Knoxville: Summer of 1915

In this time of leaving, becoming aware of all the places and things and people at Notre Dame I will see no more, I have spent some time thinking about those other times that are now lost to me: my undergraduate years, high school (however unpleasant), even my childhood. In a short while my years at Notre Dame will join those others, to add to the pain of recollection (which, happy or not, is painful; that is the nature of nostalgia).

Ah, but now it is nearly summer, the part of the year I remember best from my childhood. (For all my love of Rilke and autumn and that sort of Sehnsucht, there is something more personal about the memories of summer.) I suspect it was the same for James Agee, who wrote about his own childhood in Knoxville, Tennessee:

It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds' hung havens, hangars. People go by; things go by.
...
On the rough wet grass of the backyard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine... with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth, and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night.

May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble, and in the hour of their taking away.

After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.

That is from Agee's essay, "Knoxville: Summer of 1915", which was later selected to serve as the introduction to his semi-autobiographical (posthumous) novel, A Death in the Family.

Samuel Barber set much of Agee's essay to music in his Knoxville: Summer of 1915. I am not sure which is my favorite recording of this admirable work (it is probably either that of Eleanor Steber or Leontyne Price). But in any case I will refer you here, where you can listen to it. (That particular recording is not special, but is the most convenient and legal to come by.)

I have been listening to the piece many times in the last few weeks. It resonates with the sense of loss I already have begun to feel about this particular place, these particular people. Oh, the terrible sweetness of nostalgia! — nostalgia, even, as in this prose poem and this composition, for a time I myself have never known and will never know. Discussing the piece in a 1949 radio interview, Barber noted its expression of "a child's feeling of loneliness, wonder, and lack of identity in that marginal world between twilight and sleep." Do you recall these feelings? I do. Sometimes I wonder whether there's much difference at all between the insecurities of childhood and the insecurities of the present.

Graduate Transience

As for the graduate student, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.

In these last few weeks at Notre Dame, now that my recital is over and I have only seven more pages to write about Sarum chant and its influence on English polyphony, things have turned bittersweet. ("Bittersweet": another overused word. Oh well.) One becomes aware of how brief two years actually is. Yesterday I had my last class; today I had my last lesson and cantored for the last time at the Basilica. Wandering around before Mass, I saw some saints in the windows I hadn't noticed before: Margaret (with snake), Mechtilde, Jerome. At lunch I happened to run into some fellow sacred music students, and afterwards we basked in the sun and shot the breeze, enjoying some Gemütlichkeit. (An aside: the first recorded use of "shoot the breeze" is from 1941, but beyond that nobody is quite sure where the expression comes from. How many other etymologies have we lost?) This is exactly the sort of thing one can do in a community, and it is exactly the sort of thing that is cut short when graduate study concludes and we scatter to the ends of the earth. How can we hope to have real community without some semblance of rootedness? The Benedictine vows of stability, conversion of manners, and obedience are much better things than we give them credit for.

G.M. Hopkins, "Spring"

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring —
         When weeds in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
         Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
         The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
         The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?
         A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden. — Have, get, before it cloy,
         Before it cloud, Christ, lord and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
         Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

Christ ist erstanden

"The Resurrection", from Matthias Grünewald's stunning Isenheim Altarpiece. This is the primary reason I want to visit Alsace.

Lutheran Worship, the old blue hymnal we used to use, had its flaws — and they were numerous — but one thing I liked very much about it was its pairing of two particular Easter hymns, Christ lag in Todesbanden (#123) and Christ ist erstanden (#124), on facing pages: it's a grand thing to go from one great melody to another. (They're both based on everyone's favorite sequence, Victimae paschali laudes, anyway.) For your paschal edification, here are settings of each hymn:

J.S. Bach: Christ lag in Todesbanden, chorale, the second movement of BWV 4.


Michael Praetorius: Christ ist erstanden, from Polyhymnia Caduceatrix et Panegyrica (1619).

Media vita in morte sumus

In the midst of life we are in death:
of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord?

Recently I've been looking into Tudor church music, especially the sort written during the reign of Mary I. (Foxe's Book of Martyrs notes that "Mary, having succeeded by false promises in obtaining the crown, speedily commenced the execution of her avowed intention of extirpating and burning every Protestant." So you see, children, propaganda is not so modern an invention as we sometimes think.)

The casual listener of classical music may know the name Thomas Tallis, but it is far less likely he knows that of John Sheppard (c.1515-1558), who also wrote music at about the same time. (Oh, the vicissitudes of musical popularity!) Sheppard's work is every bit as impressive as that of his better-known contemporary. Chief among his compositions is a remarkable six-voice setting of the text Media vita, the antiphon for the Nunc Dimittis at Compline on major feast days in the two weeks before Passion Sunday. Though in the one surviving source for this motet (Oxford: Christ Church Library, Mus. 979-983) the tenor partbook is missing, there are several reconstructions, including one by the Tallis Scholars.

Listen: John Sheppard - Media vita,
performed by the Tallis Scholars (dir. Peter Phillips), available here

The word "poignant", like the word "unique", is terribly overused these days, but I daresay that this motet is poignant; in any case it is well-suited for Lent. It may not even be hyperbole to say that Sheppard's Media vita is one of the most important works of English polyphony.

Music Links Round-up

• Click the squares: Wondering why there are no dissonances? 'Cause it's a pentatonic scale!
  
• Nokia fugue: Not bad fugal writing, really. The motivic derivations are not quite as tight as Bach (cf. BWV 547), but there are nice little surprises. (Look for the inversion, for example.)
  
• Compleat organ works of Bach, available for free download
  
• Arvo Pärt Information Archive
  
• Bizarre Musical Deaths
  
• Our Polyphony Class Web-site: with recordings of Renaissance polyphony by our professor's (pretty good) ensemble, Pomerium
  

And, for good measure, some web-logs concerning matters musical:
Chantblog
Magister Perotinus
Pipe Organs (dormant, but its archives are worth giving a look-see)

Humor and Religion

It has been a general guideline of mine, for years, now, not to trust anyone without a sense of humor. Humor is a good and worthwhile thing, and I will have no truck with anyone who insists on doing without it. (Perhaps there are some people who never acquired a proper sense of humor; if so, these are wretches to be pitied. What I am chiefly concerned with, here, is the sort of person who has a sense of humor and seeks to stifle it.) The particular misconception of the humorless is that lightheartedness somehow contradicts the effort to take things seriously, that humor is somehow the opposite of earnestness.

I am sorry to say that there are a great many religious people who feel (and act) this way. Many of them are convinced that religion is A Very Serious Thing Indeed, and that any attempt to acknowledge the inherent humor of certain things (dropped thuribles, outlandish lectors, ridiculous vestments) would be to detract from the dignity and reverence and decorum due to the Mass.

(An aside: it's always about the dignity and reverence and decorum of the Mass, in some Roman Catholic circles. What is dignity and reverence and decorum, anyway? Is it a Mass where nobody smiles, or acknowledges the presence of others? Is proper reverence so easily confused with catatonic rigidity? Mind you, I shudder as much as the next person at the thought of those horror stories of post-Vatican II liturgies — beach balls at Mass, rainbow vestments — but one can acknowledge the human dimension of the liturgy without resorting to such excesses. In any case, it might be worth pointing out that regrettably varicolored vestments are not the sole province of hippies and Franciscans.)

But where was I? Oh, yes, humor. Would you believe, like St. John Chrysostom — or Jorge the monk in Eco's The Name of the Rose — that Christ never laughed? I certainly hope not; there's enough to be construed as humor in the Gospels to suggest that he did. (Roman Catholics may take particular satisfaction in that the Church was founded on a pun.)

In any case, if you would associate with religious types at all, I would suggest the sort with a sense of humor: most Anglicans, for example. Avoid the dire sort of fundamentalists (of both Protestant and Papist persuasions). As for me, I shall be having a Life of Brian viewing party next Sunday.

Miscellaneous Links:
A Joking Matter: And Jesus Laughed
On the Second Book of Aristotle's Poetics (his lost treatise on Comedy)
Umberto Eco web-site

The Venice Baroque Orchestra

This evening I attended a performance by the Venice Baroque Orchestra. It was quite good. The program included concerti by Albinoni (yes, he of the famous Adagio. Except that that particular Adagio was not actually written by him), Galuppi, Tartini, and of course Vivaldi. The popular insult for Vivaldi is that he wrote the same concerto five hundred times; indeed, in mediocre performances this often comes across as accurate. But in a really good performance — like the one I heard tonight, fortunately — the music sounds much more inspired. (The key for the performer, I suspect, is to become aware of the improvisatory nature of the music. Paradoxically, one must work far harder to make music sound as though it were improvised.) When it is performed well, one can understand why Bach thought so highly of the music of his contemporary.

Incidentally, I think I might look into becoming a theorbist. Surely the demand for skilled players of the theorbo is great, is it not? (Not every over-eager high schooler with some slight skill at playing the theorbo is deciding to do it for a living — now is he? — unlike the case in certain other instruments, the blogger added, insultingly.) And the fellow who played it tonight looked to be having an awful lot of fun.

Mark Your Calendars:

An ORGAN RECITAL
Reyes Organ & Choral Hall, DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, Notre Dame
7:00pm, 30 April 2011
The program will feature both the Paul Fritts Opus 24 and our 17th-century Neapolitan instrument (by an anonymous builder, restored by Martin Pasi). A small schola will perform a chorale as well as plainchant from the office of compline.

Program:
1. J.S. Bach (1685-1750): Prelude & Fugue in G Major, BWV 541
   
2. Paul Hindemith (1895-1963): Organ Sonata No. 2
   
3. Domenico Zipoli (1688-1726): selections from Intavolatura per Organo e Cimbalo, Part I
   
4. Johann Adam Reincken (1643-1722): Chorale Fantasia on An Wasserflüssen Babylon
   
5. J.S. Bach: Prelude & Fugue in A Major, BWV 536
   
6. Jehan Alain (1911-1940): Postlude pour l'Office des Complies, AWV 13

Annunciation

Today is the Feast of the Annunciation. For my part, I will be playing for a service with the (precipitously high-church, Deo gratias) Lutherans over at Emmaus.

Shortly after the account of the Annunciation (Luke 1:26-38) comes the greatest of the Biblical canticles, the Magnificat. For your edification, I offer an excellent recording of Arvo Pärt's setting of this song, as well as two excerpts of a sermon Luther gave on the Magnificat.

Listen: Arvo Pärt, Magnificat
(Performed by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, dir. Tõnu Kaljuste, found on this CD.)
Luke 1:46-47 (Authorised Version): And Mary said, "My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour."

For God is not magnified by us so far as His nature is concerned — He is unchangeable — but He is magnified in our knowledge and experience, when we greatly esteem Him and highly regard Him, especially as to his grace and goodness. Therefore the holy Mother does not say, “My voice or my mouth, my hand or my thoughts, my reason or my will, doth magnify the Lord.” For there be many who praise God with a loud voice, preach about Him with high sounding words, speak much of Him, dispute and write about Him and paint His image; whose thoughts dwell often upon Him, and who reach out after Him and speculate about Him with their reason; there are also many who exalt Him with false devotion and a false will. But Mary says, “My soul doth magnify Him” — that is, my whole life and being, mind and strength, esteem Him highly.

Luke 1:48-49: "For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed. For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name."

The "great things" are nothing less than that she became the Mother of God, in which work so many and such great good things are bestowed upon her as pass man's understanding. For on this there follows all honor, all blessedness, and her unique place in the whole of mankind, among whom she has no equal, namely, that she had a child by the Father in Heaven, and such a child. She herself is unable to find a name for this work, it is too exceedingly great; all she can do is break out in the fervent cry: "They are great things", impossible to describe or define. Hence men have crowded all her glory into a single word, calling her the Mother of God. No one can say anything greater of her or to her, though he had as many tongues as there are leaves on the trees, or grass in the fields, or stars in the sky, or sand by the sea. It needs to be pondered in the heart, what it means to be the Mother of God.