Living Wittily

Yehudi Menuhin - Discovering the Inner Universe of Music

We're soon going to know the list of those nominated for the Queen's New Year Honours list. The process of identifying, recommending and nominating those to be honoured I'd hope has criteria beyond the person's fame, capacity to influence or celebrity profile. I'd like there to be two specific criteria. :

Is the person a great human being?

Have they contributed  to human compassion and inspired us to be more humane?

The answer to the second would help answer the first. Now I admit this post didn't begin with a thought about the New Years Honours List. It started with me listening to a piece of music and thinking for the umpteenth time that the violinist is one of the greatest human beings I've admired in my lifetime. That sparked the question, what makes someone a great human being?

Generous outward looking compassion.

Discontent with injustice.

Love for a broken world. 

Bringer of joy into the lives of others.

Cherishing of human worth.

Communication across cultures.

Hopeful poise towards the future.

Moral integrity and courage. 

That isn't an exhaustive list. It certainly won't be universally agreed. But for me it describes Yehudi Menuhin. I first encountered Menuhin on an EMI recording of Brahms' Violin Concerto, the first classical record I ever listened to at the age of 20! A mind and soul that was soaked exclusively in the ferment of the music of the late 60's and early 70's, had no idiom or discourse to interpret what I was hearing. I remember the joyful bewilderment, the humbling realisation that there are other languages than my own, deeper chords in my being than I knew, longings from who knows where. These were awakened by the creative power, remorseless beauty, corrective harmony and proffered vision of an artist at the height of his powers commanding attention with the overwhelming argument of that wordless language of the human heart and spirit which we call music. I still can't hear the first bars of the second movement without remembering with grateful embarrassment that epiphany in sound which conferred such a generous invitation to come, to hear, and to relinquish that culpable arrogance that thinks it knows, and discovers such arrogance is ignorance.

There are different ways God invades our lives and subverts our certainties. Ever since that afternoon, music has had the power to do this to me. Not long after I read Menuhin's autobiography, Unfinished Journey. That's when I became interested in what moves and inspires, what gives moral content and human value, what is that inexplicable quality that is expressed through the creative kenosis that enables music to express human integrity, transcendent beauty and those deep truths of existence out of which our joys and tragedies are fashioned. Amongst other things it is the list of attributes of what I consider makes a great human being. On my own unfinished journey, Yehudi Menuhin has been a recurring humanising presence whose gift was the opening up of a new inner universe.

Karine Polwart, Folk Singing and the Prophetic Imagination

It's becoming an enjoyable if unpredictable habit. Innocently driving down or up the road to Paisley listening to the radio and there's a moment of illumination, or a coincidence of mood and music, or the fusion of idle thought and good ideas, or the interruption of the complacent routine by the unsettlingly different. It was the last of these this morning. I was ambushed by a song that compels our consideration of an unsettlingly different view of ourselves, our world and our responses to life around us.

On Radio Scotland I heard the haunting voice of Karine Polwart singing Better Things, the lyrics deceptively gentle in their subversive questioning of the way things are. And that lyrical gentleness and acoustic melody pushes ideas through our road metal defences like patiently persistent green shoots whose life force won't be denied the life giving sun even by the tarmac surface of minds hardened by the endless traffic of excess experience, information overload and sensory saturation that is our post- modern networked, globalised, rapid-feed culture. And yes, that is a long sentence, and a few over-wrought metaphors - perhaps.

The truth is that some of our best folk singers fulfil the role of prophet, and speak truth to power. They do this by calling in question the assumptions of the powerful, they dare to interrogate the ethics of political decisions, they refuse to accept that the economic bottom line has some kind of absolute veto on human compassion, is the reality check for kindness, or makes an ethical generosity foolish, unrealistic, or even worse, unaffordable.

The song Better Things does several of these things in oblique poetry that is at the same time a profound questioning of the wisdom of the world. Here are the words, and Karine polwart's own reasons for writing them given at the end:

So is this the best that we can do?
Oh I can think of better things - can't you?
Yes I can think of better things
That hands can make and hearts can sing

For now we deal with those for whom
A life is but a carnal tomb
In which the darkness holds no power
And neither does the final hour

So is this the best that we can do?
Oh I can think of better things - can't you?
Yes I can think of better things
That hands can make and hearts can sing

We may lament the deadly art
Of tiny atoms torn apart
Of visions that we can't return
And future fires in which we fear we'll burn

So is this the best that we can do?
Oh I can think of better things - can't you?
Yes I can think of better things
That hands can make and hearts can sing

Yet this is the art of those before
Who found a cure within the core
The noble mind behind the ray
That eased our earthly cares away

So is this the best that we can do?
Oh I can think of better things - can't you?
Yes I can think of better things
That hands can make and hearts can sing

Words & Music: Karine Polwart (Bay Songs Ltd 2007)
I wrote this for the "Bin The Bomb" campaign in protest at the UK Government's decision to re-commission the Trident generation of nuclear weapons. I just think maybe there are a few imaginative and constructive ways to spend £30 billion or so that don't involve weapons of mass destruction.

Swords into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks, and technology turned towards the healing of the wounds of the world - I too can think of better things that hands can make, and hearts can sing.

Carrie Newcomer - poet of the mystery of the ordinary

Ever since I read a review in Sojourners years ago, I've listened to the music of Carrie Newcomer.  She is one of my favourite singer songwriters,(Mary Chapin Carpenter being another) strongly connected with the Quakers, outspoken on issues of justice and peace, a poet of human relationships of love, loss, forgiveness and joy, and a singer whose voice ranges from conversational confidence to a clarion call to community and convictions essential to human flourishing.

She writes and sings out of a life committed to Christian principles and practices, but the spiritual is an undercurrent, a powerful but gentle pulling of the listener to consider and ponder, wonder and care for what goes on around us.

I've just ordered her Geography of Light album, another collection of songs that gently and at times peruasively, and occasionally assertively, invite or demand that the listener pays attention. Attentiveness to people, to our inner world, to the situations of others, to those ordinary experiences that hint at the extraordinary, and to the mundane which can contain mystery - Newcomer balances the poetry and the music, and the result is a style that is somewhere between folk and progressive country, but always the sense that wisdom, insight and compassionate observance of human longings and behaviour inform her thought and suffuse her music.

Her membership of the Quakers is for her a natural commitment, a spiritual context within which she is at peace and an ethos of gentle enquiry that resonates with her own reflective appreciation of human living, longing and loving - the emphases on peace, silence, pondering deeply, community building, and shared wisdom are not so much themes in her songs as presuppositions and assumptions of her poetry and her worldview.

There is some irony in her being voted one of the ten most influential musicians working in the States just now, and her not being as widely known as that would suggest. So this is an unabashed plug for her music, and her voice as a call to pay attention to the life we are living, and to be attentive to those who share that life.

When being bold is hard to be, and being scared is ok

You know how now and again, at church, you find yourself invited to sing something you don't want to sing.

It isn't just to be awkward. And it isn't because you don't want to sing something you don't much care for, or it's a duff tune or one that is unsingable. It's more fundamental than that.

You are being asked to sing what isn't true in your experience. The last place to pretend is in a service of worship. And amongst the most corrosive forms of pretence is emotional insincerity, which isn't far from spiritual self-deceit.

You see, the Catch-22 of congregational singing is that while you want to share the faith of the community, sometimes you can't without being untrue to yourself. Because how that faith is expressed, and what it is declaring to be everyone's experience right now, may not be at all congruent with where your own heart is, what is so in your life, and may wrongly presuppose that it is well with every soul gathered in this place, with these people, for worship, now.

Some time ago ( and it is a while ago) I was standing alongside someone in her own church, who was going through the most horrendous experience of their life. The details don't matter - what matters is that this person was inwardly broken, clinging to whatever faith might have enough buoyancy to stop her from drowning. And she was afraid, scared of the future, her inward defences dismantled by what had happened. And we stood to sing

Be bold, be strong, for the Lord your God is with you!

Be bold, be strong for the Lord your God is with you!

I am not afraid. I am not dismayed

For I'm walking in faith and victory

Come on and walk in faith and victory

For the Lord, your God is with you.

Now I know it's biblical, it's the spirituality of Joshua, its the confidence of the conqueror and a declaration of assurance. But there is also the spirituality of the Psalmist in lament mode, and of Isaiah who understood broken hearts and bewildered spirits and people's deep fears for the future. And allowing for that, I wonder if we could just occasionally take time to sing, to each other, same tune, much less strident:

Though scared, though weak,  Still the Lord your God is with you;

Though scared, though weak,  Still the Lord your God is with you;

Yes you are afraid, Yes you are dismayed,

Because you're walking in deep uncertainty,

We know you're walking in deep uncertainty,

But the Lord your God is with you.

This is a plea for emotional honesty, and emotional inclusion, so that we recognise in each gathered community, the experiences of joy and sorrow, laughter and lament, of confident faith and struggling faith, healed hearts and breaking hearts. I too like a good sing when my spirit is singing - but I need different words when I'm inwardly crying. Worship is honest when the declarative mood is sometimes muted by the interrogative mood, and worship that arises from the real experience of the life I live is more likely to have integrity. And whether I am going forth weeping or rejoicing in the homecoming, it is one of the great gifts of the worshipping community that the content of our services enables us to laugh with those who laugh - and weep with those who weep.

I offer this not as a rant, or a hobby horse - I think these are trivial forms of complaint. I'm more interested in making an observation of pastoral consequence, and spiritual sensitivity, and human solidarity, all of which are inherent in the practices of Christian fellowship.

The etching above comes from my personal canon of artistic exegesis - I guess at some time in our lives we are the one clinging to the mast, or holding on to Jesus for dear life!

 

 

 

 

Bob Dylan - the latter day Ecclesiastes?

One of the signs of age is when you see Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in concert in the 1960's and remember the excitement and passion of discovering they sang about things you cared about as a teenager. Last night on BBC4 I watched the first part of Arena: No Direction Home, a biography of Dylan's early years. The footage of him singing Blowing in the Wind, evoked more than nostalgia - a kind of pride that my generation used music as a medium of political protest, moral exhortation and ethcial censure of cynical power structures. The civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the Peace movement and CND, the ruthless greed of corporate business, the unequal  lives of the powerless poor and the powerful rich - these were issues of critical importance for humanity, and they were being sung with rhetorical power, or iconoclastic sarcasm, or blunt poltical incorrectness long before politcally correct means what it now means.

And Pete Seeger all but in tears remembering how it felt to know a singer as genuinely committed to political protest had taken up his torch, and Joan Baez reminiscing about the discovery of Dylan the soon to be phenomenon and prophet for his generation - these were significant moments of cultural history. Dylan is both perplexing and fascinating, complex and enigmatic, passionately humane and incapable of indifference, deeply religious but despising religiosity.

What was evident in last night's programme is the power of a life story to shape and direct the way others live their lives. It's going too far to talk of Dylan having disciples - but there are millions who now span at least two generations, for whom Bob Dylan has articulated what we want to say about the world, our joys and fears and loves, to tell of the things that outrage us, to sing the causes that matter because they are about human flourishing - both what hinders and helps human beings live in peace and freedom. It takes a troubled soul who looks unflinchingly at trouble to interpret what troubles, or ought to trouble, each generation. In that sense, Dylan is a prophet - flawed, enigmatic, sometimes wrong, quite often right in the diagnosis of the self-inflicted wounds of our humanity.

"Human beings are born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward..." "Vanity, vanity, all is vanity, says the Preacher". "Let justice roll down like waters...." "Now abides faith, hope and love, these three, but the greatest of these...." Job, The Preacher, the Prophet, the Apostle - in secular terms Dylan weaves those strands of human experience (the tragic, the skeptic, the ethical and the romantic), into a corpus of music that is profoundly spiritual, and which for 50 years has resonated with those who question the status quo, who are restless for change, and who are looking for an exegete of their own lives' experience. It's only a thought - but if the preacher of Ecclesiastes had been looking for a way to communicate with the Western World of the 1960's, he could have done worse than being a singer song-writer who composed Blowing in the Wind....

As a coincidence of serendiptious proportions - the picture of the young Dylan above, which I saved to my picture file, is next to a photo of David Cameron used in an earleir post. Now there's a conversation I'd like to overhear - Dylan and Cameron, on the things that matter most!

Seasons of the Heart - and the complexities of our emotions

As you'll gather from the earlier post, I am an unashamed fan of John Denver.  Frankly I am puzzled by anyone who doesn't at least know or remember several of his best known songs - and those who raise their eyebrows when I wax lyrical about his lyrics, or sing his songs, or enthuse about his earth-loving people-hugging philosophy, I consider with much goodwill and sympathy as misguided souls!

The first album I ever bought was Rhymes and Reasons. The title song is about the loving and valuing of children as the source and focus of our wellbeing and the guarantee of our human future; the royalties were gifted to UNICEF in 1979. Then I bought the double album live concert, An Evening with John Denver, which I played till the vinyl was worn and I bought it again. And when vinyl was replaced by CD I bought it again and regularly play it in the car. Then Windsong was released and he moved to a different level of sound and developed from there material that expressed his deep protective love for the earth's environment, and long before environmental responsibility became politically acceptable or economically thinkable.

I still have a dozen vinyl LPs, a kind of chronology of his career. People differ on which is his best; even fans know that several albums took him as near mediocrity and inferior derivative material as someone of his talent could go. But Seasons of the Heart is the most complete and unified album he ever produced. Written out of his experience in the Far East it contains some of his most reflective, poignant and honest songs about human love and the complexities of human relationships, the mystery of the universe and human existence, and the joy and pain of human togetherness. The combination of emotionally frank lyrics and orchestral musical accompaniment gives it a depth of expression he previously achieved only in Windsong. I've just bought Seasons of the Heart on CD, and listening to it again it still has that emotional complexity, sincerity and inner knowing that gives weight and integrity to the greatest love songs. On one car journey north I listened to this album, then Brahms' violin concerto, some of The Best of James, and Abba Gold. A kind of musical ecumenicity......

Christian Forshaw, Sanctuary, and How Music Restores the Soul.

I've spent the last ten days in Paisley and away from home. Snow. No other explantion needed. Two big splurges a few days apart made travel North to Aberdeen a rreally daft idea. Anyway, on Monday, the day of the big blizzard, my wee Jazz got half way up a hill and then the traffic in front started sliding back towards me. Reversing on wet fresh snow is tricky but I got into the side and out of the way. At which point it was clear the car was there for a while. Three days in fact. And the campus closed for those three days too.

So I stayed with friends. Until today I finally got back to Aberdeen, and while checking email and finding my way around the house I decided to listen again to the best rendering of the most theologically profound and spiritually enriched piece of Advent music I own. Let all Mortal Flresh Keep Silence is for me unerringly centred on the essential truth that the Word became flesh, and the light that enlightens everyone has come into the world, and the darkness comprehendeth it not. That translation is brilliant - the darkness neither understands nor overcomes the Light; bewildered and defeated darkness is the ontologically reverse truth of "the darkness comprehendeth it not".

I seldom advertise on this blog - I often recommend and enthuse. But Forshaw's music is in my view uniquely evocative, touching deep into those emotional corners I'm sometimes afraid to look in. And then when I do, by listening to this haunting, gentle summons, I find that these hidden unsettling corners are places where I don't have to be afraid, or anxious, or ashamed. Music is one of the few keys that can unlock those inner fastnesses and coax, persuade, summon and pull us out to face - what exactly? Well ourselves to begin with; our needs, our losses, our hopes, desires and hurts, and all those human feelings and thoughts and memories that with so much else makes us into the loveable and vulnerable people we are. 

Music therapy is one of those approaches to our need in which spirituality, aesthetics, theology and psychology intersect in the healing of the heart, the calming of the mind, the restoring of the soul. And if these three are distinct aspects of our humanity, or different words that we use for the complexity that is our inner life, still, they answer to those strands of our being that nourish and give content to that which, for want of a more secure term, we call our self. Christian Forshaw's music does this for me, and sure, you and others will have your own source of renewal to which you turn. But if not, or if you want to encounter a master musician whose gift to the listener is more than the music, try Christian Forshaw's Sanctuary. You can order it at his website here. The remastered CD has a different cover from mine, but I'm finding it hard to believe it has been improved! 

Gabriel's Oboe - and why only the occasional composition should be called "glorious"

I saw The Mission the year it was released, and still remember my first hearing of the soundtrack, and the glorious Gabriel's Oboe. I was once told by someone who knows a bit about writing that the word "glorious" is too overused, and now a cheapened word. Well, yes it can be. And a lazy word, a flattering exaggeration, a way of investing importance in something relatively mediocre by invoking a vaguely heavenly glow. But Gabriel's Oboe on its first hearing was glorious, and hundreds of subsequent hearings have only confirmed that for The Mission, Morricone composed a musical score that is heartbreakingly congruent with the tragic story of a priest for whom glory only came through martyrdom.

The Mission remains a potent and subversive statement of the perilous connections between church and state, faith and empire, prayer and politics - because mission is itself an ambiguous word. If the Church has a mission, so has the state. The word mission is used of an army incursion, a diplomatic service, a task delegated by a higher authority. And in the film, there is a collision of missions, an encounter between the Gospel and the Empire, a fatal meeting between the priest carrying the gold sunburst Ostensorium surmounted by a cross out of the burning mission church, and the lead musket balls that tear the life from his body. And all of this haunted by the aching melody of Gabriel's Oboe, and a film score redolent with the gift of genius.

The popularity of Gabriel's Oboe made it inevitable someone would want to put words to it. Written by Chiara Ferrau, and first performed by Sarah Brightman, the lyrics (English translation below) convey the aching longing of humanity for a different and better world, a humanity more humane and a world more just, and a wistful yearning for cities warmed by the winds of peace. And the singer confesses this is all in the imagination - but the music is not wistful and resigned - what makes Gabriel's Oboe such an emotionally subversive experience is a melody that weaves together our deepest longings and highest aspirations as human beings, and composes them into imagined possibilities and resilient hopefulness. I suppose that's what is meant by saying the piece is inspired....and glorious.

All the above reflection is because I've just ordered the double CD (will wait for Christmas for the DVD) of Morricone's recent Vienna Concert.  I'm familiar with a number of other Morricone scores. There's an apparent incongruence between some of his music and the films that engendered them. The spaghetti westerns of Clint Eastwood are bleak, violent, enjoyably cynical, and minimally moral, other than the blunt and dubious morality of vengeance in the shape of a poncho wearing gunfighter who gives the really bad people their come-uppance. Yet in for example, "The Good the Bad and the Ugly", some of the soundtrack is haunting, even tender, while other tracks even 40 years on have a menacing edge that bears comparison with the best of contemporary cinema music. The versatility and imagination of Morricone has produced for cinema goers unforgettable music - and for music lovers some of the finest compositions of the last 50 years.  The music of Gabriel's Oboe, and the lyrics translated below, are still for me the pinnacle of cinematic musical interpretation.

In my imagination I see a just world,
Everyone lives in peace and in honesty there.
I dream of souls that are always free,
Like the clouds that fly,
Full of humanity in the depths of the soul.

In my imagination I see a bright world,
Even the night is less dark there.
I dream of souls that are always free,
Like clouds that fly.

In my imagination there exists a warm wind,
That breathes on the cities, like a friend.
I dream of souls that are always free,
Like clouds that fly,
Full of humanity in the depths of the soul.

Hurry up with my CDs!!

Vivaldi's Gloria and sabbath moments of the soul

New patterns of life are bringing new ways of keeping inner experience nourished, and even enriched. I mentioned travelling in the car as my new place to listen to baroque and early music. Some of the music is an acquired taste I might never acquire. But then I remember I didn't like Yoghurt, loathed olives, didn't fancy smoked salmon, and would have thought stilton cheese was a good cheese gone bad. Now they are each of them staple food, and looked forward to treats. Music has been a bit like that for me too. I now listen with great pleasure to music I first thought boring because it didn't taste familiar on a very limited sound palate.

Now I'm writing this in College at 7.37 a.m. Listening to Vivaldi's Gloria. The fire alarm test has just gone for twenty seconds and shattered the intricate architecture of sound I was exploring. Sound - whether the fire alarm or chamber orchestra, is dependent on context. If a fire has broken out somewhere I want to be scared out of my seat, and a chamber orchestra can't do that; and if my soul needs the balm of music that opens up visions of glory and vistas of sound then I can do without the stress accelerator pedal being floored by a pitched for panic screaming fire alarm.

But back to new practices of inner sustaining. In the College and in my study (not an office -  too many books contradict that - the ratio of filing cabinets to bookcases is for me the defining geography - and it's 1 to 5), I have started having half an hour of music, reading and thinking about the day with a sense that life is for joy, peace and purpose, as well as for concentration, work and obligation. I suppose such a half hour is a subversion of any work ethic that needs to have a measurable end product. Not sure how you can ever measure the impact on heart, life, mind, relationships, and overall view of the world and our place in it, that a great piece of music or fine writing can have. So I allow the music time, space, movement in and through those places of  mind and heart that will soon be filled with other stuff. The other stuff is legitimate enough, in fact that's too grudging - not just legitimate but necessary stuff, obligations rightly placed, expectations fairly faced, work requiring to be done well, a vocation to fulfil. But before then - sabbath moment s for the soul. And anyway - you never know when the fire alarm will shatter the conversation between flute, oboe, strings and human voices.

Spem in Alium - music and the experience of recovered equilibrium

As one who has spent most my life filling the unforgiving minute, there's the small question of how to fill 360 minutes of travel per week. I do it by car so the laptop isn't the answer. A combination of Radio Four and Classic FM helps, but at the times I'm travelling it tends to be news (Radio 4), and that becomes cyclic after half an hour; or you get weary of Classic FM's daft juxtapositions of Ave Verum followed immediately by silly advert jingles, or the Mozart Clarinet Concerto slow movement followed by a condensed milk voice dripping syrupy words about smooth classics!

So. A strategy. I have long wanted to explore the treasures of Baroque music, and I have a friend who knows stuff about Renaissance and early sacred music. So each journey I listen to a CD, sometimes the same one twice. This week it was a new double CD of Thomas Tallis, whose work spans the 16th Century Tudor period. Most of this is new to me, one or two I have a vague recollection of hearing before, but no real previous engagement with this range of early choral music. My one complaint is there is no copy of the words, Latin or translation. Now in complex choral music sung in parts, knowing what is being sung seems to me to matter - certainly to those unfamiliar with the pieces. That said. The central piece is Spem in Alium, which to my embarrassment I only recently discovered through the afore-mentioned friend asking if I knew Thomas Tallis. The first hearing of it was magical, shared in the background of quiet conversation, and immediately marked it for me as a quite beautiful expression of hopefulness and longing, human voices lifting that longing heavenwards in sounds that are breathtakingly lovely.

So I listened to Spem in Alium several times on the way home yesterday - for this one I do know the words and they are included below. It did what great music should do - it lifted my heart, it reconfigured the world around, it restored my inner climate, it was an experience of recovered equilibrium. One of the most important discoveries in my own faith development is that prayer is a much more thickly textured experience than any one Christian tradition can contain or express. For me great art like the Rublev Icon, the Caravaggio of Jesus calling the disciples (pictured), glorious music like Ave Verum or Laudate Dominus, or poetry like Herbert and R S Thomas, as well as great liturgies and great cathedrals, mountains, sunsets, mountain avens, a hovering kestrel, the face of a friend - they are all ways of recognising the presence of God, and the touch of love through created things. And perhaps prayer only happens at those points of recognition, when something other than us, greater than us, less self-consciously anxious than us, takes hold of the heart and mind and renews feeling and thought. That was what happened on the way home yesterday. Some might call it music therapy - I call it God healing the heart through created things, including those few people who know us best, and those people of genius in whose work we hear, see, apprehend, encounter, A God who is hard to ignore.

Spem in alium nunquam habui praeter in te

Deus Israel

qui irasceris

et propitius eris

et omnia peccata hominum in tribulatione dimittis

Domine Deus

Creator coeli et terrae

respice humilitatem nostram

...........................................

I have never put my hope in any other but in you,

O God of Israel

who can show both anger

and graciousness,

and who absolves all the sins of suffering man

Lord God,

Creator of Heaven and Earth

be mindful of our lowliness