associations, bisociations, coincidences....(2)

Well now, here's a thing.

SATURDAY

A new friend was enjoined by her neighbour and mentor bravely to employ the electric telephone that she might be assisted in her search for the solution to an anagram in a crossword that had been baffling her for a week, and she communicated with one.  The solution to the anagram - of CHOP IT RYE - one instantly offered (well five seconds + instantly) as HYPOCRITE.  Well, one does that sort of thing, crosswording and such,  to supplement one's pension, doesn't one?  One knows one does.

SUNDAY

It started with that most lustrous star in the firmament of the Fourth Estate, the excellent Sunday Express (and I mean that most sincerely), which broke the story that a certain Home Secretary (can't name her, but she could be an anagram of "Hi! I'm just a QC" - or, of course, not) might or might not have been using public money (ie yours and mine) to fund the watching in her household of, um, let us say films of a slightly azure hue.

Well, apart from the use of public money to fund it, I have no particular objection to people watching mucky movies if they want to.  One man's meat is another man's fish (as they say in France.)

But the greater obscenity was the autonomic reaction of the State machine (ie the House of Spin, aka 10 Downing Street)  - "There must be a Tory mole in the Home Office."

Excuse me?  Dear No 10 : yours is the same government which gave legal protection to whistleblowers.  In the interests solely of good and precise English, you understand, would you please explain to me what you think is the difference between a whistleblower and a mole? I really really really would like to know.

Evensong versicles for women clergy

You are free to download and print these versicles and responses.  Typographical copyright is waived.

Music and the Clergy

Songs of Praise, I have to confess, is a programme I watch only under duress.  However nobly young Aled might try to present it, it's always the same mixture of entertainment and buck teeth and crooners who sigh and sob a lot, and even when there is a half-decent hymn some invisible string-puller decides the viewers will change channels unless there are some creative twists, so verse 1 of Praise My Soul comes from Exeter Cathedral, verse 2 from Belfast and v3 either from a beach in Tenerife or somewhere in deepest Botswana (and I mention Botswana only, and subtly, to indicate that I am pretty well up on matters televisual.)

But last Sunday (22 March) was a bit of a surprise.  Three Irish priests singing very beautifully together.  I hadn't heard of them before, so I hadn't had time to prepare the usual cynical, however elegantly phrased, response, and they got in under my armour.  A neighbour then kindly lent me a CD of them.  Hm.  Nothing wrong with the voices, but the orchestrations and arrangements are only OK if you like that sort of thing (Mantovani, candy-floss and aural kitsch.)

The point is, of course, like the dog that could stand on its hind legs, not that the clergy do it well, but that they do it all.  These three Fathers could take off the dog-collars and get a job stacking shelves in Tesco's and they would still be worth listening to, but they are exceptional (though being Irish must help.)

We, on the choirstalls side of things, just do not associate fine singing with the clergy - and that isn't meant to sound rude or clique-y, it is just a statement of fact.  The tremulous clerics doing their best to intone the versicles are a fact of life, from parish church to evensong on the wireless, and every choirmaster and choirperson feels his or her heart sink when Gibbons in G is going to be intoned by Father Audubon in A-flat, E, and C# minor, often at the same time, and they are going to have to try and pick up the pieces.  And it must be worse for women clergy, because all the versicles are in the wretched bass clef (except in our Waterside parishes, of course - where willing choirpersons have reset them in both clefs - the next post is a downloadable, printable, copyright-free set (I hope!) of the usual Evensong versicles and responses, but with the versicles in the treble clef.)

But there is another side to it.  I gather, from the dark whispers that you pick up on if you accidentally bend down and put your ear to the keyhole as you pass the clergy vestry, that the two most terrifying prospects for the newly ordained curate are sermons and singing. I cannot imagine what that first sermon must feel like for him or her.  I really feel for you (as they say.) You thought you were to preach peace and love, and convey God's word as only you can do, but down there nice Mrs Featherington-Fotheringhay-Hawhaw and old Albert the sexton are just waiting to turn into pit bull terriers the moment you reach the top step of the pulpit, and the rest of the congregation have shed their Sunday suits and become leopards, alligators, and marauding lions seeking whom they might devour.  And they've got their eye on you.  And they're hungry. They know they can't heckle you when you're in the pulpit, but just wait till they get you at the social next Wednesday. "Oh vicar - have you got a moment?"

And even if you survive the sermon you've still got some singing bits to do, and now even the choir are sniggering at you behind their hands.

No, of course it isn't like that (is it?)  Congregations want you to do well, and choirs want you to do well, and on the singing front the RSCM wants you to do well, which is why it has joined forces with Bangor University to offer courses in sacred music, some of which are aimed specifically at clergy.  More information here (though detailed syllabuses and prospectuses are still awaited.)

The courses are mostly distance learning, with only the occasional need to set your Satnav to find Bangor.  And without a doubt you will have the protective arms of the RSCM around you - no chance of finding Mrs Featherington-Fotheringhay-Hawhaw and old Albert on the same course.

You hope.

associations, bisociations, coincidences...

It has always intrigued me that when you've been following one train of thought for a few days little pieces of relevant information appear, unbidden.  Coincidence, because you have become sensitised in a particular corner of your thinking?  Divine intervention?  

Arthur Koestler coined the term 'bisociation' (The Act of Creation, 1964) to offer a theory of the creative act (which at its simplest informs something as ubiquitous as the joke), and his ideas have indirectly led to a more general theory of  'conceptual blending', where disparate ideas come together and generate creative thought.

But this curious process of unbidden relevance is an associative (and accretive) process, not a bisociative one: it is the connections between ideas, not their differences, that seem to be at work.

This was the sequence of associations this week:

1.  Translation (literature)

2.  Hildegard of Bingen

3.  Mothering Sunday

4.  Church Times today, 27 March, letters page

Translation 

One of the week's possible blog posts was to be called In Praise of Translators.  There were three obvious ones - translators of Dostoyevsky (David Magarshack), Eco (William Weaver), and Borges (Norman Thomas di Giovanni).  Halfway through the article, I suddenly remembered another - Christa Weisman, who prepared an 'unrhymed, unscanned literal' translation of Goethe's Faust for Howard Brenton's 1995 play.  The final words of the Chorus Mysticus in Part II of Faust, well known for its magical appearance at the end of Mahler's 8th Symphony, in German begins Alles vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis, which Brenton gives as  

All that passes

Is merely a symbol;

Here the unwinnable

                 Is won:

The impossible

                 Is done;

The eternally feminine

Pulls us up to heaven.

Hildegard of Bingen

The Oxford Book of Flexible Anthems arrived yesterday.  Flicking through it at random, I came across Hildegard's Laus Trinitati, in English, but with an editorial footnote:

The composer uses the word 'creatrix', ie a female creator, in the second line

as indeed she does/did - 

Laus Trinitati, que sonus

et vita ac creatrix omnium...

Mothering Sunday

Every Sunday at St Oswald's the congregation is given an A4 sheet with bits and bobs of information about events in the three Waterside parishes, the day's readings and Gospel, and so on.  That's on the back (or front) of a preprinted "bulletin" for the day, called Sunday Link, which always features a short prayer to help the congregation get in the mood, sorry, to assist meditation and contemplation.  Last Sunday, Mothering Sunday, the prayer read:

God, you love us as a caring mother, and we 

inherit our gifts from you.

Help us to recognise them, nurture them

and use them, whatever our age or gender,

so that we may share your mothering love

with others...

Church Times, 27 March 2009

A letter to drag us back to the real world:

Sir: You say, with qualification, that

those who "refer to God as 'she' are 

perfectly at liberty to do so" 

(Leader, 20 March.)  But biblical

usage includes contrast: our God and King

is neither "the Queen of Heaven"

(Jeremiah 44.17) nor "the great goddess"

(Acts 19.27).  So male titles for

God require non-use of feminine ones.

It doesn't automatically follow, of course,

but the letter was from a male member

of the clergy.

On the other hand, the cartoon was as splendid as usual.

Dulce Jésus Mío - 3

To mop up a few stray thoughts -

the music of Dulce shouldn't 'work'.  The harmony, even judged by baroque/renaissance notions of correctness, is clumsy, and the melody is too dependent on the third.  There is no reason to suppose that Fr Piotr Nawrot's transcription is not faithful to the original.  Yet it does work, and I think it has a simple beauty that (to me) is the expression of a perfect faith.

I am troubled, when I find myself rejoicing at the rediscovery of this music, by an awareness of how it came to exist.  The conquistadores were not all Jesuits.  Colonialism is always ugly, and the suppression of indigenous cultures and religions and the ruthless extermination of entire peoples in Central and South America was a crime against humanity that should be on all our consciences still.

However, we can only deal with what is, not what should have been.  Well, that's my excuse, anyway.

For the sound of music still played and sung today in Chiquitanía, try these (for example - there are more out there):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ_wp_s71kE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaS6J6CspOU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rV3AULHNKY

Lamartine - Le Vallon

Just a quickie, honest.

When I was about sixteen I was tutored in the necessary skills involved in reading French poetry in national competitions for the glory of our boys' grammar school, and when I didn't win, after KEGS had paid for my train ticket to Londres, I was coventrated for a while by the staff (silly buggers.)  But the tutoring was done by an assistant,  Bernard Dick, who was on the school's payroll for perhaps no more than a year, and I don't know, perhaps he saw something that wasn't really there in me - but if it wasn't there before, it was there when he'd finished with me - an abiding love for French poetry and the glorious sound it makes, and I'm still a bit of a dab hand at the old liaisons, however dangereuses at my time of life (though Pierre Bernac's treatise is still the best guide to the vagaries of French pronunciation at different times and in different circonstances, not that I know anything about it, not being French, mind.)

The nub of this quickie is that it has taken me nearly fifty years to find the poem I read that day in Londres in the true competitive spirit of the English School - win, and then forget it, or you're no gentleman.  My memory of it was that it was de Musset.  It wasn't.  I seemed to remember, later,  that it was a conversation between a lute-enabled poet and a philosopher (been to Montmartre lately? It's changed a bit.)  So Victor Hugo leapt to mind, and it took me a very long time to read all the poetry Hugo wrote only to find that it wasn't by him (nice journey, though.)

Anyroadup, to cut a very long story short, last year the web came up with the goods.  The line I had  remembered a bit, from rhythm and a repetition of "J'ai trop... j'ai trop... j'ai trop", was this:

J'ai trop vu, trop senti, trop aimé dans ma vie...

I won't do your work for you, for the joy of exploration and discovery is its own reward, but here's two hints - Lamartine.  Vallon.  (And another - Byron.)

Bonne nuit, chers amis.  Maintenant, c'est à vous.

Herzliebster Jesu

First, the easy stuff:  the text of Ah! dearest Jesu in the Orange Brick, marked as alt. by the editors, has been so alt-ed that what is left will only do you good if you believe in homeopathy.

If we compare the text of the OB with, say,  EH or NEH, we find that what in v3 in EH reads

/

/

For man's atonement, while he nothing heedeth,

God intercedeth.

becomes in OB

/

/

for our atonement Christ himself is pleading,

still interceding.

I'm no theologian, but I'm not sure what's going on here.  Where has while he nothing heedeth gone?  Was it important? And are the two lines taken together supposed to be a clarification of a perhaps somewhat obscure passage ('God intercedeth' - with whom? ) or is there a change of meaning?  And if a change of meaning, are we to suppose that the editors of the OB consider themselves to be better poets than the writer of these lines?

For there is a further difficulty - getting at the Urtext.  The vocabulary of this English poem isn't the vocabulary of the original German text, or rather, I haven't found it in the original text.  The translation in EH is attributed to "Y.H" (Robert Bridges' Yattendon Hymnal), and it isn't until NEH that the translation (the same one as in EH) is attributed to Bridges by name.  Bridges' translation is a poet's translation, and the sense, or some of the sense, of Heerman's original 15 verses Bridges condenses into five.

Here's some more.  There is a considerable difference in import between v1 in EH

Ah, holy Jesu, how hast thou offended,

that man to judge thee hath in hate pretended?

/

/

and OB

Ah, holy Jesu, how hast thou offended,

that so to judge thee mortals have pretended?

/

/

and if that isn't a bowdlerising job, then I don't know what is.  Bridges has here been sanitised so that we don't have to think.

In v2 there is another change - such a minor one that it's hardly worth mentioning except to let it advertise its own silliness (again, EH first)

Who was the guilty?  Who brought this upon thee?

Alas, my treason, Jesu, hath undone thee.

'Twas I, Lord Jesu, I it was denied thee:

I crucified thee.

and then OB -

Who was the guilty?  Who brought this upon thee?

Alas, O Lord, my treason hath undone thee.

'Twas I, Lord Jesu, I it was denied thee:

I crucified thee.  

I can't see that the intention (of the editors) was to tidy up the repetition of 'Jesu', for the result is only the repetition of 'Lord'.  I think the intention was to smooth out the flow of Bridges' rather jagged line (which it certainly does.)

But did they pause to consider that Bridges might have written the line that way on purpose? That there might be a poetic motive behind these clumsy inversions, archaisms and dramatic juxtapositions?

After all, Robert Bridges also wrote this:

I have loved flowers that fade,

Within whose magic tents

Rich hues have marriage made

With sweet unmemoried scents:

A honeymoon delight--

A joy of love at sight,

That ages in an hour--

My song be like a flower!

I have loved airs that die

Before their charm is writ

Along a liquid sky

Trembling to welcome it.

Notes, that with pulse of fire

Proclaim the spirit's desire,

Then die, and are nowhere--

My song be like an air!

Die, song, die like a breath,

And wither as a bloom;

Fear not a flowery death,

Dread not an airy tomb!

Fly with delight, fly hence!

'Twas thine love's tender sense

To feast; now on thy bier

Beauty shall shed a tear.

Now it seems to me, although I can claim no qualifications whatsoever for banging on thus about poetics (O-Level Eng Lang and Lit in 1958 ? hardly!), that Robert Seymour Bridges knew what he was about.  Gosh - he could even handle the subjunctive.  He knew when to change the metre to confound expectations (cf the metres of the first lines of the three stanzas), and he knew when to use those weapons in the poet's arsenal of inversion and enjambement (3rd stanza, last three lines) to telling effect.  So why can't little people leave his words alone and try to hear what he said, instead of what they think he ought to have said?

And a last, though relatively minor, observation.  I couldn't find this Bridges poem in any of my (printed) texts at home, so I tried online reference sources.  Eventually giving up and googling, I came across several texts which claimed to be authentic (all in online hymnals.)  No two were the same.  Each text had suffered some unacknowleged editorial tweak or other.  The line for man's atonement, while he nothing heedeth appears variously as for our atonement, while we nothing heeded and (much, much worse) for man's atonement, while God nothing heedeth, a complete misunderstanding of the line. Some alleged versions of Bridges don't like the vocative form Jesu so they change it to Jesus.  Some, in their earnest desire to be PC, try to substitute you for thou, and can only do a pathetic half-job (a complete rewrite would be needed.) And so on.

My favourite, though, must be from Oremus -

while we nothing heedeth

- at which moment, I groaned, put my head in my hands, and sobbed, and wished I'd never started on this one.

Some pointers (not links).

Google Robert Bridges and Homophone in English, and then Bridges and hymns - two downloads from the Gutenberg Project.

And, if you're really interested, I.A. Richards' Practical Criticism is out there, too.  Very dated, but still good on techniques of analysis (without having to tear off the butterfly's wings.)

acknowledgements:  Judith Blezzard, Senior Lecturer in Music, University of Liverpool, for a lot of useful information about Bridges' Yattendon Hymnal in an article here

Cracking Church Times last week, Gromit

Much of the time the thrill of reading the Church Times on a Friday is akin to the naughty feeling you used to get when you delved into the minor prophets at the back of the OT under the bedclothes with a torch - wonderful if you suffer from insomnia.

But occasionally something goes wrong, as it did last week (Friday 13th, actually), and you open it, and find all your old preconceptions challenged by insights, wit, and even sense, and then suddenly it's ten o'clock and you haven't even put the kettle on yet.

Unfortunately I cannot share with you (as we say nowadays, even in church, which is supposed to be holy) the delights of last Friday (the 13th, I believe) (of March) because of the law of copyright.  You will have to buy the paper, as I do (and sadly you can't gift-aid your subs.) I could give you references to everything worth reading - name, page number, the lot, but it wouldn't help you very much, Gromit.  You missed last Friday's excellent edition (with that very risqué Page 3) and now it is too late.  The moment has passed.   Last week's CT is a goner.  It has lain on its back and curled up its toes.  It is an ex-Church Times.  You could use the online archive of course, but you have to be a subscriber.  Not to the paper edition, but to the online edition. Which means effectively that to gain access to the archives you either pay twice or get a very large garage and keep your own pile of mouldering papers with bits cut out of them.

Oh well.  I suppose it's a worthy attempt to save the rain forests. 

A plea - Berkeley's I sing of a maiden

Just a quickie.

I have been trying to pin down where I first saw Lennox Berkeley's beautifully crafted setting of I sing of a maiden/that is makéless - the setting with the S and T in canon at the octave.  An old choir of mine sang it, but I've never been able to find it since.

Anyone who can furnish a pdf with source notes would earn my undying gratitude.

Geoff

Dulce Jesús mío

Following on from a recent musing [in the parish mag] , I was thinking today that languages can be difficult things to sing if you don’t speak them.  Imagine, for example, a French choir wanting to sing “We plough the fields and scatter”.  “Ow do we say zees word plough?’, they would ask.  “Ees eet ‘pluff’, like ze rough?  ‘ploff’ like ze cough? ‘ploo’, like through?  ‘ploch’, like lough? ‘ploe’ like ze dough? ‘plugh’, as in ze borough? ‘plup’, comme ze hiccough? ‘plow’, like ze bough? Or ‘plor’, like ze bought?”

 

Sensitive as French people would be about pronunciation after the rebuke from Pius X that I mentioned a couple of months ago, I think the last thing they would do, the people of this choir, would be to take a vote on it.  They, being French, and punctilious about matters of language, would find an English person and ask  (they would probably still end up pronouncing it pompyloo, but that’s because they, the French, do like to do things their own way, bless ’em.)

 

I only mention this because the other night, in another place where singists gather, exactly this hiatus of ignorance occurred in relation to the pronunciation of a foreign place-name, and unbelievably, unless you are acquainted with the peculiar ways in which English committee democracy work, a vote was taken, despite that fact that at least two people in the room knew exactly how it should be pronounced.

 

It reminded me of a similar incident years ago, with a very different choir - the pronunciation of a Latin word being decided by a show of hands.  It was a triumph of democracy over education and knowledge, and it reminded me of a very useful maxim given to me by a French part-time monk, a good friend and mentor, when I was in my formative years - “democracy is the enemy of excellence.” (If you think I’m making this all up - his name was Fr Bernard Dick, and he was pear-shaped.)

 

Language matters.  The language of a culture embodies the distinctness of that culture, and when a language dies (as Welsh very nearly did 30 years ago) a whole culture dies with it, and in that death a unique history is lost for ever.

 

One of the more enjoyable jobs that I’ve been doing on and off for the last three years is making performing editions for some singist chums of music from the period of the conquistadores.  Older members of the congregation might remember stout Cortez, who introduced Christianity and influenza to South America, and who was wont to stand upon peaks in Darien (or so Keats tells us) and survey, with his men, the wild Pacific, and have a bit of a ponder (or surmise) thereupon. One of the more interesting consequences of their trips to South America is that the Jesuits founded missions (or “reducciones”), and churches, and eventually cathedrals, and they had thoughtfully taken with them some composers and instrumentalists and singers and the tools of their trade.  The clash of Catholic Spanish culture with the ancient religions and musical cultures  of South America had unexpectedly fruitful consequences for  church music.  In large parts of Bolivia the teachings of the Jesuits sparked off a cultural revolution, and in a very short time local people, particularly children, were singing western music and playing western instruments in missions and churches.

 

Enthused by the ready acceptance of catholicism by the indigenous peoples, the composers set to work with a will.  Years behind them, their continent, Europe, had changed, and the new musical ideas of the Renaissance were beginning to take hold.  But the composers now living in South America had learnt their art in the last years of the Baroque, and that was the style of composition that they knew.  They were working with willing musicians from a completely different culture, and the exchange of ideas must have been wonderful for them, and there was a cross-fertilisation that produced an entirely new offshoot of the Baroque - old-style European church music reinvigorated by the music of a completely different, even alien, culture, an historical hiccup that has only really come to light in the last thirty years or so, mainly thanks to one man - Fr Piotr Nawrot, a Polish priest who has been transcribing much of this forgotten music.  That I was able to get my greedy hands on four volumes of Fr Nawrot’s recensions is entirely due to the efforts  of my dear friend-of-old,  Dr Viv Burr, Reader in Psychology at the University of Huddersfield, who in her spare time does the occasional two-woman recital with soprano Mandy Doyle, and who is also very good at lending people books of interesting old music and then smiling sweetly and saying “could we have, say, four duets by November?”

  

The texts of a lot of the choral music from this period are in Castilian Spanish, which is easy enough to understand and translate, but some of it is in Chiquitano, a Bolivian language from the region now known as Chiquitanía (accent on the last I, please) which is jolly difficult to pronounce or translate if you don’t have a dictionary (and as far as I know there isn’t one.)  Further, Chiquitano has undergone a spelling reform  as part of a very worthy drive by S American scholars to preserve and reinvigorate languages that live in speech but don’t have much of a written record, and reformed Chiquitano doesn’t look an awful lot like ancient Chiquitano, which might make singing the following hymn a bit of a challenge, even for the most accomplished linguist (the music, but only for v1, is in the following post.)

But first, the text.  The first two verses are in Spanish; the rest in Chiquitano.  The English translations I confess to, and no, I don't know a single word of Chiquitano, but Fr Nawrot thoughtfully provided Spanish glosses and it's those I've translated.

And this is fingers-crossed time - I've tried to use non-Ascii IPA characters on the blog before, and what I thought I'd left working happily on Sunday night had turned to garbage by Monday morning.  Your Chiquitano text should show an occasional lower-case i with a bar through it.

 

1. Dulce Jesús mío,             Sweet Jesu mine

mirad con piedad                Look with pity

mi alma perdida                  on my soul, damned                

por culpa mortal.                 by mortal sin

 

2. Llorad ojos míos,             Weep, mine eyes,

llorad sin cesar,                   weep without ceasing

a Dios ofendido                    to God, offended

con mi mal obrar.               by my wicked deeds

 

 

3. Yya1 Jesuchrixhto,         Lord Jesus Christ,

apuk1rui                         have pity on me,

ityaku  niyausus1p1           my soul damned

ninait1 sobi.                           by mortal sin

 

4. Apuk1rui,                          Have pity,

oxonx1 aemo,                       I am repentant:

chenauncup1 caima              without wishing to

n1nait1 sobi.                          I have offended thee

 

5. Asasat1 iñemo,                 Behold me -

ñonkat1 aemo,                      in thee I trust,

ache na graciax                    grant me thy grace

mo na uxia sobi.                   that I might be good

 

6. Acheityo uxhia                 and grant me

isonkobo,                               a good  death

niyasata aekat1                 thus allowing me to gaze upon thee

ta naesa ape.                         in heaven

 

Dulce Jesús mío

Go, lovely rose - the music

I mentioned Edmund Waller's poem Go, lovely rose (12 December 08, or click the Waller tag).  Well, it's taken more than two months, but at last I've found the music, from about 1987, I think.  I can't remember that  it was ever performed.  It's probably better with harpsichord or clavichord acc't rather than piano.

Click on the images for a decent sized copy for printing out.  For clarity files are quite big (around 1MB) - they would have been smaller if Blogger accepted .gifs.

Parish Mag - March 2009

 

There was I, all robed up and about to sing a festival evensong (with about 120 other choir persons, you understand, not on my own) and I suddenly realised that there were only about three choristers there who were medal-less: me, and a couple of tiny trebles who appeared to be about six years old.  It was a mite embarrassing.  People were giving me sideways looks as they clinked and clanked their processional way to the choirstalls, some of them bent low under the weight of a veritable ironmonger’s-shopworth of gongs.  “Poor old git,” I heard one of them say, pityingly: “ ’e can’t ’ave bin in t’job long. ’E ent got no tin yet.”

 

It’s a bit horrifying when you realise that old anno domini has been creeping up on you, and you’ve been doing church choir singing for more than half a century, on and off, with no medals to show for it.  When I were a lad the head chorister had a gong with a red ribbon, and the rest of us had blue to show that we weren’t the head chorister. Now the ribbons are all colours of the rainbow, and I find it all quite bewildering.  A fellow bass from Broughton took me on one side and tried to explain it.  “That one’s the Bishop’s Award”, he said.  “That’s the Dean’s, and that’s the Archdeacon’s. That one’s Long Service, and that’s Loyalty and Perseverance.  “What’s that green and pink one, then?” I asked in all innocence.  “Ah!”, said my friend.  “That un’s special.  You only get that when you’ve done Stanford in B-flat 500 times or Amazing Grace twice.  It’s like the George Cross, see? Bravery in the face of adversity.” 

 

The event was, of course, the annual festival evensong and presentation of awards organised by our local branch of the choirpersons’ union, the Royal School of Church Music, held in recent years in Blackburn Cathedral. There is quite a lot of music to rehearse in a very short time (two 60-minute sessions) and much of it is unfamiliar to many of the singers, so it is always a severe test of the old sight-reading skills.  This year it was even more so: coming so soon after Advent and Christmas, the event, on Saturday 17 January, had given little time for preparatory rehearsals in the parishes and everybody was thrown in at the deep end, with a 74-page book of music to rehearse and perfect by 3:30pm.  It was a severe test for us peasants from the sticks, who are used to pootling our way through Sunday services, mostly singing jingles in unison, but this year we had some real experts singing with us, and some good stuff to get our teeth into besides.

 

Blackburn’s cathedral choir is - or should I say its choirs are - among the best in the land, even though there is no choir school to provide intensive musical education for its junior choristers.  All the more reason therefore to celebrate the accomplished musicianship of the boy and girl trebles of the cathedral choirs, and that of the children of the other choirs of excellence in the diocese, many of whom were there singing on the day.

 

Something that should be a cause for rejoicing for at least 50% of human beings is that girls are no longer locked out of the choir vestry lest they squeak or tease the boys or want to sing Amazing Grace all the time.  It is a revolution that has happened in my lifetime and I am glad I was there to see it.  I don’t know whether this experiment was ever tried, but it should have been, to counter the more ludicrous physiological arguments that the anti-female brigade (that included my dad) used to haul out:  take six nine or 10-year-old boys and girls in any proportion,  stick ’em behind a screen and have them sing Oh For the Wings of a Dove one at a time, in random order, then say which were the girls and which the boys.  I’m surprised it hasn’t been done on the telly. How, I suspect, would the mighty be fallen.  If a boy of 10 has the priceless opportunity to grasp and display the subtleties of Renaissance polyphony (Tallis and Byrd are routinely sung in our cathedrals) why were girls denied that opportunity for so long? Thin end of the wedge, perhaps?

 

Richard Tanner, the cathedral’s director of music (who was in charge on Saturday) was full of praise after the rehearsals.  He directs courses in the US, and he told us random assortment of choristers that what we had achieved in two hours would have taken a week on the other side of the pond.

 

And let him have the last word on what choristering is all about.

 

How do we sing the Lord's song in a strange land – the strange land of early twenty-first century society? We get as many people to sing it as possible because we see that in doing so we are advancing the mission and ministry of the church, a church which says to each and every person: your talents and gifts are precious. They are to be used for God's glory.