters singing "If it be your will". A long time since I heard anything so beautiful, haunting and full of resigned longing.

Cohen is described as follows in some of the advance blurb for his US tour:

The poet, singer/songwriter and novelist's intense and complex explorations of interpersonal, romantic and political themes have resulted in a life's work that has impacted countless contemporary recording artists and writers.

Midwinter - My Advent CD

 Last year I wrote about the music of Christian Forshaw, and the CD Sanctuary. You might want to read that post along with this one.

I've just bought the new CD Midwinter, a collection of music earthed in Advent, and celebrating the Incarnation, itself earthed in the historical particularity of the birth of Jesus. Several of the tracks are worth a post in themselves so I'll return to this CD between now and Christmas.

We all listen to music differently, I suppose. What we hear, what we listen for, is largely a matter of personal taste, but perhaps also depends on individual temperament and receptivity. But something else happens when the music you hear is music most of which you've heard before, because it is part of a known tradition. Memory triggers resonance, mind and heart are prepared with remembered thought and feeling, so the music has an emotionally enriched context.

Yes, but what if the familiar tradition is subverted by unexpected surprise? That is what Christian Forshaw and the Sanctuary Ensemble achieve in this (somebody suggest an alternative to the overused "stunning") extraordinary CD. Impatience with traditional form and content, the pursuit of novelty for its own sake, the assumption we can do better than the efforts of those before us - these and other dismissive shrugs towards tradition are not what Christian Forshaw is about. The music on this CD is widely representative of Christian traditional Advent music. So whence the unexpected surprise? It is in the way the Advent music tradition has been handled by artists who value what is essential, and repristinate the music to prevent it from falling into unexciting cliche.

The first impression on listening to the whole CD is one of paradox. The sound conveys vastness and intimacy, spaciousness and immediacy, as voice, saxophone, organ and percussion paint images of great harmonic power. The soprano soloist, Grace Davidson, brings a singular beauty and clarity to the prayerful longing of Veni Emmanuel. Throughout, the saxophone is used as a voice which communicates meaning in sound not only without words, but in ways that transcend words; at times reprising instrumental impressions of phrases still fresh in the mind, at other times developing themes which evoke in the listener that same Advent longing and looking towards light, and upwards.

Several times the way the tracks are arranged and produced, the power of the instrumental intervention, like a revelation, is sudden, unexpected but welcome. In places Forshaw rises to those high piercing passages that express not only musically driven aspiration, but the determined ascent of the heart and soul towards unreachable truth that nevertheless irresistibly beckons. The power of Forshaw's musical arrangements complements without dominating, virtuosity serving the music and empowering the hearer. It's characteristic of Forshaw's work that saxophone, organ and human voice, at times weave sound together and then separate into their own controlled virtuosity. On this CD the human voice is enabled, without diminishment, to articulate in clear powerful diction, that particular kind of truth-telling we call story, in this case Advent.

One of my favourite carols is Christina Rosetti's In the bleak midwinter. On this album the first verse is sung with aching restraint, followed by a passage of saxophone solo that is as near to a theology of hope as I've ever heard in music. The following verse about "What can I bring Him" moves slowly towards its simple resolved response, the only gift that makes any sense, because it makes no sense, "Give my heart".

This album is, in my humble but unprepared to be contradicted opinion :-) ! - music worthy of the great human themes, vast theology and great contradictions of grace and cruelty, gift and loss, celebration and fear, forever embedded in the Advent cycle, and waiting to be expressed in "utmost art".

If you want to buy the CD you can order it from Christian Forshaw's own website where at £9.99 + p&p it is cheaper than Amazon, and will come within a few days of ordering.

O Come! O Come! Emmanuel.

Eternal Light, Requiem by Howard Goodall

Just been listening to Classic FM and the preview of this Requiem by Howard Goodall. I've ordered it from Amazon on the basis of that one track. Why? Two immediate reasons. First I liked it. Second, I was intrigued by the composer's description of what he was seeking to do. Here's an extract.

The writing of a Requiem is a special challenge for any composer. The great Requiems of the past by composers such as Mozart, Verdi, Fauré and Duruflé interpret the sacred Requiem text literally, and represent a prayer for the salvation of the departed soul(s). Howard Goodall's Requiem, by contrast, is intended to provide solace to the grieving. The composer said, "For me, a modern Requiem is one that acknowledges the terrible, unbearable loss and emptiness that accompanies the death of loved ones, a loss that is not easily ameliorated with platitudes about the joy awaiting us in the afterlife. ... Musical expression can I hope provide some outlet, some reflection, some transportation, even some comfort....This was to be a Requiem for the living, a Requiem focussing on interrupted lives."

Once I've listened to it I'll let you know whether impulse buying is to be recommended as a way of discovering what new music you like by listening randomly to Classic FM!

The Saxophone and Sacred Longing

Last night I was writing a responsive liturgy for one of our Baptist communities. It's intended to invite all those who work and serve within the church to rededicate their gifts of time, energy and ability - and to seek the blessing and strength of God. While all this was happening I was listening to Christian Forshaw's CD, Sanctuary. I first heard this during advent two years ago, sitting outside Parcel Force while Sheila collected our mail, with Classic FM on. The track that was played was 'Let all mortal flesh keep silence'.

I sat transfixed. It was one of those brief interludes when something other than the music is heard, but which can only be heard through the music. It was as if the Holy Spirit pulled up the blinds, and left me with my eyes screwed up against early streaming sunlight. And that moment was recpatured last night, as again this stunning piece of music simply opened my eyes - the eyes of my mind, the eyes of my imagination, the eyes of my soul - whatever part of us it is that needs to be opened in order to see the glory and beauty of what always lies beyond our senses.

Christian Forshaw is the Professor of Saxophone at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. One of his great passions and current interests is music as an experience of purity and intensity, particularly as music within the context of worship.

'I first began working with the church organ in 1995. I was intrigued by the way the saxophone could sit within the sound of the organ, but could also add a far more expressive dimension. The sound of the organ is static once the key is pressed, whereas the sound of the saxophone is ever changing and moving.'

On this disc the combination of human voice, church organ and saxophone make possible enormous variety and subtlety of mood, of pace, of sound. There are episodes of rumbustuous joy and passages of gentle, persuasive assurance; at times I find the invitation to worship which is inherent in this music, an irresistible grace, and at other times the longing and yearning conveyed in tones ranging from the shrill to the plaintive, is more reminsicent of the flickering sun and shadows of the Psalms at their most poetic and disturbing.

The rendering of Come Down O Love Divine, ends with a passage of saxophonic improvisation that expresses my spiritual longing more authentically than any words I could ever write. This is a track of the most sublime sacred music - by which I mean music that makes the sacred not only plausible but audible, not only imaginable but desirable with that desire that is fuelled by the eternity that God has put in our hearts.

The CD can be found on the Quartz website here. You order it from them as it isn't easily available in High St megastores. (Which makes me feel unreasonably and sniffily superior!)