Bach Cantatas

I sang in the Bach concert St Ann’s, Dawson Street, yesterday as a member of The Cantata Singers. Four cantatas, numbers 62, 61, 60 and 36. This year sees the end of the Orchestra of St Cecilia ten-year project; by the last concert on the 7th of March, all 200 extant church cantatas by J S Bach will have been performed. Bravissimo! What next? Well, there are the secular cantatas, which strangely include (according to Lindsay, the St Cecilia manager) the Actus Tragicus—the funeral cantata with two recorders and two viols. Ausgezeichnet!—or as they say in the States, Outa sight.

Dublin’s Cantata Singers were founded by John Beckett in the seventies, when he began the tradition of doing cantatas in St Ann’s on Sunday afternoons in February. He played the piano himself for our rehearsals, brilliantly. Such a stickler for time: his rehearsals were set for 8pm but everyone knew well enough to come early—they always actually began at five to eight.

In those days if you got a phone call at 7.30 in the morning, you knew it was John Beckett.

Our high point came in 1979 when the Cantata Singers were invited to do an all-Bach programme for the Proms in the Albert Hall, conducted by John and with the previous incarnation of the Orchestra of St Cecilia, confusingly then called The New Irish Chamber Orchestra. I remember clearly travelling from South London on the tube to the concert, and having to restrain myself from telling everyone on the train ‘I’m going to sing in the Albert Hall’. The following year we did a similar concert in the Flanders Festival, in Bruges.

When John died three years ago, Rhoda Draper put together a memorial concert for him in St Ann’s. She contacted all the old Cantata Singers and a mighty proportion of us got back together for the concert, under David Milne. Since then we have regrouped twice, for Lindsay’s cantata series last year and yesterday. We haven’t lost our verve.

In 1973, just after he started putting on the cantatas, John also began the Academy viol consort class, which I attended and eventually inherited when he left for London in 1983. Honor took it for the five years I was in Clare in the nineties, and just last September it left the Academy: it continues on Wednesdays in my house. As a viol player, its most distinguished ex-member must be Ibi Aziz, who fell in love with the viol and gave up medical studies in TCD to become a career violist. Four of us are off to a course taught by him in Wales next April.

Thoughts for a new year

Malachy gave me a perfect holiday book: The QI Book of the Dead, a collection of facts and scandal about historical persons. I love the portrait of Epicurus, and the big-minded Ben Franklin.

Epicurus, the book tells us, has the reputation ‘as the high priest of high living and sensuous pleasure, the philosopher of the debauchee and the gourmand.
‘Except that he wasn’t. So far from indulging in orgies and banquets, Epicurus lived on barley bread and fruit, with cheese as a special treat only on feast days. … But Epicurus had the misfortune to live in the highly competitive golden age of Greek philosophy, where he found himself up against the Academy founded by Plato, and the porch (stoa) of the Stoics: both articulate and well-organised opponents. The mud they slung at him over two millennia ago has stuck firm.’

Which deserves to be preserved in an epigram:

To have a bad reputation is to have influential enemies.

A Christmas thought: if the Magi saw and followed ‘a star in the east’ then they came from the west. They may have been from a sect of Platonists disenchanted with the way the Academy’s teaching had descended into nihilism—

I went to university
Studied Greek philosophy
And all that it taught me was there’s nothing to know
But that knowing you know nothing, well that’s knowing something too.

In my fantasy these wise men came east looking for a newborn child to take on the mantle of Socrates, moral model and innocent victim, condemned to death by the state he sought to reform. Socrates (at least as reported by Plato) had improved on previous moral teachers by urging kindness to enemies simply because that is the right thing to do—something Jesus certainly passed on. The Proverbs of Solomon had said that doing good to your enemy will ‘heap coals of fire upon his head’, and this vengeful prospect was reiterated some centuries after Socrates by a professed Christian (Romans 12:20). Perhaps St Paul didn’t quite get the message.

Hence my take on Christianity and Christmas:

So what has Christ to do with Christmas trees?
This younger, more attractive Socrates
Forever dangles from his spar of wood:
See, children, what you get for being good.

I had what may best be called an Epicurean thought (I saw it then as more like Diogenes, another philosopher with influential enemies who have given his school, the Cynics, an even worse name) on one of my long cycles with Michael. I was approaching the age of sixty and wanted to prepare myself for old age: what should my priorities be? I came up with:

Be less
Do less
Have less
Get out more

My new year’s resolution.

Clancy bashing

Liam Clancy has died, the last of The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. In his honour I sang two Clancy Brothers songs last Saturday, at the Ukuhooley get-together in Doheny & Nesbitt’s—Brennan on the Moor and The Bold Tenant Farmer. These came off the first Clancy Brothers album which we more or less wore out in Kerry in the summer of 1962; I played guitar and Nick and I sang, and I think we memorised the lot. No trouble remembering them last Saturday, even though I only decided on the spot that that’s what I would sing.

At the session I met Lucy Johnston of The Johnstons. To my embarrassment, though I knew the name I had never heard her family group which flourished in the sixties and included the young Paul Brady, but she had been at our St Sepulchres concerts.

On Saturday we added harmonies to other people’s songs. A nice noisy night.

Theology as entertainment

One of my current favourite books is Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation: Europe’s House Divided 1490-1700. I’m on a second read through, having got about half way last year before losing the plot. It is complicated and full of characters, but brilliantly written, and the history is often stranger than fiction.

I see he has a new book out now, a history of Christianity published to coincide with his BBC4 series. Tempted to get it despite its thousand pages. Two reviews I’ve read are tantalising enough: the Irish Times reviewer (a Maynooth professor) loved it but regretted MacCulloch’s description of Christianity as ‘a personality cult’, while the Telegraph TV reviewer found the whole enterprise much too PC. MacCulloch’s response to him was “I think the term ‘political correctness’ was invented to describe what’s essentially showing politeness towards other people’s feelings” to which I say hear hear.

I can’t really explain my interest in theology, the pursuit of certain error. Of all my family I was the one most likely to find myself drawn to a church career. A hundred years earlier, or even fifty, I could have gone that way. My nearest relation in the clergy was Uncle Tom, but I didn’t want to be like him. I preferred the shambolic but credible Billy Wynne who was our rector in Monkstown; as an old man he told me he was ‘a Christian agnostic’. My Dad would have been sympathetic to that. I feel he would also be sympathetic to the person famously quoted by Disraeli:

“Sensible men are all of the same religion.”
“Pray, what is that?”
“Sensible men never tell.”

There is a very good reason for not telling. It would be most flattering to be asked for one’s theological views, except of course by an Inquisition. But apart from the entertainment of conversation, the only reason for consulting another’s beliefs is either to flatter or to exploit them. Unless the interviewee is in a position of command, one can gain little from sitting through an exposition of their articles of faith. It is like their health, equally fascinating to the speaker and boring to the listener.

Studying philosophy in TCD in the sixties, I was very taken by Berkeley. He seems to have been the first to note that

The grand mistake is that we think we have Ideas of the Operations of our Minds.
certainly this Metaphorical dress is an argument we have not

In a nutshell! That would knock all theology on the head, it seems to me. Not only can we not know the universal mind, we can’t even expect to perceive (the workings of) our own minds, since everything that is perceived is in a category (Berkeley called it Ideas) that does not include the perceiver. Of course later in life Berkeley became a bishop and started saying the things bishops say; the quote from his notebook above was written about the age of twenty-two. I was sad to see the egregious theology he committed towards the end of his last book Siris, but there you go. He was only human, and that was then. I still regard Berkeley highly; I wrote a short appreciative article on him for the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Earth edition).

Two poems about soap

In my last or second-last year at Mountjoy School, that is, around the age of fifteen or sixteen, I wrote some poems in my jotter on the subject of soap. I am surprised to find I still remember them.

Sope—the magic word again
Gives me hope of sopehope
And sohope I cope in hopucopusope

Peter Pope picked up a bar of sope
This, says Yaya, is purity and hope

(The last line refers to Gerard Hoffnung’s Punkt Kontra Punkt, where two German musicologists discuss a piece of twelve-tone music by ‘Bruno Heinz Jaja’. One of them says he ‘never attempted, like some of the Frrrrrench composers, to use thirteen tones. This, says Jaja, is the Baker’s Dozen—the Nadia du Boulanger.’ Ah, Hoffnung!)

Poem no 2
If I were a bar of soap
I’d fight the germs with all my scope
And I know that I could cope
For germs are seen with microscope

In the washroom people grope
Inside their bags for bars of soap
And will they be discouraged? Nope!
For people fill them up with dope
Proclaiming the delights of soap

Ruby anniversary

This weekend we celebrate forty years. That is something.

From the happy day I met you
I made a bet that I was going to get you
Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, will you be mine?

The Beatles

I had to go into town today and buy myself the newly-remastered Beatles CDs.

I was just the right age to catch the mania; I turned 15 in 1963. The first song I heard of theirs was Please Please Me, and I remember where: in the sixth form room in Mountjoy School, on a tinny transistor radio. I was interested to hear a variant on ‘do-re-mi-fa’ as a bridge to the subdominant. Pop music was utterly stuck in formulas at the time. American pop meant Elvis, plus Dion and the Belmonts and Bobby Darin, and English pop meant Cliff, plus Billy Fury and Adam Faith.

I couldn’t believe on that first hearing that the Beatles were English, white, only four, playing their own backing, and writing their own songs. I was learning piano and had decided to educate myself by listening to bass lines, and suddenly here were bass lines from Paul McCartney that went somewhere. In all other bands the bass just plodded, but Paul took it by the scruff and twirled it around a bit.

Coming up to the next Valentine’s Day I wrote amorous doggerel in prep, as we did:

My name isn’t Ringo, or John, George, or Paul
And I’m not the swingingest guy of them all
But if you will love me the way I love you
My heart it will beat and the beat’ll be true

In vain to you I whispered
Please please me, love me do
In vain I sent you letters
With love from me to you
Then someone said ‘She loves you’
That made me twist and shout
And now I want to hold your hand
Whenever we go out

To think I have remembered those. Well well.

It would be decades before it struck me that the Beatles’ name refers to Buddy Holly’s band, the Crickets.

Raglan Road

The last line of Patrick Kavanagh’s poem ‘On Raglan Road’ is

When an angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.

A curious image: an angel losing his wings as punishment for, or at least as a result of, material attachment.

The poem was written in 1946, the year the film It’s a Wonderful Life came out. In the film, George Bailey (played by James Stewart) is saved from suicide by an angel called Clarence who needs to do a good deed in order to earn his wings.

The idea of an angel earning his wings is presented as a piece of lore, but how old was the tradition? In the eighth century BC, angels simply had wings—six each, in the year that King Uzziah died: with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly (Isaiah 6).

The honorific awarding of wings began in the US armed forces during the First World War: winged aviator badges were issued to Air Force pilots and Army and Navy aviators. In Britain the Royal Flying Corps, which preceded the RAF, also had winged badges at least as early as 1912, and pilots still graduate by being ‘given their wings’.

Pet Hates (no. 2)

“Excellent choice, sir.”

There is something unsettling in being congratulated on a purchase by the vendor.

“You must be keen to get it off your hands—on second thoughts I’ll have something else.”

Les Paul

Les Paul died last week at the age of 94.

He invented the solid-body electric guitar when he was 26; he called it ‘the Log’, as the essential feature was a block of 4×4 timber with a Gibson guitar neck attached. He stuck bits of an Epiphone body onto the sides of the log, for comfort and looks, but that didn’t affect the sound. The main thing was not to have a resonating body: the pickups should be static while the strings did the vibrating. He had experimented with strings and a pickup attached to a railway sleeper in 1937, and his comment was ‘You could go out and eat and come back and the note would still be sounding.’ Nigel Tuffnell pays his homage in Spinal Tap to a Gibson Les Paul guitar. The sustain! Listen to it!

I brought my first guitar with me when my Dad brought us on a trip round the States in the summer of 1962; I was fourteen. The first place we stopped for the night was a trailer park just outside New York, across the river in New Jersey. Right next to our ground-breaking camper van (Louise) was a shiny silver caravan (trailers, they call them) where a man was playing tasty licks on an electric guitar. I wandered over and hung about, and he introduced himself as Andy Nelson; I introduced myself as Worm. Andy was a Gibson representative: his job was to go round the States demonstrating guitars and taking orders. His wife was with him, and they invited us all over for drinks. She was sad because her bottle of crème de menthe had fallen over and spilt in the cupboard.

Andy said he was going the next day to see his friend Les Paul. It’s Less, he said, not Lez, because it’s short for Lester. I had heard Les Paul and Mary Ford on the radio: Put a ring on my finger, in their trademark multi-tracking style, was a hit from 1958. Andy, or Mrs Andy, said that Mary was a true angel, she had saved Les repeatedly from drink and depression. He asked me would I like an autograph, so I said yes, and he came back the next day with a big shiny black-and-white photo of Les and Mary, signed to ‘the Worm’ and urging me to keep up the guitar playing. I may still have it, though I can’t think where: my one and only star autograph.