Living Wittily

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

Johnny Cash and the deeply turned tilth of personal experience

Just listened again to a Johnny Cash album, the definitive collection. Some of these songs are masterpieces of their genre; and one or two of them transcend genre in their significance and power. I remember the first time I heard the album Man in Black. Along with The San Quentin and Folsom Prison Concerts, and Bitter Tears (a stunning apologia and lament for the way of life of the native American peoples), these albums confirmed Johnny Cash as one of the artists whose music is for me indispensable. I know the often noted weaknesses - sentimentalism, sensationalism, banal lines, thematic repetition, and sheer deluge of recordings some of them little more than ordinary. But Johnny Cash is one of the truly great artists whose greatness grew out of the deeply turned tilth of personal failure, emotional suffering and his own acknowledged brokenness. Few Country singers give voice to the highs and lows of human experience with such searing honesty, and with that knowing tone of voice that articulates lostness, longing, love, laughter and lament. 

The title song, Man in Black, became Cash's theme song, and black his chosen fashion statement. Bernard Levin, in his book A Walk Up Fifth Avenue, tells of going into the top tailor's store and being measured for a suit that cost a year's salary. The justification?

"Clothes aren't only for wearing Mr Levin. When you wear this suit you are making a statement."

Cash knew that - "there's a reason for the things that I have on", he . Man in Black is one of those pieces that takes its place in the premier league of protest songs, the songs of the discontented, the poetry of the dissenter, the lyrics of those fed up with the status quo, the music that combines compassion and outrage, ballads that tell a human story to elicit human understanding and responsiveness.  

The poignancy and dignity of his last few years when suffering from Parkinson's disease pushed Johnny Cash deeper into his search for inner and outer peace, for healing mercy and a way of leaving life that would finally satisfy his yearning for a life that had been worth living. His courage in performing till his hands wouldn't do what was needed on his instruments, that unique gargling-with-gravel voice weakened but still able to orchestrate the pathos and passion of human emotion with the range and intensity of a full orchestra. And the closing scene of Hurt, when he closes and caresses the piano lid - these are unforgettable moments of great art, and human tragedy transcended by brave dignity.

.

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.....