Lord Taylor's address

To all journalist fans of Lord Taylor who might be looking for him to sign their autograph books: I haven't got his phone number (Canatxx could probably help), but I do have his address - he lives in the same village.

£120,000.01 and it's yours. Plain brown envelope, please.

(Well, we've all got to make a living, haven't we?) 

Parish Mag, February 2009

The text that follows appeared in St Oswald's parish mag in February 2009.  The supporting documents, above, are taken from 'Suñol, Dom Gregory, and Durnford, G M: Textbook of Gregorian chant according to the Solesmes method; Desclée & Co, Belgium, [1929]' in an on-demand reprint from www.kessinger.net

When you’ve sung Hark the Herald 143 times since the beginning of the Christmas shopping season, which starts in about June, and when you’ve sung it 143 times a year for about the last 60 years, you could be forgiven, I think, for giving a deep sigh, even groan, and thinking “here we go again.”

Yes, I know it’s tradition, and we’ve all got to go through it, and in church we don’t actually sing it until Advent is nearly done, and we can all sing it from memory anyway (and get the words right - you know, the words some minor official decided had to be changed in case a Guardian reader or America might be offended), but sometimes you do yearn for something different; something that hasn’t been blared at you in shopping arcades for months and months and months in upbeat arrangements with drum machines and soupy strings and highly trained Disney vocalising agents so that when it’s time to celebrate the birth of Jesus you are heartily sick of the whole wretched business, not to mention flat broke.

So in our household we have a secret store of recordings of Christmas music that only see the light of day once a year, for a couple of weeks from Christmas Eve, and with them we refresh our ears, then at Epiphany they go back into the box until next year.

This year’s private gem chez No 9 was going to be Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s gay and enchanting Messe de Minuit (ca 1690), but unfortunately we can’t find it. At least, we can’t find the recording I wanted to spend Christmas with - the one with “authentic” French pronunciation of the Latin text.

 As you are all aware (are you not?), we choir persons, when we are required to sing in the Latin tongue, have to know that there are now two main ways of pronouncing the language - the Italian way and the German way (Italian - “Eggshell-seess”; German “Eck-sell-siss”).  Get it wrong and you will be a laughing-stock among the cognoscenti (“con-yo-shenty”)

But in Charpentier’s time French people had their own way of singing Latin (as you would, if you were French), and it would have been to the sound of Latin as pronounced by French people that Charpentier set the texts

So I was a little peeved a few years ago when I was invited to a sing-along Messe de Minuit at Bretton Hall in Wakefield to discover that we were going to sing it in Italian Latin, not in the old French pronunciation I had come to love.  I did remonstrate with our Leader, an eminent early-musicologist from the North-East Early Music Society, but I was slapped down pretty sharply.  “Whay-ay mon”, he pronounced, wisdomfully.  “They never sang it like that. It was all the invention of a discredited French scholar whose name I have conveniently forgotten.”

Ah indeed.  And I would have forgotten, too, if I hadn’t come across an exchange of letters [above] between Pope Pius X, Cardinal Dubois of Paris, and Pope Pius XI in the early 1900s, in which Cardinal Dubois dutifully agreed that the way that Latin was spoken in France did indeed render it incomprehensible to the rest of the Roman Catholic Communion.

So - “they never sang it like that”?  Excusez-moi?  Time for les devoirs,  je croix, mes chers amis de la Société Nord-Est de la Musique Ancienne. Also hé-hon, hé-hon, hé-hon, which is roughly French for yah-boo-sucks..

 

How much is the licence fee, again?

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.  The distinctly unlovely Woss is out of the cold and back on Auntie's payroll (half a million quid a month out of the licence fee, which makes my £400-a-month state pension look decidedly pathetic.) And ten minutes into his repulsive programme he's at it again.

Meanwhile, up in the boardroom, the top brass are debating whether to run an urgent appeal for funds to help the innocent victims of the latest war in Gaza, who've been bombed out of their homes, and decide no.  It wouldn't be ethical, see? 

Meanwhile, meanwhile, another lot of top brass, members of the Upper House, are definitely NOT taking bribes, as some uncouth scribes might allege, good heavens no, but are just exploiting loopholes in the rules so as legally to allow their clients to enjoy preferment by tweaking the odd bit of legislation here and there. For a consideration, you understand. For their time and effort. Perfectly legal, perfectly ethical, innit?

SSPX, Scottish history, pictures of bare ladies

Crafty but dangerous tactics by the holy head person of the RC church, undoing the excommunications of SSPX and their archhenchperson Bishop Richard Williamson, the nutter who denies the Holocaust, to the great annoyance of the souls of 6m Jewish people.  Crafty, because it brings back into the RC communion some 140,000 souls, which can't be bad for the collection plate, but dangerous, because the creed of the Lefebvrists is so right-wing as to border on the fundamentalist, and we all know where that leads (a return to the Dark Ages, basically.) Surely there are better ways of getting bums back on pews? A good start might be to sell off some of the treasures of the Vatican to help feed the starving people of the world.

Neil Oliver's history of Scotland has been so alluring as to woo me of a Saturday to watch it in real time. The history curriculum I was force-fed at school in the 1950s was, I am slowly realising, and partly thanks to Neil Oliver, an insult to the very word education.  It was the back end of Victorianism - Engand triumphant, rulers of the world (until the USA took over, and for pretty much the same reasons, viz and to wit, exploitation of the world's natural and human resources.)

My early education in history lessons took no account of Scotland (we beat them) or Wales (we beat them) or Ireland (we beat them) or France (we beat them) or Germany (we beat them, twice), and it pretended that this England had never been invaded or conquered.  It was not education: it wasn't even brain-washing. It just denied our innocent young minds access to one uncomfortable truth: that there are at least two sides in every argument, and it tried to persuade us that the best way to learn anything in England was to stick your fingers in your ears, put on the blindfold, and trust your teachers.  And the people who poured this one-sided drivel into us were paid, and handsomely, for the PR job they were doing for the State (or Queen Victoria.)

And it takes you years, and years, and years to undo the damage that your formal education did to you.

Let's have another go at Auntie

Damian Thompson's blog earlier today (don't bother scrolling down to the feed - it'll have changed by the time you get there, such is the nature of a feed) was having a long overdue bash at Radio 4's feeble attempt to inject a little spirituality into the otherwise slumber-inducing slot-filling that nowadays passes for programming at the Beeb (or should I say "in" the Beeb?  On "on" the Beeb?  Or perhaps "over" the Beeb, a broadcaster whose employees are never quite sure which is the right preposition to use or where a word accent falls) with the programme known to its chums as TFTD, or to us outsiders as Thought for the Day.

So it is refreshing to discover that for quite a long time somebody has been quietly and methodically deconstructing the spiritual sound-bites of TFTD and exposing them to the ridicule and belly-cackles they deserve - as one comment on Damian's blog observed: 'Have you seen this parody site? It takes each day's "thought" and subtly re-writes it to show what the "thinker" is actually "trying to say". Very funny.'  

This is the website, and it's good enough to sit next door to Damian Thompson at the very bottom of this page as a constantly updated feed.

Sorry, but it's the Orange brick... (cont'd)

A small matter, this, but since it cropped up yesterday in the same service as Pange lingua and Brightest and best it's worth mentioning.

OB 724

John Henry Hopkins (Jr - please don't confuse him with his dad) wrote We three kings of Orient are towards the end of the 19thC, when England still had an Empire and the CofE and Queen Victoria, and its only virtue (apart from an inexplicable popularity) is that it gives three different choir chaps a once-in-a-year opportunity to sing a solo.  But it's harmless stuff, and hardly worth, you might think, the attention of the text editors of the Orange Brick.  But they evidently don't think they're earning their keep unless they meddle with somebody else's words, and here they are, at it again.

The last verse of this jolly bit of nonsense runs, as you will remember:

Glorious now behold him arise,

King and God and sacrifice;

Heaven sings "alleluia",

"Alleluia" the earth replies.

I can't for the life of me see why the earnest editors of the Orange Brick felt it necessary to change the last two lines, not quite logically, to:

Alleluia, alleluia,

earth to heav'n [sic] replies.

Unless, of course, it is to claim copyright for the next 75 years and watch the boodle rolling in.

Which has given me another idea...

Sorry, but it's the Orange Brick again

I have decided that the only way to deal with the manifold sins, omissions and schoolboy howlers in the Orange Brick is to document them one by one as I (and my team of highly trained blooper-spotters) come across them during divine service, where the convention is that you do not hurl your hymnal at the nearest member of the PCC with a cry of "rubbish!"

So here is this morning's crop of boo-boos (from the "revised and corrected" edition of Complete Anglican Hymns Old & New.)

OB 473

Best of all is in 473, a new setting of the music, and the words, of the 13thC hymn by St Thomas Aquinas, Pange, lingua, corporis gloriosi mysterium (the last two verses of which constitute the Tantum ergo, by the way.) A literal translation of the first line would be something like "tell, my tongue, the mystery of the glorious body...".

THE WORDS

There are two versions of the first two lines in use - "Of the glorious body telling..." (EH; NEH; etc) and "Now, my tongue, the mystery telling..." (A&M; OB), and of the two, I prefer the second, where at least "tongue" (L. lingua) comes near the beginning, even if "sing"  (actually, "compose") (L. pangere) doesn't.

So far, so good.  EH and A&M then follow with only minor variations the translation by J M Neale (1818-1866) as amended by Edward Caswall (1814-1878) and a few others, which give v4 as:

Word made flesh, by word he maketh

very bread his flesh to be;

Man in wine Christ's blood partaketh:

And, if senses fail to see,

Faith alone the true heart waketh

To behold the mystery.

The Orange Brick, whose editors aim for inclusiveness above all else, even apparently above the rules of English grammar and syntax, changes the third line to:

"we, in wine, Christ's blood partaketh",

a howler which would have had Bunter in Quelch's study instanter.

To refresh your memories, Orange Brick people: the archaic suffixes  -est and -eth were used only in the singular, 2nd person and 3rd person respectively, and never in the plural. So - I partake, thou partakest, he/she/it partaketh:  we partake, you partake, they partake.

THE MUSIC

The old plainchant melody has survived in many forms, all slightly different one from another.  But in general plainchant was intended to be sung unaccompanied. The resurgence of ancient forms of chant in the Anglican church in the 19thC (mainly by the efforts of the Oxford Movement) mirrored the resurgence of Gregorian chant in the Roman Catholic church, but it was not until 1906 that Ralph Vaughan Williams, in the first edition of the English Hymnal, introduced plainchant for congregational use, implying the need for some sort of accompaniment.

RVW, already steeped in the theory and practice of the old church modes, was ideally placed to "invent" a form of harmonic accompaniment for plainchant that discreetly supported congregational singing without being unduly assertive.

But in the Anglican church, however high, hymns are sung in English, and English is a language which lacks those subtleties (and complexities) of Latin versification which inform the rediscovery of Gregorian chant by the monks of Solesmes Abbey in the 19thC. Plainchant, in English, enjoys a freedom of word-setting that makes Anglican plainchant very distinct from true Gregorian chant.

This freedom does not, however, extend to the mis-accentuation of words and mutilation of melodic line as in Andrew Moore's "arrangement" in the orange brick, which has just about as much historical truth in it as a photograph of Attila the Hun in a bikini, and is, if anything, slightly less subtle.

OB 85

Brightest and best of the suns of the morning, Reginald Heber's Epiphany hymn, is set in OB to Joseph Francis Thrupp's tune Epiphany, complete with Thrupp's curious bass line in the last but one bar of the third line - 

OB also gives Bach's Liebster Immanuel as the second tune (albeit in A minor, a tone down from EH1906, but manages to drop a clanger in the first bar of line 4, where the bass A should be an F (otherwise the D-minor chord lacks its necessary third).

But there is a worse clanger in the words of v4, which should read:

Vainly we offer each ample oblation,

Vainly with gifts would his favour secure:

Richer by far is the heart's adoration,

Dearer to God are the prayers of the poor.

The sense of those lines is, I would have thought, clear enough.  So why did the editors deliberately confuse the meaning by changing "ample" to "humble"? Do they simply not understand what the words meant? Do they think "vainly" here means "in vain"? The OED gives three meanings for the adverb "vainly" - futilely;  foolishly (obs. since the end of the 18thC); and conceitedly, with vanity.  It is pretty obvious from the context that Heber's usage is this last.

Pretty obvious to anybody reasonably well-read and competent in the English language, that is - but these are evidently qualities not considered important in a text editor in the Kevin Mayhew kingdom.

From the Land of the Free (- Range Brain Cell)

Well, it had to happen.  The country that gave you an online PhD for a dollar or two to save you the trouble of actually having to do any thinking after primary school will now ordain you so that you can pick up lucrative wedding jobs and issue expensive (though not legally recognised) certificates.  Don't take my word for it.  Click here and savour the delights of the Christian Glory Church, while I reach for the sick-bag.

There's one born every minute, and they're taking over...