Category: Music

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.

Just been over at Faith and Theology where Ben Myers has posted on a Leonard Cohen concert he was fortunate / blessed / lucky enough to attend. Apart from a great review and a serious plug for Cohen as a prophet, there is a superb link to a clip of The Webb Sisters singing "If it be your will". A long time since I heard anything so beautiful, haunting and full of resigned longing.

Cohen is described as follows in some of the advance blurb for his US tour:

 Last year I wrote about the music of Christian Forshaw, and the CD Sanctuary. You might want to read that post along with this one.

I've just bought the new CD Midwinter, a collection of music earthed in Advent, and celebrating the Incarnation, itself earthed in the historical particularity of the birth of Jesus. Several of the tracks are worth a post in themselves so I'll return to this CD between now and Christmas.

We all listen to music differently, I suppose. What we hear, what we listen for, is largely a matter of personal taste, but perhaps also depends on individual temperament and receptivity. But something else happens when the music you hear is music most of which you've heard before, because it is part of a known tradition. Memory triggers resonance, mind and heart are prepared with remembered thought and feeling, so the music has an emotionally enriched context.

Yes, but what if the familiar tradition is subverted by unexpected surprise? That is what Christian Forshaw and the Sanctuary Ensemble achieve in this (somebody suggest an alternative to the overused "stunning") extraordinary CD. Impatience with traditional form and content, the pursuit of novelty for its own sake, the assumption we can do better than the efforts of those before us – these and other dismissive shrugs towards tradition are not what Christian Forshaw is about. The music on this CD is widely representative of Christian traditional Advent music. So whence the unexpected surprise? It is in the way the Advent music tradition has been handled by artists who value what is essential, and repristinate the music to prevent it from falling into unexciting cliche.

The first impression on listening to the whole CD is one of paradox. The sound conveys vastness and intimacy, spaciousness and immediacy, as voice, saxophone, organ and percussion paint images of great harmonic power. The soprano soloist, Grace Davidson, brings a singular beauty and clarity to the prayerful longing of Veni Emmanuel. Throughout, the saxophone is used as a voice which communicates meaning in sound not only without words, but in ways that transcend words; at times reprising instrumental impressions of phrases still fresh in the mind, at other times developing themes which evoke in the listener that same Advent longing and looking towards light, and upwards.

Several times the way the tracks are arranged and produced, the power of the instrumental intervention, like a revelation, is sudden, unexpected but welcome. In places Forshaw rises to those high piercing passages that express not only musically driven aspiration, but the determined ascent of the heart and soul towards unreachable truth that nevertheless irresistibly beckons. The power of Forshaw's musical arrangements complements without dominating, virtuosity serving the music and empowering the hearer. It's characteristic of Forshaw's work that saxophone, organ and human voice, at times weave sound together and then separate into their own controlled virtuosity. On this CD the human voice is enabled, without diminishment, to articulate in clear powerful diction, that particular kind of truth-telling we call story, in this case Advent.

One of my favourite carols is Christina Rosetti's In the bleak midwinter. On this album the first verse is sung with aching restraint, followed by a passage of saxophone solo that is as near to a theology of hope as I've ever heard in music. The following verse about "What can I bring Him" moves slowly towards its simple resolved response, the only gift that makes any sense, because it makes no sense, "Give my heart".

This album is, in my humble but unprepared to be contradicted opinion 🙂 ! – music worthy of the great human themes, vast theology and great contradictions of grace and cruelty, gift and loss, celebration and fear, forever embedded in the Advent cycle, and waiting to be expressed in "utmost art".

If you want to buy the CD you can order it from Christian Forshaw's own website where at £9.99 + p&p it is cheaper than Amazon, and will come within a few days of ordering.

O Come! O Come! Emmanuel.

Just been listening to Classic FM and the preview of this Requiem by Howard Goodall. I've ordered it from Amazon on the basis of that one track. Why? Two immediate reasons. First I liked it. Second, I was intrigued by the composer's description of what he was seeking to do. Here's an extract.

The writing of a Requiem is a special challenge for any composer. The
great Requiems of the past by composers such as Mozart, Verdi, Fauré
and Duruflé interpret the sacred Requiem text literally, and represent
a prayer for the salvation of the departed soul(s). Howard Goodall's
Requiem, by contrast, is intended to provide solace to the grieving.
The composer said, "For me, a modern Requiem is one that acknowledges
the terrible, unbearable loss and emptiness that accompanies the death
of loved ones, a loss that is not easily ameliorated with platitudes
about the joy awaiting us in the afterlife. … Musical expression can
I hope provide some outlet, some reflection, some transportation, even
some comfort….This was to be a Requiem for the living, a Requiem
focussing on interrupted lives."

Once I've listened to it I'll let you know whether impulse buying is to be recommended as a way of discovering what new music you like by listening randomly to Classic FM!

Last night I was writing a responsive liturgy for one of our Baptist communities. It’s intended to invite all those who work and serve within the church to rededicate their gifts of time, energy and ability – and to seek the blessing and strength of God. While all this was happening I was listening to Christian Forshaw’s CD, Sanctuary. I first heard this during advent two years ago, sitting outside Parcel Force while Sheila collected our mail, with Classic FM on. The track that was played was ‘Let all mortal flesh keep silence’.

I sat transfixed. It was one of those brief interludes when something other than the music is heard, but which can only be heard through the music. It was as if the Holy Spirit pulled up the blinds, and left me with my eyes screwed up against early streaming sunlight. And that moment was recpatured last night, as again this stunning piece of music simply opened my eyes – the eyes of my mind, the eyes of my imagination, the eyes of my soul – whatever part of us it is that needs to be opened in order to see the glory and beauty of what always lies beyond our senses.

Christian Forshaw is the Professor of Saxophone at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. One of his great passions and current interests is music as an experience of purity and intensity, particularly as music within the context of worship.

‘I first began working with the church organ in 1995. I was intrigued by the way the saxophone could sit within the sound of the organ, but could also add a far more expressive dimension. The sound of the organ is static once the key is pressed, whereas the sound of the saxophone is ever changing and moving.’

On this disc the combination of human voice, church organ and saxophone make possible enormous variety and subtlety of mood, of pace, of sound. There are episodes of rumbustuous joy and passages of gentle, persuasive assurance; at times I find the invitation to worship which is inherent in this music, an irresistible grace, and at other times the longing and yearning conveyed in tones ranging from the shrill to the plaintive, is more reminsicent of the flickering sun and shadows of the Psalms at their most poetic and disturbing.

The rendering of Come Down O Love Divine, ends with a passage of saxophonic improvisation that expresses my spiritual longing more authentically than any words I could ever write. This is a track of the most sublime sacred music – by which I mean music that makes the sacred not only plausible but audible, not only imaginable but desirable with that desire that is fuelled by the eternity that God has put in our hearts.

The CD can be found on the Quartz website here. You order it from them as it isn’t easily available in High St megastores. (Which makes me feel unreasonably and sniffily superior!)

Last night went to a music concert in Paisley Abbey. The music was unfamiliar, but the New Cologne Chamber Orchestra played to a good crowd, in a building brightened by evening sunlight, and it was a good place to be at the end of a busy burst of work in between holidays. I was able to listen without much visual distraction because we couldn’t see the performers! A level church nave, a seat well back, and some big people in front of me, ensured this was a primarily auditory experience. And the pew seats were clearly designed to prevent sleeping through anything going on at the front!

The flute concerto was the highlight. I’ve always found the flute a wistful, playful, gentle sound, which can express all kinds of yearning, joy, loss and love. Looking down to the magnificent stained glass window, brightened by a sunset, and hearing the sound of flute accompanied by strings – it was prayer through sound, without words. Not unlike my description earlier, prayer as ‘a wistful, playful, gentle sound, which can express all kinds of yearning, joy, loss and love.’

On a more discordant note – the connection between flutes and drums, in military music, and in the West of Scotland and Northern Ireland, I find offensive. Whether the band is Irish Republican or Orange Lodge, I find the whole performance of marching music commemorating religious conflict inimical to a gospel of peace and reconciliation. One of the most effective exposures of the brutality and hatred that underlies flute and drum music as an expression of religious hatred is in Bernard MacLaverty’s novel, Grace Notes. There is a scene well into the novel where the philabeg drums feature as the destructive, rhythmic symbol of the violence they both foment and portray. The flute is capable of such beautiful, creative, life affirming sound, made by the shaped and directed breath of the performing musician – but so likewise the flute can be made to serve the violent, commemorative sounds of ancient hatreds kept alive by musicians performing for quite other reasons. As an expression of religious conviction – on whichever side plays them – they are a shame and an embarrassment.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God – the flute music I heard last night, in the setting of a place of worship, with the sun streaming through stained glass, in a pre-reformation building, was a gentle defiance of all that would pull our human lives into discordant conflict.

When stopped for speeding Oscar Levant, the American pianist and composer explained, "You can’t possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven’s seventh Symphony and go slow!"

When it was premiered, the critics panned Beethoven’s Seventh, one review accusing Beethoven of being as drunk as the music itself when he composed it. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve listened to it – and it never lets me down – it always lifts. Wallace Stevens’ poem about wistful piano playing says something about the spirituality of music:

Just as my fingers on these keys

make music; so the selfsame sounds

On my spirit make music, too.

Music is feeling, then, not sound.

Today, driving back from Laura’s Teashop at Carmunnock, Classic FM played the whole of that last movement. To my knowledge I didn’t speed – but music like that is to me what a double espresso is to some of my pals!! There is a dynamic payload of energy in it that makes Oscar Levant’s mitigation plea perfectly plausible. How a deaf composer was able to celebrate and synchronise sound into such joyful, aggressive, in your face vitality I’ve no idea. Part of the miracle that is Beethoven at his best, I suppose. But for me, Beethoven clinches Wallace Stevens’ argument – when music touches deep in our spirits, "music is feeling, then, not sound."

And maybe Beethoven was remembering the critics when he said:

Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.

Music is a powerful, persuasive, subversive force in human culture, having a capacity ‘to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.’ Decided recently to have a summer of rediscovered favourite music and newly discovered shouldn’t have missed it first time music. So I’ve added a sidebar called Music Redivivus – the albums there list the music I’m now making time to listen to. My usual stuff includes Baroque, Beethoven, assorted Country – mainly female vocalists, Joan Baez and bits and pieces of other stuff. So I’ve asked several folk to give me the name of a CD they think would help me recover from my self imposed philistinism and restore a sense of cultural connectedness!! Over the next couple of months I’ll occasionally update on my progress on a musical refresher course, curriculum dictated by other people’s tastes.

But first, a singer I am revisiting. Several years ago I discovered Carrie Newcomer. Her work was profiled in Sojourners, never a recommendation I’d ignore. I discovered a singer and writer whose major key is hopefulness, who combines faith with justice, and laughter with serious critique of all that makes laughter hard. She tells stories of the hopes and dreams, the struggles and courage of immigrants, single mothers, refugees and others whose place in the world is threatened and whose life chances are made fragile by ‘the way it is’. Her songs vibrate with a sense of life’s mystery, how frustration mixes with fulfilment, sadness with joyfulness, loss with new possibility. She is a wonderful apologist for music as a deeply formative shaper of moral response and a hopeful worldview. Here’s one of her songs from the CD My True Name.

When one door closes another door opens wide
It’s hard to believe all of the locked doors I’ve tried
And you can’t pray for what you want or what you’d have instead
You can only offer up your heart and ask that you be led

Life’s gonna take you, where you never thought you’d go
When you finally think you’ve got it down, It isn’t so
There are windows and doors, you’re not finished with yet
It’s not always getting what you want, but wanting what you get
Chorus

It’s not gettin’ easier, so I’m not going to pretend
That I know this story from it’s beginning to it’s end
Oh believe me when I tell you, believe me if you can

If I could turn down the noise of my own will and choice
I could hear the truth of my life in a clear voice
I will bow down my head to the wisdom of my heart
Cool my heels and hold on to the best parts