Postlude pour l'office de Complies

The case of Jehan Alain is one of the great what-ifs of classical music. Had he lived more than his twenty-nine years — in 1940 he was gunned down by advancing German soldiers, but not before taking out sixteen of them — who knows what sort of music he might have written? As it is, his output is a gift to organists: he combines twentieth-century harmonic language with influences of plainchant, chansons, jazz, and oriental dance, all with a very French ear for colors. (The house-organ built by his father Albert is an odd little instrument, indeed. But what mutations!)

One of my favorite Alain works is the Postlude for the Office of Compline, which he wrote while on retreat at the Abbey of Valloires in 1930. The piece is a dreamy series of chords — almost static, at first — over which is laid several quotations of chant. (One presumes that Alain originally heard the chants performed in a Solesmes style; they certainly aren't metrical in the composition. Indeed, the snippets of chant in the piece bear little rhythmic relation to the accompaniment, which makes the piece rather more difficult than it sounds.)

Listen: Postlude pour l'office de Complies
This is a live performance on the Letourneau instrument at the Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemani, performed by W. Dudley Oakes. (I would provide a link so that you could purchase the CD, but the abbey, where I bought it, does not appear to be selling it online.)

We hear portions of the following melodies: Miserere mei, Domine; Te lucis ante terminum; In manus tuas; Salva nos, Domine; and finally the minor doxology, with some repeated amens. I suspect that there's an essay to be written regarding Alain and the "Cistercian aesthetic", one characterized by simplicity, utility, and yet great beauty.

"In our time we are tired of lofty discourse. The public is not so stupid. Do not insist on musical evidence. Avoid commonplaces. Be brief." — Jehan Alain

Other links:

• An Order for Compline (Book of Common Prayer)
  
• Pre-Reform Order of Compline (Roman Catholic)
  
• Some free Alain scores
  
• Cistercian architecture, a fine introduction to Cistercian aesthetics

Absentmindedness

This past weekend I served as a calcant for several hours. A calcant (non-organists can be forgiven for not knowing the terminology), from the Latin calcare, "to tread", is the unfortunate fellow whose job it is to pump the bellows to supply wind pressure to an organ's pipes. It is a dull task that is at the same time quite unforgiving of lapses in concentration, for if the wind lags everyone in the audience will hear it. In former times, I suppose, it was the duty of every apprentice-organist to pump the bellows; perhaps it is only fitting I should have to do it. Bach surely served as calcant for his teacher Böhm, don't you think?

Calcants' minds wander. Indeed, my mind has been elsewhere much of the time these past few weeks. There is the past: on Monday the weather reminded me so much of early spring in Vienna that I experienced the first palpable longing for that city I've felt in more than a year. When will I walk 'round the Ringstraße again; when shall I climb Kahlenberg; when shall I eat at Schnitzel King or Café Prückel? I want to go back before I forget how to use the subway or order a Hot-Dog.

There is also the future to distract me. I come from a long line of worriers, and I have begun to wonder about the sort of job I'll get after I am an accredited Master of Sacred Music. My natural inclination — one not yet dulled by the unquestioned assumptions of an incurably mobile society — is to go home. Ah, but I wonder what it will be like, trying to make good music and good liturgy in a place where ignorance and poor taste are so entrenched. I am willing to teach, of course, but one cannot change a culture singlehandedly.

In any case, I acknowledge I really ought to be thinking about the present. All shall be well, and all that.

O qui perpetua mundum ratione gubernas

O Thou whose pow'r o'er moving worlds presides,
Whose voice created, and whose wisdom guides,
On darkling man in pure effulgence shine,
And cheer the clouded mind with light divine.
'Tis thine alone to calm the pious breast
With silent confidence and holy rest:
From thee, great God, we spring, to thee we tend,
Path, motive, guide, original, and end.

— Dr Johnson, after Boethius (Consolatio Philosophiae, Book III §9)

Admirable Words, Vol. I

1. Autochthonous
   
2. Globule
   
3. Gumption
   
4. Lambaste
   
5. Lugubrious
   
6. Muliebrity
   
7. Protuberance
   
8. Skulduggery
   
9. Snickersnee (or: Snicker-snee)
   
10. Unguent

On Translating Borges

For what amounts to years, now, I have been attempting to translate a lecture given by Jorge Luis Borges on the Book of Job. (He's got some interesting ideas about it, as it so happens.) Every time I near completion, however, I find myself dissatisfied with the result. It is invariably either unfaithful to the original or awkward-sounding in English. (One will note that often Borges used Spanish words to unusual effect. But the English-speaking reader is not aware of this and will likely attribute it to poor translation.) Consider, if you will, the opening paragraph — insofar as an oral lecture can be divided into paragraphs:

A pesar de la hospitalidad que siento en ustedes me considero un poco intruso. Pero hay dos razones que me hacen mitigar esa impresión. Una de las razones es que yo he sido criado dentro de la fe cristiana y la cultura occidental; la cristiandad, más allá de nuestras convicciones o de nuestras dudas personales, es una malgama de dos naciones que me parecen esenciales para el mundo occidental. Esas son: Israel (el cristianismo procede de Israel) y Grecia. Más allá de las vicisitudes de nuestra sangre, de nuestra múltiple sangre, ya que tenemos dos padres, cuatro abuelos, etc. — en progresión geométrica — y ya que Roma fue una suerte de extensión del helenismo, creo que todos, por el mero hecho de pertener a la cultura occidental, somos hebreos y griegos. De modo que algún derecho me asiste hoy al hablar sobre el Libro de Job, aunque ignore la lengua hebrea y aunque no he podido leer el texto original y los comentarios Rabínicos.

And here is my attempt at a translation:

Despite the hospitality I sense in all of you, I consider myself rather intrusive. But there are two reasons that mitigate this impression of mine. One of them is that I have been raised in the Christian faith and in western culture; Christianity, notwithstanding our personal beliefs or doubts, is an amalgam of two nations that seem to me essential to the western world. They are: Israel (Christianity arose out of Israel) and Greece. Regardless of the vicissitudes of our blood, out of our multiple heritages, since we have two parents, four grandparents, etc. — in a geometrical progression — and since Rome was a sort of extension of Hellenism, I believe that all of us, by the mere fact of belonging to western culture, are Hebrews and Greeks. As a result, I have a certain right to speak today about the Book of Job, though I know no Hebrew and though I have not been able to read the original text nor its Rabbinical commentaries.

What is one to do? Part of the problem is that spoken sentences can be far longer than their written counterparts before becoming excessive; one can nest parentheticals (as I am wont to do) without too badly breaking up the flow of a spoken idea, but when written this becomes tiresome after a while, unless you read lots of James and must therefore enjoy endless sentences.

The chief problem, I suppose, is that Borges's style is deliberately obscure. In a review of five new Borges anthologies, Martin Schifino (interesting surname, that) explains this well:

[Alfred] MacAdam describes Borges's early style as "tortuous" and his vocabulary as "rarefied". [Suzanne] Levine calls the writing of his essays "radical" and even "bizarre to those who read him in Spanish today". Both are right in general. But it is a matter of detail in which way Borges "replays the Latinate prose of the Baroque era", and perhaps the best way to convey this might not be to "improvise a rococo English" – an intention declared, but fortunately never carried out, by Levine. The baroque influence can be felt, sure enough, in Borges's inkhorn terms, but his rhetorical habits are much closer to home: plain Edwardian. He sounds a little like Kipling, and a lot like Chesterton. His essays are full of Chestertonian throat-clearing and oratorical flourishes. Part of the challenge for translators may be to make new an existing manner that has fallen out of favour. In any case, more resources from the English tradition will need mining if Borges's big voice is to be fully energized.

The best way to translate Borges, then? Read more Chesterton. Borges was famously fond of him, anyway.

Flor Tropical, por D.C. Hawley

En el aro ardiente que ciñe el trópico
un día andaba con la cara al sol
cuando una liana me detuvo el paso,
una liana que llevaba una flor:
flor tan bella que no pude dejarla;
me la llevé de esas tierras del sol,
yo me la llevé a mis llanos helados,
tierras frías calentadas de amor,
y entre las nieves de llanos lejanos
revivía la liana y floreció.

Y ahora que las nieves de mis setenta
largos inviernos cubriéndome están,
soy como la casa en tierras del norte:
mientras más helada, más calor da.
Sobre el llano se amontona la nieve;
dentro aún guardo mi flor tropical.

Lucky Jim

I took advantage of the Schneetag today to finish Kingsley Amis's first novel, Lucky Jim. (I have added to my list of aliases the name "Kingsley"; why does no one name their son Kingsley nowadays?) The book is really quite funny. It is about the goings-on at a university. As anyone who has attended an institution of "higher" "education" can tell you, academics are generally an absurd lot: their foibles call out to be lampooned, and Amis is mercilessly accurate. Though the novel can be said to have a protagonist (the titular Jim), all of the characters therein are for the most part contemptible, loathsome, and unpleasant. The book is a rogues' gallery of all the worst types of people one can find on a college campus: the soporific tenured professor (whose natural habitat is the history or English department), the incompetent and disinterested junior professor, the perpetually-medicated and emotionally unstable female academic, the spiteful colleague, the pretentious and self-absorbed artiste...

One might think that such a book, lacking any character of any virtue whatsoëver, would be a depressing read. On the contrary: it is the funniest book I've read in a good long while. Whether you be a misanthrope or not, it is still gratifying to see absurd pomposity — the sort of behavior any college student can identify — mocked.