The Artsy Honker

What I am planning for Lent...

2012-02-15T23:05:00.004Z

No, not the music -- more on that anon. I'm planning something else.

I'm planning on sowing, each day of Lent, some seeds for edible plants. I'll be posting pictures to Tumblr and those will turn up on Twitter; once a week I'll try and do a summary post of some sort, which I'll link to from here and FaceBorg and various other places for those of you who aren't into Twitter.

Do feel free to join me, and whether you do or not may you have a blessed Lent.

It's Up To Us to Change the Narrative

2012-02-02T15:30:00.006Z

I was thinking the other morning about community size, economies of scale, and our perception of other people as human beings worthy of care and respect. In larger communities, where everyone doesn't know everyone else, the media have quite a lot of power over how we see one another. And now Cameron's government have passed the Welfare Reform Bill.

I don't know whether the Daily Fail, the Sun and so on have always vilified the poorest and weakest in society, those reliant on others for help for whatever reason. I struggle to take such articles seriously, as I don't quite understand how intelligent people can believe them. But I know that the advertisements about benefit fraud, which I started to notice under a Labour government, seemed to be a sign of something very wrong with the way we perceive one another and the way we speak and write of one another. I'd like to remedy that.

In my head, I'd like there to be some requirement for legislators to work with those who their laws will affect the most. I'd like those legislating about welfare reform to work with people who don't have much money and with the disabled for a year before being allowed to make changes which will affect them. I'd like those who would further privatise the NHS (yes, further privatise -- this has been going on for a long time, too) to think about what it might be like to need medical care and simply not be able to afford it, as well as looking at the cost-effectiveness of various systems.

But I think the propaganda may be so strong and so widespread that it can override even personal contact. Victim-blaming happens at all levels, and contact doesn't always help.

As an example of that, for every GP I've had who has been helpful and supportive regarding my own health conditions, I've had another who doesn't think there is anything physically wrong with me. This has led to delays in diagnosis which were mentally very distressing, not to mention physically risky. I remember being told my chronic pain was due to depression, and in the next appointment two weeks later being told I wasn't "really depressed". It turned out to be more complicated than that, of course.

Now, GPs aren't stupid. They've been through medical school, and you do need quite a few brain cells to rub together to get through successfully! And they work with people. Yet they still do victim-blaming, even with an articulate patient with good levels of self-awareness. So I have to conclude that the problem we face isn't one of intelligence or of contact.

I'm inclined to think that instead, the problem is one of narrative. A dominant narrative in the society in which I live is "You Make Your Own Life". It's an attractive narrative, because it seduces us into thinking that we can keep ourselves safe, that no matter how bad things get we'll be OK because our efforts will be effective. And it's a comfortable narrative for as long as health and wealth hold out, because it absolves us of the responsibility for the plight of anyone around us, even if we're directly abusive toward them. After all, They Make Their Own Lives, too. And it's slippery, this narrative, because we do seem to consciously choose our actions, we do think about consequences, some of our efforts do pay off. So obviously we must be in control of our circumstances!

But it's wrong. You don't Make Your Own Life. I don't Make My Own Life. Not entirely, and the wealth of self-help literature out there might be just a small hint that none of us do.

Now, I don't believe in full environmental determinism, and I do believe in free will. We always have a choice in how to respond to our situation. But we make this choice out of limited options of varying acceptability, and with limited foresight. Every choice includes risk. We don't get to decide on our circumstances, our limitations, any more than we get to decide on our biological parents. And there is no isolation: all of our choices affect everyone else, and all of everyone else's choices affect us, to some degree. We exist in a networked community with 7 billion interdependent active members, as well as countless previous members whose legacy still forms our environment. We don't make our own circumstances, and our circumstances affect our choices. We make our own choices, but we don't make our own life.

Yet this is the dominant narrative! The poor are poor, we're told, because they don't sufficiently desire wealth to take the necessary action to acquire it -- so we must change the incentives by lowering their benefits to make them hungry for work. (Literally.) Never mind the economic reasons why this won't actually help (people who don't have enough to eat will spend less, not more, and the economy will suffer further as a result, with fewer jobs and lower productivity...), the poor are poor because they choose to be poor and therefore they deserve to be poor. The disabled are obviously only suffering disability, we're told, because being disabled is a pretty good lifestyle compared to hard graft. So we must change their incentives by taking away what support they have and then they'll learn how to "adapt" to their conditions. As for the sick and the elderly, they wouldn't need so much medical care if they took proper care of themselves, so we'll cut the NHS: that will encourage them to develop healthy habits!

Gentle readers, this is all preposterous. People don't choose to be poor: if you don't have enough money to live on, getting enough of it is not trivial. People don't choose to be disabled: in case you hadn't noticed, blindness, deafness, wheelchair use, and long-term illnesses are things that happen to people, not lifestyle choices. People don't choose to get sick: if they did, would anyone ever suffer from a common cold? People don't choose to get old, despite what the beauty creams would have you believe, and nobody has the intention of aging badly.

But these atrocities are what the "You Make Your Own Life" narrative leads to. This narrative has made our society sick, so sick that we're now actually doing the things in the last-but-one paragraph. Yes, I said "we"; whether or not they do so with our full support, the government act on our behalf.

I think we face two challenges here. One is to ensure that the vulnerable among us still receive care; this is going to be a massive effort, and I'm sure one at which we will fail in some cases, but we do have to try.

The second challenge is to find a better narrative and, somehow, make it supplant the one I've been talking about. We need a narrative that is more attractive than the idea that each of us can save ourselves, more comfortable than the idea that other people's problems are nothing to do with us.

I haven't found such a narrative outside of religion; the closest I come is the idea that we are all children of God and therefore worthy of respect and care and love regardless of our circumstances. But the "You Make Your Own Life" narrative is so pernicious that sometimes it actually invades religion, turning into "If you are ill/poor/old/disabled/unhappy it's because you didn't pray enough/love God enough/do what we say God wants." Grace becomes the means by which we are wealthy and healthy and favoured in this world, rather than the mystery which prompts us to help others. Ugh! This caricature is not what we need. On a deeper level I think religion does have a lot to offer, but simply making a more religious society won't solve the problem unless we can also purge religion of make-your-own-life-itis.

I believe that human beings have automatic worth, not based in ability or achievement or economic activity but personhood. I believe that human beings are interconnected and interdependent, each contributing to but not controlling our own wellbeing and that of everyone else on the planet. I believe that if anyone suffers at the hands of another, we are all much worse off, and when we work to help one another we all gain.

I believe it is urgently important that we make sure everyone knows this, especially those in power and those who will be in power in five or ten or fifty years. And because of the stickiness of the existing dominant narrative, it's going to be an uphill battle to do it.

Now what?

Flash Compline, Monday 23rd January

2012-01-21T22:57:00.003Z

There will be a Flash Compline service at 9.00pm on Monday, 23rd January, in the gardens of St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate, near Liverpool Street tube and mainline stations - here's a map

Music: We will use this setting of Compline.

We will have a small number of spare copies, which you can purchase for £2 if you want to keep them, or borrow if you don't. Don't worry if you aren't a confident singer -- follow along with the text and see what you can pick up. Everyone is welcome. If we don't have enough confident singers we can always say the liturgy instead.

This setting uses the words from Common Worship Traditional Language Compline. Various smartphone apps for this exist and it is also available from the C of E website on the day, if you're worried we won't have enough music or you'd rather just use the words.

You may wish to bring a torch or book light.

PLEASE ARRIVE QUIETLY AND DEPART IN SILENCE.

@FlashCompline on Twitter
Flash Compline on Facebook

If you buy my music, I will make more.

2012-01-12T20:30:00.000Z

If you liked the Twelve Days project and you'd like to support me in making more music, the album is now available to purchase from Bandcamp. You can pay as little or as much you like, and you can download the music in a variety of formats (including FLAC and .ogg). The recordings themselves are still under a CC BY-SA license, so having downloaded the album you can put it on USB drives and give it to all your friends or even burn it to CD if you want to. You can also make derivative works, whether that's using the music as a soundtrack for video, using it in liturgy in some way or a mash-up with your favourite banjo track. As long as I'm attributed, you're free to do what you like with it.

If you buy my music, I will make more.

On great works of great faith

2012-01-06T18:15:00.005Z

He said to them, ‘Because of your little faith. For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, “Move from here to there”, and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you.’

This isn't an easy verse.

Why, why is our faith so small? I've never moved a mountain; certainly even things I find rather more realistic are sometimes very difficult. I want to believe that nothing is impossible, but the balance of evidence seems to indicate that much is.

This verse seems to be saying "believe harder, have more faith, and things will work. And if they don't work, well, you just aren't believing hard enough!"

But I think that's not the point. I think that's something we read into the text.

I think faith is a gift, rather than an obligation. Oh, I'd make a rubbish Calvinist, to be sure. I don't get on with the idea of predestination, and the implications I think it has for free will. But the Spirit blows where it will, and some are given great faith and others none at all, and I think it is a mistake to tell ourselves that we can believe harder and somehow force ourselves to have greater faith. Rather, greater faith is something we pray for, and accept if it is granted. I'm reminded of Psalm 80 -- turn us again, O Lord, and we shall be saved -- and of Pharaoh's heart being hardened or softened by God.

What is actually required? Are we asked to have faith? Yes, actually. And the great works of great faith are held out, carrot-like. But we aren't told that we must have faith so great that it can move mountains. We're simply told to have faith in Christ, as a sort of extension of our faith in God. I say if we're listening, if we are giving these words any weight at all, that in itself is already an act of faith, however miniscule. So stop berating yourself for not having enough faith. You are a flawed and marvelous human being, a beloved child of God, and you do not have to be perfect.

What else are we told is required of us?

Love God. Love your neighbour as yourself. These two are so important that Jesus says they are the basis of the entire Law and Prophets -- the Law and Prophets being the bulk of Jewish biblical canon at the time. I try to do them and I fail every single day. It's that "flawed human being" thing again.

What else?

Eat, drink. Do this in remembrance of me. Gladly, though it isn't always easy.

Pray in this way. I can just about handle this one, if what Jesus means is the formulaic pattern of the Lord's Prayer, which I have known so long I cannot remember learning it. But that business of forgiving others is quite sticky.

Judge not. This, too, is non-trivial. I can but try.

Love one another as I have loved you. That's a tall order; it applies to more than just washing one another's feet. He tells us to love one another as he loves us and then he goes and gets himself crucified! We're meant to follow the example. If this isn't daunting I don't know what is.

And yet...I have seen countless examples of what I can only call sacrificial love. I have heard the joy of judgments overturned, reconsidered. I have felt the warmth of forgiveness rising out of prayer and I have tasted sweet living remembrance, whether you want to call it sacrament or memorial, body and blood or bread and wine.

Are not all of these mountains moved?

Twelve Drummers Drumming

2012-01-05T17:40:00.001Z

I wonder if the "true love" in the song remembered to get a gift receipt.

Image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vitraj_Crkva_Gospe_Trsatske_2.jpg

I was feeling indecisive, so you get something of a baker's dozen. Think of the second track as a sort of bonus track, or save it for the Epiphany tomorrow. Either way is good.

I wasn't planning on singing this first one, but the tune for this American version of the Joys of Mary is fantastically haunting. I'd love to do it again properly when I have a bit more time.

The Blessings of Mary by artsyhonker

The very first blessing that Mary had, it was the blessing of one:
To think that her Son, Jesus, could live a father's son;
Could live a father's son; like Emmanuel in glory
Father, Son and the Holy Ghost, through all eternity.

The very next blessing Mary had, it was the blessing of two:
To think that her Son, Jesus, could read the Scriptures through;

The very next blessing Mary had, it was the blessing of three:
To think that her Son, Jesus, could set the sinner free;

The very next blessing Mary had, it was the blessing of four:
To think that her Son, Jesus, could live for evermore;

The very next blessing Mary had, it was the blessing of five:
To think that her Son, Jesus, could bring the dead alive;

The very next blessing Mary had, it was the blessing of six:
To think that her Son, Jesus, could heal and cure the sick

The very next blessing Mary had, it was the blessing of seven:
To think that her Son, Jesus, could conquer hell and heaven

The very next blessing Mary had, it was the blessing of eight:
To think that her Son, Jesus, could make the crooked straight;

The very next blessing Mary had, it was the blessing of nine:
To think that her Son, Jesus, could turn water into wine;

The very next blessing Mary had, it was the blessing of ten:
To think that her Son, Jesus, could write without a pen;

The next tune is also American, arranged by William Walker. The words to the first verse are anonymous; the rest are by Reginald Heber, and you might know a very different tune to "Brightest and best of the songs of the morning."

Hail the blest morn by artsyhonker

Hail the blest morn! See the great Mediator
Down from the regions of glory descend!
Shepherds, go worship the Babe in the manger!
Lo! for his guard the bright angels attend.
Brightest and best of the songs of the morning,
Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid;
Star in the East, the horizon adorning,
Guide where our infant Redeemer was laid!

Cold on his cradle the dewdrops are shining,
Low lies his bed with the beasts of the stall;
Angels adore him, in slumber reclining,
Wise men and shepherds before him do fall.

Say shall we yield him, in costly devotion,
Odours of Edom and offerings divine,
Gems of the mountain and pearls of the ocean,
Myrrh from the forest and gold from the mine?

Vainly we offer each ample oblation,
Vainly with gold would his favour secure;
Richer by far is the heart's adoration,
Dearer to God are the prayers of the poor.

Eleven Pipers Piping

2012-01-04T20:00:00.000Z

I suppose the Lords-a-Leaping and those dancing ladies have some appropriate music, now, at least.

Image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adoration_of_the_magi_st.michael_toronto.jpg.

It seems that the version of this I have has rather more verses than standard. That's alright, it will give you time to learn the refrain if you're singing along.

Puer natus in Bethlehem by artsyhonker

Puer natus in Bethlehem, alleluia,
Unde gaudet Jerusalem, alleluia, alleluia.

Refrain: In cordis jubilo Christum natum adoremus,
Cum novo cantico.

Assumpsit carnem Filius, alleluia,
Dei Patris altissimus, alleluia, alleluia.

Per Gabrielem nuntium, alleluia,
Virgo concepit Filium, alleluia, alleluia.

Tamquam sponsus de thalamo, alluia,
Processit Matris utero, alleluia, alleluia.

Hic jacet in præsepio, alleluia
Qui regnat sine termino, alleluia, alleluia.

Et Angelus pastoribus, alleluia,
Revelat quod sit Dominus, alleluia, alleluia.

Reges de Sabâ veniunt, alleluia,
Aurum, thus, myrrhum offerunt, alleluia, alleluia,

Intrantes domum invicem, alleluia,
Novum salutant principem, alleluia, alleluia.

De Matre natus Virgine, alleluia:
Qui lumen est de lumine, alleluia, alleluia.

Sine serpentis vulnere, alleluia,
De nostro venit sanguin, alleluia, alleluia.

In carne nobis similis, alleluia,
Peccato sed dissimilis; alleluia, alleluia.

Ut redderet nos homines, alleluia,
Deo et sibi similes, alleluia, alleluia.

In hoc natali gaudio, alleluia,
Benedicamus Domino, alleluia, alleluia.

Laudetur sancta Trinitas, alleluia,
Deo dicamus gratias, alleluia, alleluia.

Ten Lords-a-Leaping

2012-01-03T19:00:00.000Z

Image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%27%27_Nativity_%27%27_.JPG

A pretty little carol, which, like "Away in a Manger", I've only ever heard sung to a different tune than this one.

A virgin most pure by artsyhonker

A virgin most pure, as the Prophets do tell,
Hath brought forth a baby, as it hath befell,
To be our Redeemer from death, hell and sin,
Which Adam’s transgression had wrapped us in.

Refrain
Aye, and therefore be you merry,
Rejoice and be merry,
Set sorrow aside;
Christ Jesus our Savior was born on this tide.

At Bethlehem city in Jewry a City there was
Where Joseph and Mary together did pass,
And there to be taxed, with many one more,
For Cæsar commanded the same should be so. Refrain

But, when they had entered the city so fair
A number of people so mighty was there,
That Joseph and Mary, whose substance was small,
Could get in the Inn there6 no lodging at all. Refrain

Then were they constrained in a stable to lie,
Where horses and asses6a they us'd for to tie;
Their lodging so simple they held it no scorn,
But against the next morning our Saviour was born. Refrain

The King of all kings to this world being brought,
Small store of fine linen to wrap him was sought,
And when she had swaddled her young son so sweet,
Within an ox manger she laid him to sleep. Refrain

Then God sent an Angel from Heaven so high,
To certain poor Shepherds in fields where they lye,
And bade them no longer in sorrow to stay,
Because that our Saviour was born on this day. Refrain

Then presently after the Shepherds did spy
A number of Angels that stood in the sky;
Who joyfully talked and sweetly did sing,
To God be all glory our Heavenly King. Refrain

Nine ladies dancing

2012-01-02T21:30:00.000Z

Image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sonnenaufgang_mit_As.jpg

From the rising of the sun to the ends of the earth, let us sing of Christ the Prince,
born of the Virgin Mary.

Image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:A_solis_ortus.jpg

A solis ortus cardine by artsyhonker

A solis ortus cardine
Ad usque terrae limitem
Christum canamus Principem,
Natum Maria Virgine.

Beatus auctor saeculi
Servile corpus induit,
Ut carne carnem liberans
Non perderet quod condidit.

Clausae1 parentis viscera
Caelestis intrat gratia;
Venter puellae baiulat
Secreta quae non noverat.

Domus pudici pectoris
Templum repente fit Dei;
Intacta nesciens virum
Verbo concepit Filium.2

Enixa3 est puerpera
Quem Gabriel praedixerat,
Quem matris alvo gestiens4
Clausus Ioannes senserat.5

Foeno iacere pertulit,
Praesepe non abhorruit,
Parvoque lacte pastus est6
Per quem nec ales esurit.

Gaudet chorus caelestium
Et Angeli canunt Deum,
Palamque fit pastoribus
Pastor, Creator omnium.

Gloria tibi, Domine,
Qui natus es de Virgine,
Cum Patre et Sancto Spiritu,
In sempiterna saecula. Amen.

Translation into English available at CPDL.

Eight Maids-a-Milking

2012-01-01T22:51:00.004Z

Can you milk swans? Or do the maids bring their own cows? I'm not convinced about all these presents.

Image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Santa_Maria_del_Mar2.JPG.

I don't have much to say tonight.

Ther is no rose of swych vertu by artsyhonker

REFRAIN: Ther is no rose of swych vertu
As is the rose that bare Jhesu.

Ther is no rose of swych vertu
As is the rose that bare Jhesu.
Alleluya.
REFRAIN

For in this rose conteynyd was
Heven and erthe in lyttyl space,
Resmiranda.
REFRAIN

Be that rose we may weel see
That he is God in personys thre,
Pariforma.
REFRAIN

The aungelys sungyn the sheperdes to:
'Gloria in excelsis Deo.'
Gaudeamus.
REFRAIN

Leive we al this worldly merthe,
And folwe we this joyful berthe:
Transeamus.
REFRAIN

Seven Swans-a-Swimming

2011-12-31T18:33:00.003Z

I think it's illegal to eat swans over here, except with special permission of the Queen or someone important. I'm told the ones on Wanstead Lake were swimming quite happily today; I didn't get there to have a look, myself.

Image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chester_Cathedral_-_Weihnachtsfenster.jpg

Just a little something to bring in the New Year. The Shorter New Oxford Book of Carols says "This may have been written for the rumbustious festival of the subdeacons/lay brothers on New Year's Day." Of course I would never encourage any early rumbustiousness*.

Verbum Patris Umanatur by artsyhonker

Verbum Patris umanatur, O! O!
Dum puella salutatur, O! O!
Salutata fecundatur viri nescia.
He! he! hei! nova gaudia!

Novus modus geniture, O! O!
Sed excedens ius nature, O! O!
Dum unitur creature Creans omnia.
He! he! hei! nova gaudia!

Audi partum praeter morem, O! O!
Virgo parit Salvatorem, O! O!
Creatura Creatorem, Patrem filia.
He! he! hei! nova gaudia!

In parente Salvatoris, O! O!
Non est parens nostri moris, O! O!
Virgo parit, nec pudoris marcent lilia.
He! he! hei! nova gaudia!

Homo Deus nobis datur, O! O!
Datus nobis demonstratur, O! O!
Dum pax terris nuntiatur celis gloria.
He! he! hei! nova gaudia!

The translation is, roughly:

The word of the Father is made man, maiden, conception, mumble, hurrah, new joy!

This is a new manner of birth, exceeding the power of nature, mumble Creator united with everything mumble, hurrah, new joy!

Hear of a birth mumble, a Virgin has borne the Saviour, mumble creature/Creator, daughter of the Father, hurrah, new joy!

Something about the parent of the Saviour being different from what we know as parenting, Virgin, lilies, hurrah, new joy!

God made man is given to us; this is demonstrated, peace on earth mumble glory in the heavens, hurrah, new joy!

No, I have never studied Latin. And the translation in the Shorter New Oxford Book of Carols is, as far as I can tell, not in the public domain.

*Any rumbustiousness I get up to tonight will have to be comparatively early, as tomorrow is Sunday and that means I will be at church making rather a lot of noise at everyone else's hangover.

Six Geese-a-Laying

2011-12-30T18:58:00.002Z

More geese!?

This isn't the most popular tune for this particular carol; though it is in Carols for Choirs 1, I've never heard it sung in a service.

Any mother will tell you that "no crying he makes" is a complete fiction; it's bad theology to imply that the Christ child was not fully human, as well as fully divine. But I like this tune, so here you go.

Away in a manger by artsyhonker

Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,
The little Lord Jesus laid down His sweet head.
The stars in the bright sky looked down where He lay,
The little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay.

The cattle are lowing, the baby awakes,
But little Lord Jesus no crying He makes.
I love Thee, Lord Jesus! Look down from the sky,
And stay by my side until morning is nigh.

Be near me, Lord Jesus; I ask Thee to stay
Close by me forever, and love me, I pray.
Bless all the dear children in Thy tender care,
And fit us for heaven, to live with Thee there.

Five Gold Rings

2011-12-29T17:42:00.002Z

Finally off the poultry! Though if you look closely there is the Holy Spirit, represented by a dove, in this stained glass window of the Annunciation.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vitrail_Choeur_Laon_260808_2.jpg

This is very much a mixture of old and new. The words date from the 15th Century. The music dates from 2010 and is by one Chris Upton, who has released it under my favourite license, CC BY-SA.

I Syng of a Mayden by artsyhonker

I syng of a mayden
þat is makeles,
kyng of alle kynges
to here sone che ches.

He cam also stylle
þer his moder was
as dew in aprylle,
þat fallyt on þe gras.

He cam also stylle
to his moderes bowr
as dew in aprille,
þat fallyt on þe flour.

He cam also stylle
þer his moder lay
as dew in Aprille,
þat fallyt on þe spray.;

Moder & mayden
was neuer non but che –
wel may swych a lady
Godes moder be.

I sing of a maiden
That is matchless,
King of all kings
For her son she chose.

He came as still
Where his mother was
As dew in April
That falls on the grass.

He came as still
To his mother's bower
As dew in April
That falls on the flower.

He came as still
Where his mother lay
As dew in April
That falls on the spray.

Mother and maiden
Was never none but she;
Well may such a lady
God's mother be.

Four calling birds

2011-12-28T18:19:00.004Z

As usual, no birds. I guess turtle doves just aren't nocturnal...

Image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Merope.jpg

I know about this piece of music thanks to Francis Roads, Tim Henderson and the London Gallery Quire, where I play serpent and occasionally sing a bit or wave my arms about.

I've transposed it down a semi-tone for comfort, and am playing the instrumental bassline on the horn rather than a string instrument; a string instrument or maybe a bassoon would be more historically accurate but I don't play them! And the serpent is a bit too honky for this piece. While the tune, Epiphany, is anonymous, it puts me very much in mind of the music of Phocion Henley.

I love Wesley's words, which remind me of part of the Benedictus:
"Through the tender mercy of our God : whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us;
To give light to them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death : and to guide our feet into the way of peace."

Wesley might not have been writing about the Holy Innocents, but I think it's an appropriate text for this day.

Sons of men, behold from far by artsyhonker

Sons of men, behold from far,
Hail the long-expected star!
Jacob's star, that gilds the night,
Guides bewildered nature right.
Fear not hence that ill should flow;
Wars and pestilence below;
Wars it bids, and tumults cease,
Ush'ring in the Prince of Peace.

Mild it shines on all beneath,
Piercing through the shades of death;
Scatt'ring error's wide-spread night,
Kindling darkness into light.
Nations all, remote and near,
Haste to see your God appear:
Haste, for Him your hearts prepare,
Meet Him manifested there.

There behold the Day-spring rise,
Pouring light upon your eyes:
See it chase the shades away,
Shining to the perfect day.
Sing, ye morning stars again,
God descends on earth to reign,
Deigns for man His life to employ;
Shout, ye sons of God, for joy.

Three French Hens

2011-12-27T20:42:00.005Z

No, I don't have three French hens. I don't have three English hens. I don't even have one hen, of any description. I'm still eating leftover goose, if you must know.

I've been eating leftover goose, and trying to catch up with the world, and getting discouraged about politics. The Saviour of the world may have been born but looking at the state of things, "salvation" is not the word that comes to mind... and I know, I'm not suffering, I'm eating goose for crying aloud, but that doesn't actually make it all right that other people are worrying about how they're going to get health care, how they're going to feed their families, how they're going to find somewhere safe to sleep.

Image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mare_de_Deu_del_Castell_d%27Agres.jpg

I don't have a constructive response to this. My instinct is to hold the ones I care about and tell them it will be okay...

So here, have a lullaby.

Swete was the song the Virgine soong by artsyhonker

Swete was the song the Virgine soong
When she to Bethlem Juda came
And was deliver'd of hir Sonne
Who blessed Jesus hath to Name.
"Lulla, lulla, lulla, lullaby,
Lulla, lulla, lulla, lullaby,
Swete Babe!" soong shee;
"My Sonne and eke my Saviour borne,
Which hath vouchsafed from an high
To visitt us that ware forlorne.
La lulla, la lulla, la lullaby,
Swete Babe!" soong she,
And rockt him featly one hir knee.

Two Turtle Doves

2011-12-26T21:56:00.001Z

Okay, there are no turtle doves in this file. Just me, and a serpent.

The version I sing isn't exactly what's on that ancient manuscript; but it is good fun.

Resonet in Laudibus by artsyhonker

Resonet in laudibus
Cum jucundis plausibus
Sion cum fidelibus
Apparuit quem genuit Maria!

Christus natus hodie
Ex Maria Virgine
Sine virili semine:
Apparuit quem genuit Maria!

Pueri, concinite,
Nato Regi, psallite,
Voce pia dicite:
Apparuit quem genuit Maria!

Sion, lauda Dominum,
Salvatorem hominum,
Purgatorem criminum:
Apparuit quem genuit Maria!

Deo laus et gloria,
Virtus et victoria,
Perpete memoria:
Apparuit quem genuit Maria!

A Partridge in a Pear Tree

2011-12-25T20:50:00.004Z

Well, not quite a partridge. We had goose for dinner.

Not quite a pear tree, either, but holly:

Image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hulst2.jpg

Green Grow'th the Holly by artsyhonker

Flash Compline: 8.30pm, Friday 23rd December, Whittington Garden

2011-12-22T10:12:00.003Z

There will be a Flash Compline service at 8.30pm on Friday, 23rd December, at Whittington Garden, near Cannon St rail - here's a map.

Music: We will use this setting of Compline.

If you want to let us know you're coming then respond to the Facebook Event or reply to this post, but no need to confirm: you can just turn up, if you'd rather.

We will have a small number of spare copies, which you can purchase for £2 if you want to keep them, or borrow if you don't. Don't worry if you aren't a confident singer -- follow along with the text and see what you can pick up. Everyone is welcome. If we don't have enough confident singers we can always say the liturgy instead.

This setting uses the words from Common Worship Traditional Language Compline. Various smartphone apps for this exist and it is also available from the C of E website on the day, if you're worried we won't have enough music or you'd rather just use the words.

You may wish to bring a torch or book light.

PLEASE ARRIVE QUIETLY AND DEPART IN SILENCE.

Flash Compline: 8:30pm, Monday 12th December.

2011-12-11T19:47:00.002Z

There will be a Flash Compline service at 8.30pm on Monday, 12th December, at Christ Church Greyfriars, near St Paul's tube - here's a map

Music: We will use this setting of Compline.

We will have a small number of spare copies, which you can purchase for £2 if you want to keep them, or borrow if you don't. Don't worry if you aren't a confident singer -- follow along with the text and see what you can pick up. Everyone is welcome. If we don't have enough confident singers we can always say the liturgy instead.

This setting uses the words from Common Worship Traditional Language Compline. Various smartphone apps for this exist and it is also available from the C of E website on the day, if you're worried we won't have enough music or you'd rather just use the words.

You may wish to bring a torch or book light.

PLEASE ARRIVE QUIETLY AND DEPART IN SILENCE.

When you made this planet

2011-12-08T12:23:00.000Z

Some time ago, Thomas Thurman drew my attention to a text to try setting as a hymn. The story behind the text, as well as the text itself, is here.

After spending the requisite months sitting in a "drafts" drawer while I got distracted by other things, and some help with editing from various people (Dr Christopher Parker at St Mary's Addington was particularly helpful), I think it's about as finished as it is going to get.

I've called the tune "Hitchin", because that is the birthplace of the author of the text, and because clever Latin things ended up looking like "Cum hoc tellure" which, let's face it, isn't going to be a giggle-proof title for working with choirs.

Today the some churches celebrate or remember the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and this morning after the necessary clarification about just whose conception this refers to (the Immaculate Conception is not the same as the Virgin Birth), I was thinking about that. I was thinking about how it is that when someone does something wonderful, or fulfills what we might call God's purposes for them, we are sometimes tempted to say "Oh, but they're special, we could never do that..." rather than being inspired by their actions. For me, the amazing thing about Mary is not that God chose her or somehow set her aside -- whether or however that happened -- but that she said YES. "Let it be unto me according to thy will," she said.

Or possibly, in today's language, "My Lord, I pray my life will mirror you."

Here is a .pdf of the music.
Here is a .midi file of robots singing it.
As usual, the material is CC BY-SA.

Miscellany

2011-12-05T13:03:00.003Z

1) Flash Compline again tonight. Christ Church Greyfriars, 9.15pm. Details here. We arrive quietly, and depart in silence.

2) I have a very rudimentary page on Bandcamp now. It lacks a biography, pictures, that sort of thing. The one track there is one that you can also download for free from Soundcloud; I'm using it as a sort of test, to play around with things like artwork. So it's very un-pretty right now, but it's there. Advice, other than "do more stuff with it", would be welcome.

3) The Advent Psalms are going well but I am, obviously, not going to have the booklet done by the start of Advent. I will try to finish something by January, so that the next time Year B comes around I can just point at it. This may seem like a long way off but these lectionary cycles seem to go awfully fast if you ask me. If I do the same thing for Lent I will try and get it finished with more time to spare.

4) I've started using my Dreamwidth account as a sort of notes repository for creative projects. The idea is that I update the post for each project as I go along, so that my various notes are all in one place. I can make the entries private or restrict them to an access list of Dreamwidth/OpenID users if I need to put more sensitive information in them.

5) Everything Takes Longer.

Flash Compline: 9.45pm, Wednesday 30-11-11.

2011-11-29T10:10:00.004Z

There will be a Flash Compline service at 9.45pm on Wednesday, 30th November, outside St James Garlickhythe, near Mansion House Tube station. Here is a map.

Music: We will use this setting of Compline. I will have a small number of spare copies, which you can purchase from me for £2 if you want to keep them, or borrow if you don't. Don't worry if you aren't a confident singer -- follow along with the text and see what you can pick up. Everyone is welcome. If we don't have enough confident singers we can always say the liturgy instead.

This setting uses the words from Common Worship Traditional Language Compline. Various smartphone apps for this exist and it is available from the C of E website here on the day, if you're worried we won't have enough music or you'd rather just use the words.

PLEASE ARRIVE QUIETLY AND DEPART IN SILENCE.

Please can I keep it? It followed me home...

2011-11-25T19:32:00.007Z

I was feeling a little unfocused and restless yesterday so decided to go for a walk after lunch.

I wandered past the charity shop on Leytonstone High Road, as I sometimes do, and decided to have a peek inside.

I came home with a musical instrument. This is why I shouldn't be allowed out of the house unsupervised...

At first glance, it just looks like a box.

A box with strange protrusions and fittings, mind, but a box all the same.

But this is what happens when you get it open!

The "lid" goes all the way vertical...

...then folds backward. Release the little metal tab at the top...

...and you get a bellows!

The bellows are operated with one hand while the other plays the 3/4-size keys.

I don't have enough hands to play and pump and hold the camera.

Brother James's Air by artsyhonker

From what the internet tells me, this is a very simple portable harmonium. More complicated ones have drone stops which, when activated, sound a drone note constantly, and some also have couplers or even separate sets of reeds to give various different textures.

I'm quite pleased with this: I finally have a keyboard instrument that can play more than one note at once which fits on my bicycle. The fact that it doesn't require electricity is an added bonus. I think it will be really good for folk music and some bits of community music, and it suits me a lot better than trying to learn the guitar would (though that is still on the wishlist). But to be honest, I probably would have bought it anyway; I have a soft spot for weird and wonderful instruments, even if they're not all that practical.

There are a few very low and very high notes where the tuning is a bit of an issue, and I'm wondering exactly what is involved in maintenance of an instrument like this. It looks like flathead screwdrivers are required for taking it apart, but I haven't done more than give it a superficial dusting.

(Some of the alignment is messed up in this post, but to fix it I would have to re-upload all of those pictures, so I'm not going to. Sorry. It's staying crooked.)

St Andrew's Carol Service

2011-11-17T15:07:00.004Z

This service will draw on a mix of Advent and Christmas repertoire, including the Advent Prose and Berlioz's Shepherd's Farewell, as well as a West Gallery carol and traditional hymns.

There will also be a rehearsal at 3.30pm on 11th December. All are welcome to join the choir. If you can't make all the rehearsals but would still like to take part, please speak to me.

Stuck in the middle with You

2011-11-16T12:58:00.002Z

Various folks have blogged on David Cameron's favourite Bible passage, and the comments that this is the "central message" of the Bible. I did enjoy Archdruid Eileen's viewpoint.

I suppose it isn't a definitive answer, but apparently someone asked Jesus what the central message of the Bible is. Or at least, the greatest commandment.

I shouldn't like to argue.

I hate cancelled services...

2011-10-28T13:45:00.003+01:00

...so we are still going to have Evensong at St Paul's-in-the-Camp this evening.

I have no wish to compete with the cathedral, but I also don't want anyone turning up thinking there is a service and then finding out there isn't one. That has happened to me so many times, in so many contexts, that I can't bring myself to take the risk of it happening to someone else.

I do plan to attend the Evensong inside St Paul's at 5pm, but then, I really really like Evensong.

Friday Evensong at St Paul's-in-the-Camp, 6.15 for 6.30pm.

2011-10-27T11:29:00.007+01:00

EDIT, FRIDAY AFTERNOON: It turns out St Paul's are having Evensong tonight after all, but didn't tell anyone about it until late morning. While I don't wish to compete with them, I think we should go ahead and have Evensong outside anyway.
END OF EDIT

On Friday we will have Evensong outside St Paul's. While the Cathedral has said they will be open for worship, I don't believe they are having Evensong tomorrow, so I want to go ahead with this. It's the day for St Simon and St Jude, apostles.

Meet at 6.15pm for 6.30; outside M&S seems to be a reasonable place for it, although we may need to move (especially if there are enough of us to obstruct the walkway).

You can print a copy of the liturgy from here ON THE DAY or from here today (Thursday). Alternately you can follow along online using the same links on a smartphone or using one of the various Common Worship smartphone apps.

The really simple way to do it will be to bring a Book of Common Prayer, though. I have a small number of spares. The Psalm will be Psalm 119.1-16. The Old Testament reading will be 1 Maccabees 2.42-66 and the New Testament reading will be Jude 1-4,17-25.

I did not choose these readings; I want to use the same ones that will be on the Church of England website, for ease of letting others follow along at home or elsewhere. Readers for the readings will be assigned when we meet.

We will sing the psalm and canticles from the Parish Psalter. If you have a Parish Psalter please bring it, even if you don't sing! These are harder to get hold of than the BCP and I only have a small number.

Unless a conductor volunteers in the next couple of hours, we will stick to the ferial responses. Please bring music to these if you have it; it's hard to get hold of online and I only have a small number of copies. I will cantor if there are no clergy there who are willing/able to do so.

We will use the same hymns as on Sunday and Wednesday. If you want to print the words to these yourself they are available in .pdf format here. If you want to bring a hymnal to sing harmony I prefer New English Hymnal (note that some of the words are different).

If you don't have any of these bits of pieces, you can still come! Really. You can look over my shoulder, or someone else's, or participate in a more reflective manner.

It would be helpful to have a rough idea how many people will be coming along, so if you are planning on it please do leave a comment here. Anonymous comments are fine.

If there are enough singers we might do an anthem -- same one as yesterday -- but be aware that if numbers are low this will be cut.

Summary:
6.15 for 6.30pm outside M&S, St. Paul's-in-the-Camp
Liturgy here on the day.
Bring BCP, Parish Psalter, and ferial responses if you have them.
Further updates from @artsyhonker and @FlashEvensong on Twitter.

Wednesday: St Paul's-in-the-Camp Flashmob Evensong

2011-10-25T10:00:00.002+01:00

On Wednesday we will have Evensong outside St Paul's -- unless the cathedral has opened for worship again, of course, in which case we may as well join them inside.

Meet at 5pm for 5.15; outside M&S seems to be a reasonable place for it, although we may need to move (especially if there are enough of us to obstruct the walkway).

You can print a copy of the liturgy from here ON THE DAY or from here today (Tuesday). Alternately you can follow along online using the same links on a smartphone or using one of the various Common Worship smartphone apps.

The really simple way to do it will be to bring a Book of Common Prayer, though. I have a small number of spares. The Psalm will be Psalm 119:145-176. The Old Testament reading will be @ Kings 9:1-16. The New Testament reading will be Acts 27:1-26. I did not choose these readings; I want to use the same ones that will be on the Church of England website, for ease of letting others follow along at home or elsewhere. Readers for the readings will be assigned when we meet.

We will sing the psalm and canticles from the Parish Psalter. If you have a Parish Psalter please bring it, even if you don't sing! These are harder to get hold of than the BCP and I only have a small number. Ditto the music for the ferial responses. I will cantor if there are no clergy there who are willing/able to do so.

We will use the same hymns as on Sunday, mostly because I have about 20 hymn sheets and I don't want to waste them. If you want to print the words to these yourself they are available in .pdf format here. If you want to bring a hymnal to sing harmony I prefer New English Hymnal (note that some of the words are different).

If you don't have any of these bits of pieces, you can still come! Really. You can look over my shoulder, or someone else's, or participate in a more reflective manner.

If you want to join the choir for the anthem please contact @FlashEvensong on Twitter, who is organising that bit. I've said that if we don't have at least two strong readers per voice part it's better not to do the anthem. There is a poll here for you to sign up.

It would be helpful to have a rough idea how many people will be coming along, so if you are planning on it please do leave a comment here (even if you aren't planning to sing the anthem). Anonymous comments are fine.

Summary:
5 for 5.15pm outside M&S, St. Paul's-in-the-Camp
Liturgy here on the day.
Bring BCP, Parish Psalter, and ferial responses if you have them.
Contact @FlashEvensong for choral anthem enquiries, poll here.

Flashmob your own liturgy

2011-10-24T14:12:00.004+01:00

Dashing this off very quickly, but here are some online resources for putting together your own flashmob services:

BCP Mattins

CW Morning Prayer

BCP Evensong

Compline (Trad language)

Compline (Modern language)

The Oremus Hymnal

St Paul's Evensong at OccupyLSX

2011-10-23T20:31:00.009+01:00

I didn't think, when I got up this morning, that I would somehow wind up leading a BCP Evensong at St Paul's Cathedral.

The cathedral has had Occupy LSX, a protest camp, on their doorstep for the past week. Last weekend the Canon Chancellor, Revd Dr Giles Fraser, told the police to leave the protesters alone. As the week has worn on and the tents have stayed up, the cathedral has been operating on a reduced schedule, and on Friday the Dean issued a statement saying it would have to close until further notice.

I have no strong criticism of the cathedral closing to sightseers; there is a point at which keeping things ticking over stops making economic sense, and though I am uncomfortable with entry fees for cathedrals I cannot condemn them without calling into question the legitimacy of thousands of smaller, parish-based fundraising efforts. Fair game.

But a cathedral is more than architecture and establishment. Cathedrals exist to serve the local community, as well as to support parish churches in their work. Their primary task is of public worship, and it is difficult to see how Occupy LSX are a significant threat to that. The supposed health and safety reasons for closure given by the cathedral haven't, to my knowledge, been specified in a way that would allow the protesters to improve matters, and so things have come to a sort of impasse.

Practising the organ this morning I half-joked on Twitter about being tempted to turn up at St Paul's and hold Evensong myself, if they weren't letting people in for services. Then I went back to practising, it being one of those mornings where I felt like I had someone else's fingers and feet, and the choir turned up and we rehearsed, and there was a service and afterwards tea and toast. I checked my phone before heading home and there seemed to be some positive response to the idea of an outdoor Evensong, and I began to think more seriously about it.

I'm accustomed to Evensong services of varying sizes. I knew that without any real idea of who was going to turn up, I wouldn't want to plan anything too complicated.. but there definitely wasn't time to select metrical psalms, so we'd have to do simple Anglican Chant (and hope for enough people who can make sense of it for it to work) or even just said psalms and canticles. I made a few more tentative tweets, putting out feelers to see who else might be interested. I tried to contact both St Paul's, and Occupy LSX, through Twitter, and got no response -- fair enough, both are busy organisations. But people who had been involved in the protest, and various clergy and churchy types online, seemed encouraging, so I decided to go for it.

At 12.12 I tweeted "Right. Evensong at @OccupyLSX outside St Pual's, 3.45 for 4pm. Please bring Parish Psalter & BCP if you have them." From there it was a matter of choosing hymns with words in the public domain and printing them, providing links to those and to the BCP liturgy for the day through the C of E website, making sure I had the readings and the Collect for the 21st Sunday after Trinity to hand, and the sort of low-grade terror at what I was doing that you might expect, complete with wildly beating heart and trembling hands. A lot of people were generally supportive but simply unable to get there due to geography or prior commitments. But people said they would come, and I turned up and they found me. Our numbers were small but mighty, and included an atheist and a Roman Catholic, as a typical Evensong at St Paul's well might! Apparently there had been some sort of praying and singing not too long before my arrival, but the clergyman involved was busy being interviewed by someone with a camera and I had come over all shy, so we decided just to get on with it. We chose an almost-quiet spot outside M&S and did just that.

And it was good. Christ is made the sure foundation was our introit, chosen because I love it and it is a good length, and one or two people did join us as we sang. There was a bit of informal awkwardness going from one bit of the service to the next -- I nearly forgot the psalm, think of it! -- but we chanted psalms and canticles in something resembling unison, and the ferial responses were fairly straightforward. The readings were Ecclesiastes Chapters 11 and 12, and St Paul's 2nd Letter to Timothy, Chapter 2, verses 1-7. One annoying photographer insisted on trying to ask us questions during the service, which I found a bit difficult -- I tried to explain we weren't finished, I think someone else went and talked to him and then came and joined us again. Instead of sermon (the epistle said it all with "The husbandman that laboureth must be first partaker of the fruits.") or anthem we had Guide me, O thou great Jehovah and after the "Prayer for the Clergy and People" (rather apt I thought) and "A Prayer of St Chrysostom" and the Grace we sang O God, our help in ages past and went our respective ways -- some of us to the pub, to slake the thirst after righteousness (I'll get my coat), others off home or to other parts of the protest.

So, that was a pretty strange day. I wonder what tomorrow will bring?

By Popular Request: Gin Sandwich recipes

2011-10-21T12:00:00.000+01:00

A while ago on Twitter, in one of those conversations that sometimes happens when I ought to be practising or tidying or some such thing, there was discussion of gin, and taking gin on trains, and so on. In the way of such things it got rather whimsical and somehow, I'm not sure how, ideas for gin sandwiches came up.

I'm pleased to say I have now tried two of the ideas, and they worked beautifully.

The first one is easy: slice cucumbers, soak them in gin, in the refrigerator, overnight. I don't mean "sprinkle some gin on them" I mean "put them in a container and fill it up until the gin covers the cucumbers". Then use these cucumbers in sandwiches, as you would normally use cucumbers. They seem to go very well with herby cream cheese, but I see no reason they couldn't be used with other sandwich ingredients.

The second sandwich idea is to make sloe gin jelly.

To do this I used Oetker's gelatine; it comes in a yellow box and has sachets in it. Each sachet says it will set one pint of liquid.

Mix one sachet of gelatine with about 150mL of hot water. You may need to stir quite a lot to dissolve it all. Add about 300mL gin. Set in the refrigerator for several hours. I had been hoping that the jelly would set hard enough to be sliced, but even with the reduced liquid the alcohol in the gin prevented that happening, so it was a spreadable jelly instead. However, it was very tasty! This works beautifully with good-quality sliced sandwich meat, particularly smoked varieties.

I don't know how long the cucumbers will take to go mushy, but if they don't they shouldn't spoil in any hurry. The jelly ought to stay good for a fair while, too. Basically it's hard for anything with that much alcohol in it to actually go off. Whether they keep depends more on supplies of bread, creamcheese and sliced sandwich meat!

There you have it. Gin sandwiches: the perfect treat when you get back from Evensong too tired to cook properly.

Metrical Psalms for Advent

2011-10-19T14:58:00.007+01:00

I want to encourage the use of psalms in liturgy. To this end I have committed to compiling a small booklet of metrical psalms for use this coming Advent (Year B). As with everything else I publish I will release the work under a CC BY-SA licence so that other people can use it, free of charge, without having to bother me for permission.

I aim to have two settings of each of the psalms for the main Sunday morning service, one with a very well-known hymn tune and one perhaps a little less well-known (I might even write something myself). I will include full music, and also a "lead sheet" version with the melody line and chords. The psalms will have an optional refrain, so that they can be sung congregationally (without the refrain) or in the "responsorial" style with the choir/music group/whoever singing the verses, and the congregation joining in with the refrain. I used this method of metrical psalm singing quite successfully in my own parish, St Andrew's Leytonstone, during Lent.

There is a catch, however. Most of the public domain metrical settings of the psalms use language that, at best, is considered archaic. Some of the older settings are quite difficult to understand. While that might be all right for the choir at St Andrew's, where people have a fairly high tolerance for "old-fashioned" language, I do think it might be difficult in other contexts.

To this end I would like some modern metrical settings of the following psalms:

Advent I Psalm 80:1-8,18-20
Advent II Psalm 85:1-2,8-13
Advent III Psalm 126
Advent IV Psalm 89.1-4,19-26
(These are all from RSCM's "Sunday by Sunday", so please tell me if I've got the lectionary wrong...)

It would, of course, make sense to add these translations or paraphrases to Psalter Commons. Some of them have been shortened in order to be a sensible length for congregational worship; that's the lectionary's suggestion, not mine, so please feel free to include a bit more if the text sits better that way.

A modern metrical setting of the Magnificat (listed as an alternative to the psalm on Advent III or Advent IV) would also be useful, but this is not as crucial as there are serviceable settings already available in many hymnals (Timothy Dudley-Smith's "Tell out my soul" is perhaps the best known).

I've promised people I'll have this booklet done by mid-November, so I really, really need the text by the end of October. Do let me know if you'd like to help out.

A bit about why I use the CC licenses I do.

2011-10-15T17:24:00.004+01:00

When I write music I release it under a Creative Commons license. I usually use a CC BY-SA license, known as Attribution-ShareAlike. This means people can use it, without first asking me, as long as they give me attribution and any derivative works they make are shared under a similar license. If I am using CC BY-SA then they are free to earn money for derivative works, but since they have to release those works under a similar license they are not going to be in a situation where they have a monopoly on the work. For example, a musician might get paid for recording one of my compositions -- this is a commercial use of the work -- but as they must allow others to use the recording they are not going to end up being the only supplier of it. The CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike ) license is more restrictive, and I rarely use it these days; I believe the drawbacks outweigh the benefits of restricting copyright in that way.

The reason for "giving my music away for free" is something I've been through a number of times, but a short summary is that it is more important to me that the music is heard and used than that I make money from it. People are not queuing up to pay me to write music and the writing I do is little enough, and sufficiently esoteric by mainstream standards (mostly choral music, mostly for use in churches), that I'm unlikely to make much money from it anyway. Like the majority of musicians throughout history, I earn more money from teaching and performing than from composing, publishing or recording. When I do write something, and someone uses it, I'm delighted. It would be great if they could chuck a fiver my way, but a lot of people are in the same boat I am, with little or no sheet music budget, so I'm not going to worry about it too much if they don't.

So, why do I use Creative Commons licenses rather than simply adding a preface to work saying that people are free to use it?

One is that the license information is easier to include on the work itself, so that in the event that it gets separated from the preface my intentions are still clear. (See Christ Has No Body Now On Earth But Ours for an example -- that work is four pages, but it wouldn't have been hard to include the license information on all of them, and anyway one page of it isn't that useful on its own.) This isn't a big deal for short pieces, but I'm working on a booklet of psalms for Advent, and it's quite likely that some people will want to use -- and print -- only one or two pages from it. It makes sense to have licence information on all of them, rather than expecting people to remember where the music came from and come back to find it again.

Another reason is that the people at Creative Commons have done the research to make sure that their copyright statements are legally valid, whereas a simpler text statement may not be considered binding (particularly in areas of international jurisdiction). I've seen lots of plain text copyright statements that aren't absolutely clear whether, for example, an organist playing for a wedding which will be recorded is allowed to use the work if they are being paid. While I'm alive this isn't too bad, as people can contact me (I try to include an e-mail address on most paper copies of my work too), but after I'm dead if there is any lack of clarity people will have to wait seventy years for my work to become public domain. So there's a lot to be said for using a standardised license that others will be able to interpret and which has been formulated by people who understand the full legal implications.

I use a Creative Commons license because I want to give my work away and I want to do it with a minimum of fuss for myself and for others.

Your Commission, Should You Choose to Request It

2011-09-27T20:48:00.005+01:00

An experiment:

I would like to write more music, particularly choral music. I would prefer to do this on commission, for a whole bunch of reasons. But my music is not well-known, and so I don't attract attention from people who have serious money to pay for commissions, on the whole. So far, every note I have ever written has been for free.

What if the money for commissions isn't quite so serious?

For £30, I will set up to 50 words of English for SATB, with or without a simple organ or piano accompaniment. I'm willing to do more complex compositions, or simpler ones, or other languages, but please do contact me about it -- Latin is easy, Russian much harder! You can see (and in some cases hear) examples of my other compositions by using the look what I made tag on this blog. That isn't a full list (I'm working on it; processing works that pre-date this blog is another thing that is easily pushed aside!), but it's something.

Your chosen text must be in the public domain, or you must have permission from the appropriate sources for me to set it. The copyright of the finished work will remain with me but I will release it under a CC BY-SA license, meaning that others can use it freely in derivative works, even for commercial purposes, as long as they acknowledge my work and share it similarly. So if you commission a choral work from me, you won't just be contributing to my livelihood, you'll be contributing to a body of publicly available art.

Any takers?

Who do you say that I am?

2011-09-21T18:10:00.001+01:00

Who is considered "Christian"? Why do any of us care?

Edward Green wrote an interesting post about the UCCF's Doctrinal Basis, a sort of pseudo-creed which it seems is sometimes used as a litmus test of who is "in" and who is not at university Christian Unions.

Revd Green rightly points out that even the Catechism of the Catholic Church has a broader remit than that, stating that “All who have been justified by faith in Baptism are incorporated into Christ; they therefore have a right to be called Christians, and with good reason are accepted as brothers in the Lord by the children of the Catholic Church.” I would agree that this is true, but I shy away from relying on the sacrament of baptism as a way of defining who is Christian, or rather, who is not.

The Salvation Army is one example of a non-sacramental movement that I would find difficult to classify as "not Christian". There are also Christian Quakers, and Christian Unitarians, and all sorts of people from all walks of life who consider themselves Christian in the sense of trying to follow the way of Jesus of Nazareth regardless of not sharing creedal beliefs. There are Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses; I've lived with the former and been friends with the latter and I am not willing to call either group "not Christian" because of their divergences from the creed I give my heart to. Quite frankly, if someone believes in the Flying Spaghetti Monster but also self-identifies as Christian I am willing to consider them Christian.

There are a few reasons I have this attitude. One is that I believe God is ultimately ineffable and limitless. This puts everyone in a bit of a pickle as it's difficult to say anything meaningful about the nature of God without putting limits on God. If God is pink then God cannot be blue, but if God is limitless then God is both pink and blue. So while I am concerned with right belief, I try to sit lightly to it, if you will, remembering that we are all heretics.

Another reason is that the example Jesus set for us, if I am to believe scripture, points toward accepting others and treating them with respect and loving kindness regardless of their religious background. What is the point of my knowing what sort of Christian someone is? So often, this seems to be a case of trying not to associate with the "wrong" sort of people.

Sometimes this is out of a concern for sacramental purity: only baptised, confirmed Christians who have jumped through this hoop and that hoop are welcome at the Lord's table, says the Church. We mustn't "adulterate" the sacrament by allowing anyone who might have the wrong idea to try it for themselves, or by allowing anyone we aren't quite sure about -- sinners, gays, women -- to preside at the Eucharist. I think this is incredibly sad; we are all heretics, remember? and I would say we are also all sinners! But Jesus ate with society's outcasts and died as an outcast himself. He asked people to believe in him, but didn't demand they believed before feeding them. I have better things to do than try to follow obscure rules about who I may or may not eat with.

Sometimes the purity concerns seem to be more along the lines of worry that someone will come along and infect us with wrong belief. I can understand this a little better. If you have a nice comforting belief and someone comes along and questions the premises, then of course it's going to be unnerving. But scary and evil aren't the same thing, and building isolating walls around our faith does two things: it puts the community at risk of stagnation and idiosyncracy, and it gives people leverage over us. Now, I do think that people in community should give one another power; we are accountable to each other, we live together on this interconnected planet where there is only one flesh we can wound. But I don't think that power should extend as far as someone saying "Well, you aren't really Christian if you believe that. You don't belong here."

At Greenbelt, I went to a talk by Mark Vernon on fundamentalisms and boundaries. He described the difference between bounded sets and centred sets by talking about ways of keeping herds of cattle together in Australia. There are basically two strategies: you can build a fence, or you can sink a well. Then in the rest of his talk he went on to talk about how some people seem to need boundaries, how without boundaries we can't define what the church is or isn't and cross those boundaries to reach -- who? Other churches? the "unchurched"? I don't quite remember, to be honest, because for the rest of the talk I was thinking "OK, but what happens if we just sink a well?"

Boundaries make us feel safe, right enough, whether that's to do with purity of thought or purity of sacrament. It's natural enough to want to associate with the "right" kind of people. But dividing the sheep and the goats by doctrinal fences isn't, in the end, for us to do. The wheat and tares are not for us to sort out.

Instead we are told "by their fruits ye shall know them" and "love your neighbour as yourself". I hope that if people classify me as Christian it is not because I go to church to pray, or because I regularly receive Communion, or because I happen to agree with them on matters of doctrine or liturgy. When someone tells me that they are Christian, I consider it a statement of intent, not a statement of adherence to some orthodoxy or another. I am not a theologian and some would say I lack the education to make such assumptions. Nevertheless, I hope that if people classify me as Christian, it is because of my attempts, however frail or flawed the results might be, to live in the world as an example of God's love for the world.

Lost Link

2011-09-08T22:27:00.002+01:00

Some time ago -- a year, two years? -- I came across an article on the technical demands of music. I think it might have been linked to from Elaine Fine's blog, Musical Assumptions (to which I commend you anyway), but I can't find it there.

I remember quite clearly that it used a typing analogy, comparing playing music to copy-typing, but in a specific rhythm, in time with others, with precise pressure on each key according to how bold the letters are on the page, and having to get everything right. It went into more detail than that and explained the process far better than I can.

I can't find it anywhere. Has anyone seen it?

Ssssssomething a little different

2011-09-04T22:44:00.006+01:00

I'm trying to find more local teaching. Rather than having the same old boring poster for piano lessons I thought I'd advertise a bit differently...

I've chopped off the bottom line for security reasons as I don't want my telephone number all over the internet, but please leave a comment or contact me via twitter if you are interested in lessons!

Song for October Ending

2011-08-31T19:07:00.003+01:00

In around 2006 I wrote this SATB setting of a poem by my grandmother. The weather is a bit autumnal here today and a few people were talking about things they like about autumn, so I thought I'd post it even though it's two months early.

SONG FOR OCTOBER ENDING

For a season
cold rain imprisons us; our lives
circle around coffee cups,
blue teapots,
things simmering on the stove,
baking in the oven.

We
make jams, jellies and
press
radiant leaves
between slices of waxed paper.
Preserve the days.

Warmth imprints our lives
Warmth is the imprint
of our love.

----

I haven't made a recording, I ought to work on that at some stage.

Psalter Commons

2011-08-18T19:18:00.005+01:00

I have a new project! It's called Psalter Commons and I would love your help with it.

I'd like the words of the psalms to be freely available for liturgy and study, but copyright law means the only truly free translations are quite old.

If you have translated or paraphrased a psalm or many psalms, please feel free to add the texts! They don't need to have music, though if you do have music that's great too. If you know of existing public domain psalters not listed on the category page please add those, too, preferably with links. Using a wiki is easy and quicky, er, quick.

More background details:

I have often whinged about the lack of freely-accessible, modern-language, metrical settings of psalms available these days. The older psalms available in the public domain are glorious! I do love them, and I'm very glad to have a chance to sing them fairly regularly in London Gallery Quire (though I play the serpent more often than I sing, I still get to read the words as I usually play from a vocal score). However, the language is considered archaic by many, and in some cases the translations are a bit suspect too, compared to modern scholarship.

There are modern metrical translations. Some of them are even included in the Christian Copyright Licensing Initiative (CCLI), which means that for a fee and with a lot of paperwork, we're allowed to make copies of the words -- if we've already bought a copy of whatever book they're in. That's admirable, but for a small parish like St Andrew's it's still a pretty high barrier to use. Why not just release them under a CC-BY-SA license and let everyone use them? Then I would be able to write my own musical settings if I wanted to, or set them to existing hymn tunes where appropriate.

There are accessibility difficulties with prose translations, too. The Common Worship Psalter publication terms aren't too bad for liturgical use but if I want to use that material in a separate piece of music I have to write an ask for permission. The Coverdale psalms which are usually bound with the Book of Common Prayer, and those in the King James Authorised Version of the bible, are commonly thought to be in the public domain, but in the UK they're actually under strange special copyright laws which mean that, again, I would need to ask for permission to use them.

So, I was having my usual moan and a friend offered to set up and host a wiki. It seemed like a better idea than just whingeing, so I said yes.

I hope that Psalter Commons will eventually become a valuable resource for anyone interested in the psalms for study and liturgical purposes. It will take a lot more work than I could do myself, which is why a wiki makes so much sense -- now others who are interested can join in. Please do, and please send this page to others who might be interested.

Alive and well.

2011-08-09T14:31:00.001+01:00

I'm not in London at the moment, and where I am is perfectly safe.

St Andrew's Leytonstone will be open tomorrow from 11am to 3pm for prayer and for discussing concerns and responses to the London riots.

I might do a more in-depth post later. In the meantime if you want to help please see http://wiki.crisiscommons.org/wiki/London_Riots for information on how to do so.

Multi-tracking chant experiment

2011-07-17T22:55:00.006+01:00

This is a brief experiment with multi-tracking chant.

Creator lucis optime (English) by artsyhonker

You see, I've got this hare-brained idea about podcasting a sung Compline online, possibly in some kind of Whitacre-style virtual choir. That's hard to coordinate, with chant: the pulse is directed by the words, so metronome markings are no help, for starters. But gathering together a little schola cantorum to come and sing with me in person once a week or once a month seems equally daunting. And I worry that singing Compline by myself is just going to sound a bit daft; there are too many responsorial bits, really.

So I thought I'd take something simple and see whether I can sing chant with myself, so to speak. In went the headphones and out came the hymnal to select something I'd not sung before. The results are... instructive, really. This will need a lot of work on intonation and timing before I'm happy to do an entire Compline. I did actually cheat and "mute" some sections of some voices in one or two places where the timing was just unbearably out of sync; I didn't do any other fancy stuff, though. What you hear is what I sang.

I guess if I want an online Compline to be a recording of an actual prayer, rather than something that takes hours of editing and re-recording to get into acceptable shape for posting online, I need to find some people to sing with me, or get used to the idea of singing alone.

There are, of course, other folks who put this sort of thing online. Most seem to be regular "Compline choirs" in the US, who rehearse regularly, or monastic groups with their daily Office available as podcasts. I'm not entirely sure how what I want to offer would be significantly different, and maybe I need to figure that out, too. On a very basic level, I'd like it to be something that encourages people to join in. That means providing links to the text and preferably to notation with the text underlaid, not just an audio file as I have above.

A little something for Canada Day

2011-07-01T23:48:00.003+01:00

I had a horn teacher who had the custom, on Canada Day, of taking his canoe out to the middle of the lake and playing "O Canada" on the horn.

I lack a boat, the nearest lake has rather a lot of traffic noise and I'm a bit disorganised. So instead, here is a recording of me playing "O Canada" on the serpent.

O Canada by artsyhonker

Dances, not dirges

2011-06-27T17:02:00.001+01:00

On Saturday I had the pleasure of conducting the <a href="http://www.lgq.org.uk">London Gallery Quire</a>, not once but twice. We started with a service of Mattins at St John's, Fulham, and then in the evening made our way to St Peter's in the Forest for a concert as part of their Flower Festival.

Elsewhere there are conversations going on about music and liturgy, and as usual there is a certain amount of lamenting over organists who refuse to play anything "modern", the boring drudgery of most hymns, and the problems this causes in making the church seem outdated or old-fashioned among young people.

As an aside I would like to note that, within the Church of England, canon law is quite explicit on the matter. I don't have the specific reference to hand, but the final responsibility for choice of music lies with the incumbent, not with the organist. Any organist who point-blank refuses to comply with the wishes of the incumbent in this might do well to consider whether the position is right for them. In practice, this can get difficult: the liturgy, the "work of the people", is collaborative and no one person can easily be held responsible if it just doesn't work... but that is another discussion. My point is that simply blaming the organist for the overall feel of the liturgy is a cop-out.

That said, organists (and other church musicians) do have a huge impact and responsibility in worship. Problems with the perception of liturgy as drab or outdated are, in my opinion, usually systemic, but an organist may have more
influence within that system than others.

What does all this have to do with the lovely West Gallery music I was conducting at the weekend? More than you might think. Some of the metrical psalms and non-conformist hymns we were singing are direct precursors to what most people would recognise as "traditional" hymnody. Regular metrical texts with fairly simple (even if lively) rhythms are easy for people to sing together, and that is crucially important for congregational music. The more florid and complex styles which arose out of the West Gallery tradition, while glorious and great fun, weren't so easily learned or understood by congregations and I think this is a large part of why the Victorians slammed on the brakes. The tension in liturgy between rich complexity and accessibility is not limited to this period, or even to music. But metrical hymns are a very good and versatile compromise.

I believe many of the complaints launched against "traditional" hymns are groundless when those hymns are played and sung appropriately. Understanding their roots in folk melodies and dances (yes, I said dances) is important. The organ is perhaps not the instrument best suited to conveying the rhythmic vitality of this music, but it is not an impossible tool for the job. It is possible to be creative with articulation to imitate a strong pulse without distorting the timing; even doing this for one or two hymns per service would help to counter the impression of a wall of noise with no real beat.

Also important is remembering that congregations do not have an unlimited lung capacity. One December I was somewhat taken aback by the extremely slow speed at which I heard "Lo, he comes with clouds descending" sung, and then even more discouraged when I looked around on YouTube to find a version at a more lively tempo and found dozens which, like the live version I had encountered, were painfully slow. I am not certain whether the habit of playing most things too slowly in parish churches is from trying to imitate cathedral hymnody, where the acoustics often demand a slow tempo, whether it is because so many organists are like me -- pianists who have taken up the organ later in life and simply cannot play the pedals that fast -- or whether it is simply musical laziness, following the congregation (who are following the organ) so that things get slower and slower. All of these are, in my opinion, bad reasons to play everything slowly. Cathedrals are wonderful but they are not the same as parish churches, and imitating cathedral-style hymnody while disregarding local circumstances is foolish. Pedals are wonderful too but if you can't play them nimbly, I suggest that discretion may be the better part of valour. Congregations are wonderful but left to their own devices will tend to sing too slowly.

None of this is meant to suggest that no hymns should ever be played slowly; there is some music which works better at a slower pace. My point is merely that if someone thinks all traditional hymns are boring drudgery, the problem might be more to do with how they have heard hymns played and sung than with the century in which the hymns were written.

Big Hymn Sing 2011

2011-06-06T22:59:00.003+01:00

This Saturday there will be a Big Hymn Sing at 1pm at St Andrew's Leytonstone. The congregation have sponsored about 30 hymns and I will add some more that I think are worth singing, for a total of about 48.

The more people turn up the more fun we'll have! We'll sing for about twenty minutes at a time and then have a ten minute break; Café Refresh will be open, and I hope people will feel free to pop in and out. Donations raised will go toward organ repairs.

This week, I will be mostly practising...

Obligatory Rapture Post

2011-05-21T09:21:00.002+01:00

First of all, I don't really believe in this rapture stuff. I've mostly been ignoring it.

But, just for the record: if the "righteous" or the elect or whatever are taken up into Heaven and everyone else (atheists, heretics, sinners, quarrelers, people who like "Jerusalem" and so on and so forth) is left on earth to await some final judgement day, I'd rather stay here.

There'll be a lot of work to do.

Stop, collaborate and listen

2011-05-15T17:48:00.003+01:00

David Sinden has a series of blog posts recording different stops on various organs, one at a time so that you can really hear the character of the stop. It seemed like a good project, so I decided to try and record some of the stops on the organ at St Andrew's.

Here, then, is the Oboe stop on the swell box. This is probably an original stop on this instrument.

Swell Oboe 8 playing Stanley by artsyhonker

Apologies for the whooshing noise. The bellows are in need of serious repair, but we're a very small parish and the repairs aren't cheap so for now we just have to put up with it. In services, I usually turn the organ off completely after the gradual hymn, so that the Gospel reading and the sermon are a bit easier for people to hear, then turn it on again during the Peace before the Offertory hymn.

The piece is the beginning of a voluntary by John Stanley, whose (manuals-only) voluntaries I generally enjoy. I suppose I should find a pedal-only piece for another stop recording, I am meant to be getting better at this business of playing notes with my feet.

A nice afternoon out

2011-05-07T10:37:00.003+01:00

If you're thinking about coming to Evensong tomorrow (St Mary's Rotherhithe, SE16 4JE at 6pm on Sunday) why not stop by the Brunel Museum first? They open until 5pm, leaving just enough time for a quick half pint at The Mayflower before the service starts.

I certainly fancy a wander around the museum. I wonder if I can convince someone to carry the serpent so I'm not too knackered to play it later!

London Gallery Quire Evensong

2011-05-04T18:18:00.007+01:00

London Gallery Quire will be singing an Evensong at St Mary's Rotherhithe this Sunday, 8th May, at 6pm. I'm really looking forward to it!

Here's a very rough sample of one of the pieces. This is just me singing the parts, one take each, so the tuning isn't amazing, the timing is ragged and some of the words aren't very clear. But it's such a wonderful little piece I wanted people to be able to hear it!

Blest who with generous pity glows by artsyhonker

EDIT: The embed thing doesn't seem to be working but here is a link to the file at Soundcloud.

You can download a PDF of the music from the LGQ website if you want to follow along. The more observant may notice that I've put the whole thing down a tone and then transposed the bassline up, in order to accommodate my vocal range.

If you want to hear it done right you'll have to come to Evensong!

Life as usual

2011-05-02T23:25:00.002+01:00

This morning I drifted in and out of groggy sleep... you know the sort, when you've set the alarm with the best of intentions but don't actually have to get up right away and a few more minutes sleep seem the better option. I heard someone on the radio speaking of a death, of rejoicing in the streets, and thought, "Oh, that'll be Osama bin Laden, then" before rolling over, too somnolent to have any strong opinion. So it was no real surprise to me later to find Twitter all a-tweet with the news.

It may be just the peer selectiion effect, of course, but the overwhelming impression I got was of righteous dismay at reactions to the news. Choice verses from Proverbs were being quoted, as well as one 9/11 survivor who was just saddened to see yet another person killed. Then, of course, there were the worthy objections to someone, even a terrorist, being killed without a trial -- though others rightly questioned whether a fair trial would have been possible. And of course there were the pragmatic voices, pointing out that the result of vengeance, of making a martyr of a charismatic leader, can only be further bloodshed as the cycle of violence continues.

All of these are entirely correct, of course.

Participation in tit-for-tat wars is almost never a good idea. Osama bin Laden may well have been an extremist who doesn't represent the views of the vast majority of Muslims, but there will still be extremists who are upset and angered by his death. I can't say that makes me feel any safer, in London.

A fair trial may well have been difficult to ensure, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't have been attempted. Justice and vengeance are not the same thing. Was it truly impossible to capture this man? One argument I saw said that if he had been captured and detained, there would have been countless hostages taken in order to demand his release. But keeping in mind the pragmatists, aren't we all now hostage to those who would retaliate?

Prooftexting is rarely helpful, but the point so many people tried to make today -- that Osama bin Laden was a human being and it is wrong to rejoice in his violent death -- is one I agree with. I don't really mind whether you couch this in theological terms, stating that every creature is a beloved child of God, made in God's image and therefore worthy of love and respect, or whether less theist principles about the dignity and worth of human beings or the senselessness of violence are more agreeable to you. If you were saddened, disgusted, frustrated or dismayed at the triumphant celebrations of killing, rest assured that you were not alone. I was unsurprised, but certainly disappointed. Humanity should be able to do better than this.

It is seductively easy to talk online with my peers and sigh and tut about people's reactions, though. "What is the world coming to?" we ask, as if we have never cheered at another's loss or our own gain. It takes little effort to disapprove of the lack of any attempt at a trial, fair or not. It is not difficult to chime in with my own doubts about whether the lack of this one person really makes the world a safer place.

None of that is enough, though. Peace will not be achieved by spending a day or a week criticising the sorts of decisions most of us hope or pray we never have to make. Justice will not be served by focusing on the end result of a systemic culture of competition where might is taken as right. Those people whose raucous glee so upsets us will not become more compassionate as a result of our condemnation, however righteous we might feel about it.

It is not enough to sigh and shake our heads and go back to life as usual. "Life as usual" is part of the problem. "Life as usual" got us where we are. Life as usual means nothing will change, for us or for those we eagerly criticise or all too readily fear.

People hurt one another because they feel threatened. People are vulnerable to extremist ideologies because they feel threatened. Wherever people do not have enough to eat or drink, wherever people are denied access to medical care, wherever people struggle to have even their basic needs met, there will be strife, warfare, and suffering. And all that need happen for suffering and evil to exist is for good people to do nothing. We are all interconnected and our daily actions affect six billion other people (and counting). These problems are systemic and we are part of the system, like it or not. It's up to us to change it.

Instead of continuing with life as usual, we need to take positive steps toward creating a better world. A culture of peace will take root where there is trust and cooperation. A culture of justice will grow when we honestly examine our own actions and choose fairness over giving ourselves some advantage. A culture of compassion will thrive when we treat one another with loving kindness despite the risks, despite the costs.

Let's make "life as usual" something that we can all live with.

Adventures in hymn selection

2011-05-01T21:58:00.004+01:00

In the Common Worship lectionary there are two options for Eastertide. One uses an Old Testament reading, a reading from Acts, and a Gospel reading each week. The other uses an epistle instead of the Old Testament. The point is that Acts is required.

Somehow, I thought we were using the Old Testament readings, and chose hymns accordingly. So this morning we had a lovely reading from Acts, then a letter to Peter or someone, then a gradual hymn which was very much related to the Old Testament reading we hadn't just heard.

Mix-ups do happen. I planned that we would sing "Allelyua, sing to Jesus" as the Communion hymn on Easter Sunday -- what can I say? I like to get as much of that A-word in as I can now we're allowed to say it again. When I had a closer look at it the night before, I realised that the words to verse two are very much more appropriate for Ascension, particularly "Though the cloud from sight received him when the forty days were o'er". Oops! Thankfully I caught that one in time to change it.

I usually choose hymns in advance, about a month at a time, sending the list to the vicar for approval (canon law means the incumbent does have the final say). Occasionally we end up caught in the guessing game of trying to figure out which hymns the choir and congregation will already know, and then find out that no, it's just us who think of some hymn tune as very well-known. I would have expected them to know NUN DANKET ALL for "Jesus, these eyes have never seen", for example, but at rehearsal on Thursday that turned out not to be the case. We used another Common Meter tune instead, there are enough of them about that it wasn't a problem!

The other thing that has happened sometimes is that I've chosen carefully, the vicar has given a thumbs-up to the choices, and then on Sunday morning we both wonder what on earth we were thinking! Sometimes I can follow the thread of my thoughts backward, sometimes not.

On acknowledgement

2011-04-30T23:00:00.000+01:00

On Thursday I got an e-mail from someone. He was writing to tell me he'd found my piece Crux Fidelis on the Choral Public Domain Library a few months ago, and had used it in the liturgy for Good Friday at the church where he's organist. It went well and they intend to use it again next year.

It felt really wonderful to be thanked, and even just to know that my music is being used. I know others have used that piece this year, but they're all friends or acquaintances. Of course I'm glad they like it and use it, but in my head it feels like strangers liking my music enough to use it is another level. One of the difficulties of putting my work online is that I never really know whether it is getting used. Oh, SoundCloud has some stats for listens and downloads, but once a track has been downloaded I have no idea how often it's played. CPDL doesn't seem to offer any stats, but even if they did, there's a long way between downloading a piece of music and having a choir sing it!

If there were such a thing, I'd be tempted to use a Creative Commons license where people can do what they like with my music as long as they tell me, somehow. As things currently stand I'm reliant on etiquette.

Perhaps, though, it's just as well that such a license doesn't exist. Having to let the creator know what's happening might be enough to put people off using the work, after all, and if it comes to a choice between the music being heard and my hearing about it, I think I'd choose the former.

A creative response to copyrighted lyrics...

2011-04-26T12:37:00.000+01:00

Eric Whitacre wrote this music to fit the poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost. Rather stupidly, Robert Frost's estate told him that he couldn't use it until it becomes public domain in 2038.

So he asked Charles Anthony Silvestri to write a new poem to fit, using the same meter and some of the same words... this is the result:

The whole virtual choir thing is pretty darn awesome, too.

(Hat tip to @elmyra who brought the post on BoingBoing to my attention.)

Ever onwards...

2011-04-26T08:00:00.001+01:00

This badge from Miss Music Nerd pretty much sums up my feelings on the subject. Alleluia, I survived! Like her, I'm also left with a rather large "to do after Holy Week" list that needs tackling. I think mine starts with tidying up the music room, I'm sure it had a floor once. I did take Easter Monday as a day to be lazy at home, and it felt decidedly odd not to be thinking of everything in terms of the next church service.

I couldn't have managed it without the choir, though. They were stellar in putting up with rehearsals before every service and with my relative unfamiliarity with the pattern of Holy Week at St Andrew's, and with keeping the practical choir stuff under control so I didn't have to play herd-the-choristers alongside playing the organ. Really they deserve this badge as much as I do.

Instead, they got glittery cupcakes. Hopefully that will do!

In the great congregation I will praise...

2011-04-22T07:19:00.004+01:00

Though my diocesan cathedral in Chelmsford is a bit of a trek for me, I'm privileged in London to be within easy travel distance of both St Paul's Cathedral and Southwark Cathedral.
Yesterday, partly out of curiosity and partly out of a desire to attend a service that I couldn't mess up by playing the organ in the wrong place, I attended the Chrism Mass (actually called "The Renewal of Ordination Vows and the Blessing of the Oils" on the order of service) at Southwark Cathedral. In the Church of England, this is the service at which Chrism oils are blessed and at which clergy renew their ordination vows. It was a good service, and I'm glad that I went. The Mass setting by Langlais was perhaps a tad inaccessible, but if you can't sing Latin and some crunchy harmonies when you've got several hundred clergy who all know what the words mean, when can you sing them? Certainly there were bowed heads when the Sanctus came around, so I'm sure the vast majority knew what was going on.

Accessibility was also my concern with the Psalm. The choir sang their verses of Psalm 23 beautifully enough that, at first, I wondered whether my previous disdain for responsorial psalmody might be unjustified. I don't know whose setting it was; it isn't the one in the only book of responsorial psalmody I own, and by the time I've looked it up anywhere else I'll probably have forgotten it. It was simple, the text was clear, and when the choir broke into four-part harmony for the last four lines it was simply sublime; I think it was some of the best choral singing I heard during the service.

Why, then, interrupt this with a congregational response? The response itself was interesting enough, but I struggled to remember it correctly after hearing it twice and singing it once. Perhaps I'm just getting too dependent on having dots in front of me! But switching from unmetered chant to a metrical response without some sort of indication of tempo is hard in a small congregation and even harder in a large one. I felt like an unwieldy, oversized ox in a specialist china shop for dolls. I value congregational participation in the psalms, but given the nature of most of the congregation -- ordained clergy and the odd "church geek" layperson such as myself -- I think that just the chant without any congregational singing might well have been participatory enough. It would have been better had the response had some sort of metrical introduction, but even that might not be heard clearly in an echo-y cathedral with an organ. I was too far away to see the musical director well enough to follow any directions given to the choir.

(The psalm was also labeled as Psalm 133 -- a wonderful psalm to use at a Chrism Mass, given the focus on unity and the imagery of oil -- but the psalm they sang was definitely Psalm 23. I can only attribute this to a clerical error!)

By contrast, I absolutely loved the hymnody; there is something about singing hymns with several hundred other people singing their hearts out that is just too good for words. I was disappointed we didn't make it to the end of "Lift high the cross" (which I've sung so seldom I didn't actually remember the tune) and none of the hymns were real favourites of mine, but there was none of the lumbering uncertainty I felt during the psalm. Ordinarily I prefer good metrical hymnody in full parish churches to cathedrals, for some of the same acoustic, aesthetic reasons I didn't like the psalm response: in a big echo-y space, chances are you've got to go slowly enough to spoil the line, and if the place isn't absolutely rammed (and even sometimes when it is) people tend to sing quietly under their breath so that the general effect is that of an indecisive jellyfish; I usually end up listening carefully for the organ and choir and trying to stick with them while people around me mumble into their hymn books, and I really struggle if there's a tune I don't know. But in this instance everyone was singing, the tempo was on the whole right for the space without being too slow to get through a line in one breath, and it was all quite wonderful. I really enjoyed being able to sing without feeling like I had to take the lead for twelve people sitting near me who had no idea what the tune was, and being able to let my voice follow others when I didn't know the notes. Maybe this is what hymns were like, or could be like, when there was more general enthusiasm about singing. Maybe this is what hymns can still be like if people can be convinced to sing! It was one of the best experiences of congregational singing I've had for a long time.

IMSLP is back

2011-04-22T06:59:00.003+01:00

Just a brief update on yesterday's situation with IMSLP -- the site is back!

It looks like the MPA contacted GoDaddy to request that the domain name be reinstated. Their offer to work with IMSLP to ensure all relevant scores meet relevant copyright legislation seems like a bit of a joke to me, though: clearly they know much less about copyright than the good folks at IMSLP. I don't see much sign of an actual apology, either, though I've only had time to skim things this morning so I may well have missed it.

IMSLP under attack on bogus legal grounds

2011-04-21T07:46:00.006+01:00

I'm a big fan of the International Music Score Library Project, also known as the Petrucci Music Library.

It seems the Music Publishers Association, a UK organisation with industry links to EMI, PRS and many of the other usual suspects, is being quite problematic for them.

A short extract from their forums:

The MPA, without notifying us, sent to our domain registrar GoDaddy a bogus DMCA takedown notice. GoDaddy took the entire IMSLP.ORG domain down. IMSLP has filed a DMCA counter notice with GoDaddy, however, the DMCA seems to require the registrar to wait no less than 10 days before restoring service. This means that IMSLP is inaccessible from IMSLP.ORG during this period of time. We will be working to restore service as soon as possible.

What is the MPA complaining about? Rachmaninoff's Bells, which is public domain both in Canada and the USA: http://petruccilibrary.org/wiki/The_Bells,_Op.35_%28Rachmaninoff,_Sergei%29
MPA's claim is entirely bogus.

Further legal clarification is available here on the IMSLP forums.

Basically I think this looks like bullying, plain and simple. It's scandalous that such a valuable resource should be taken offline because "traditional" music publishing companies have their knickers in a twist over something that isn't even illegal.

Workaround: You can still reach the site by using either petruccilibrary.org or petruccimusiclibrary.org. Note, however, that some links on the site that refer to IMSLP.ORG may be broken; you will have to manually replace IMSLP.ORG with one of the two above domain names manually in the URL bar.

Anyone who is interested in suing or helping to sue the MPA under DMCA section 512(f) (misrepresentations) please contact imslproject yahoo.ca. Note that the feldmahler imslp.org address is likewise offline.

Ruht wohl

2011-04-20T16:10:00.004+01:00

Last night I went to hear Bach's St John Passion at St Paul's Cathedral.

The cathedral is not the best acoustic environment for it, to be honest: there's a very long echo and the sound just gets incredibly muddy. Bach is better, I think, with some clarity.

The Passion was sung in English. As a rule I tend to prefer singing in the original language and as an audience member I think I feel the same, though I can see the point of using English given the context. I'm not sure about the translation, either, though. The first part of the clip embedded above was sung as follows:

"Sleep well, and rest in God's safekeeping,
who makes an end of all our weeping.
Sleep well, and on his breast sleep well.

The grave, that was prepared for thee,
from all our sorrows sets us free,
and points the way to Heaven,
and shuts the gates of Hell."

The German is:
"Ruht wohl, ihr heiligen Gebeine,
Die ich nun weiter nicht beweine,
Ruht wohl und bringt auch mich zur Ruh!
Das Grab, so euch bestimmet ist
Und ferner keine Not umschließt,
Macht mir den Himmel auf und schließt die Hölle zu."

and another translation into English is this:
"Rest well, ye holy bones and members,
Which I henceforth shall never weep for,
Rest well and bring me, too, to rest!
The tomb which for you is assigned,
And henceforth no distress will hold,
Doth open heav'n to me and shut the gates of hell. "

I definitely like "rest" as being closer to "ruht" than "sleep" is, and "rest in God's safekeeping" seems to basically be made up. But the second translation is pretty awkward as English verse goes. I've not studied German so I can't nitpick too much, and I'm a poor translator in any case, but I would like something faithful both to the meaning of the words and the metrical form.

Despite these imperfections I was thoroughly glad I went. This movement echoed in my head as I cycled home, and will probably stay with me the rest of the week.

Words, words!

2011-04-19T09:35:00.000+01:00

When I write music, I struggle with the words. As a child I was a decent poet, I'm told, but at some point I lost the habit of writing poetry in a notebook in spare moments. I think it may have been around the time I took up playing the horn and got a paper route and somehow seemed to always be out at one rehearsal or another! These days, most of the words I write are typed directly onto a screen and unpoetic at best.

But I do seem to compose better with words than without. So, I try to find others' words that say what I want to say, words that inspire or words that I think will be right for the context for which I'm writing. Invariably, I run into trouble with this. Anything that's still under copyright is a massive pain; sometimes it's possible to contact the author and ask for permission but often attempts to do so are simply ignored, and in some cases it's hard to find out who to get in touch with in the first place. As I often struggle to find the right words in the first place (it took me several months to choose the words for Christ Has No Body Now on Earth but Ours, and even then I wasn't sure until I sat down to write; In Commendation of Music was similarly fraught, though for very different reasons), the bother with copyright is a significant hurdle.

Lately I have been enjoying Thomas Thurman's poetry. Eventually I summoned up the courage to ask, since Thomas seems a churchy type, whether there might be any psalm paraphrases I could use. I was pleased that there are two of them, and possibly more to come! One of those is more Christianized than I'd be happy to use as a psalm in liturgy (more on that in another post), but would definitely stand well as a hymn on its own; perhaps it was that comment which prompted Thomas to point me at this hymn text, which can't be used with the tune it was written for due to copyright issues (see? it isn't just me that has trouble with this stuff!)... Thomas also writes software and so is familiar with and happy about Creative Commons and other open licenses.

It's not exactly a time of year when I ought to be taking on new projects, but the other Friday I had a long-ish train journey to a rehearsal (Zone 5, south of the river, there's no way to do it without at least two changes and as I wasn't cycling to London Bridge it was three this time). So, I printed out the words, chucked some manuscript paper in my bag and decided to see what I could make of it. It was a delightful tune to set to music: all the word stresses line up beautifully from verse to verse, and though the meter is somewhat non-standard I do now have a tune I'm reasonably happy with. As, for once, I'm not working to a deadline, I'm leaving it in a drawer for a month before doing some editing, so you don't get to see it yet. But I'm pleased with it so far, and really happy to have access to some newer words which I'm allowed to put to music!

In Commendation of Music

2011-04-18T09:00:00.000+01:00

Somehow, I neglected to blog about this at the time... last year I wanted to make a birthday present for Stella, who keeps everything ticking over smoothly at Quire.

So of course I wrote a piece of music. The text is by one William Strode, and I chose it (after the usual laboured searching) because it was a fairly simple metrical poem which I could set in the style of an 18th-century glee. PDF file here and the usual too-slow MIDI. As always it's released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

WHEN whispering strains do softly steal
With creeping passion through the heart
And when at every touch we feel
Our pulses beat and bear a part;
When threads can make
A heartstring shake
Philosophy
Can scarce deny
The soul consists of harmony.

When unto heavenly joy we feign
Whate’er the soul affecteth most,
Which only thus we can explain
By music of the wingàed host,
Whose lays we think
Make stars to wink,
Philosophy
Can scarce deny
Our souls consist of harmony.

O lull me, lull me, charming air,
My senses rock with wonder sweet;
Like snow on wool thy fallings are,
Soft, like a spirit’s, are thy feet:
Grief who need fear
That hath an ear?
Down let him lie
And slumbring die,
And change his soul for harmony.

Psalm 31 vv 9-16 to Aylesbury

2011-04-17T13:40:00.000+01:00

This is the last of the metrical Psalms for this Lent. On Maundy Thursday we'll be singing Psalm 22, right enough, but it will be a chanted version using the Common Worship text. The plan is to keep that very simple: two notes only, a minor third apart.

I wanted to use the opportunity to teach the choir (and expose the congregation) to another good tune that's in the New English Hymnal but which we don't seem to sing very much. It is perhaps a bit dreary for the repeated insistence of the response, "That thou, my God, art good and just, my soul with comfort knows," but the repeated request to see God's mercy fits it very well. Again, I wanted something relatively easy -- there's an awful lot going on already on Psalm Sunday, what with processions to the forest, palm crosses and so on.

I chose Brady and Tate's "New Version" for this psalm portion not because I especially liked the text, but because the Scottish Psalter and Sternhold and Hopkins' "Old Version" both seemed... well, awkward.

I'm sure that this verse from the Scottish Psalter:

When they me saw they from me fled.
Ev'n so I am forgot,
As men are out of mind when dead:
I'm like a broken pot.

would have some of my younger choristers in fits of giggles. The Old Version is only slightly better:

As men once dead are out of mind,
so am I now forgot;
As little use of me they find
as of a broken pot.

But still, on the whole, I thought it would be better to stick with the "shattered vessel" language, even if the rhyming is a bit strained:

Forsook by all am I,
as dead and out of mind;
And like a shattered vessel lie,
whose parts can ne'er be joined.

In any case, here is the response:

For a more complete picture there is a PDF file here.

The Lord Bless Thee

2011-04-16T11:50:00.000+01:00

I wrote this for the King James Trust 2011 composition competition. I had intended to enter both categories but failed to get my act together in time, so this was thrown together rather hastily. However, I do like it for what it is: short, sweet, simple. It should work well with either organ or piano. If you had a flute or another instrument, it would lend itself to a descant based on the keyboard part or, for a more advanced player, a skilled music director could write a more complex descant.

The MIDI robots play this just a bit too slowly, I think, but there is a MIDI file here and a PDF file here. As usual I've used a Creative Commons license.

London to Oxford on a Pashley

2011-04-14T17:19:00.004+01:00

This year for my birthday I got a very shiny bicycle. This was in no small part due to someone else being positive about cycling in London without turning into a fluorescent Lycra-clad speed demon or getting squished; not only was she enthusiastic about cycling, but she recommended a shop where I might be able to find a bicycle that fit me properly.

Now this lovely lady is planning on cycling from London to Oxford on a Pashley Princess Sovereign to raise money for Help the Hospices.

I'm not joining her, though I might just try something similar another year when I've improved at this "cycling up hills" thing. She's nearly at her fundraising target so do help out if you're so inclined.

Organ diagnostic chart

2011-04-14T09:03:00.000+01:00

We had our organ tuned earlier this week, preparing for Lent. Hooray! I have all the notes back on the Tromba stop! I can use the Great Stopped Diapason when playing in flat keys! I approve of this. Some problems are going to wait until there's time for a longer visit, and then there are the bellows which need repairs -- a huge and expensive job which we don't yet have sufficient funding to undertake.

Most organs I've visited seem to have a sort of organ log book where the organist can write down faults and the tuner can write little notes of the temperature and humidity (which always seem to me to be chiding somehow, though I'm sure they aren't meant to sound that way). Invariably there will be scribbles along the lines of "F# below middle C not right" or similar, or as in my case the organist will try and remember to make a note of problems but then completely forget to write them down in the little book!

During the summer I couldn't find the book at all so I made this chart. It's a very simple affair: date, place and manual, then a table with a column for each key (up to 61) and a row for each stop (up to 11). I've shaded the black notes so it's a bit easier to keep your place when filling it in, and left plenty of space underneath the chart for writing down further observations. I found myself using different symbols for different problems and extrapolating below the chart.

This was just a quick sort-the-easy-stuff tuning, and so I didn't actually fill out these sheets, but for the Really Big Tuning that happens each summer they're really valuable. It does take a while to sit down and play every note of every stop but it's well worth it in terms of letting the organ tuner know exactly which notes are problematic.

Psalm 130 to Cheshire

2011-04-13T22:36:00.004+01:00

This past Sunday -- Passion Sunday -- was not an All-Age Service, or anything else requiring exceptional liturgy, and so it was back to metrical psalms with a congregational response.

I was pleased with this setting of Psalm 130. The tune I chose is one that we'll be using on Palm Sunday and which is not terribly well known in the congregation, so sneaking it in as the psalm is one way of getting people used to it. I'm also very fond of the harmony. That said, the dotted rhythms mean it does need to be taken quite slowly in order that the words don't get swallowed up.

I did stumble at first over the beginning of the last stanza:

"And plenteous redemption
is ever found with him."

At first glance this doesn't seem to have the right number of syllables. There should be eight in the first line and six in the second, right? But I know from singing other music that pronunciation has changed; the word "redemption", which most people now pronounce with three syllables, would have had four. The choir were happier to sing it with four syllables than change the rhythm of the music to make it fit, so that's what we did.

Here's the response, taken as usual from the last line of the melody:

And if you want the whole thing, you can download a .pdf file. I played the verse first, then the choir sang the response once through, then the congregation sang it. This seems to work well.

Here we go...

2011-04-08T13:59:00.001+01:00

There's this Sunday, and then another "normal" week, and then it's Palm Sunday and Holy Week. Maundy Thursday to Easter Sunday will see four services in four days -- not excessive, by any means, but bear in mind I am used to just four or five services per month, with the occasional funeral thrown in.

Suddenly there doesn't seem to be nearly enough time, both in terms of learning to play the music myself and in rehearsal time for the choir. Suddenly, using a new Mass setting for Eastertide doesn't seem like such a great idea. The parish has been using Shephard's "Addington" setting since <strike>Moses parted the Red Sea</strike> long before I got there, which is really too long to use the same piece of music. I'm wondering whether I really can learn the voluntaries in time or whether there's something else, something easier, I can pull out instead. I'm abandoning thoughts of harmonic changes for last verses and thinking that I may need to keep the Easter bonnet simple this year. And I'm trying to keep hold of a Lenten quietness, the still solemnity of doing less and being more, rather than allowing Lent to become just another busy period at work.

So of course, in the midst of all this, it's also time to choose hymns for May!

Psalm 121: Anglican Chant with a congregational response

2011-03-30T17:10:00.006+01:00

Continuing with the inclusion of psalms to our liturgy during Lent, on 20th March at St Andrew's we sang Psalm 121. This is a favourite of mine and of many others, and I wanted to use Anglican Chant this time. There are various chants that can be used; the one by H. Walford Davies, with solos in the first and third quarters, is certainly well-known. But it wasn't really appropriate for our very small choir, which doesn't have enough voices to cover four parts. Instead I used a chant by Phocion Henley, who I know better as the composer of many West Gallery tunes.

We still needed a congregational response. I made this one by using the last half of the chant, keeping the rhythm simple:

It worked a treat.

This past Sunday we had a said psalm, which I must say I didn't find nearly as rewarding. Next week is Mothering Sunday and we are having an All Age ~~Chaos~~ Service. Happily the psalm appointed for that day is Psalm 34, which has actually made it into our hymnal thinly disguised as a hymn: "Through all the changing scenes of life" is from Tate and Brady's "New Version" of the psalms, published in 1696. We will sing it to the Common Meter tune "Wiltshire", attributed to George Smart (1776-1867) and originally set to Psalm 48. This is relatively familiar to the congregation and choir alike so everyone will sing, rather than my fussing about with responses.

That leaves me with Psalm 130 (Passion Sunday), Psalm 31 vv 9-16 (Palm Sunday), and Psalm 22 (Maundy Thursday, during the stripping of the altar) to sort out; we won't have sung psalmody on Good Friday or during our Easter Vigil. I'm planning on metrical psalms with congregational responses for the first two, but that won't work for Maundy Thursday; for that, I think it will be a unison chanted psalm with alternate lines by a soloist and the rest of the choir.

I've enjoyed working with the psalms so far and trying different ways of fitting in the congregational responses, and I will miss them.

With cheerfulness rejoice

2011-03-13T22:15:00.006Z

Psalm 51 on Wednesday night went well, I thought: the congregation sang their response and the choir led well. There were even some positive comments after the service!

For this morning's service I wanted to keep things simple -- fitting in the extra music for Ash Wednesday had already squished our rehearsal time a bit. So I decided we'd do the same thing, using a metrical version of Psalm 32 and an appropriate congregational response.

I had originally thought to go with the Isaac Watts paraphrase of the psalm but in the end settled on Sternhold and Hopkins; I don't entirely remember why. That runs to eleven stanzas in Common Metre (CM) and a response after every verse would have added 50% to the length, so I looked at the version in the Common Worship: Daily Prayer Psalter to see when to add the responses. I settled on Caithness as a tune because I know the choir know reasonably well, but not so well that singing different words than they're used to will be disconcerting.

Here's the response we used:

As with Psalm 51 on Wednesday, the notes in the response are the same as the last line that the choir sings, which makes it easier for the congregation to pick things up. Again, I thought it went well. It's very hard to hear from the organ but I'm told the congregation did sing the response. I was glad to have chosen something simple, as in the end the usual weeknight rehearsal was cancelled due to illness and we only had the pre-service rehearsal this morning to work on this psalm. It was certainly very different from the setting of Psalm 32 that London Gallery Quire sang this evening at Manor Road United Reformed Church, but still appropriately cheerful, I think. More on the Manor Road service in another post!

Next week is Psalm 121, one of my favourites. The plan is to use the non-metrical Common Worship text this time, set to a lovely little chant by Phocion Henley, with, (guess what?) a congregational response based on the last line. We started learning it this morning, and the tune seems fairly solid but fitting the words to it will be more difficult. I'll be sure to update with further details!

FairTrade Fortnight and Metrical Psalmody in Stoke Newington

2011-03-07T20:04:00.007Z

It's FairTrade Fortnight, which means lots of tasty, guilt-free chocolate floating around, among other things. Others have laid out, far better than I can, the reasons for buying FairTrade when possible, so I won't add much to that except to say that I don't buy tea, coffee or chocolate at all if they aren't FairTrade and I try to avoid non-FT sugar, cotton and bananas.

On Sunday, 13th March the London Gallery Quire will be leading music in a service at Manor Road United Reformed Church, 102 Manor Road, N16 5NU (map). The music is that which would have been sung, played, and heard in nonconformist chapels in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it's well worth coming along to hear. I'll be playing the serpent and even singing a bit. There'll be a retiring collection in aid of the FairTrade Foundation and the Quire, and the service will be followed by a tasty "Fairtrade Supper". Visions of chocolate-dipped bananas are floating in my head, but I bet they can come up with some pretty good main courses too.

I still haven't constructed my new, improved serpent case so I think I might be stuck with buses, trains and the like for this one, rather than the snake on a bike method of instrument transport, but I'll see how I'm feeling on the day.

Starts with P and that rhymes with T

2011-03-06T12:33:00.010Z

Lent approaches fast and, at St Andrew's at least, this will be a time of penitence, prayer, purple vestments and psalmody.

The latter is my concern. During Advent we tried adapting the Common Worship psalter to a simple plainchant melody from Palmer's "Manual of Plainsong". It worked well for the choir, who could rehearse, but the congregation struggled to join in. Even when using the same plainsong melody for the whole season, fitting unfamiliar lines of varying length to the same tune was either too difficult or too unclear.

I feel strongly about congregational participation in church music in general, and psalms in particular. While there is an argument for reverent, contemplative musical worship where a choir sings the psalms on behalf of the rest of the congregation who participate silently, I think that kind of vicarious liturgy is more suited to Choral Evensong. The psalms are a dialogue, a means by which human feelings can be honestly explored and offered to God, and I feel there is something to be gained from very direct participation in sung psalmody.

So this Lent I'm trying another approach: responsorial psalms. The term "responsorial" is a bit of a mis-nomer, I feel, but refers to psalmody in which the main body of the psalm is sung or said by cantor, choir or reader, with a refrain repeated by all present.

A lot of the chanted responsorial psalmody available today is in a particular style of simplified, interpreted Gregorian chant. Murray's settings of the Grail psalter are by far the best known of this type of recitative chant; and for the Grail translation I understand they work very well. Copyright issues abound, however, and I can't quite be having with a paperwork fight. New Psalms for Common Worship, compiled by Colin Mawby, also uses this style of responsorial psalmody -- and also has copyright issues, as the publisher, Kevin Mayhew, do not take part in the Christian Copyright Licensing Initiative, so I cannot photocopy the chants for the choir to learn or the response for the congregation to read. In addition, the text of the Common Worship psalter, like the beloved Coverdale psalms used in the Book of Common Prayer, was not really designed to make chanting easier, and hard-to-sing accents on the last syllable of the line are common. That might eventually be okay if we had sung or chanted psalmody every weekday or even once a week on Sundays but as things stand, it only has a place during the penitential seasons, unless I get particularly insistent. This is unfamiliar stuff to the majority of the congregation and so it needs to be very easy to pick up. Besides that, I don't want to limit myself to just one translation or one musical style. There is a rich heritage of English psalmody upon which to draw, and I don't mean just Anglican Chant, lovely though it can be.

I'm taking a slightly different approach. Several months ago, I attended a RSCM-led psalmody workshop in Salisbury where the director suggested combining Anglican Chant with the refrains of the responsorial psalmody. Writing a refrain certainly isn't beyond my abilities and having the congregation sing the same refrain, after hearing the choir sing it once, makes it more likely that they'll be able to join in.

If we can do this with Anglican Chant, why not do it with other styles of psalmody?

For Ash Wednesday, Dr Francis Roads (who also conducts the London Gallery Quire) kindly furnished me with copy in Sibelius of a metrical setting of the first half of Psalm 51. The music is by Playford, set for SAB, and the text is from Sternhold and Hopkins; you can download the manuscript from the International Music Score Library Project. But while the metrical text and regular tune make this easier to learn than chanted psalmody, it's still a bit much to ask of a congregation with no warning and no rehearsal -- or so they would have me believe every time I introduce a hymn someone hasn't heard for a while! Since I already had a shiny Sibelius file I transposed the entire lot down a tone, and modified the alto part to be less awkward. I also made this response:

to be sung in unison. That line of music, plus all the words, with the refrain in bold type, will be printed in the pew slips for the congregation to follow. As the notes are the same as the last line of the verses, I'm hoping it will be reasonably easy to follow, and that Playford is not turning in his grave.

Of course, the trouble now is that the vicar would quite like the words to all the rest of the psalms for Lent as soon as possible, so I need to find suitable settings and write responses for all of them in a bit of a hurry! I'd like to include a mix of plainchant and metrical psalmody, sticking for the most part to better-known tunes for the latter, but I might go for a chanting tune or two.

So of course this afternoon I've been blogging about it, instead of getting on with the actual setting. Next up is Psalm 32.

The Volunteer Organist

2011-02-26T08:20:00.002Z

Last Sunday I rolled along to Christ Church Wanstead as I often do for Evensong; it's usually quite a small service and I enjoy turning up, singing, and going away again without having to worry about messing anything up. Evensong doesn't have to be all cathedrals and choirboys and processions and Stanford; it can be an intimate, quiet occasion, comfortable like an old coat -- even if, for me, it's an old coat I've only recently acquired, somewhat by accident.

It wasn't quite like this Victorian parlour song, but I arrived to find the organist was absent, and somehow I ended up volunteering to play.

Thoughts:

The minister's decision to say rather than chant the psalm was the right one, given that the congregation was also small that day. I don't have enough experience of chanted psalmody to be able to do this without at least being able to play through the chant a few times. The canticles were okay though, because the text is more familiar.

My sight-reading isn't as bad as I thought! But, it isn't good enough yet that I'd really be happy to do that for a "main" service. I didn't do myself any favours with tempo and I might have taken things a bit more slowly, especially as at previous services there I've found the hymnody leans toward a more stately pace. On the whole I think I would be better off playing the first line or even just the starting notes and then singing: people would likely find that easier to follow than an organ or piano. In fact (and I did discuss this with the minister afterward) there's a strong argument for two-note chanted psalms and canticles, and unaccompanied hymnody, with so few people and without the usual organist.

Next time, it would be better to spend more time rehearsing the unknown hymns on the electric piano and less time trying to work out how to turn the organ on... and I really should get around to doing some practice at Christ Church, as a change from the instrument I'm learning on at St Andrew's.

Building a Case for a Serpent, Part I

2011-02-12T10:19:00.000Z

In order to attempt longer and more adventurous Snake On A Bike journeys, I want to build a better case for Charlie the Serpent. The existing case is a box, lined with blue muppet pelt, with some padding on the two largest sides. But there's nothing that really holds the instrument securely within the box, it is very heavy, and the box itself is worryingly flexible. It has all the weight of a hard case with the reduced protection of a soft one, and while it is well-made, I'd worry taking it very far on even the most loyal and reliable bicycle.

So I'm out to build something better. This is going to be interesting -- most of the tools (and expertise) I need are at London Hackspace, but I want to cycle there rather than taking public transport as it is a much more convenient journey. And I won't take the serpent that far on the bicycle. There's a hole in my bucket... To reduce much to-ing and fro-ing with a serpent case in varying stages of completion strapped to my bicycle, I've made a cardboard dummy I can fold up and take with me:

My plan is likely to change as I go along and may end up adapted as I find or think of better ways of doing things. The general idea is to make a hard shell, then half-fill it with expanding foam insulation, carve a serpent shape out of the foam, cover that with film and repeat for the other half which will be attached to the lid. I'll line the expanding foam with some softer foam padding and either muppet pelt or some other soft cloth. Then I need to attach the lid to the case -- I am thinking a cloth cover for the whole lot, with a waterproof zip around the edges as well as some webbing straps, would be good. It will need a handle, too. And of course I'll put reflective strips on, and places for attaching bike lights.

In addition to this case being stronger and more protective than the old one, I'd like it to make better use of space. The rectangular box is a good shape to work with (and great for busking as the lid can be used to display information while the bottom collects money) but as the serpent narrows at one end there is a fair amount of wasted space. I haven't decided whether I should make a trapezoidal case, potentially easier to fit onto a bicycle, or stick with rectangular which will be much easier to build; most of the bits and pieces I need to carry on a regular basis with the serpent can fit inside the largest curve of the instrument, except a music stand, but that won't quite fit in the "wasted" space in a rectangular box anyway.

Here are the materials I've gathered so far:

Three (3) plastic underbed storage boxes to be cannibalised for the outer shell -- Tesco, £10 the lot
Two (2) bamboo trellises to be cut to size to fit into the outer shell to aid rigidity and protect from impact -- £11.49 each, Homebase
Medium duty garden wire for holding the trellises to size if necessary -- £4.59 for 30 meters, Homebase. I'll be really surprised if I use 30 meters of this!
One 300mL can of fast-setting UniBond NO MORE BIG GAPS -- £7.49, Homebase. It says this will make "up to 15 litres" of cured foam, which may not be enough, so I might pick up some more of this. I only found the little "How far will it go?" bit on the label after getting home.
I suspect I will also be using significant quantities of masking tape and gaffer tape.

Here is a picture of the three lids fitting over the bottom half of the existing case:

As you can see, I'll be able to overlap the plastic considerably.

The storage boxes and lids have lips which will get in the way, so the first thing is to cut those off. The resulting angular bits of plastic can go inside the shell, at corners and vertically around the edges, to provide additional reinforcement.

That's all for today; I'm not sure when I'll next have a chance to work on it, but will try to take pictures along the way.

Snake on a Bike! Snake on a Bike!

2011-02-10T17:55:00.000Z

On Sunday I tried an experiment. Carefully, gingerly, I manoeuvred the serpent case onto the back of the bicycle, and used several bungee cords to secure it there. The plan was to then walk the bicycle to St Mary's Wanstead, where the London Gallery Quire were providing music for Evensong. It seemed a better option than taking the Tube one stop, and a more comfortable one than walking with a heavy case on the end of my arm.

The whole set up seemed quite secure, though, so I decided to cycle instead. I was cautious at first, not wanting to take too many risks, but I do know the route to Wanstead quite well and the traffic on a Sunday afternoon is not exactly heavy. So off I went, like some sort of low-budget sequel to a certain film, and sure enough we got there all right. The journey back was in the dark but I have lots of lights (some would say I'm excessive in this, I prefer to think of it as "highly visible", which is surely a good thing!), and I was feeling confident enough to take a detour to a friend's house for a visit.

I didn't take any pictures, so you'll just have to imagine a great rectangular box with a red light on it sticking out off the back of the pannier rack. I'd definitely do the same again for short journeys -- but I'm still not happy enough with the case to try this method for getting to and from Quire.

Warmer wrists!

2011-02-09T10:24:00.010Z

On Saturday a pair of these arrived in the post:

They were knitted for me by my aunt, and my mum sent them along to keep my wrists warm while I'm practising at church.

St Andrew's, like many church buildings of its time, was built with not much regard for temperature regulation. Once upon a time there was some kind of underfloor radiator system but that has since been replaced by radiant electric heaters, which are a lot of good if you're standing directly where they are pointed (preferably wearing something dark), but not much help elsewhere. This hasn't been the warmest winter, and while indoor morning temperatures at the moment are around 9ºC with the milder weather, over Christmas it was sometimes as low as 3ºC. I do have a radiant heater pointing at the organ keys, which does help, but the organ itself is part of the problem as a fierce draught comes down from behind it! I can't really wear gloves, even fingerless ones, because they interfere too much with playing. Practising I can leave my coat on, but services are another matter as I can't fit very many warm jumpers underneath cassock and surplice. Brr!

This week hasn't seen much organ practice at church yet, and the weather is warming up here now, but I'm looking forward to trying out the wrist warmers tomorrow morning. If I can use them for playing then my work in the winter months will be far more pleasant. Many thanks, Aunt Pat!

Now to figure out how to keep my feet warm while wearing my organ shoes, which fit very closely and are just a thin layer of leather... I'm thinking fuzzy gaiters or legwarmers.

A Response to that "CCM praise songs we can't stand" meme:

2011-02-05T21:35:00.007Z

"There are two musical situations on which I think we can be confident
that a blessing rests. One is where a priest or an organist, himself a
man of trained and delicate taste, humbly and charitably sacrifices
his own (aesthetically right) desires and gives the people humbler and
coarser fare than he would wish, in a belief (even, as it may be, the
erroneous belief) that he can thus bring them to God.

"The other is where the stupid and unmusical layman humbly and
patiently, and above all silently, listens to music which he cannot,
or cannot fully, appreciate, in the belief that it somehow glorifies
God, and that if it does not edify him this must be his own defect.
Neither such a High Brow nor such a Low Brow can be far out of the
way. To both, Church Music will have been a means of grace; not the
music they have liked, but the music they have disliked. They have
both offered, sacrificed, their taste in the fullest sense.

"But where the opposite situation arises, where the musician is filled
with the pride of skill or the virus of emulation and looks with
contempt on the unappreciative congregation, or where the unmusical,
complacently entrenched in their own ignorance and conservatism, look
with the restless and resentful hostility of an inferiority complex on
all who would try to improve their taste – there, we may be sure, all
that both offer is unblessed and the spirit that moves them is not the
Holy Ghost."

- CS Lewis

In response to this meme.

As I've said in comments on Phil Ritchie's blog, I do think that some modern music used in worship is pretty awful. So is some of the older stuff. But this isn't really about "old" vs "new"; new music doesn't need to replace more ancient offerings but can exist alongside it, with a bit of liturgical and musical sensitivity. I am definitely not a worship band kind of girl, but that doesn't mean I don't want to include as many people as possible. In addition, there are some real theological and aesthetic bloopers among older music, too. Some of it has been sifted out through decades or centuries of persnickety musicians and clergy saying "no more" but some of it is remarkably persistent.

There are significant challenges to anyone trying to create new liturgical music. These include the passive, consumer-oriented nature of many people's primary musical experiences today, the huge breadth of styles available in popular music (so that emulating one style really won't make more than a fraction of listeners feel "at home"), the deplorable state of many church instruments (organs are the main things allowed to fall apart, but church pianos can be pretty horrendous too) and the expectation by many churchgoers of not having to engage with anything that doesn't fit them exactly.

These challenges are real, but they are not insurmountable.

I believe:

people will always respond better to good music, performed well and with some liturgical sensitivity, than to bad music that is not in context
there is a lot of really good music, old and new, that people simply don't know about because they only ever experience what happens at their local parish church or at larger gatherings where the music is chosen for familiarity
the fact that people are complaining about the music at all, in any capacity, shows that they care... there must be a way to harness this enthusiasm!

So I ask:

What is your favourite piece of music for congregational singing? Why?
What is your favourite piece of music for performance by a group of specialist musicians within a liturgical context? This might be a worship band or a cathedral choir or just a very snazzy organist or something else entirely, but the point is that it is not congregational singing and it is live music in liturgy.
What is your favourite piece of music which makes you think about God to listen to outside of your place of worship? Why? This could be secular music.
What is one thing you like about the music at your usual place of worship? Have you told the musicians about this lately?

I tag Phil Ritchie, BanksyBoy, and Good In Parts.

The Singer and the Song

2011-02-03T10:33:00.009Z

Maggi Dawn, looking for debaters on the subject of scripture and translation, asked some questions on Twitter this morning which got me thinking.

@maggidawn: The Message: do you love it or hate it? I'm looking for debaters on the subject of translation

@maggidawn: The King James Version: beautiful or incomprehensible? I'm looking for debaters on the subject of scripture and translation

@maggidawn: who have you read/listened to that has most influenced you on translation and interpretation of the Bible, tweeps?

I have very little familiarity with "The Message" as a paraphrase or translation, and my familiarity with the King James Version is by no means complete. But I am also acutely aware that my Hebrew is very poor and I don't understand Greek at all. When I read the King James Version I think I understand the language fairly well, but I know that isn't true for everyone. If we are going to have scripture available to everyone that means we will need to renew our translations and interpretations as our use of language changes. So I find a certain irony in the existence of groups which believe the King James Version is the only valid scripture, given the Reformation value of accessibility of the text -- despite the situation surrounding the actual translation, which I understand was made with certain goals regarding the status quo in church and politics.

A few years ago I read various books by Karen Armstrong, and was struck by her repeated assertion that in many faiths there has at some point been a tradition of compassionate exegesis. That is, the "rules" are that any interpretation of scripture which is harmful, violent or cruel, is necessarily incorrect. That helped me a lot in coming to terms with a collection of texts which is often contradictory. Indeed, learning to see the Bible as an anthology rather than as one coherent book was also helpful.

As far as interpretation is concerned, there's a great post by the Three Minute Theologian which illustrates the difficulty of scriptural literalism. A musical score contains a certain amount of information about which notes are to be played when, and if you're lucky you get instructions about volume and articulation, too. But all of that must be interpreted in the context of the performance expectations of the time: in some periods there is a great deal that nobody bothered to write down because it was just the done thing, for example repeated phrases having some variation in dynamic. Debussy and Brahms are both composers who wrote a huge amount of what they wanted on the page, so that it is possible to follow their instructions exactly and get a half-decent musical result, but both still require a sense of line and direction, and the knowledge to interpret things like the time signature, which doesn't only tell the performer how many beats there are in a bar but how they should be stressed in relation to one another. Bach left much more to the discretion of the performer. As I commented there, an historically accurate interpretation of music requires study of contemporary performance practice, but an informed contrast to that tradition of interpretation also requires some understanding of how the music would have been performed. Performers always end up interpreting, too.

What is important in the interpretation of music, in the end, is not how correctly one interprets the dots and squiggles, but the impact of doing so on the listener. A very historically authentic performance and one that departs drastically from traditional performance practice can both be moving and inspiring; it is likely that neither will consist only of what is written on the page. The creative interpretation of the performer or performers is an intrinsic part of the music, whether the performance consists of singing, blowing air through tubes, drawing a bow across stretched strings or even putting together instructions for robots to play the music (I refer to various forms of digital music, most of which are so far outside my own area of training as to be incomprehensible to me in their performance techniques).

I'm not a theologian, but I'll go out on a limb here: I believe that how people present scripture in the way they live their lives is a more important interpretation issue than which translation or tradition of interpretation they might use to read it. That doesn't apply only to Christianity, either. Actions speak louder than words and actions are more important than which words you read.

What do we say in our daily actions?

(edited slightly for clarity)

Candlemas

2011-02-02T11:58:00.002Z

By Window: workshop of Franz Borgias Mayer (1848–1926); Photo: Wojciech Dittwald (my own photo) [http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html">GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

When to the temple Mary went,
And brought the Holy Child,
Him did the aged Simeon see,
As it had been revealed.
He took up Jesus in his arms
And blessing God he said:
In peace I now depart, my Saviour having seen,
The Hope of Israel, the Light of men.

Help now thy servants, gracious Lord,
That we may ever be
As once the faithful Simeon was,
Rejoicing but in Thee;
And when we must from earth departure take,
May gently fall asleep and with Thee wake.

Bucket Bass at London Hackspace

2011-02-01T23:52:00.004Z

Tuesday night after teaching I wended my weary way to London Hackspace for their social night. I recently joined, since I always have a few more making-random-stuff projects than is good for me and not quite enough time and space to work on them; the idea is that if I can get there regularly enough, I might get on with some of them.

I was locking up my bicycle and saw someone else arrive with some sort of thing on a bicycle; at first glance I had no idea what it was and wondered if it was some sort of carrier. Inside it was explained: this was a bucket bass, strapped to a bicycle. It was duly unstrapped and assembled, and I had a few tries.

I don't really play any string instruments so it was hard going at first. Another London Hackspace sort had very carefully marked the neck of the instrument with lines to show where the semitones would be; that's okay, if you keep the neck tension absolutely constant, but I found it difficult to use this visual aid without losing my bearings. When I stopped trying to do things visually and just listened, I found it easier going. It's certainly an instrument that anyone with a good ear and strong hands could learn, though I think for now I shall resist the temptation to add another instrument to the list of things I feel guilty about not practising quite enough...

Muse musings

2011-01-31T22:57:00.005Z

I seem to composing better for people and occasions than for competitions. Maybe I haven't entered enough competitions to gather accurate data from which to draw such a conclusion. However, despite putting a lot of work into it, I wasn't really happy with my entry for the St Paul's competition in June. The last few weeks I've had in mind the King James Bible Composition Awards, which I scrape in as being young enough to enter. But despite taking time to select texts that are important to me and putting in a lot of effort, I just wasn't getting anywhere with that, either.

On Thursday, I happened across a text that had a specific memory attached, with particular people involved, though they probably don't remember same details I do. It's a fond memory, and thinking about those words and how they (or another translation of them) were used on that occasion, I found myself composing quite easily. I think it unlikely that I'll win this competition based on what I've written, but it's worth a try, and I feel positive about the music as something that will be useful in a liturgical setting. I won't post it online until I know the competition results, since that sort of publication could disqualify me.

That said, the process of writing a piece for someone or for a special occasion is also one that can be quite fraught. Until I've found the right words, I worry frantically about whether I'll be able to find them in time. I try to keep texts in reserve, I often make a few false starts before finding something that's just right. So perhaps my problem is not that I write for people better than for competitions, but that inspiration is not something I can control, just something to which I can try to remain alert and open.

Next up, I'm meant to be writing a Mass setting to use at St Andrew's. Watch this space...

"Go quietly to bed"

2011-01-30T22:53:00.006Z

Sunday evening, I had the privilege of singing Compline with the choir at St Mary's Addington. I started attending services in the parish once in a while in order to visit a friend of mine who is Curate there, but the community -- and especially the choir -- has become a real resource for me. As an organist working in a C of E church but who doesn't come from an Anglican background it's been excellent to be exposed to some of the standard repertoire from the rehearsal side as well as hearing it sung in services and, eventually, joining in and even conducting from time to time; they also did me the honour of singing a piece I composed. I've always been made very welcome and if the journey from Leytonstone weren't so silly I'm sure I would want to be there more often.

Anyway, Compline. I hadn't ever attended a Compline service before, not even a said one, so this was a new experience for me, though I'm familiar with the general shape of the liturgy. I've had a bit of a brush with chant notation in other contexts, and it's pretty straightforward to read if you're already good at transposition, so that wasn't a problem for me. I struggled a bit more with the psalm pointing but once I got the hang of it that was also straightforward. The service was by candle light, and very atmospheric. Choir and cantor sang well; that sort of unaccompanied unison singing is harder to do well than you might imagine, but the pitch stayed pretty stable throughout and I think the timing was good.

Compline is the last Office of the day and it is traditional to go quietly to bed afterward, without speaking and certainly without any cavorting about. I can certainly see how after singing the service in the cosy intimacy of St Mary's, going home quietly and to bed without further ado would be quite welcoming even if it meant a fairly early night. That option was, alas, not open to me: my journey from Leytonstone to Addington had been by bicycle, then train, then tram, and so on the way back I did the same in reverse (well, I didn't ride the bicycle backward, that doesn't work...). I wouldn't say I was cavorting, exactly, but even on a Sunday night in London one must keep one's wits about oneself on a bicycle. Still, I'm very grateful for having had the opportunity to go.

Organists Online birthday celebration

2011-01-29T23:11:00.004Z

Saturday afternoon I attended the Organists Online ten-year anniversary event, an Open House at Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church.

It was good to meet other organists; we tend to get quite wrapped up in our own work, being all busy at around the same times on Sunday mornings, and if I didn't go out of my way to speak to some in other parishes I could easily not meet any at all.

The programme included talks and mini-recitals as well as a buffet. I didn't attend the entire afternoon, but the talks about the organ in the church, and about the Small Choirs website were interesting and informative.

I was sorry to miss some of the playing, but the standard of what I did hear was superb. The organists were on a video camera with the footage projected on two screens in the front of the church -- one of the few times I've seen projector screens used suitably inside a church ;) -- which meant that I could see their technique for myself. It was interesting seeing the difference between Cherry-Willow Pauls's very fluid, rounded movements and David Aprahamian Liddle's absolute economy of movement. It's rare that I meet an organist in their natural habitat and even rarer that I get to watch them carefully while they play, so this was an excellent opportunity for me.

I do hope there will be another one!

EVENSONG AS HARDY KNEW IT

2011-01-29T23:00:00.001Z

In the final year of my degree I decided I needed to do more singing, and one thing led to another...

I am delighted that we'll be singing and playing Evensong at a church not too far from where I live! It makes carrying the serpent much easier. Playing from the gallery is a treat, too; many galleries have had so many bits of pipe organ added that we can't get into them.

EVENSONG AS HARDY KNEW IT

A special service of Evensong with the

London Gallery Quire

Hear the leading exponents of West Gallery music, the psalmody heard in parish churches and non-conformist chapels during the Georgian period, sung from the West Gallery of one of the finest, most unspoilt Georgian churches in England – St Mary's Wanstead.

Sunday 6^th February 2011 at 6.30pm

ST MARY'S CHURCH

Overton Drive, Wanstead E11 2LW

All welcome

A multiplicity of translations

2011-01-22T17:58:00.006Z

Over at the Liturgy blog, Rev Bosco Peters has a series of posts on the new Revised Grail Psalter. In the first post he links to the full text of the psalter, and laments the multiplicity of translations, though he does say "An English psalter for worship needs to balance accuracy on the one hand with rhythm for proclaiming, chanting, and singing on the other." I don't have the book he recommends as an accurate translation -- though it is inexpensive and I might well look into it. If I am curious about translations I go first to the Psalter Kata Bob.

In a second blog post, Rev Bosco goes on to lament the use of antiphons coming from the Revised Grail Psalter (which is translated directly from the Hebrew) together with others coming from the Latin Mass. In addition to not fulfilling Liturgiam authenticam, which is defined as a translation of the Latin Mass, this leads to a certain lack of liturgical coherence. I am sure that this is regrettable, but as at St Andrew's we use the Common Worship texts it doesn't affect me directly.

In a third blog post, Psalm 2 is appraised with regard to translation and sources; it appears to be something of a mash-up between the original Grail translations, the NRSV, and new translations for the Revised Grail Psalter. Interesting; I don't know how much of this sort of mashing-up is present in other psalm translations. But I thought I might present some other translations of Psalm 2:

There is the 1662 Book of Common Prayer version, of course:
Quare fremuerunt gentes?

WHY do the heathen so furiously rage together : and why do the people imagine a vain thing?

2 The kings of the earth stand up, and the rulers take counsel together : against the Lord, and against his Anointed:

3 Let us break their bonds asunder : and cast away their cords from us.

4 He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh them to scorn : the Lord shall have them in derision.

5 Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath : and vex them in his sore displeasure:

6 Yet have I set my King : upon my holy hill of Sion.

7 I will preach the law : whereof the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.

8 Desire of me, and I shall give thee the nations for thine inheritance, : and the utmost parts of the earth for thy possession.

9 Thou shalt bruise them with a rod of iron : and break them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

10 Be wise now therefore, O ye kings : be learned, ye that are judges of the earth.

11 Serve the Lord in fear : and rejoice unto him with reverence.

12 Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and so ye perish from the right way, if his wrath be kindled, (yea but a little) blessed are all they that put their trust in him.

There is the "Old Version", a metrical setting of the text by Sternhold and Hopkins:

1 Why did the Gentiles tumults raise?
What rage was in their brain?
Why do the people still contrive
a thing that is but vain?

2 The kings and rulers of the earth
conspire and are all bent
Against the Lord, and Christ his Son,
whom he among us sent.

3 Shall we be bound to them? Say they,
let all their bonds be broke;
And of their doctrine and their law
let us reject the yoke.

4 But he that in the heav'n doth dwell,
their doings will deride;
And make them all as mocking-stocks
throughout the world do wide.

5 For in his wrath he shall reprove
their pride and scornful way,
And in his fury trouble them,
and unto them shall say,

6 I have anointed him my King
upon my holy hill;
I will therefore, Lord, preach thy law
according to thy will:

7 The law whereof the Lord himself
hath thus said unto me,
Thou art my only Son, this day
have I begotten thee.

8 The people I will give to thee,
as heirs at thy request
The ends and coasts of all the earth
by thee shall be possessed.

9 Thou shalt them bruise e'en like to those
that under foot are trod,
And as a potter's vessel break
them with an iron rod.

10 Now ye, O kings and rulers all,
be wise therefore and learned,
By who the matters of the world
are judged and discerned.

11 See that ye serve the Lord above
in trembling and in fear;
See that with rev'rence ye rejoice
when ye to him draw near:

12 See that ye do embrace and kiss
his Son without delay;
Lest in his wrath ye suddenly
Perish from the right way.

13 If once his wrath (but little) shall
be kindled in his breast,
Then only they that trust in him
shall happy be and blest.

There is the "New Version", that is, the metrical setting by Tate and Brady:

1 With restless and ungovern'd rage
why do the heathen storm?
Why in such rash attempts engage,
as they can ne'er perform?

2 The great in counsel and in might
their various forces bring;
Against the Lord they all unite,
and his anointed king.

3 "Must we submit to their commands?"
presumptuously they say;
"No, let us break their slavish bands,
and cast their chains away."

4 But God, who sits enthroned on high,
and sees how they combine,
Does their conspiring strength defy,
and mocks their vain design.

5 Thick clouds of wrath divine shall break
on his rebellious foes;
And thus will he in thunder speak
to all that dare oppose:

6 "Though madly you dispute my will,
the king that I ordain,
"Whose throne is fixed on Zion's hill,
shall there securely reign."

7 Attend, O earth, whilst I declare
God's uncontrolled decree;
"Thou art my Son, this day my heir
have I begotten thee.

8 "Ask and receive thy full demands;
thine shall the heathen be;
"The utmost limits of the lands
shall be possessed by thee.

9 "Thy threat'ning scepter thou shalt shake,
and crush them every where;
"As massy bars of iron break
the potter's brittle ware."

10 Learn then, ye princes, and give ear,
ye judges of the earth;
11 Worship the Lord with holy fear;
rejoice with awful mirth.

12 Appease the Son with due respect,
your timely homage pay;
Lest he revenge the bold neglect,
incensed by your delay.

13 If but in part his anger rise,
who can endure the flame?
Then blest are they whose hope relies
on his most holy name.

More recently there is the Common Worship version:

1 Why are the nations in tumult, •
and why do the peoples devise a vain plot?

2 The kings of the earth rise up,
and the rulers take counsel together, •
against the Lord and against his anointed:

3 'Let us break their bonds asunder •
and cast away their cords from us.'

4 He who dwells in heaven shall laugh them to scorn; •
the Lord shall have them in derision.

5 Then shall he speak to them in his wrath •
and terrify them in his fury:

6 'Yet have I set my king •
upon my holy hill of Zion.'

7 I will proclaim the decree of the Lord; •
he said to me: 'You are my Son; this day have I begotten you.

8 'Ask of me and I will give you the nations for your inheritance •
and the ends of the earth for your possession.

9 'You shall break them with a rod of iron •
and dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.'

10 Now therefore be wise, O kings; •
be prudent, you judges of the earth.

11 Serve the Lord with fear, and with trembling kiss his feet, •
lest he be angry and you perish from the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled.

12 Happy are all they •
who take refuge in him.

And then, of course, there is the Latin:

The thing that I find fascinating is that all of these are words I would happily use, in different contexts. I would probably use the metrical settings in congregational worship where people are less familiar with the psalms or with singing chant; the Common Meter texts are easy to sing as a group and the vocabulary is relatively simple, though the translation is a little, er, "free" at times to the point of being quite unsuitable for interfaith gatherings. I would use the Common Worship text for said psalmody as it's nearer than the other examples to the way people actually speak today; I would use Common Worship or the BCP version for Anglican chant, and either Common Worship or the Latin for plainsong, depending on the type of service. Anglican chant can work in very small and intimate services, as I've discovered by attending Evensong at Christchurch Wanstead, but where people want sung, non-metrical psalmody to be performed by a choir and there isn't already a certain familiarity with Anglican Chant, plainsong seems to work better. I don't think I'd like to be limited to just one psalter, and I am grateful for the "multiplicity of translations" which others lament. I'm grateful, too, that in the Church of England we are free to use any translation of scripture that is not banned, subject to the approval of the incumbent as per Canon B5 -- and as yet, no translation has been banned.

Alas, there'll be none of it for me tomorrow morning as we have a gradual hymn instead of a psalm. But that's a post for another day...

New Year

2011-01-02T21:07:00.004Z

Christmas has come (though it isn't gone yet -- not until Epiphany), the various services at church have gone well, my students are still on break, and so I am going away for a few days.

I'm really, really looking forward to it. When I come back the "new" year must begin in earnest, nose back to the grindstone with teaching and rehearsals and practising and oh, some forms to fill out and send off for HMRC, apparently I might need to give them some tacks, but I probably haven't earned enough.

I'm not much of one for resolutions. I already tend toward excessive tweaking, chronic attempts to re-think, re-arrange, improve strategy, and I know that I'm also prone to a feeling of dismal failure if I don't live up to some arbitrary expectation I set for myself. So I'm not going to make any promises of one post per day, or per week, or anything like that.

That said, I would like to write here more. I've struggled to find a voice for this blog for a while now -- since near the end of my degree, really -- and I feel like it would be really good to get something going again.

I'm thinking about what to write. I need to be quite careful in writing about my work teaching, and my work at St Andrew's, because of course there are confidentiality issues in both cases, but are there aspects of it that I should be documenting? I'm not sure which of my other work is interesting; composing is something I tend to post about when I have actually written something, I do try to flag events I'm involved in but often fail to get around to it in time (with very low readership it doesn't seem to be very worthwhile). My recent spate of political or social commentary is not likely to be sustainable, though I don't guarantee I won't rant sometimes. I could write at some length about practice methods, but I don't know that I'd be contributing much; some of my thoughts on music in liturgy may be interesting but I suspect they echo work done by others. I am still keen on doing some more in-depth research into various forms of sung psalmody, but I don't seem to know where to start there either.

What would you like to see me write about here? If you could ask me anything about my work in music what would it be? I'd love some open-ended questions with which to get started.

Building a New Society

2010-11-23T13:26:00.005Z

At the weekend I met a friend for dinner. She's quite a bit more politically active than I am, not to mention being a trained economist. We are both very concerned about the human cost of the cuts brought in by the current, Tory-led government. But she is concerned, rightly, that my response -- that we must all participate in caring for one another and reduce reliance on state provision -- is unhelpful.

Her objections, as I understand them, are good ones:

1) A simple "I will work harder" approach, where charitable people and organisations take on additional burdens while banks re-instate bonuses, does not address the root of the problem.

2) The state has access to economies of scale which are unavailable to us everyday folk.

3) Relatedly, the state is in a position to be fairer in resource allocation than private companies or charities can.

I can understand the worry that volunteerism is exactly the position the current government is manipulating us into. It's hard not to have a sense of growing dismay as we are asked, again and again, to make more and more bricks as the daily supply of straw is reduced. But my response here is not an endorsement of the cuts, but rather a pragmatic reaction to the way things are. If I don't take action to help the least fortunate, I am colluding in a system that allows people to fall through the cracks. My volunteering at a homeless shelter isn't going to change government policy, but writing to my MP and campaigning in the street are not going to give anyone a safe place to sleep.

The economies of scale available to the government are a strength and I don't propose that we can find an alternative overnight. Specialist care is needed and it is difficult to see how small, locally-run initiatives could hope to meet that need. I know some basic first aid but that doesn't qualify me to treat cancer patients! I don't suggest that state access to specialist care can or should be abolished, especially not in the short term.

However, I also think that some of the economics of scale previously only widely available to the state or to large corporations are, in fact, becoming less clearly limited. Our opportunity to communicate with one another is more extensive than it has ever been. I believe there is huge potential for economies of scale to emerge, and things like Wikipedia are only scratching the surface of what is possible. It's important to note, too, that this is not just about online interaction, not just about kids who haven't left home sitting editing the article on photosynthesis or bloggers prattling away to a nonexistent audience: the notion of a sharp divide between "online" and "real life" is a false dichotomy in any case. We're starting to see this with the likes of Kickstarter and FundBreak which use online crowdsourcing to fund projects which may well be offline. There's a lot of noise at times, but the level of connectivity is incredible and if we can find a way to coordinate our efforts, the government no longer has a monopoly on economies of scale.

Another advantage of state-run rather than crowd-driven care is that it can be administered fairly. If you tick the boxes, you get the benefit -- regardless of your accent, gender, skin colour, sexual orientation, religion or intelligence. At least, that's how it works in theory. In practice, box-ticking systems are systems where people will jump through hoops and it is pretty much impossible to make a selection system complex enough to be completely fair. It becomes paradoxical, because the more complex the system is the higher the barriers to access. If you don't believe this, ask anyone who's had to fill out student loan forms!

I'm willing to accept a certain amount of "waste" from people gaming the benefits system, but another serious problem with state care is that delegating caring for one another to the state -- reducing our obligations to paying tax, voting if we feel like getting involved, and maybe writing to an MP on issues we really care about -- means we can exist in a little bubble of our peers, telling ourselves that the homeless person begging by the Tube station isn't our problem because there is state care available. Far from reducing localism and NIMBYism, I propose that delegating our societal responsibilities onto the state actually fosters the sort of isolated attitude that renders people unwilling to bear the collective costs of supporting one another. Letting someone else deal with the nitty-gritty allows us to reduce our awareness of the interdependence of people and to fool ourselves into thinking that this is actually a pure meritocracy (it isn't) and that we have our privileges because we've worked for them and not because we've been incredibly fortunate. It's never that simple, but we're upstanding citizens who pay our taxes and vote, and so we walk past the woman who is sleeping rough rather than go back to her abusive boyfriend and we congratulate ourselves on having done so well. Next thing you know, you've got the tabloid rags blaming benefits recipients (or asylum seekers, or some other disadvantaged group that receives some pittance of state support) for economic recession and people actually believe it. Sound familiar? It's where we already are. The government we have now is not an enemy of our society: it is a product of our society. We, collectively, have created this monstrosity.

It's up to us to build a new society. That doesn't mean just getting the current government to take proper responsibility for the care of the citizens who elected them (or voted for someone else).

A new society would be one where the government cannot be held hostage by the banks.

A new society would be one where the state works with people, not against them, for the good of all.

A new society would be one where we use financial resources to reduce human costs, not human resources to reduce financial ones.

A new society would be one where we contribute to economies of scale.

A new society would be one where protest works a lot better than it does now.

A new society would be one where we ask, "How can I help you?" rather than "How can I benefit from you?", and where we are not afraid or ashamed to ask for help ourselves when we need it.

I don't have all the answers about how to create such a society. But I think it goes much further than public protest and much further than reversing the cuts. It involves all of us thinking about how we live, how our actions affect others, and whether it is actually okay to walk on by while someone else suffers. Then it involves us choosing to live in ways that value human life.

It's up to us.

First Fifteen music meme

2010-11-13T08:34:00.002Z

I wasn't tagged by Phil Ritchie or anyone else, but thought I'd do this anyway...

1) Turn on your MP3 player or music player on your computer.
2) Go to SHUFFLE songs mode.
3) Write down the first 15 songs that come up–song title and artist–NO editing/cheating, please.

Oh, very well then.

1) Adams: Short Ride In A Fast Machine (Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra)
2) Gregorian chat: Mass VIII - Ite Missa Est (Choir Of St George's Cathedral London)
3) Blow ye the trumpet words by Charles Wesley, tune "Rotherhithe" by I.P. (Brigantia Consort)
4) Kitten Intro (They Might Be Giants)
5) Rachmaninov: Vespers, Op. 37 - 4. O Serene Light (BBC Singers)
6) Bach: St. John Passion, BWV 245 - Und Neiget Das Haupt Und Verschied (Collegium Vocale Gent)
7) Tea Leaf Picking (David Wei He Yin)
8) Morley: Now Is The Month Of Maying (Canadian Brass)
9) Bach: St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244 - Aber Am Ersten Tag Der Süssen Brot (Nikolaus Harnoncourt: Concentus Musicus Wien, Arnold Schoenberg Choir, Etc.)
10) Pärt: Lamentate -IX. Risolutamente (Hilliard Ensemble)
11) Bach: Italian Concerto, BWV 971 - 2. Andante (Glenn Gould)
12) Stuck In The 90's (Moxy Früvous)
13) Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 - Fugue #18 In G Sharp Minor, BWV 863 (Angela Hewitt)
14) Bach: St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244 - Ja Freilich Will In Uns Das Fleisch Und Blut (Nikolaus Harnoncourt: Concentus Musicus Wien, Arnold Schoenberg Choir, Etc.)
15) Tomas Luis de Victoria: Requiem -- Offertorium (Spiritus)

Yes, okay, I listen to a lot of Bach.

I tag Kathryn, and anyone else who fancies a go.

Carol Service

2010-11-11T08:39:00.001Z

As part of my work as organist and choirmaster at St Andrew's Leytonstone I am helping organise the annual Carol Service. This year the service will be on Sunday, 12th December at 4.30pm.

Choral singing is great fun, and I've always found it a good way of keeping my spirits up in the increasing gloom of November and December. Why not come and join us?

Rehearsals will be Fri 19th Nov, Thurs 25th Nov, Fri 3rd Dec and Thurs 9th Dec at 7.30pm, at St Andrew's. They're split between Thursdays and Fridays in order to accommodate those who already have commitments on one of those weeknights, and to avoid a clash with the popular Bistro Night at Cafe Refresh, our church cafe. If you'd like to participate but you can't come to all the rehearsals please do get in touch and I'll see if we can work something out!

All are welcome to come and sing.

It's Up To Us

2010-10-23T19:04:00.003+01:00

I've spent a lot of time and energy this week thinking about the Comprehensive Spending Review cuts, as well as the recent cuts to science and education in this country.

A lot of that time has been spent cursing under my breath at the Great British Public for voting in the Tories -- did people honestly think they wouldn't be horrible? -- and at the LibDems for selling out and allowing their coalition partners to get away with this. A further chunk has been spent in fuming ire at the banking bailouts of 2008 and the various unpaid tax bills of large corporations. I find it hard to believe that the money so freely given away by the government is justified by the contribution the banks and large corporations make to the economy.

None of those are useful responses.

I think that the cuts to education and benefits are wrong, but I also think they're very short-sighted. If my neighbour's house is on fire, you can bet I'm going to be there with a bucket trying to help put it out, not only because of any love I might have for my neighbour but also because I know full well that my house is next. Poverty and lack of access to good education don't work as fast as fire, but I know that the world is so interconnected that what affects the poorest in our society will have knock-on effects for the rest of us. Only the rich and very rich can insulate themselves from this with their money.

For the rest of us, I think it's been clear for some time that relying on the government safety net of cradle-to-grave welfare is just not going to work. The government is far too beholden to a financial services industry with not enough regulation to prevent bubbles, and has forgotten about Keynesian economics or about any sort of duty to act on behalf of voters. Single-provider welfare doesn't work because it is so vulnerable to abuse. This is just as true now as when the Church was the arbiter of assistance.

The idea of the "Big Society" that has been waved about is, in some ways, a solution to this. I don't think the current government really believes in it: if they did, they'd be funding Big Society projects to get us started rather than removing vital support from the most vulnerable people in our society. But the lack of government support for the Big Society doesn't mean it's a bad idea in and of itself.

Imagine a society where everyone volunteers for something, or donates a substantial portion of their income to charities. Imagine a society where people can form meaningful friendships with people different than themselves. Imagine a society where if you fall on hard times, there is not just one route to get help but three or four; where everyone is concerned with the wellbeing of their neighbours (near and far -- we are all neighbours), where people are involved in deciding how resources are used, where even the most vulnerable are valued as having something to contribute. Imagine a society where nearly nobody is on government benefits because their communities take care of their needs. That's the Big Society, as I imagine it. I don't think it'll be easy to build, and there are serious issues of competence in relying entirely on volunteerism (but this could be offset by those who don't volunteer but instead donate money). There will always be an element of waste in that there will always be people who game the system, even if that system is actually many systems which overlap. But I do think that the vision of a Big Society where people care for one another and the vast majority of basic needs are met is one that is possible and is worth striving for.

What's interesting about this is that there are parallels in access to information. For most of the 20th century we had mostly one-way broadcast media; that is now changing to networked media. There are advantages and disadvantages of this and it is becoming apparent that the peer selection effect is very strong now compared to the days when one had less choice in one's social surroundings. Rather than the internet being one huge network where everyone pays attention to everyone else, it functions more as a system of networks which sometimes overlap. I'm on the edges of at least two such networks that spring to mind immediately, one full of church folks and one full of geeks, but there are several more.

I don't think the Big Society is going to happen overnight and I don't think that we can expect the current government to lift a finger to help us, but I don't think that has to prevent us working for change. I've been trying to say this on Twitter for a day or two and mostly I am getting compared to Boxer in Orwell's Animal Farm, who, faced with each new difficulty in the fourlegs-led revolution, vows to work harder. I've been told that I shouldn't be trying to take up the slack because that's exactly what our rich Tory overlords want me to do. I've been told that asking Vodafone UK to pay their £6bn tax bill would be fruitless, because our government wouldn't spend that money on benefits for the disabled but on police-state surveillance and guns to kill brown people.

The reason I think this is different is that, while network communication (rather than uneven broadcast) doesn't guarantee democratization of information access, it does make it easier, in the same way that Gutenberg's printing press and increases in literacy brought about huge changes in the society of the time. We have amazing tools for connecting to one another and people are recognising that it's about relationships.

I do think that organised resistance does need to be part of this, and I've signed the statement committing to get involved with that.

I also don't think that my signing a petition is going to have much immediate effect. I don't think that the risks of going ahead with creating a better society outweigh the need to get on and do it. Signing a petition or a statement will not give a homeless person a safe place to sleep. Volunteering with a homeless shelter will. Writing to my MP will probably not change how my high-street bank uses my money, but switching to something more ethical will. That doesn't mean I don't sign the petitions or write to my MP, but it means I do need to think about how my decisions affect everyone else, not just fob them off onto the government.

The government, as far as I am concerned, has proven that it cannot be trusted to help.

It's up to us to build the Big Society.

The government won't enforce tax laws, so it's up to us to withdraw or withhold custom from the worst tax evaders.

The government won't stop banks lending irresponsibly, so it's up to us to provide debt counseling and aid to those who've been wooed into "cheap" credit they can't afford.

The government won't protect disadvantaged people from destitution, so it's up to us to provide food and shelter for those who have none.

It's up to us to teach one another the skills we need to survive.

It's up to us to strengthen the weak. It's up to us to care for the sick. It's up to us to comfort the brokenhearted. It's up to us to protect the vulnerable.

I'm not saying it should be that way, but that it is. Like it or loathe it, it's up to us.

What are you doing to help?

Travel time and time travel

2010-10-17T00:03:00.004+01:00

This morning feels about a million years away! Really, I only had two main events today, but the day felt much longer.

I started with a Gregorian Chant workshop put on by RSCM EEL. I wouldn't ordinarily have gone to something like that with such short notice -- I got an e-mail about it on Thursday -- but it was led by Nick Gale, director of music at St George's RC Cathedral, and it was close to home at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Wanstead. Our first chant of the day was not Gregorian but Ambrosian chant, a setting of the Gloria. It dates from around 400 CE, and it was interesting to see how the later additions to the text of the gloria were clearly of a different musical pattern than the earlier text. There was also quite a lot of actual Gregorian chant, including some things that might be useful for Advent.

I enjoyed the workshop immensely. After that I was off to a Harvest Supper at St Mary's Addington, where I was to play the serpent and the piano as part of the entertainments. The journey was quite horrific; I was kindly offered a lift by another workshop participant who lives near Addington, and as it had only taken him about 45 minutes to get to Wanstead in the morning I accepted. Unfortunately the southbound Blackwall Tunnel was closed and we spent about two hours on Blackwall Tunnel Approach. I couldn't even get out and take public transport until after we'd cleared the start of the tunnel.

I got there in the end, though, and the entertainments hadn't yet started. Phew! My piano playing was accompanying two friends singing "Misalliance" by Flanders and Swann. I was still a bit rattled after the journey and my hands were shaking badly, so I didn't play as well as I might have, but we got through okay and the audience loved their singing -- and acting! Later on was the serpent number. The choir had rehearsed "O God, my heart is fixed, 'tis bent", a metrical setting of Psalm 57 vv7-11 from the London Gallery Quire book Your Voices Raise, but we hadn't had a chance to play it together at all; it went well. The tune is "Lynn" by Uriah Davenport (1690-1784) and the words are from the New Version of Tate and Brady (1696). I had left my notes for the brief chat about the serpent and about West Gallery music at home, so forgot large parts of them; hopefully I didn't baffle people too much. I closed that set with a brief rendition of "Fly Me to the Moon" for reasons which I won't go into here. I have found that, anachronistic as it might seem, some of the jazz standards work remarkably well on the serpent. Possibly it's because I'm so accustomed to playing vocal basslines.

Then it was just the long journey home again... given the earlier transport problems, I accepted with some trepidation a lift as far as East Croydon station from a choir member, and though there were indeed some roadworks and a detour it was smooth driving all the way there. Then came the train, and the tube, and the rail replacement bus, and the walk home.

Dates for music I have sung/played today:
~400BC
18th century
20th century

Types of transport I have used today:
walking
Tube
private cars (not mine -- I don't drive!)
bus route 15
Docklands Light Railway (a sort of train)
London Overground (another sort of train)
Croydon Tramlink
British Rail
TfL rail replacement bus.

Clearly what I need is one of these:

No wonder the day felt long. It's far past my bedtime now, though; I've got to get up in the morning to play the organ at church.

A transport of delight...

2010-10-15T20:13:00.005+01:00

Allow me to indulge in a little off-topic blogging...

Today was my day off, and it is nearing my birthday, so I went to pick this up:

Her name is Millicent, and she is a birthday present from a certain boy who seems to take inordinate pleasure in spoiling me rotten. No complaints here!

Since I was a teenager I have been hankering after a bicycle that is a grown-up version of the big old blue pushbike I had for a few years. I want to be able to sit absolutely upright, I don't use many gears and dislike derailleurs, I want to be able to carry a fair amount, and I don't want to get too muddy or have to wear much in the way of special clothing.

I think I may have found what I've been looking for. Millicent is more sophisticated than the old blue pushbike: she has three gears, which will be a help for hills, and also a front caliper brake to supplement the back-pedal brakes. In the picture above she's only got one pannier on but the rack is quite sturdy and will easily take one on the other side and a top rack as well; I haven't opted for a front basket just yet, but that is also a possibility in future. The model I opted for has battery-operated lights, and I have some extra ones to attach for added visibility. I have my cycle maps and I know that as I ride more, I'll get more confident riding in the traffic and be able to deal with unfamiliar routes and busy roads more safely.

Unfortunately, I'll still need to rely on public transport a fair amount. I like the pannier but there is no way it will take the serpent! Any trailer rack that will would add sufficient length to be a problem in traffic and sufficient width that getting through the keep-the-cars-out barriers would be a real pain. I don't want a longbike (longbike is lonnnnng), Millicent only just fits in the hallway as it is. In any case, bikes offer less padding for the instrument than either walking or being in a car, and that's just not going to work with such a fragile beast. It might be possible with a custom case, or a trailer with some shock absorption.

The horn is a little easier: I have a Marcus Bonna backpack case already, and though it isn't great for wearing for long periods it could be adapted (I've done this before when I had to carry it a lot). It will be a while, though, before I'm confident enough with the bicycle and the traffic to be happy about wearing my horn on my back whilst zooming about London. Give it three or four years, maybe.

Trying to cycle with a piano or a pipe organ? Right out of the question.

I do hope, though, that in a year or two I will be fit enough to manage my commute from Leytonstone to Hendon for teaching. I'm told there's a rather steep hill in the way, which isn't so noticeable on the Tube.

Meanwhile, tomorrow I am traveling to Addington Village via Wanstead with no Central Line (or not the bit of it I need) and a serpent. I don't think it's time to turn in the travelcard yet!

Music for St Michael and All Angels

2010-09-29T20:26:00.004+01:00

Today I've been to St Paul's Cathedral for Evensong, to hear the winning entry in the recent New Music Competition. There were 58 entrants, out of which one was chosen for the £1000 prize.

Andrew Cusworth chose the same text as I did for the competition, one previously used by Richard Dering in this gem (YouTube link). It was interesting to hear the difference in our approaches to it. I like to think that there are some similarities, and of course I can't make a fair comparison having heard his piece once and knowing mine rather better than that, but I think his is the better composition, both in terms of technical polish and in terms of suitability for that cathedral. So congratulations to Andrew Cusworth!

I struggled over my submission, trying to be faithful to the idea of angels as strange and terrifying beings, but also to stay within strict limits -- SATB + organ, under 4 minutes -- and keep the piece suitable for use in a liturgical setting. In the end I knew I hadn't quite managed the latter; what I wrote was too exciting, too dramatic, and too ragged round the edges to fit into a stately Evensong. I did start over several times with several versions of the text in English and Latin, and each time it seemed to demand such a treatment. Eventually I gave up, tidied up what I had and submitted that.

It doesn't look like Andrew's version is online. So, here is my version: Factum est silentium [PDF] [MIDI]. Of course, the midi version sounds like robots rather than angels, but that's always the way of these machines! As always this is released under a CC-BY-SA license. Perhaps in a different building with a different choir it will work better, or perhaps someone else can take my ideas and develop them.

It was while I was researching the Revelation-based text of Richard Dering's "Factum est silentium" that I happened across a blog which eventually led me to Dust, a blog I've been trying to keep up with and very much enjoying the last few days as its author has been to a very shiny conference. (He quotes Christopher Smart in his subtitle, too.) My own research into psalmody has mostly consisted of reading a lot and doing some singing, and is much less advanced; I expect that much of the Oxford Psalms Conference would have been beyond my grasp. Nevertheless, I'm really glad to have found this rather random connection, which I might not have otherwise stumbled upon.

Going loopy

2010-09-27T23:40:00.003+01:00

Those of you who follow me on Twitter may have caught me going on about something called "looping" or "live looping".

Basically this involves recording oneself playing and then playing back the recording within the same performance; in this way one can accompany oneself. There are all sorts of fantastic machines to assist in the process.

I'm interested for a few reasons. One is finally, finally getting around to listening to Zoe Keating over on Bandcamp, which seems to be where the cool kids are releasing albums these days, and reading an interview on her creative process. Another is the simple augmentation that looping can give to solo horn.

I love chamber music, and I hope it will always be part of my working life, but it always seems to result in a lot of time getting tied up, and a lot of effort arranging rehearsals. My main instrument growing up was the piano, which can be much more solitary; I am used to that sort of independence in my rehearsing and performing. Now, there is always unaccompanied horn repertoire, and indeed I want to learn more of it, but that is not exactly a bottomless well of material. Some of it is extremely technically demanding and it doesn't really appeal to a wide audience. Looping would allow me to do solo improvisation and could make me much more independent as a musician.

I think live looping could be incredible fun. I've always enjoyed improvising, and I recognise some similarities with my own inner world in the interview linked above: I, too, am seldom without music in my head, and very often it takes the form of short snippets which could be built into something else.

I'm not sure anyone else out there is doing much live looping on the horn; a quick search turned up one YouTube video. I think the horn might be quite well-suited to it, as are the cello and the electric bass: like the stringed instruments, the horn has a wide range of available tone colours and a decent compass in terms of pitch.

I'm a complete newbie to all of this, so at this point I'm just reading a bit, and thinking about whether to borrow or hire some equipment to play with. It would be a shame to buy it and then let it gather dust. But I'm also really excited about the musical possibilities, and it's good to have a horn-related project.

Further updates as events warrant...

Give Us Grace

2010-09-23T21:45:00.005+01:00

Earlier this year, Rev Kathryn Fleming asked me to write something for the patronal festival of St Matthew's, Cainscross, which was this Tuesday. It needed to be something fairly simple, a round perhaps, something the congregation would be able to pick up quickly and sing at the service; it needed to be relevant to the occasion but useful for other situations as well.

I was happy to make an attempt, of course.

I found writing a round an interesting exercise. I've written one before, which I released anonymously, but that one was not something I set out to write, just one of the little ditties that turns up sometimes. Keeping melodic interest while not writing too many harmonic crunches was a challenge, especially at one point when I got a deceptive (that's interrupted to you Brits) cadence stuck in my head.

Give us grace [PDF] [MIDI] is the result. As usual, I have released it under a CC-BY-SA license; you are welcome to use this music, as long as you attribute me appropriately and as long as any derivative works are released under a similar license.

With Merry Glee

2010-09-22T15:30:00.005+01:00

Over two months after the actual performance, I'm finally sorting through some of the music the Brigantia Consort performed this summer.

The first track went up to Soundcloud just over a week ago; since then it has had 48 plays and six downloads. I promise you only one of the plays was me! I didn't advertise it very widely, and I know it might seem like small beans, but if those are unique plays rather than duplicates it has already been heard by over double the number of people who came to the concert. A larger concert audience would of course have been good (apparently, there was some sort of game involving kicking a ball around happening at the same time -- who knew it would affect our numbers?), but being able to reach people who couldn't be there is wonderful. The recordings were made, with the help of Dearest Button-Pusher, on a little Olympus LS-10 linear PCM recorder.

I'm not sure whether we'll keep using Soundcloud, or move to something like Bandcamp. It seems like Soundcloud is great for getting rough tracks out there quickly, while Bandcamp might be better for a more polished album with artwork and so on, or at least fewer sirens than on "She's Like the Swallow". I love Steve Lawson's approach of putting all of his stuff on Bandcamp with a pay-what-you-will label. As an aside, I also really have him to thank for making me aware of Bandcamp and Soundcloud, and his article on Talking About Awesome Things gave me a major kick up the backside.

Coming soon: a way for people to give money to Brigantia Consort. That will probably start with a PayPal button, unless someone can tell me what the cool kids are doing these days.

Today I blogged ever so briefly on She's Like the Swallow; it will be interesting to see what the publicity there, and here, does to the Soundcloud stats.

Transcendence

2010-08-31T19:44:00.003+01:00

I've just been to Greenbelt, a Christian arts festival held at Cheltenham Race Course. There is music, but I didn't get to much of that, tending instead to be drawn to talks, workshops and worship.

The days are already merging into a sort of blur, but some things stand out.

One of the most memorable and perhaps transcendent experiences for me was an Orthodox Vespers on Sunday night. The room was a small space near the top of the grandstand, and crowded. The east-facing windows looked out over the hills, glowing gently in the sunset. Two icons served as a visual focus for prayers.

There was a short introduction before the start of the service. We were invited to stand, as the Orthodox do, to join them in their prayers, and gently reminded to think of the choir as praying, rather than performing.

The entire service was chanted or sung, in English -- nothing was spoken. We weren't given any service sheets, which left my hands relaxed and my eyes free to look at the icons or out at the beautiful horizon. The portions sung by the choir were beautifully simple and reverent, and repetitive enough that the rest of us could quite easily join in with "Lord, have mercy."

So we did, again and again.

It was very moving, and 45 minutes flew by. I can't speak for others but I was caught up, absorbed, really not thinking of the technical details of the music or liturgy at all after a while. Afterward, I thanked a choir member, and she said it was wonderful that we sang, too, and that her daughter had said it was something special, that there were "so many prayers".

I sat for a while, pondering, with the sound of the repeated song ringing in my ears.

Then I went to an entirely different service. This one, called "Transendence -- an Ancient Future Mass", was using the Common Worship liturgy -- with a bit of a twist. Like the Orthodox Vespers, large parts of the service were sung, and there was near-constant music. Like the Orthodox Vespers, there was a strong visual component. Like the Orthodox Vespers, there were no paper service sheets.

But my impression was not one of reverence and awe but of busy-ness. I found the electronic music more disruptive than meditative, with some disjunct transitions between sections. I found it hard to sing along when the clergy and choir had microphones (with significant amplification) and I did not. I found the visual displays were also distracting, constantly moving, and as all the words for the service were projected onto screens (and it was too dark for me to have been able to read a service sheet even if I had one) I didn't have the option of looking away. The very best parts of that service, for me, were when the background music dropped away and the choir sang a capella polyphony... but that wasn't something that I was able to participate in. Overall, my experience wasn't one of transcendence at all, but of being overly aware of a liturgy which could have been much simpler.

The thing that troubles me about this is that I can see how it could have worked. I think that the electronic music would have been alright had it been selected in such a way that it didn't jar with the other music; I think that the images on the screens would have been much more effective if they hadn't moved as often or as fast. I understand the need to use microphones with so much going on, but much simpler music at a lower volume would have meant that the human voices could have been amplified much less (though in that particular space, full of carpet and not acoustically kind, some amplification would probably still have been necessary).

I mustn't judge too harshly, as I did arrive late. There were elements of the service that worked. There were physical intercession stations of a sort; I didn't visit all three, but some people did. The darkness of the space gave people freedom to sit or kneel, stand or even prostrate themselves, and being able to do that without worrying about what everyone else is up to is a strength. Maybe the whole thing works better in York Minster.

The Common Worship liturgy is far more familiar to me than the Orthodox Vespers liturgy. I'd never been to the latter at all and I attend the former most Sundays. But the intimacy and simplicity of the Vespers service made me feel very much at home, so that phrases I'd never heard were somehow familiar enough to become prayers.

I'm not going to run off and join the Orthodox church, but I do want to think about how to develop that sort of beautiful reverence and simplicity in music at St Andrew's.

St Albans Organ Theatre and various other sundries

2010-08-22T22:50:00.005+01:00

This afternoon, N and I went to the St Albans Organ Theatre, a marvelous museum of various instruments. There were a number of instruments, from tabletop music boxes and cob organs to two impressive theatre organs and four mechanical, "self-playing" organs -- like player pianos but much larger. There were also some player pianos; I don't think I've seen one in action before.

Possibly my favourite specimen was the roll-playing Aeolian Orchestrelle. The picture on the website really doesn't do justice to the beautiful intricate oak. The instrument had been painted black, so someone had to remove all that black paint... but the real beauty of it was a lovely warm tone colour and quite a few drawstops. I'd encountered a parlor organ or harmonium as a child in Canada but they were generally in poor repair. This one had the addition of a roll, similar to a player piano roll -- but with the additional twist that the foot pumps seemed to control the speed of the roll, and the various stops could be pulled to change the tone. The roll demonstrated had dynamic instructions and even some pauses marked.

The various mechanical instruments put me in mind of a sort of steampunk pre-cursor to MIDI files. That in turn reminded me of this:

The video is of a sort of robot that fits over the manual of a pipe organ and plays it from a midi file, made by Dorkbot Alba.

Searching for that, in turn, turned up the Odd Musical Instruments website. Some of the contraptions on there make the serpent look quite tame!

Vacation

2010-08-15T13:09:00.004+01:00

I've been on vacation for most of the past week, staying in a guesthouse in Mark, Somerset and cycling a lot.

I'm well aware that I have a shiny new job starting in September, and I didn't want to miss too many days of practice. So I rang up the local vicar to ask if I could use the organ in Mark Church. I'm glad I did; it's a lovely instrument in many ways and I spent a few hours on Wednesday morning playing, as well as a bit of time on Thursday. I don't think the organ has the range of tone colour that the one at St Andrew's has, and I'm accustomed to three manuals rather than two and a greater range of pedal stops, but the blowers were much quieter (probably on account of not being broken) and -- this was exciting -- all the notes work. It's being kept in reasonably good tune, too.

Yesterday was back to work, of a sort -- I was playing serpent with the London Gallery Quire at a wedding in the afternoon, and then again in the ceilidh band in the evening at the reception. The wedding itself was very long, with a range of liturgy and music that showed a fair portion of the breadth of the Church of England. After the wedding some Quire members had kindly arranged a lunch, which was very much appreciated, especially by those of us going on to play in the band. Playing the ceilidh was good fun -- I'd like to do more of that sort of work -- but it did mean I got home after 1am!

Today, then, is for tidying, laundry, all the post-holiday stuff, so that tomorrow I can settle into a working routine again without tripping over myself. That's the plan, anyway...

Chanting tunes

2010-07-16T20:49:00.003+01:00

Dr Francis Roads has written an article on Joseph Key's chanting tunes. An extract:

"The chanting tune was developed as means of enabling local quires to sing prose psalms and canticles. The Anglican psalm chant was the usual manner in which prose psalms were rendered in the cathedral style. But Anglican psalm chanting is an art, which entails the ability of singers to fit phrases of several, sometimes many, syllables to a single note in the manner of speech rhythms, and then to change notes together at the right instant. Then as now many local quires found this art beyond them. The metrical psalms developed as one means of solving this problem, and proved a popular option. But chanting tunes remained an alternative."

We had a chat about these the other evening, and I'm just getting around to reading the article myself and looking up the form in Temperley.

Chanting tunes are a way of singing prose psalms and canticles to metered music -- unlike Anglican chant, the words aren't sung in natural rhythm on a single reciting note. Instead, each word is assigned a note value within the melody. The tenor and alto alternate singing verses of the psalm, the basses sing throughout, and the sopranos tend not to have much to do until the doxology. Like other music of its period it would likely have been accompanied by whatever instruments were available. Having sung with musicians who are not singers or even wind players, I wonder whether the challenges of getting a number of amateur instrumentalists to accompany chanting with a freer rhythm was another factor contributing to the need for regular, metrical music. This would especially apply if there were few enough resources that the person directing the music also had to sing or play.

I think there are some advantages and disadvantages to this method of chanting psalms. The first thing is that it will require rather more paper than either Anglican prose chants pointed for singing, or metrical psalms in Common Metre. But there is an advantage too -- with flexibility of word placement but metrical music it should be possible to make sure the emphases stay on the right syllables, which is not easy in Anglican chant.

A second disadvantage is one that applies also to other chant forms: the longer psalms and canticles may get tedious with so much repetition of the same melodic material. In Anglican chant this is sometimes worked around by not only the alternation of the cantoris and decani sections (which is echoed in chanting tunes by the alternation of alto and tenor) but by dramatic treatment of the text, easier in a free rhythm, and by creative registration on the accompanying organ (if any). Having all the music written out without any specified variations might make people less likely to experiment with such variations; but in the hands of a sensitive and competent director, even a small group should be able to give an effective performance.

One of the things Francis mentioned was the adaptation of chanting tunes to the resources available today. This is definitely an area of interest for me -- this evening at St Andrew's I had three choir members turn up for rehearsal, and I consider myself fortunate on Sunday mornings when there are twice as many as that. With three, I would need to adapt the tenor and alto parts to be sung by all, and play the bassline on the organ; with six, if the two gentlemen turn up, it should be possible to alternate the ladies and mens voices. Since I'm using an organ all the possibilities for creative registration are there; and this style of chanting is going to be much easier to learn and to direct than the more fluid Anglican chant.

I guess my next steps in exploring the possibilities of chanting tunes for modern liturgy are to visit the British Library to look at some more examples, and to try my hand at writing some -- perhaps using the Common Worship psalter, which aims to retain some of the feel of the Coverdale psalter used in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer but uses somewhat less archaic language.

Play Me - I'm Yours

2010-06-24T11:22:00.003+01:00

Back by popular demand, the City of London Festival brings you Street Pianos.

I played one of these at Liverpool St station last summer, for a few minutes. There were many notes that did not work, and it was horribly out of tune; my suggestion is that if you want to get out and play, it's best to do so sooner rather than later, while the instruments are still in a better condition.

The Week, er, Behind

2010-06-19T21:35:00.004+01:00

On Monday I posted about all I have to do this week.

Things are some things that didn't get done. I still haven't rescheduled my dental appointment, and there are a few other phonecalls that have piled up, which isn't so good. I fought with the piece for the St Paul's competition but still I don't have a rough draft I'm happy with, so I'm having to consider whether I'll submit anything at all. I didn't get around to finding recordings for the choir at St Andrew's to listen to, and I didn't get to the recitals at Trinity that I wanted to attend.

There were some good things, though. The choir rehearsal at St Andrew's yesterday evening went well despite my rather shallow preparation and only having two people there. It's quite hard work to sing with so few people present and those who did turn up worked hard and did well.

Also yesterday I met with Rev Kathryn Robinson, the newly-appointed Performing Arts Adviser for the Barking Episcopal area. It was good to meet her and to talk about some of what I do, what's going on at St Andrew's, and some of the collaborations that might be possible.

The Brigantia Consort rehearsal on Thursday night felt efficient and useful, despite all of us being rather exhausted. We've managed to share out the writing of programme notes in a way that I think makes sense, we made some decisions about clothing (always difficult if you decide you don't want to just wear black), we narrowed down some of the repertoire for the concert on 11th July and oh, yeah, we rehearsed some music. I don't want to speak too soon -- it definitely needs more work -- but tuning between serpent and violin does seem to be improving.

At Quire on Wednesday night I did not completely disgrace myself at playing a rather tricky bassline on an instrument with a turning circle the size of an elephant, and as usual I enjoyed the rehearsal immensely.

Teaching on Monday and Tuesday went well. It was the first week of trying out some new timing for Tuesdays, which looks like it's going to work a lot better for my students as well as meaning I get home a good 45 minutes earlier. Hooray! The long-term viability of making the journey from Leytonstone to North London two days a week has been weighing on me recently; the later nights on Tuesday definitely weren't helping. I was still too tired to do as much psalmody-related reading as I would have liked, though.

Today has been a Day Off, except that writing this post probably counts as work, oops. Tomorrow will be mostly church and another attempt at some composing, and then a look at what lies ahead next week.

The Week Ahead

2010-06-14T09:14:00.002+01:00

This week is looking pretty typical in terms of what I need to do, at least musically.

I'm teaching tonight and tomorrow night. I've done most of the preparation for that, but need to remember to bring music with me for my students. I'll be leaving home at 2pm each day and spending a lot of time on public transport... I usually use this time to read. Right now the important reading is all to do with psalmody and church music. I had rather hoped to have finished my psalmody-related reading by now and be well into writing workshop outlines, but the last few weeks I've been flagging.

Wednesday night there will be a London Gallery Quire rehearsal. Some of the music is a bit technically challenging on the serpent so I need to take some time to look at it.

Thursday night Brigantia are rehearsing at my place, and I need to practise that music beforehand, too. I also need to spend a significant amount of time on programme notes and organisational aspects of our concert on 11th July. It would be nice to get a gallery up on the website, too, but I don't think that's going to be realistic this week.

Friday night I am taking the choir rehearsal at St Andrew's, and I will need to learn the hymns well enough to accompany. I also want to find recordings of some of the pieces for a joint Evensong on 27th June at which we've been invited sing. We're a small choir and don't usually have all four parts at rehearsals, and it can be disorienting to suddenly have whole sections of tenor and alto rather than one each, and any bass part at all. Since I haven't been taking the choir rehearsals for very long, I don't even know what the facilities are like for listening to a CD. This could be a challenge.

I've been working on a piece for a competition which has a deadline of 30th June. Late last week it became clear that I'd managed to go onto the wrong track and was writing something that wouldn't really be suitable for the terms of the competition, so I went right back to the drawing board, decided to ditch the organ for now and stick to SATB a capella... I found a new text, but alas no English translation that is in the public domain in this country, so ended up commissioning someone else to make a new one for me. I ought to try and have at least a rough draft by the end of this week.

In addition to that, there is a final recital at Trinity College of Music that I'd like to attend, I need to reschedule a dentist appointment (cancelled this morning due to transport difficulties), I have two peer support meetings and one project planning meeting, perhaps some other meetings getting in there as well and a physiotherapy appointment on Friday afternoon. Errands need to get a look-in, too.

I'll try and report back later in the week with how I'm getting on...