Two days ago I spent some of my Boxing Day watching Sister Wendy art documentaries from the 90s, which have held up extremely well. (That's the thing about the public television sort of production values, which are never high: when the focus of the program is its content, rather than its medium, the content endures. Consider Julia Child, for example.) I was saddened to hear, later in the day, that she has died. In fact, I must have been watching one of her shows as she was dying, which would strike many people — though not a member of a religious order, I suspect — as a morbid thought.
If you've not encountered her documentaries, I recommend them highly. Sister Wendy is the best sort of person that the Christian tradition can produce: a genuinely humane person, in the truest sense of the word. The Christian life, even the consecrated religious life, should not be a retreat from the reality of lived human experience. I speak, frankly, of sex: Sister Wendy looked at it — and there is so much of it, in the history of art — with an honest and uncompromising eye. (Downplay or retreat from sex in art and you end up sublimating it like Gerard Manley Hopkins, writing quiveringly of bathing boys. Such art, wrought from curdled sexuality, makes me nauseous.) She was a keen observer, and not afraid to look things square in the face.
I'll refer you to an essay she wrote, "The Art of Looking at Art".
And here is one of my favorite Sister Wendy bits, from her Story of Painting:
28 December 2018
17 June 2018
Regarding Gibbons
Glenn Gould, when asked his favorite composer, gave an unexpected answer: Orlando Gibbons. At first glance, this seems an irritatingly contrarian thing to say — and indeed, Gould could be irritatingly contrarian in his musical decisions. (The living musician most like that who comes to mind is John Eliot Gardiner, whose relish in smashing musical idols results in performances that are either epiphanic or perversely wrong-headed, with little in between.) Why should Gould profess a fondness for this relatively minor English composer — all English composers are minor, to hear most musicologists speak about them — over every Continental giant of the literature? How, in short, could Gibbons be better than Bach?
The first misconception one must needs clear up is the lingering denigration of English music. Heinrich Heine, whose distaste for the English in general is well-documented, had the misfortune to hear English music at its early-Victorian nadir, and wrote: "These people have no ear either for rhythm or music, and their unnatural passion for piano playing and singing is all the more repulsive. Nothing on Earth is more terrible than English music, except English painting." (Heine's opinion of J.M.W. Turner, to my mind one of the finest painters of his age, or perhaps of any age, is not recorded. Certainly their concerns overlapped in works like Turner's The Slave Ship and Heine's Das Sklavenschiff.) In 1904 the now-forgotten German critic Oscar Schmitz condemned England as das Land ohne Musik ("the land without music"), and the sentiment has stuck. But whatever the state of British music in the two centuries after the death of Purcell (for, you see, we are apparently obliged to treat Handel as merely a foreign import), the music of the English Renaissance was every bit the equal of that on the Continent. (It's a bit harder to argue that the revival in English music at the turn of the twentieth century produced works of comparable quality to European music of the time, but Elgar and Stanford remain underrated, to say nothing of Vaughan Williams, Howells, and Britten.) And yet the average music-lover has heard of perhaps three English Renaissance composers: Tallis, Byrd, and Gibbons.
Tallis, while perhaps the closest to achieving a vision of the divine (in either his Latin or English works), can be so austere as to distance the listener. Byrd, though the best contrapuntalist, is off-putting to me as a performer because he willfully ignores any constraints of instrumentation or technique. Consider the ranges of his vocal parts: what other Renaissance composer regularly expects two-and-a-half octaves? One gets the sense that Byrd's music, like Bach's, was written to be performed by angels rather than mortals. Perhaps we can come close at times, but there is inevitably a sense of disappointment. Weelkes and Tomkins deserve far more recognition than they are given, but their pieces rarely achieve the internal logic achieved by the big three.
And this, really, is what so distinguishes Gibbons from most composers: his innate sense of proportion. (It is for this reason, incidentally, that Handel is on the same tier of composers as Bach: Handel's sense of proportion is marvelous, which can't always be said of his Thuringian contemporary. It's why Mozart is among the very best composers, and why Mozart's innumerable imitators rarely could produce much worth hearing. There are also certain lesser composers, like Widor, whose sense of proportion saves their works from complete oblivion.) Gibbons had a command of counterpoint as learned as any Englishman between Byrd and Purcell, but it is the underlying structure and balance of his works that make them so very fine. Listen for the precise internal logic of "Behold, thou hast made my days", or "Great King of gods" (with its magnificent "Amen", perhaps the best in all English choral music), or the Short Service, or even the deceptively simple-sounding hymn tunes. (Regrettably, the hymn tunes are marred by the lamentable poetry of the texts for which they were originally compiled. Fortunately, later hymnographers have paired them with better texts.) Very few composers can be said to have composed a perfect work, but Gibbons's anthem "Almighty and everlasting God" is perfect.
In scholarship it feels a bit too on-the-nose to find a composer's complete ethos summed up in his own words, but we find this very thing in Gibbons's introduction to his First Set of Madrigals and Mottets (1612): "It is proportion that beautifies every thing, this whole Universe is measured by it, and Musicke is measured by it, which I have endeavoured to observe in the composition of these few Ayres..." Gibbons's fixation on proportion was perfectly in keeping with prevailing thought of his time. Consider George Herbert's notion of Christ making the redeemed Just: the just man "tunes" the three parts of his soul (reason, appetite, and a mediating spirit), just as music is "but three parts vied and multiplied". (The whole thing goes back to Plato, of course.) The best music reflects the underlying proportion of the universe, just as does the rightly-tuned soul. Church musicians sometimes like to think that the right music is not just aesthetically edifying, but morally so.
Is Gibbons "better" than Bach? Good heavens, who on earth cares? Indeed, the idea of ranking composers is absurd, anyway, though I'll still maintain that there are objectively good and bad composers. I'll leave you, dear reader, with one of my favorite musical finds of the past year: the Magdalena Consort, along with Fretwork and His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts, have released the first volume of a projected set of CDs featuring the pre-Restoration English verse anthem, and it's all Gibbons pieces. The title of the album, In Chains of Gold, comes from the introduction to Morley's famous Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practical Musick: music ought "to draw the hearer, as it were, in chains of gold by the ears to the consideration of holy things."
The first misconception one must needs clear up is the lingering denigration of English music. Heinrich Heine, whose distaste for the English in general is well-documented, had the misfortune to hear English music at its early-Victorian nadir, and wrote: "These people have no ear either for rhythm or music, and their unnatural passion for piano playing and singing is all the more repulsive. Nothing on Earth is more terrible than English music, except English painting." (Heine's opinion of J.M.W. Turner, to my mind one of the finest painters of his age, or perhaps of any age, is not recorded. Certainly their concerns overlapped in works like Turner's The Slave Ship and Heine's Das Sklavenschiff.) In 1904 the now-forgotten German critic Oscar Schmitz condemned England as das Land ohne Musik ("the land without music"), and the sentiment has stuck. But whatever the state of British music in the two centuries after the death of Purcell (for, you see, we are apparently obliged to treat Handel as merely a foreign import), the music of the English Renaissance was every bit the equal of that on the Continent. (It's a bit harder to argue that the revival in English music at the turn of the twentieth century produced works of comparable quality to European music of the time, but Elgar and Stanford remain underrated, to say nothing of Vaughan Williams, Howells, and Britten.) And yet the average music-lover has heard of perhaps three English Renaissance composers: Tallis, Byrd, and Gibbons.
Tallis, while perhaps the closest to achieving a vision of the divine (in either his Latin or English works), can be so austere as to distance the listener. Byrd, though the best contrapuntalist, is off-putting to me as a performer because he willfully ignores any constraints of instrumentation or technique. Consider the ranges of his vocal parts: what other Renaissance composer regularly expects two-and-a-half octaves? One gets the sense that Byrd's music, like Bach's, was written to be performed by angels rather than mortals. Perhaps we can come close at times, but there is inevitably a sense of disappointment. Weelkes and Tomkins deserve far more recognition than they are given, but their pieces rarely achieve the internal logic achieved by the big three.
And this, really, is what so distinguishes Gibbons from most composers: his innate sense of proportion. (It is for this reason, incidentally, that Handel is on the same tier of composers as Bach: Handel's sense of proportion is marvelous, which can't always be said of his Thuringian contemporary. It's why Mozart is among the very best composers, and why Mozart's innumerable imitators rarely could produce much worth hearing. There are also certain lesser composers, like Widor, whose sense of proportion saves their works from complete oblivion.) Gibbons had a command of counterpoint as learned as any Englishman between Byrd and Purcell, but it is the underlying structure and balance of his works that make them so very fine. Listen for the precise internal logic of "Behold, thou hast made my days", or "Great King of gods" (with its magnificent "Amen", perhaps the best in all English choral music), or the Short Service, or even the deceptively simple-sounding hymn tunes. (Regrettably, the hymn tunes are marred by the lamentable poetry of the texts for which they were originally compiled. Fortunately, later hymnographers have paired them with better texts.) Very few composers can be said to have composed a perfect work, but Gibbons's anthem "Almighty and everlasting God" is perfect.
In scholarship it feels a bit too on-the-nose to find a composer's complete ethos summed up in his own words, but we find this very thing in Gibbons's introduction to his First Set of Madrigals and Mottets (1612): "It is proportion that beautifies every thing, this whole Universe is measured by it, and Musicke is measured by it, which I have endeavoured to observe in the composition of these few Ayres..." Gibbons's fixation on proportion was perfectly in keeping with prevailing thought of his time. Consider George Herbert's notion of Christ making the redeemed Just: the just man "tunes" the three parts of his soul (reason, appetite, and a mediating spirit), just as music is "but three parts vied and multiplied". (The whole thing goes back to Plato, of course.) The best music reflects the underlying proportion of the universe, just as does the rightly-tuned soul. Church musicians sometimes like to think that the right music is not just aesthetically edifying, but morally so.
Is Gibbons "better" than Bach? Good heavens, who on earth cares? Indeed, the idea of ranking composers is absurd, anyway, though I'll still maintain that there are objectively good and bad composers. I'll leave you, dear reader, with one of my favorite musical finds of the past year: the Magdalena Consort, along with Fretwork and His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts, have released the first volume of a projected set of CDs featuring the pre-Restoration English verse anthem, and it's all Gibbons pieces. The title of the album, In Chains of Gold, comes from the introduction to Morley's famous Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practical Musick: music ought "to draw the hearer, as it were, in chains of gold by the ears to the consideration of holy things."
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