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Recently been listening to Leonard Cohen. Not sure if he's a poet who sings or a singer who writes poetry, or a singer who reads poetry with musical accompaniment, or a poet who uses the range of his voice to make words sing. It's one of the great omissions of my life that I didn't try to work the miracle of getting a ticket for one of last year's concerts.

But it's hard to listen to the two disc recording of the London Concert and not want to write a review. I'm not qualified. I don't know enough about music. The range of voices in Cohen's oeuvre, from playful raconteur to contemplative poet, from lyricist of longing to apocalyptic seer, and from biblical prophet to lover and lover of words, makes any categorisation ridiculously reductionist. These two discs contain two and a half hours of the London performance and 26 tracks, and listening to them in a sitting has been a musical experience like a limited few others in my life.

One was when the Beach Boys ignited for a generation an enthusiasm for life with what I think is still one of the best tracks they ever produced, "Good Vibrations". Though my favourite Beach Boys track, as those who have lived in my orbit any time know, is "Sloop John B" – not because of its depth, but because of its sheer joie de vivre about heading home when one's vivre hasn't been much joie! Second was when I listened to the first classical LP Sheila ever bought me, Yehudi Menuhin playing "Brahms' Violin Concerto". The second movement, played with heartbreaking intensity, was for me a personal graduation from what I thought I liked to a different musical world where music is heard to serious humane purposes. A third, (and there are probably still one or two more) was the first time I heard the Ode to Joy from "Beethoven's Ninth (Choral) Symphony". It was on a TV Documentary in the early 1970's in which Jimmy Reid the Union Leader of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders strike, was interviewed. He spoke of his dad's long working life for low wages and long hours of hard graft, and the way those with money made more on a stock market deal than his dad could in several lifetimes of such hard graft. His vision, long before the EU captured the Beethoven chorus for its anthem, was of a society where humanity itself was valued, where materialism was subservient to humanism, and where money and power are means to more humane ends.

Which brings me back to Cohen, and why this recorded concert is itself a musical and humanising experience. Some of Cohen's songs are also about how joie de vivre is often ambushed by circumstance and accident. Witness the masterpiece that is "Hallelujah", at least as sung by Cohen himself – this arrangement has lost none of the intensity and affirmation of humanity and our struggles with love, loss and limitation, and it is sung by a 73 year old who still deeply, defiantly and gently cares. And some of the songs take you to those far reaches of emotional responsiveness we know we have treasured away somewhere deep inside us, but which aren't easily accessed without the right guide – and in songs like "If it be your will", Cohen knows his way there, and back – and the version here by the Webb Sisters is quite simply beautiful. And then you only have to listen to "Democracy" to sense  essential combinations of satire and seriousness, compassion and cynicism, rebellion and patriotism. So many voices in that voice.

And so on. One of the areas I'd like to spend time learning about is music as a form of biblical exegesis. Not the advanced technical stuff about aesthetics and hermeneutics – but the more straightforward use of words and music to sound the depths, to explore the options, to guage the texture of a text. Not just the obvious choices like Handel's Messiah, Bach's Matthew Passion, but lesser known texts which form the basis of musical compositions, or which are echoed in the songs that move us. I once arranged a service around the theme music for the film "2001 Space Odyssey" (Also Sprach Zarathustra) played as background to the first verses of the Gospel of John. That's the kind of hermeneutics I mean. The intentional and imaginative juxtaposition of biblical text with music which is totally unrelated, until it is brought into conversation with that specific text and we hear the words and we are affected by the music, we hear the music and we are interpreted by the words.

The brief benediction at the end of the concert comes from the book of Ruth, so the concert ends with a prayer that people of difference learn to live together, not in mere tolerance but in faithful companionship, which is the more telling gift of blessing for our times, living in the jagged fragments of a broken world.

Off to listen…….. again.
 

Not much time for the blog today. All my spare time being spent marking papers, or (note, not while), listening to this. Tonight I'll find a couple of hours to listen to it all. Tell you what I think tomorrow.