music: the king’s singers, “born on a new day”

That blend! Those phrases! (At some point in my life I might start to become a coherent music reviewer. For now, though, I’m at the doge-level of expressiveness.)

it’s a random day for a new album: “Christ was Born to Save”

A new album from the friars at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington D.C. It’s actually really good! Their voices are beautiful and the chorus is generally well-balanced. I love the just-short-of-ostentatious trumpet solo (on the organ I think?) in Lo He Comes.

music: Elgar’s ‘Lux Aeterna’, Voces8

“requiem aeternam…”

Today I was having a conversation when Duruflé came up–someone sang the melody of his polyphonic Ubi Caritas, trying to recall whose it was. I was reminded in that moment of how the thing that I most saliently associate with him is the fact that he used chant themes in his compositions. And as I considered this over the course of the evening, I realised that that probably isn’t evident to people who haven’t heard the corresponding chants before. (Sort of like one of my favourite contemporary pieces, Leo Nestor’s Rorate Caeli Desuper, which is beautiful if you know the chant and perplexing, I’d imagine, if you don’t.)

But anyway. Here’s Duruflé’s Requiem, preceded by a Gregorian chant requiem.

 

music & thoughts, st cecilia

This morning I attended a mass for the feast of St Cecilia, patroness of musicians, organised by the local liturgical music committee. I was surprised, I think given that the reason we were all there was because we were musicians, to find that the texts in the lectionary were not about music at all. Instead, there was one reading from the book of Isaiah, about how the LORD would bring Israel back to himself, and one from the Gospel of Matthew, the parable of the foolish virgins. I realised, then, that while all this patron saint business is lovely and good–and I’d be the last to dismiss it–St Cecilia is a saint and a model in the Christian life not because she was a musician (because… she probably wasn’t) but because she lived a life of heroic virtue and faith. Today, then, we who look to her for intercession particularly as our patroness, must remember that we are first Christians, and thus strive to live lives worthy of our universal vocation to holiness, before  we think of ourselves as musicians.

music: oxford’s out of the blue

Sometimes–as in, when life is really stressful and there doesn’t seem to be much possibility of a miraculous recovery–it is a small pleasure and relief to be ensconced in a sonic comfort bubble.

Jane Studdock is clearly deeply confused at the beginning of the book in her effort to avoid being thought of as “little wifey”—and who wants to be thought of as little wifey? Fairy Hardcastle calls her that.

But she doesn’t want to be identified with what she would think of as stereotypes, but which are actually archetypes, having to do with womanhood and being wife or mother, etc. She is an intellectual, she is writing her dissertation on John Donne’s “triumphant vindication of the body,” and yet poor Jane is a Gnostic without knowing it. She hasn’t got a clue about the vindication of the body. She doesn’t know that her body will turn out to be virtually Mark’s salvation, not just because he remembers her with lust or concupiscence in the toils of Belbury, but because it is her womanhood that stands with clarity and truth and good sense and resilience and toughness over against the bottomless deception and disintegration that is Belbury.

It is Jane embodied, not just the idea of Jane, not just Jane’s intellect—far from it—but Jane as his spousethat saves Mark. And, of course, the very last paragraph of the book is, in one sense, the beginning. We have now come up to the real beginning of the marriage. Mark is about to be saved. He has escaped hell, and Jane is to be his salvation.

Thomas Howard, in an interview in Touchstone Magazine entitled ‘The Catholic Angler’.