Christmas will soon be upon us! The fabulous Medievalist Eleanor Parker has written two festive posts for Corymbus in recent years, but this month I’ve been revisiting some her old Clerk Of Oxford blog posts about medieval Advent hymns (see a twitter thread of them here). Her blog – which is both excellent and very popular – is full of fascinating insight into England’s Pre-Reformation religious life, and its beautiful poetry and music. Here’s a typically evocative sample from this post.

‘Among the Office Hymns for Advent is ‘Conditor Alme Siderum’, best known in translation today as ‘Creator of the stars of night’. Intended to be sung in the evening, as the early dusk of a winter night descends, this hymn praises God as the creator of the stars – those stars which seem to shine so much more brightly in a cold, frosty sky. It draws a parallel between the darkness which envelops us each day and a yet deeper darkness, ‘the world’s evening hour’, which Christ, bright as the sun, illuminates by his entry into the world.’

Eleanor includes recordings of her texts where available, and you can listen to the carol described above here. From another of her Advent posts, I also enjoyed listening this lovely Latin hymn Ecce novum gaudium.   

If that early music isn’t quite ‘early’ enough for you, I also recently came across this blog post on an Egyptian Christmas hymn found ‘on the back of a tax receipt from the mid-fifth century’ (!) https://papyrus-stories.com/2018/12/12/an-egyptian-christmas-carol/ 

Musical Youtube Roundup:

Perhaps my best recent discovery is the channel OperaVision. They put up full productions of opera and ballet in 1080p resolution, with subtitles, and without adverts – watching it feels like robbery! I recently spent 90 minutes enjoying Janáček’s enchanting opera The Cunning Little Vixen from National Theatre Brno. It’s available for another 5 months – watch here. You can browse the rest of their videos here. 

Jazzy minimalist tuned percussion in ‘Her Sanctuary’ by Joe Locke, performed by the LSO Percussion Ensemble. 

A rather romantic flute sonata by contemporary US composer Lowell Liebermann. 

I’m told that the Japanese composer Akira Ifukube is best known for scoring Godzilla movies, but I’ve enjoyed listening to his spare and meditative music for solo Koto – a plucked zither-like instrument with a slightly dry tone. Here’s some performed by Keiko Nosaka.  

Staying briefly in East Asia, Judith Weir’s light and breezy song cycle ‘Natural History’ is based on ancient Chinese Taoist texts – ‘short parables about natural life as lived by different species, human and animal; a Taoist Carnival of the Animals, in fact.’ I think the penultimate song even has a bit of an ear-worm! Listen to the broadcast premiere with Dawn Upshaw and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Simon Rattle. 

Closer to home, Roxanna Panufnik’s ‘Cantator and Amanda’ is a single-movement work for bassoon and string quartet, based on a legend from the Sussex town of Rye, about a love affair between a Friar and a local woman – according to Terry Philpott of ‘Secret Rye & Around‘ once their attempted elopement was discovered, the two were buried alive(!). The bassoon takes a prominent role in this lovely little chamber piece, making much of its plaintive higher register for this tragic story. Listen to it performed by Amy Harman and the Castalian Quartet.

Finally, I love this jazz guitar album by Herb Ellis & Remo Palmier ‎– Windflower (1978).

I wish you all a very Happy Christmas! And keep an eye open for some new Corymbus content dropping on Boxing Day…

We’re accustomed to thinking about the ‘acoustic’ of an orchestral performance space. But part of the enjoyment of live music is what you see too. The sight of massed musicians on a stage has a big impact. Watching them perform helps you understand how the music is being made, and a conductor’s gestures can help the audience to interpret the composition.

But in recent months, three concerts I’ve attended have brought up the issue extra of visual elements in orchestral concerts. Visually enhancing classical music is nothing new of course – Disney’s Fantasia added animations to symphonic favourites way back in 1940. But how does this idea work in a live setting?

In September, at the Southbank Centre, Thomas Adès conducted the LPO in his own work In Seven Days, for piano and orchestra. It was a new piece to me, but one I very much enjoyed. Reading the programme notes, I discovered that it was originally composed to be performed with a video art display – one designed by ‘Adès’s marital partner at the time, Tal Rosner’. All this considered, it was certainly intriguing to discover that on this occasion, the video would be omitted. 

Raised eyebrows aside, I certainly wouldn’t have known anything was missing. What I heard hardly sounded incomplete. 

In Seven Days is a compelling and at times very busy piece, with a piano part spinning out seemingly endless lines. The title refers to the Creation, and the music incorporates fractals – mathematical structures found in nature that repeat themselves at different scales (think of a fern leaf).

The music gathers into a grand and impressive sweep, with some suitably archaic and awe-struck moods. I particularly enjoyed Adès’ grave harmonic sequences, teasing the ear with fragments of tonality – at one point I got an uncanny illusion of woodwind passages from the first movement of Brahms’ 4th symphony. I also thought of the Great West Window at Winchester Cathedral, smashed up in the English Civil War and pieced back together into a jumbled mosaic of stained glass, unrecognisable but weirdly familiar at the same time.

The next evening, I was back in the same part of London to experience the reverse of what I’d just heard – pure music with projections added in. It was a free concert in St. John’s church Waterloo, given by the Southbank Sinfonia. But no stained glass would dazzle us here – we started at 9pm to bring on true cinematic darkness. The musicians used iPads to read their music. But I could only partly make them out, as a large screen stood between them and the audience, like a wall.

For Copland’s Quiet City, prominent soloists were back-lit as a silhouette onto the screen. Then at a bright key-change, we suddenly saw a shot of tree branches waving in the breeze. Next up was Dani Howard’s more minimalist piece Silver Falls, where we saw fragments of faces, with a more silvery colour scheme to match. Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite was the main work of the programme, and we were treated to colourful spinning buttons and cakes. Pictures of faces of some of the orchestral members were projected later on, giving a more personal touch to proceedings.

One can hardly complain about experimentation in a free concert – you can only say well done for trying something different, and thank you for great music making. Nonetheless, the colours I was most impressed by were not those of the projections, but rather Ravel’s lush score, which was far more substantial than I remembered, and fantastically played.

Admittedly, it was quite pleasant to hear music in an atmospheric gloom. But truthfully, had the projections not been there, I would have enjoyed it just as much.

If I was unconvinced about visual displays after that, the feeling was hammered home in October, when I went to the Barbican to hear the London Contemporary Orchestra perform John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean. It’s a work I love. I’ve written about twice (here and here). So I was excited to be hearing it live for the first time. I knew there would be projections too, but I wasn’t bothered about that, and I didn’t suppose they would present any problems.

As at St. John’s church, the orchestra were sat behind a large screen, with only some of the players partly visible. But once the music started, my heart sank. From where I was sitting, the sound seemed to be coming from the stacks of speakers to the left of the stage. With the orchestra square in the centre, the effect was disconcerting. At least at the Southbank Sinfonia concert I could hear the placement of the players in the church, even if I couldn’t see them all. Not so now.

I assume the speakers were there to compensate for any loss of sound produced by the screen. But what did we gain from this? The visuals were a kind of colour-wash of oceanic blues and greens, but their motion was fairly minimal. Just seeing the orchestra in full would have been a much more dynamic sight – and would have allowed me to better appreciate the orchestration of this fascinating score. Instead, the amplification obliterated my ability to catch the direction of different sounds. What I could make out of the orchestra might as well have been a projection too – a depressing realisation.

Had I sat more towards the centre of the hall, perhaps the sound would have been more comfortably balanced. And admittedly, in the great swelling climaxes, the force of the music overcame the disorientation, allowing me to enjoy it more. But classical music is about quiet delicacy too. Become Ocean has wonderful seething troughs between its foaming peaks, which I had hoped to really languish in.

The obvious question is raised: why did anybody think such a bland visual display was worth fundamentally altering of the dynamics of the concert experience? Is Luther Adams’ prize-winning composition insufficiently evocative on its own? Why sever that direct human connection across a physical space – not just during the performance, but after it, when the orchestra stand to take their applause?

To be clear, the London Contemporary Orchestra are a great ensemble, and I look forward to hearing them again soon. I’m definitely in favour of experimentation and collaboration. But on this occasion, I left the Barbican feeling as though I’d been to a cinema screening with Become Ocean as a soundtrack, all for the sake of visuals devoid of any real interest. I was annoyed, and disappointed. I felt I still hadn’t truly heard the piece ‘live’. 

If these few concerts have taught me anything, it’s that if you’re going to add visual effects to instrumental music, they need to have an intricacy and craftsmanship to match the score. Disney’s Fantasia works so well because of the many hours (and dollars) put into making really imaginative visual storytelling. The same is true of The Snowman, which I wrote about last year. Of course, most ensembles won’t have resources to create their own live displays this calibre. But equally, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to put a gimmicky bauble centre stage that can’t match the sophistication of the music.

I’ve also learned that it’s worth retaining sight of the musicians – seeing them is an important part of the orchestral concert experience. On YouTube, a video shows how In Seven Days was originally performed. The video art was relayed on large monitors behind the orchestra – complementing rather than obscuring the players.

At the same time, the success of that Adès concert shows how orchestral music, even when removed from its original visual context, can still work thrillingly. After all, nobody complains when ballet scores like The Rite Of Spring are performed without the choreography. If a score has enough of its own storytelling, the experience of seeing people committed to the act of realising it will still move us. The stained-glass windows and rolling waves are still there, even if they are not lit up on a giant screen. They are real enough, and powerful enough, in the mind’s eye.

The score of ‘Shaker Loops’ by John Adams.

         By Jason Hazeley

One Wednesday forty winters ago at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, an audience first heard a piece that has become a fingerpost on the musical map: the string septet Shaker Loops by John Adams.

Adams, now one of world’s most performed living composers, had several starts. As director of the Conservatory’s New Music Ensemble in the 1970s, he tried and abandoned pieces for tape (Heavy Metal, Studebaker Love Music, Onyx) and for electronics (Ktaadn, Grounding, Schedules of Discharging Capacitors). Meanwhile, his works for more conventional instrumentation kneaded and plaited the American vernacular into something not altogether concise, such as the piano rag Ragamarole (1973-5), and the Cornelius Cardew-inspired American Standard (1973) – a triptych of reimagined musical tropes comprising a Sousa march, a hymn, and a Duke Ellington ballad.

None of it has survived the composer’s erase head except the middle panel of American Standard, ‘Christian Zeal And Activity.’ It’s an ultra slo-mo version of Onward, Christian Soldiers for chamber orchestra and ‘pre-recorded tape, with some thematic connection to the music,’ which suspends animation in a way that suggests nothing of the urgency in either title.

In 1978 these three approaches finally negotiated their way to common ground when the composer completed Shaker Loops. The piece, now an unquestionable part of the repertoire, was the third iteration of the same idea. The first, Wavemaker (1976) for three violins, contained the grain of something worth pursuing; the second, also called Wavemaker (1978) for string quartet, ‘crashed and burned at its premiere,’ in the composer’s own recollection.

The piece takes its title, as Adams’s compositions often do, from a collision of notions. The Shakers, or the ‘United Society of Believers’, were a religious sect known for their expressions of physical religious ecstasy, a colony of which once lived up the road from the composer’s childhood home in New Hampshire. (In a deliciously trivial non-sequitur, they are now better known for their pleasingly unfussy furniture).

But a ‘shake’, in American musical terminology, is a trill – the ornamentation of a note by alternating it rapidly with a neighbouring note – while ‘loops’ are a staple of tape composition: found sounds on a recorded medium repeating themselves, as in Steve Reich’s Come Out (1966), The Beatles’ Tomorrow Never Knows, or any number of hip-hop records.

These three substrates – fervour of belief, a musical flourish and a compositional technique – inform Shaker Loops. It is, loosely, minimalistic: driven by pulse, repeated patterns and slow rates of harmonic and textural change. But it is also dramatic, lyrical and, in its climactic passage, visceral in a way that bawls with human agency, as the musicians drive faster and faster through enormous, repeated chords.

The late 1970s was, broadly speaking, a time of consolidation in American classical music. Leonard Bernstein’s Songfest (1977), for instance, took thirteen texts and, in one sitting, dished up ballad, chorale, serialism, jazz, opera – and bags of national pride.

But Shaker Loops sounds as though it emerges more from the same vapour as Brian Eno’s albums of the time. The connection may be more than coincidence: Adams’s first music to be commercially recorded was American Standard, released on Eno’s Obscure label in 1975 along with pieces by Gavin Bryars and Christopher Hobbs.

‘[Shaker Loops] has probably been my most painstakingly revised piece,’ Adams told Charles Amirkhanian in 1987. ‘I’ve changed it over and over again. Among the changes, I’ve made it about ten minutes shorter, and I’ve also made a version of it […] which can be played by a full string orchestra of 50 or 60 players, instead of seven.’

The work is divided into four sections, played without a break. In its original version, each contains highly structured elements alongside aleatory, or chance, music. Passages – even micro-passages – are subject to whim. Modules consist of smaller (repeated, or looped) submodules, varying in length, which are assigned to the instruments by indication from the conductor.

The first part, ‘Shaking And Trembling’, establishes the pulse motif in its opening moments. Two violins play double-stopped fourths in unison semiquavers: a consonant, open, familiar sound. These violins have submodules four beats long; a third violin joins them with an eleven-beat submodule, before moving to one of six beats, while the viola adds a nine-beat loop, the first cello a fifteen-beat loop, and the second cello a twenty-four-beat loop.

Such chance elements need some sort of restriction, but the score’s rubric says nothing more than ‘the overall length of the piece should not exceed 30 minutes’. A typical performance comes in at around 26 minutes.

The vivid, pulsing opening of Shaker Loops is a statement of intent that persists in much of Adams’s work. These first bars owe much to Terry Riley, whose In C made an enormous impact on the young composer. But the landscape of ‘Shaking And Trembling’ is a shifting one – and other elements gradually join the frantic party: long glissandi and high, ethereal artificial harmonics that sound like wine glasses (a relatively modern technique in which the player reaches beyond the usual upper register of the instrument by tricking its strings into behaving as if they were shorter).

At the climactic point of the first part, Adams adds to the score the unconventional direction ‘Shake!’ – a reminder, more to the reader than the player, that this is a physically exhausting piece for seven musicians to perform. ‘Orchestral string players,’ he said, ‘tend to play in a very relaxed half-drive, never really giving their all. They couldn’t: they would have tendonitis within a month.’

The second part, ‘Hymning Slews,’ is conventionally notated in 7/4 – though this is close to impossible to discern, because the music seems to float, free of pulse, in a bright ozone layer. It is exceptional string writing, as original as Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima or the ‘Murder’ cue from Bernard Herrmann’s score to Psycho. Even four decades later, there is little in the composer’s considerable output anything like this: the strings shimmer, pipe, slither and shudder their way into their very highest registers. The occasional bubble of light even bursts on the surface of the double bass. It may be the high watermark of Adams’s early output.

The third part, ‘Loops and Verses,’ comprises a sustained build-up of energy that releases itself in a series of gigantic, relentlessly accelerating push-pull chords. And the fourth, ‘A Final Shaking’, is the passive twin to the active first part – a gradual wind-down, the bows dancing across strings with the same intensity as at the piece’s opening, but with toes in place of heels. A lacy, delicate icing around the hefty fruitcake announced on the opening pages.

After Shaker Loops ballooned in popularity, the composer re-notated it conventionally – starting on the first page and finishing on the last, with everything between formally laid out. He has since withdrawn the earlier version, putting chance behind him. Such is success.

Though John Adams has abandoned much of the grammar of the early Shaker Loops, the piece is a template for much of what was to follow. There is ‘musical inspiration in earnest, unquestioning beliefs – not organized religious doctrine, but simple, pure, emotional faith,’ as Pierre Ruhe has observed – just as with the PLF terrorists of Adams’s controversial opera The Death Of Klinghoffer (1991), or the Pulitzer Prize-winning On The Transmigration Of Souls (2002). There is unarguable statement of intent. There is pulse; there is consonance; there is centrifugal drive.

Shaker Loops was the piece that established Adams, not only in the public eye, but in his own. It codified his voice and his technique. After so many tentative starts, the composer had arrived at himself. He would go on to compose Common Tones In Simple Time (1979), the ravishing, spangling, orgiastic Harmonium (1981) for the San Francisco Symphony and, that same year, the still contested cartoon-with-a-pastorale Grand Pianola Music. 

2017 was Adams’s 70th birthday year, celebrated by orchestras and opera houses the world over. Tributes were paid to him in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Los Angeles, Lyon, Stockholm and San Francisco. That March, I went to Berlin for a performance of his oratorio The Gospel According To The Other Mary (2012).

On the flight back to London, sitting six rows ahead of me, was Adams. I wish I’d thought to tell him he was the reason I was on that plane at all.

Jason Hazeley is a writer and musician. He is the co-author of the Ladybird Books For Grown-Ups series and anything with the word Cunk in the title, and is an occasional member of Portishead. He divides his time between London and the pub. Byline picture is copyright Idil Sukan.

A solar prominence captured by STEREO spacecraft, NASA.

      By Simon Brackenborough

Imagine you’re holding a tennis ball. Some 780 metres away from you – about a five-to-ten minute walk – is another much bigger ball. In fact, at over seven metres high, it’s the size of a two-storey house. These two objects, in their respective scale, are the earth and the sun.

The sun is utterly fundamental to our lives, and yet we can’t even look at it directly. We exist in the balance of its awesome power and vast distance, which even light takes eight minutes to traverse. Too close and we would bake; too far and we would freeze.

But as we orbit, our planet spins at an angle, creating dramatically different effects of light across its surface. The composer Karin Rehnqvist was born over 59 degrees north of the equator, in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. Her Solsången – ‘Sun Song’ – sets various texts about the sun from the northern fringes of Europe, with an ensemble of female singer, speakers and chamber orchestra. Introducing the piece on her website, she explains how latitude affects our experience of the sun:

For people who live to the north, the sun represents greenery, warmth, and growth. We turn our faces toward the sun as soon as its rays begin to warm us again in spring, after the long, dark winter. […] People who live closer to the equator celebrate rain instead. Without rain the sun is ruthless, leads to draught, starvation.

Sunset in Oslo, Norway. Copyright Simon Brackenborough.

That mention of the Scandinavian winter is telling – Solsången is far from ‘sunny’ in the optimistic, joyful sense. Its textures and colours are sparse, austere, and often cold. It’s a work of long shadows as much as dazzling light. But Rehnqvist composed this piece for Lena Willemark, a Swedish folk singer with a particularly expressive Scandinavian vocal style. As she explains:

She uses no vibrato, and a technique known as herding calls (Swedish kulning), traditionally used for outdoor communication over long distances and to call the cattle home. It is a highly physical, dramatic technique with a high, straightforward voice quality and strength comparable to that of a trumpet.

This vibrato-free line acts as a pure focal point – as direct and piercing as sunlight itself. And like the wide swings of the northern seasons, Rehnqvist utilises extreme contrasts in the singer’s range – from dusky lows to stratospheric highs.

Her first chosen text takes us to Iceland. Sólarljóð – ‘Song Of The Sun’ – is an anonymous medieval Icelandic poem which combines Christian and Pagan elements. At its heart are a series of stanzas repeating the line ‘I saw the sun’, which describe a sunset of apocalyptic dread, as the narrator is drawn into death. Here’s a sample, from this translation.

I saw the sun,
The true day-star,
Bow down in the noisy world;
And in the other direction I heard
The gate of Hell roaring weightily.

I saw the sun
Set with bloody staves
I was then forcefully tilting out of this world
It appeared mighty in many ways
Compared with how it was before.

The crossing of vast distance is a key theme – between sun and earth, life and death, heaven and hell. And like the cow-herd’s far-carrying kulning, the ‘bloody staves’ of sunset are those frequencies that can penetrate furthest through atmospheric scattering. Rehnqvist sets lines from Sólarljóð in a suitably bleak beckoning: sung in a slow, low monotone, and buffeted by dissonant string chords. Later on, two speakers recite lines from another passage which describes visions of men suffering damnation, their voices overlapping in a stream of confused impressions.

Similarly spooky is when, at various points, words are whispered by the speakers and orchestral musicians. But these are taken from modern scientific texts. They describe those mysterious features of the sun which we might only perceive in extraordinary natural events – the ‘prominences’ made briefly visible in a total eclipse, or the ‘solar wind’ which dances across the northern night skies as the Aurora Borealis.

The Northern Lights by Moyan Brenn, cropped. Wikimedia Commons.

So far, so much Nordic Noir, you might say. But the doom-and-gloom of Sólarljóð soon gives way to a depiction of a summer day flooded with light. Even here the music is reticent and understated, and the soprano’s gently lyrical line could be a lullaby, as she sings words from a Swedish Hymnal:

How lovely to see the fingers of the sun
Deep in the flora of the glades sewing
A lovely frock for the bed
We name summer meadow.

The second movement picks up more energy and motion, with words by Emil Hagström. Inexorably rising chromatic lines suggest the sun’s steady ascent into the sky, set to the airy textures of tremolo violins and tuned percussion, while the soprano sings:

Sun and run and rose and vine
Rose and vine, yours and mine
Hitch and ditch and skirt and bind
Run and sun and high the sky.

But Rehnqvist’s sun is a source ‘of life and of destruction’, and Solsången never fully shakes off the apocalyptic fragility of its Icelandic opening. Thunderous rumbles intrude ominously at key points, fragmenting it with a recurring sense of desolation. We hear the striking of a gong – perhaps a symbol of the sun itself. And at the end of the second movement, the energy is dissipated with a dramatic shout of ‘TURN OUT THE SUN!’.

As night falls, the final movement sets another passage from the Swedish Hymnal – ‘and so one day passes away / never to return again / and once more night of the Lord’s peace / our earth is given to gain’. The singer’s voice hangs in a low chant, shadowed by solo instruments, while others quietly snake underneath. Within the gathering darkness, the music comes to rest in the gentle arms of sleep.

Karin Rehnqvist speaking at the Stockholm Kulturhuset, 2015. By Frankie Fouganthin, Wikimedia Commons.

Rehnqvist has said: ‘in my music, I seek to express something primordial. Beyond time and trends. The eternal condition of human life of which, in the end, there will be nothing but extinction.’ That rather morbid final point resonates with another aspect of the sun that defies our everyday perception – like us, it has a finite life-span. It is over four billion years old, but in another five billion years it is predicted to enter its death phase.

The video above is a performance with soprano Berit Norbakken Solset and the Arctic Philharmonic, an orchestra based across two towns in the far north of Norway. In February this year, they travelled to perform Solsången on the remote archipelago of Svalbard. Part of the Arctic Chamber Music Festival, this was timed to coincide with the sun’s return after four months of polar night.

It must have been a breathtaking place in which to hear this work, so evocative of the slanting rays and frosty air of the north. Even in this most unlikely location, human life is ‘intimately intertwined’ with the sun, as Rehnqvist puts it. But in the time since Solsången was composed in the 1990s, the polar regions have spoken with an increasingly stark warning of a dangerous unbalancing in this relationship. In recent years, Arctic temperatures have been found to be rising at a rate twice the global average, while atmospheric carbon is at a level never before seen in human history. Meanwhile, recent figures suggest that CO2 emissions are in fact still rising in 2018.

Longyearbyen, Svalbard, by Christopher Michel. Cropped. Shared under Creative Commons.

Rehnqvist’s work captures a sense of our vulnerability on this planet, and how dependence on the sun can spell life or death for human cultures. Now we have entered an era of potentially catastrophic man-made climate change, it is worth remembering the analogy of the tennis ball and the house, to better comprehend the scale of the force we are meddling with.

Simply put, the sun is a sphere of nuclear-powered plasma over a million kilometres wide. We cannot turn it out. But we are trapping more and more of its energy in our only home, by choice, and with ample warnings of the consequences. It is strange to think that we owe our existence to a force so powerful that we cannot even look at directly. Stranger still is how easily we blind ourselves from understanding what this really means.

My blog posts are powered by caffeine. So if you enjoyed this one, a cheap but meaningful way to support my writing is to buy me a coffee on PayPal.

Find out more:
All English translations are from Karin Rehnqvist’s website.
Listen to Solsången performed by Lena Willemark on Spotify.
Watch more videos by the Arctic Philharmonic on YouTube.

‘Nazar’ amulets. Creative Commons photograph – source here.

      By Simon Brackenborough

As anyone who uses London’s bus network will know, it carries all sorts of characters. I was recently sat on the lower deck of the 68 to West Norwood, when I noticed a man stood in front of me seemed to be growing agitated. I couldn’t figure out the reason, but it soon became clear. He suddenly moved, and started to aggressively address a man sat in a row behind me.

‘Have we got a problem?’

I turned round. The man seated behind was taking out an earphone to hear what this person was saying.

He continued, clearly intent on intimidation. ‘You’ve been staring at me this whole time. Now I don’t know where you come from, but where I come from, that’s a problem, yeah?’

The atmosphere soured. But the man behind made clear there was no problem, and the aggrieved passenger eventually walked back, muttering angrily. I don’t know whether there had been purposeful staring or not. Perhaps the accused was simply zoning out to his music, and the other was paranoid.

Just another unpleasant instance of toxic masculinity in public, you might say. But it got me thinking about the fact that simply looking at someone – or even the perception of this – can cause so much trouble.

There’s no doubt that being stared at can feel uncomfortable. We are hard-wired to notice faces – we can even see them in inanimate objects – and are acutely attuned to signals of hostility. Pictures of watching eyes have been found to deter thieves. One TV analysis of the 2016 US Presidential Election race contrasted Donald Trump’s expressions of narrow-eyed resolve with Hilary Clinton’s tendency to appeal with non-threatening wide-open eyes (our brains associate those with babies).

Given our sensitivity in this regard, it’s of no surprise that there’s an ancient superstition about being looked at malignly. A belief exists across a remarkable number of cultures that a person’s gaze can bring bad luck and misfortune. In English it’s most well known as the ‘evil eye’.

A Roman mosaic in Antioch shows multiple attacks on the evil eye. Wikimedia Commons.

Like all folk beliefs, its details vary from place to place, but there are common themes. One, as documented by the ancient Greek author Plutarch, was that the evil eye was caused by envy: he wrote that envious eyes could emanate harmful rays of energy. The Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon elaborated on this idea:

The scripture calleth envy an evil eye […] some have been so curious as to note, that the times, when the stroke or percussion of an envious eye doth most hurt, are, when the party envied is beheld in glory or triumph; for that sets an edge upon envy: and besides, at such times, the spirits of the person envied do come forth most into the outward parts, and so meet the blow.

Here Bacon seems to allude to hubris on the part of the afflicted, and some believe you can bring the evil eye upon yourself simply through immodesty or narcissism. From her own childhood, Leila Ettachfini recalls how her mother deflected compliments with the expression ‘mashallah’ (‘God has willed it’) to avoid the evil eye. Others believe that unlucky people are cursed to give the evil eye through no fault or ill will of their own.

In his 1895 book The Evil Eye: The Classic Account Of An Ancient Superstition, Francis Thomas Elworthy noted the beliefs in his native Somerset, where sudden sickness or death in livestock would be blamed on being ‘overlooked’ by someone in the community – this might have once resulted in accusations of witchcraft.

He also explains that the verb to ‘fascinate’, while having a positive meaning in modern English, has more sinister roots in the Latin fascinatio – to bewitch. In the Roman empire, fascinum were phallic symbols used to ward off evil – their obscenity perhaps acting as a distraction. Similarly, in more modern times the ‘cuckold’ horns-gesture has been deployed against those suspected of carrying the evil eye.

Gallo-Roman bronze Phallic amulets, Wikimedia Commons.

Belief in the evil eye has a particularly rich tradition in cultures around the Mediterranean and Middle East, and Elworthy attests to the persistence of the superstition in nineteenth-century Italy through an incident with a bookseller:

At Venice I entered a large second-hand establishment, and was met by the padrone all smiles and obsequiousness, until he heard the last words of the title of the book wanted, sul Fascino. Instantly there was a regular stampede; the man actually turned and bolted into his inner room, leaving his customer in full possession of his entire stock. Nor did he venture to look out from his den, so long as I waited to see what would happen.

Other objects suggest the evil eye’s considerable age. In Syria, eye-shaped amulets have been found from as far back as 3,300 BC. Perhaps the most familiar talismans today are blue eye beads known as nazar, and the hamsa/khamsa, which shows a hand, often with an eye in its palm – these are commonly found across North Africa and the Middle East.

Khamsa or ‘Hands of Fatima’ amulets from the Topenmuseum, Amsterdam. Wikimedia Commons.

John Psathas is a New Zealand composer with Greek heritage. But strangely, in his own words, almost all his trips to Greece have involved ‘some unpleasant and often bizarre’ experiences. These misfortunes included motorbike accidents, a lengthy salmonella infection, and even a donkey bite to the groin (don’t laugh – it could happen to you).

After ‘an unprecedented onslaught of bad luck’ during a trip in 1998, his concerned sister consulted someone with expertise in such matters. He recalls:

The soothsayer, when checking my aura by long distance (these days such matters can of course, be conducted over the phone via free-call numbers), gasped, went silent, and declared I was so heavily and completely hexed that my halo was utterly opaque.

In 1999 Psathas composed a short, virtuosic piano piece named after a word for the evil eye – Jettatura. Like the blue-eye amulets found in his ancestral homeland, this piece is ‘my talisman, my good eye’.

Jettatura is ‘an uncomplicated moto perpetuo […] shot through with defiance and aggression’. The music seems to emerge from a wellspring of chaotic energy, opening with spiky accented motifs that leaves us without any clear sense of pulse. A series of fast figurations down in the bass register intensifies its demonic feel.

A more sparse section follows, a left-hand ostinato with rapid right-hand phrases shooting right up into the eerie stratosphere of the piano – their improvisatory jaggedness perhaps reflecting Psathas’ interest in jazz.

Rhythmic energy seems to be a feature in much of Psathas’ music, as is the prominence of percussion – his marimba concerto Djinn showcases legendary Greek themes, while Planet Damnation is a work for solo timpani with orchestra.

In his musical career at least, he seems to have had good fortune. He has collaborated with famous names from Dame Evelyn Glennie to Salman Rushdie, and composed music for the opening ceremony of the 2004 Athens Olympics.

Jettatura showcases the pianist’s dazzling skill much as the talisman dazzles the evil eye. And while it’s easy to roll one’s eyes at superstitions, the persistence of this belief across so many cultures suggests it is tapping into some deep human needs. Perhaps it is a way to rationalise the arbitrary cruelties of the life, a warning to keep hubris in check, and an awareness of potential hostility from those around us – as was so vividly exhibited by the man on the 68 bus.

As Elworthy put it, over 100 years ago:

We in these latter days of science, when scoffing at superstition is both a fashion and a passion, nevertheless show by actions and words that in our innermost soul there lurks a something, a feeling, a superstition if you will, which all our culture, all our boasted superiority to vulgar beliefs, cannot stifle.

Whether you put much store in the evil eye not, the enormous variety and artistry of the talismans made to protect us from its gaze have their own perennial fascination – that is, in the modern sense of the word.

My blog posts are powered by caffeine. If you enjoyed this one, a cheap but meaningful way to support my writing is to buy me a coffee on PayPal.

Find out more:
Jettatura is published by Promethean Editions.
Elworthy’s book previewed on Google Books.
John Psathas’ website.
Quinn Hargitai on the evil eye for BBC Culture.
More videos of Konstantinos Destounis on YouTube.

Mandala of Amitayus, 19th C Tibetan School. Wikimedia Commons.

      By Simon Brackenborough

How do you feel about your body?

If that sounds like an intrusive question, then let me explain. I don’t mean whether you’d like to lose some weight, or which of your features you like the best.

I mean how do you feel about being a body – a body that breathes, moves, touches and perceives? How does it feel to be a body right now, a unique entity that has never before existed in the history of the universe?

You probably don’t dwell on this question much in everyday life. But if you stop and think about it, being a body begins to seem strange, remarkable – even miraculous.

No doubt you’ve seen the iconic Vitruvian Man, splayed out geometrically in a circle. But imagine for a moment that your body is more than flesh and bone in various proportions. Imagine it as a place of energy and vibration.

Now hold that thought, and listen to this:

The deep, pulsating opening of Body Mandala takes us to Northern India, where the composer Jonathan Harvey visited a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. A note on the score reads:

…reside in the mandala, the celestial mansion, which is the nature of the purified gross body.

A ‘mandala’ is a design that represents the cosmos, sometimes used as a tool for meditation. It’s a visual tradition of enormous beauty and variety. But it can also be understood metaphorically. As Rae Erin Dachille explains:

Within tantric Buddhism, the body mandala is a ritual process of imagining parts of the human body as parts of the mandala, a cosmic palace inhabited by Buddhas and attendant deities.

Mahavairocana Mandala – Tibet, 19th Century. Photo by cea +, shared under Creative Commons.

At the monastery Harvey witnessed purification ceremonies, in which music and bodily actions were both fundamental. As he recalled:

The famous low horns, tungchens, the magnificently raucous 4-note oboes, gelings, the distinctive rolmo cymbals – all these and more were played by the monks in deeply moving ceremonies full of lama dances, chanting and ritual actions. There is a fierce wildness about some of the purifications, as if great energy is needed to purge the bad ego-tendencies. But also great exhilaration is present. And calm. The body, when moved with chanting, begins to vibrate and warm at different chakra points and ‘sing’ internally.

The pulsating opening gives way to wildly exuberant passages  – if you knew nothing of this music, you might think it was describing a heady narcotic experience rather than a religious ceremony. Its visceral nature seems a world away from the stereotype of Buddhism as quiet meditation – but the same can only be said of Harvey’s account of the rituals.

Harvey is not exactly duplicating the ceremonial music. But as Michael Downes notes in a recent book, he asks for performance techniques which expand the orchestra’s sonic range, bringing instruments ‘closer to their Eastern counterparts’:

Brass instruments are required to use ‘lip vibrato’, producing a pulsating effect on a single note; woodwind players are directed to use alternate different fingerings of the same note […] string instruments, as in Quartet no.4, are required to use circular bowing.’

In its mesmerising drones and extravagant outbursts, Body Mandala confronts us with an array of arresting vibrations, battering and coaxing us in a vigorous sonic massage. It might feel a bit silly to imagine yourself as a ‘cosmic palace’ with deities inside you, but nonetheless this music is describing an intense experience of bodily habitation. It asks us to feel sound to our core.

Tibetan monks playing horns in Nepal, photograph by Wonderlane. Shared under Creative Commons.

Harvey died in 2012, aged 73. Body Mandala is one of many works concerned with Buddhism he composed in later life, and it forms the first piece of a triptych written during his association with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. Respectively, these works explore the purification of body, speech, and mind – a Buddhist concept reflected in the ‘Three Vajras’.

On the Overgrown Path blog, a wide-ranging interview from 2010 offers a detailed portrait of this ‘true Renaissance man’. Harvey’s immersion in eastern philosophies was complemented by an advanced knowledge of modern composition techniques. He experimented with developments in electronic music in the 60s and 70s, and was as an early adopter of ‘spectralism’ – an approach concerned with physical make-up of sounds, through their partials in the harmonic series.

His mastery of sonic manipulation in shown particularly well in the second work, Speakings – the longest and most ambitious of the three. Building on research conducted at IRCAM in Paris, Harvey analysed recordings of speech and developed a way to utilise electronics to combine the sound of speech with music. ‘A process of ‘shape vocoding’, taking advantage of speech’s fascinating complexities, is the main idea of this work’, he wrote.

Using microphones and loud speakers, the orchestra is delicately balanced with computer manipulations, which process the sounds to create speech-like effects. There are no audible words as such, but at times it sounds uncannily like the orchestra is saying something to us.

The work begins with fragments, focussing on a series of isolated timbres, and we hear a recording of a baby crying, then cooing. From this state of innocence the orchestra ‘learns’ to speak, and the music develops into more complex chattering in the second movement.

What purifies this increasing chaos is a two-note ostinato, based on a recording of the Buddhist mantra ‘Om Ah Hum’ – considered to be ‘the womb of all speech’. This ‘celebration of ritual language’, as Harvey puts it, builds to an overwhelming climax. 

In the final movement, the music is much more quiet and peaceful. Fast chatter has given way to a focussed melody, somewhat like plainchant, and ‘the paradise of the sounding temple is imagined’. As the music slowly dissolves into silence, the baby is heard once more – perhaps suggesting the Buddhist idea of Rebirth.

Speakings is the most demanding listen of the triptych, resisting typically ‘orchestral’ textures for much of its duration. But there is a compellingly creepy quality in its subtle blend of instruments and electronics, which taps into our easily confused auditory perception, and its ability to trick our minds about what we’re hearing. The fact that electronic speech infiltrates so many aspects of our daily environment also gives it a very contemporary resonance, and the overall effect is quite extraordinary.

The process of purifying speech reflects the purifying of the chatter of the mind in meditation, and the tranquility that ends Speakings leads on to the final piece,  …Towards A Pure Land. That title pause seems significant, suggesting that what we hear must come after a period of reflection. Harvey reveals that ‘a Pure Land is a state of mind beyond suffering where there is no grasping’:

It has been described in Buddhist literature as a landscape – a model of the world to which we can aspire. Those who live there do not experience ageing, sickness or any other suffering […] The environment is completely pure, clean, and very beautiful, with mountains, lakes, trees and delightful birds revealing the meaning of Dharma. There are also gardens filled with heavenly flowers, bathing pools and exquisite jewels covering the ground which make it completely pure and smooth.

This work contains the most transparently transcendental music of the triptych. String players from the back desks of each group form an ‘Ensemble of Eternal Sound’, and throughout the work sustaining strings create sensuous and radiant effects.

Even in its climaxes, this music feels lighter and more collected than the previous two pieces. But its sonic range still enthrals – a large percussion section adds splashes of evocative colour, and performers are asked to whisper consonants. 

This work is broadly symmetrical – ‘an arch with developments’ – and once again Harvey suggests purification as continuous ritual process. At its centre is a chasm of Buddhist emptiness, ‘sound but only insubstantial pitch’. 

This final piece of the triptych is a truly magical creation, and at its close we are left at the gates of this Pure Land with vaulted string chords, punctuated by the tinkling of bells.

Jonathan Harvey, photographed by Maurice Foxall. Shared with the kind permission of Faber Music.

At the 2011 Edinburgh Festival, the BBC SSO triptych was performed complete for the first time – it garnered rave reviews. Then in January the following year, Tom Service interviewed Harvey for the Guardian at his home in Sussex, shortly before a ‘Total Immersion’ weekend of his music at London’s Barbican. ‘I wasn’t played for decades in this country’, the composer told him, ‘but it seems as if that is changing now’.

Diagnosed with Motor Neurone disease, an uptick in performances may have given Harvey some satisfaction, but he knew he didn’t have long to live. And yet as Service wrote, ‘there is no trace of bitterness or fear in the way he tells me, just a simple and moving acceptance of what is happening to him’.  

Harvey died in December that year. All religious and philosophical traditions must deal with the reality of death, and as he said in his 2010 interview, Buddhism teaches us that ‘everything is impermanent […] nothing is fixed and solid’. 

There is one particularly beautiful mandala tradition in Tibetan Buddhism, which uses coloured grains of sand. These designs can be enormously intricate, and are painstakingly assembled into complex patterns by monks. One writer describes the process:

When the mandala is finally finished, however long it takes for the monks to deal in this divine geometry of the heavens, they pray over it — and then they destroy it. They sweep it up, every last grain of sand and give handfuls of it away to those who participate in the closing ceremony as a final memory of sublime possibility. Then they throw the rest of the sand into the nearest living stream to be swept into the ocean to bless the whole world.

Our secular culture prizes the rewards of labour, and resists the decay of all that is solid, including our own ageing. But this creative destruction invites us to understand the cosmos as forever in flux, our achievements only fleeting.

Harvey wrote of the flow of elusive ideas in …Towards A Pure Land that ‘to grasp them and fix them would be to distort them falsely’. In a similar way, his triptych prompts us to reimagine ourselves with sublime possibility. To consider that our bodies might be a heavenly palace, our speech a kind of music, our minds a beautiful landscape.

A sand mandala at the Days of Tibet event in Moscow 2011. Wikimedia Commons.

We all know that religious ideas of purity – Puritanism in its various guises – can lead to dark and punitive places. But reading Harvey’s description of the monastery rituals, it seems there is a purity of purpose here, a collective endeavour of becoming less focussed on the self. It’s not the ‘Pure Land’ of the Garden of Eden – forever lost – or a pure Heaven, promised only in death. It is a ritual progression towards a better way of living.

Whatever your feelings about Buddhism, it is not hard to fathom the appeal of its outlook on life, particularly in western societies long burdened by the ceaseless striving of industrial capitalism. More importantly, at a time when scientists are calling for ‘a fundamental reorientation of human values’ to mitigate a planetary crisis, the ideal of a world ‘without grasping’ resonates deeply with the imperative for this kind of radical transformation.

Jonathan Harvey’s music is no mere spiritual tourism. It is art with a primal power to jolt us awake from the stupor of the mundane and routine. These three dazzling works remind us of something that is so easy to forget – the sheer miracle and mystery of existing, in the here and now.

How does it feel, to be a body in the great mandala of life?

My blog posts are powered by caffeine. If you enjoyed this one, a cheap but meaningful way to support my writing is to buy me a coffee on PayPal.

Find out more:

Jonathan Harvey in interview on the Overgrown Path blog.
Jonathan Harvey: Song Offerings and White As Jasmine by Michael Downes is published by Routledge – preview on Google Books.
Explore Jonathan Harvey’s works published by Faber Music.
Tom Service interviews Jonathan Harvey in The Guardian.
Watch more videos from Ensemble Intercontemporain and Codarts Symphony Orchestra.

On Sunday I went to the opening concert of the new LSO season. I was especially keen to hear Holst’s rarely-performed Egdon Heath, and £10 ‘wildcard’ tickets were available – in which you gamble on being put anywhere in the hall. So I made my way over to the Barbican.

Over the last few years, I’ve visited this concrete complex more as a place to write and socialise rather than to listen to music. It may be a formidably confusing labyrinth for newcomers, but it has an excellent music library, free wifi, and places to sit with coffee. I now know where all the toilets are hidden, and how to exit via those mysterious upper walkways. 

Concrete, it seems, can even be pleasant. In the courtyard in warm September sunshine, you’re surrounded by water features, hanging window gardens, and an upmarket cafeteria. Its designer-chic gift shop sells pencils and erasers with the word BRUTAL on them. Long despised, Brutalist architecture is cool now, even commodified. By the end of the evening, I was feeling that perhaps an idea of post-war Britain it represents is in vogue too. 

Here, in this most iconically 20th-century building, we heard a concert of works all written in the last 100 years. But extra excitement had been added by the announcement of a new music school to help children in 10 East London boroughs. This was met with acclaim in the arts media, hungry for signs of hope in the face of widespread cuts to music education. Mark-Anthony Turnage, a composer on that evening’s programme, tweeted: ‘This is fantastic news. Bravo @londonsymphony and Simon Rattle. Showing up our pathetic, morally bankrupt government’.

Growing up, I learned that the much-despised Brutalist architecture was a thing of the 1960s. So I was always surprised to learn that the Barbican Centre was actually opened in 1982, when Thatcher was already in power.

The modernity of the place is deceptive in other ways too. As the evening’s audience started to arrive in the foyer, trumpet fanfares from Guildhall students rained down from the upper level. Barbican director Nicholas Kenyon walked past with a livery-chained companion, presumably the Lord Mayor, or another dignitary from the Corporation of the City of London. The sonic heraldry was an appropriate reminder of that odd anachronism – still organised on Medieval lines – which runs this kernel of global-capitalist London, complete with its own police force.

On another day, my wildcard ticket might have got me one of the best seats, but I was given a spot on the balcony. I was in the centre with a good view, the leg-room was ample, and best of all, programme notes were given out for free – something that should be standard. This started to feel like the modern concert experience I was looking for.

Another fanfare opened proceedings, a new commission by Harrison Birtwistle. I’ve never particularly warmed to his music, and while this was enjoyably clamorous in places, with plenty of percussion, it made little overall sense. That its ending dissipated into a few low farts on the tuba was particularly underwhelming. By now, the idea of fanfares were starting to feel a little old-hat.

As percussion was bundled away, Rattle grabbed a microphone. He explained that he wanted to combine the new with the established and the neglected. Holst’s Egdon Heath is the last of those. It’s based on a fictional Dorset landscape in Hardy’s The Return Of The Native, one described as ‘like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal and mysterious in its swarthy monotony’. 

Talking nostalgically about his 20s, Rattle explained that Adrian Boult had told him ‘it’s incredibly difficult to perform, and people won’t like it when you do. But it’s a masterpiece’. 

It’s a wonderfully subtle work, and its difficulty is in its introversion – the subdued orchestration and defiant irregularity. Putting it early in the programme, while our attention was still fresh, was a good idea for what often sounds like chamber music. If you can find your feet in Hardy’s psycho-geography, as Holst reimagined it, there’s a really strange beauty about the place. And this returned native certainly did.

A modern double trumpet concerto was up next. If that screams ‘certified audience repellent’, the title of Turnage’s Dispelling The Fears might raise a wry smile. In fact he took the title from a painting, and while it didn’t leave a strong impression as a form, it came across as engagingly impressionistic. 

Fears of a difficult listen were certainly dispelled, and my main takeaway was of the whole ensemble coalescing, with vibrant, colourful energy, taking us out of Hardy’s heath and into a slightly jazz-tinged city. I might have liked more firmly defined dialogue – both between the soloists, and with the orchestra. But it is to Turnage’s credit that this piece didn’t seem to drag either – in fact it seemed over quite quickly. 

It also made a logical sense within a programme of increasing size and warmth towards the main event – Britten’s Spring Symphony, a piece that requires chorus, children’s chorus, and three solo singers.

I had never heard this work live, and after the first half, Britten’s clarity and directness of articulation was welcome. The texts summon up the cuckoo, but his approach to them was more magpie – stealing liberally across centuries of verse. Combined with the large forces, the piece has a pageant or festival atmosphere. This was all the fanfare we needed.

The combined children’s choir came on only for their two sections – and the stage being almost full, many of them had to spill out down in a line through the stalls, a bizarre sight which perhaps underlines Rattle’s desire for a new concert hall. In the last movement, the choir swayed as if drunk, and a cow-horn blasted away high up in the hall. It was all getting a bit silly – but surely just as Britten intended. The tone, in the same spirit of the new LSO school, was one of inclusivity.

It was a very enjoyable evening. And picking up the season brochure, it seems it is typical in at least one sense. The marketable angularity of the Barbican’s concrete is reflected in a strong showing of 20th-century repertoire— Sibelius, Shostakovich, Bartok, Ravel. The 18th and 19th centuries have to make do with a lot less than in many other venues.

There is plenty to look forward to, and of course there is some new music too. But a comment by Rattle in the Guardian piece about the new school had been playing on my mind before the concert. He said: ‘why do our groups of classical musicians not look like London looks and what can we do about it?’. 

I don’t have the full context of this quote, but I did wonder why he only said ‘looks like’ London, and not sounds like London.

This is the bigger problem. In this new season, the LSO will be playing little by women composers and those outside of Europe and North America. The bodies of orchestral music from, say, Latin America and East Asia remain as overlooked as ever. So while the new school is undoubtedly a great step forward, the deeper question remains: why would we expect diverse communities of children to be interested in an art form that so often defaults to the creations of white men?

Hopefully this will change over time. It is no small challenge – for me as much as anyone. I’ve been educating myself about music by women in recent years, and I still have a long way to go in classical music from outside the western mainstream. Paying audiences need educating and convincing too.

But if Brutalism is back in fashion, over the course of the evening I sensed that the commodified aesthetic of the Barbican also reflects a longing for a certain idea of post-war progressivism – of a Britain that took more pride in the civic ideals of public institutions. A Britain before that different brutality came to dominate national life, around the time this centre was opened: the brutal logic of free-market fundamentalism. 

This may be a progressivism that Rattle can nostalgically recall from the days of Adrian Boult. But it also seems to be quite a patrician one, in which he doesn’t have to think too much about the overwhelming white maleness of what he’s doing. There is little sign of the LSO really responding to the implications of today’s identity politics – however tricky that might be.

I left this modernist concrete jungle feeling more than ever that the LSO under Rattle is an ensemble successfully suited to a stylish and marketable 20th century. There’s a lot to enjoy in that. But it may be that we need to look outside the City of London to find those who will more meaningfully bring classical music into the 21st.

A Village Choir, by John Webster. Wikimedia Commons.

      By Simon Brackenborough

As regular readers of this blog will know, I’ve long been fascinated by hymns. A big part of that fascination is their community role as songs for common worship. But I’m also really interested in how hymn tunes are taken out of the church pews, and put into different contexts – sometimes even made into symbols.

The necessary simplicity of hymns for untrained voices also makes them an easy subject for instrumental elaboration. A good example are Bach’s chorale preludes for the organ. Bach is the towering figure for hymnody in the German Lutheran tradition, composing and arranging many tunes in four-part harmony, which are still used as models for teaching today. But his organ preludes spin these chorales out into a more polyphonic texture.

Luther himself composed hymns, including the famous Ein’ Feste Burg. For the 300th anniversary of the 1530 Augsberg Confession – a declaration of Lutheran faith – Mendelssohn composed his Symphony no. 5, known as ‘The Reformation’. It culminates in a finale with Ein’ Feste Burg for full orchestra, glorifying God’s ‘mighty fortress’. Its first movement also includes a references to the ‘Dresden Amen’ figure – a grand hymn cadence that was later used as a Leitmotif by Wagner in his religious-themed opera Parsifal.

On a more intimate scale, an obscure hymn tune unearthed in The English Hymnal was made into a Passacaglia for viola and piano by Rebecca Clarke. This ‘old English tune’, with its austere opening and expressive descending phrase, was attributed to Thomas Tallis. Clarke’s piece is a short masterclass in contrapuntal elaboration, with a powerful punch. It reaches an impressive climax as it turns to the hymn’s final rising line.

Sometimes hymns appear in instrumental works with a personal significance. Polish composer Andrzej Panufnik’s Sinfonia Sacra was commissioned to mark the Millennium of Poland’s Christianisation in 1966. Panufnik – who had already defected to England from what was then part of the Eastern Bloc – used the Medieval Polish hymn the Bogurodzica to powerful effect. Its emotional resonance for the exiled composer is not difficult to imagine.

Similarly heartfelt is Alban Berg’s violin concerto, a work dedicated to ‘the memory of an angel’ – the recently deceased young girl Manon Gropius. In its second movement, Bach’s harmonisation of Es Ist Genug emerges out of Berg’s expressive serialism, set for quiet clarinets. The words of this chorale deal with the preparation for death. The homogenous, ghostly sound of the clarinets could be a remembered choir, or an organ.

Hymns are a source of comfort, and are often sung at funerals and memorials. But when Cheryl Frances-Hoad was commissioned to compose a piece to mark the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death, she chose a title that subverted this idea. The composer – then only 20 –  borrowed A Refusal To Mourn from a poem by Dylan Thomas which had made a deep impression in her school English lessons.

Thomas’ arresting anti-elegy invokes religious imagery in the face of a wartime tragedy, even as he seemingly refutes its usefulness. In her piece for oboe and strings, Frances-Hoad makes a similarly bold plundering of two Bach chorales, reorganising pitches to construct chord sequences, motivic cells and retrograde versions.

The delicacy of the string writing and the bright piercing tone of the oboe lends much of the piece an ethereal aura, whose lyrical nimbleness mostly avoids the steady tread of hymnody. But in its final, serene ‘Chorale’ section, the gentle outline of Christus, Der Ist Mein Leben becomes clearer in the oboe’s part. This fascinating and beautiful piece ends on a quietly ambiguous chord. 

The small scale of A Refusal To Mourn seems suited to its material. Lutheran chorales are given a much more expansive canvas in Psalmos, a ‘concerto for orchestra’ by Theirry Escaich. In a video introduction to the piece, Escaich cites the influence of Stravinsky’s hard-edged Symphony Of Psalms, and – perhaps surprising given his source material – the overriding importance of rhythm.

Psalmos is prone to outbursts of vitality and violence, and the chorales, when they make themselves clear, seem to be part of a disturbed dreamscape. Escaich clearly delights in the range of timbres available, including marimba and vibraphone. This composer, steeped in the French organ improvisation tradition, takes us through all the metaphorical stops.

If hymns can help mark important anniversaries, they can also be more nebulous symbols of the past. Vaughan Williams gave a Tallis hymn a famously mysterious treatment for double string orchestra, replete in dying echoes. His friend Holst borrowed an old Genevan Psalm tune for a choral setting with a similarly Gothic aesthetic. In both cases the hymns appear first as ruinous fragments – they give us a magic window into the past. But it soon becomes clear that these musical artefacts are actually expressing timeless human frailties.

A very different example from the other end of Vaughan Williams’ career is his Fantasia On The Old 104th Psalm Tune for orchestra, choir and piano. This gloriously eccentric piece takes a somewhat dour melody through ruminative piano cadenzas to bombastic, neo-Baroque choral counterpoint. It is a marvellous and surprising work from his remarkably experimental old age, and it reaches a thrilling conclusion.

A similarly comprehensive treatment of a short hymn – though on a much smaller scale – comes in the Variations On Love Divine by Ailsa Dixon. This series of nineteen short movements for string quartet uses John Stainer’s melody to the oft-set text Love Divine, All Loves Excelling. But the variations are titled with parts of the Gospel, ‘exploring the meanings of divine love in a series of scenes from the incarnation to the ascension and a final vision of heavenly joy’. In the recording below, the title of each movement is narrated.

Stainer’s eight-bar tune is the model of humility, but it seems to have a symbolic role – it is only after the ‘incarnation’ movement that it is clearly heard, as the now-pregnant Mary makes her way to Bethlehem, with a clip-clop imitation of a donkey. From then on, this hymn is continually varied as we’re taken through the story of Jesus’ life.

There is something quietly thought-provoking about Dixon’s insistence on using this modest, contented-sounding tune to cover such large theological ground. Funny as it sounds, I can’t help but think of the parish church Nativity diorama – the message of this work seems to be that a whole world of religious meaning can be revealed through even the smallest means. In that sense it is closer to the civic role of hymnody than any grander setting.

Of course, hymns have been used for religious story-telling before. Chorales form part of Bach’s Passion settings. Likewise, in Britten’s operatic update of the Mystery Play Noye’s Fludde, he sets three familiar English hymns to mark important points of the story. This fits with the community aesthetic of the work, which includes roles for children, and is designed for performance in churches or other small-scale venues. At the conclusion of this most familiar Biblical tale, with the full audience coming together in song, the sense of ritual through mass participation is truly moving.

As it happens, Britten had used church music to portray a much darker aspect of community in his earlier opera Peter Grimes. In Act 2, we hear off-stage singing of the church’s Sunday morning liturgy – a sinister reminder of the Borough’s collective moral presence, which will be quick to pass judgement on the suspected Grimes. Britten, as a homosexual and Conscientious Objector in wartime Britain, would have been all too aware of dangers of parochial groupthink and religious dogma that church communities could represent.

But however much real life may fail to live up to their sentiments, hymns remain a tempting symbol of an idealised, united society – of Heaven on earth. This unattainable ideal is a poignant subject of Adelaide Anne Procter’s poem A Lost Chord, which was set to music by Arthur Sullivan. Its narrator sits idling at an organ, while feeling ‘weary and ill at ease’, when they chance upon ‘one chord of music / Like the sound of a great Amen’:

It flooded the crimson twilight,
Like the close of an angel’s psalm,
And it lay on my fevered spirit
With a touch of infinite calm.

It quieted pain and sorrow,
Like love overcoming strife;
It seemed the harmonious echo
From our discordant life.

This moment of musical glory is fleeting. At the poem’s conclusion, we find ‘It may be that only in Heav’n / I shall hear that grand Amen’. Sullivan’s song setting – The Lost Chord – was a huge hit, and though it may sound starchily Victorian today, it is not hard to see why. It is magnificently constructed, with direct emotional appeal and clever word-painting – its introduction even recalls the style of an organ prelude.

Quite aside from specific references, the homophonic, melodically limited style of hymnody is a recognisable musical trope in itself. Some fascinating allusions to the ‘chorale style’ occur in Chopin’s solo piano pieces. In the central section of his Nocturne op. 37 no.1, we hear a series of block chords which sound remarkably like hymnody. For a master of idiomatic piano writing like Chopin to resort to such simplistic means is surely no accident. Perhaps he was expressing a personal religious sentiment, perhaps he was toying with the idea of what piano music could could be. Nocturnes are night-time pieces after all. In darkness thoughts wander, and forms take on uncanny new appearances.

Meanwhile, some passages of music are so irresistibly hymn-like that they simply demand words be set to them. The ‘trio’ from Elgar’s first Pomp And Circumstance March is now virtually inseparable from its later guise as Land Of Hope And Glory. The grand theme that concludes Sibelius’ Finlandia has been set as several songs and hymns – most bizarrely, it even became the national anthem for the briefly secessionist African state of Biafra. Equally counter-intuitive is that the majestic chorale-like theme from the finale of Saint-Saëns’ ‘Organ’ Symphony was turned into a hit 1978 song with a reggae beat, appropriately titled If I Had Words. The song’s video was even set in a church.

As any parish organist will know, hymn tunes are naturally promiscuous – they frequently find themselves with several lyrical partners. But in adding words to instrumental music, we put it to a new purpose altogether. Whether it is secular, religious, or political, we lose some of the inherent flexibility in the music’s meaning.

For this reason, I have always much preferred the great hymn-like theme that emerges in the middle of ‘Jupiter’ in Holst’s The Planets to either of its settings as I Vow To Thee, My Country or World In Union.

There’s also an obvious problem here: Holst’s tune in Jupiter covers a range of an octave and a sixth – and it rises which each repetition, totalling three octaves. To be sung easily, its second part has to be transposed down an octave. So in pinning this tune to lyrics, it not only loses ambiguity, but also much of its ascendant, transportive power.

While Holst’s melody is not a hymn, it does seem to be a kind of hymn-essence. It arrives without warning in resonant unison strings, and rises gloriously, unconstrained by the human vocal range, and all the messy baggage of its words.

In my mind, that is what makes this music so much more moving than any attempt to put it into verse, however well-meaning. Jupiter – the ‘bringer of jollity’ – is a planet of astrological pondering, a source of marvel beyond our grasp. This is a hymn of impossibility; a song of pure love, free of our earthly liturgies and flawed human communities. Perhaps that is why, just before its final climax, it vanishes back into thin air. It leaves us with its own lost chord. It may be that only in a heaven, of one kind or another, that we can hear such a grand ‘Amen’.

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By chance, Islam has been a recurring theme in my reading and listening. On BBC Radio 4, Remona Aly takes a look at the sometimes rocky relationship between Islam and the female singing voice, and the role of singing as a way of accessing the divine. 

Meanwhile, a great in-depth piece on Aeon examines the problem of falsified miniature paintings depicting historic muslim scientists, some of which have even fooled experts. It asks interesting questions about why these forgeries exist, why we want to believe them, and how much we can really know about the history of science in Islamic countries.

I can only hope there is nothing fake about the beautiful images illustrating this fascinating essay on magic and esoteric traditions in Islam, and their connections to the West. Corymbus readers will know I have an interest in magic, so this essay was hugely interesting.

Perhaps there is some magic in the air at the moment – the Ashmolean in Oxford has a new exhibition called ‘Spellbound’, which I really must get up to see (perhaps inspired by the British Library’s hugely successful exhibition on Harry Potter). To coincide with it, the author Philip Pullman has written an excellent piece in the Guardian about the limits of rationalism and why the magical universe is never far away from our thoughts.

Fans of Written On Skin should definitely check out the excellent long-read profile on composer George Benjamin in the New Yorker. It covers his long journey from child prodigy to painstaking and meticulous composer who has finally found freedom in the field of opera – albeit a freedom that necessitates cutting himself off from the world for years at a time. It gives you little snippets of personal insight – for instance, Benjamin was unable to compose anything for a week after the Brexit vote.

To music: and most urgent is that you have JUST ONE DAY LEFT to watch the video of Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s piano concerto Between the Skies, the River and the Hills live in concert in Berlin, with Ivana Gavric and Southbank Sinfonia, before it expires on 14th September. I’ve enjoyed exploring Frances-Hoad’s music recently, and this is an unshowily attractive, at times brooding piece. The concert also includes Mozart and Beethoven (but come on, you can hear those two anywhere, skip straight to 23:55). Look out for more from this composer in my next piece on Corymbus.

Given my article on her last year, I excited to learn that Ruth Gipps’ magnificent 4th symphony was to be given its first modern professional recording by Chandos with BBC NOW/Rumon Gamba. The resulting disc, which also includes the single-movement 2nd symphony and two shorter works, is out now – listen on spotify. Check out those glorious woodwind solos in the slow movement of the 4th, and the way she pulls the climactic end of the finale out of the bag! I can only hope Chandos is also up for recording the 3rd symphony, which has a magical scherzo inspired by a tapestry of a unicorn hunt (that’s the cover illustration sorted already).

In truth, I rarely venture outside my comfort zone with piano music, but a debut album by the pianist Laura Farre Rozada has intrigued me. The French Reverie is a crowdfunded effort, ‘under the conceptual approach of a dream that reviews French music from the 20th century with a multicultural perspective’. It’s a refreshingly varied assortment that shows the directions French composers for the piano have taken after Debussy and Ravel. I was particularly struck by the single-note repetitions of Phillippe Manoury’s Tocatta. Listen here.

Continuing on the modern French theme, the YouTube channel for Ensemble Intercontemporain contains seriously well-produced performance videos. One of the more extraordinary is Serious Smile by Alexander Schubert, which involves a very intense choreographed performance including electronics – and I should probably warn you – strobe lighting effects.

Another consistently excellent YouTube channel is that of San Francisco-based early music ensemble Voices Of Music. While researching Giles Farnaby for my recent article, I discovered this wonderful performance of Downland’s Flow, My Tears sung by Phoebe Jevtovic Rosquist.

In my article, I compared this piece to Farnaby’s Loth To Depart – another noteworthy fact is that the latter was orchestrated and expanded on in Rubbra’s fun little suite, Improvisations On Virginal Pieces By Giles Farnaby. Despite the clunky title, it would make a great concert opener, so orchestra programmers please take note – you can listen here.

My Farnaby article also included an album by kora player Toumani Diabaté, and while researching his music, I chanced upon this lovely, hauntingly simple song by his Malian compatriot Vieux Farka Touré, perfect for a bit of chilled late-night listening. Or if you prefer something much more upbeat from the world of jazz, this live recording of Charles Mingus’ Moanin’ is a piece of absolute filth, with a sax riff that goes deep enough to strike oil. Enjoy.

Tonight the Proms season reaches that thick and pungent cultural marmite that is its conclusion. Yes, it is as inescapable as death. Over on the New Yorker, Fergus McIntosh has taken a look at the shenanigans in light of Brexit, and gets the impression that the BBC are ‘living in an imaginary past in which we had all agreed that flag-waving and national-anthem-singing were nonpolitical acts’. I mean, everything is to some extent political, it’s true. But by the same token, right now the last night of the proms is the least of our worries.

When the season was announced, I thought it was a mixed bag. I was pleased with the increase in women composers represented, though had more than a little eye-roll at the fact that Mahler once again got five symphonies in a non-anniversary year (plus one movement from his tenth). My thoughts on the modern Mahler addiction can be read here.

But of course, the Proms can never please everyone. It’s still an institution Londoners are enormously privileged to have in their city (and which far too many seem to overlook). There’s always loads worth hearing, and I ended up going to five this year, with several more I regret missing. Death-centenaries were particularly prominent. Lili Boulanger was given a good showing, and I heard three works by her, including her solemnly epic Psalm 130. Her D’un soir triste was probably my favourite, in a concert paired with the similarly short-lived Morfydd Owen, who I hadn’t heard of before but whose impressive Nocturne certainly left me wanting to hear more. The pre-Prom talk did a good job of putting Owen’s life into the context of Welsh music.

An unexpected highlight came in Prom 17. This included a rare symphony performance by Parry, who perhaps deserved more for his centenary, but it was a pleasure to hear his music live, which always shines with such innate goodwill. However, it was in the Lark Ascending, of all things, that I was truly side-swiped. Tai Murray’s performance was mesmerising, revelatory. It brought a kind of improvisatory freedom, and fragility of expression to this over-exposed work that I had simply never heard before. She is something special.

Holst’s Ode To Death was a fascinating rarity, rich and delicately strange in that way he does so well. Its ominous theme was set up nicely by a violent thunderstorm over the Albert Hall as we were queueing to enter – one thunderclap was so loud it made the whole queue jump and set off a car alarm. 

RVW’s Pastoral Symphony was its usual exquisite and compelling self, though its war-haunted landscape suffered a few too many vocal artillery shells from the audience towards the end. The pre-Prom talk, with nature writer Melissa Harrison and archaeologist/country-dweller Francis Pryor was an interesting discussion of the importance of the countryside, even if I could have done without the latter’s disdaining riffs on the inferior quality of the supermarket Broccoli we landless plebs have to eat.

Prom 44, besides the Boulanger Psalm, provided some gorgeous Debussy and ended with the irresistible Ravel Bolero to finish off with. Standing up-close in the arena was a particularly fascinating way to appreciate the details of his subtly increasingly orchestration.

The chance to hear the UK premiere of Danish composer Per Nørgård’s epic third symphony was an exciting occasion, though the hall was sadly lacking in numbers, despite Strauss’ ever-glorious Four Last Songs in the first half to pull the punters in (and its combination with Wagner’s translucent Parsifal Prelude was lovely). Their loss: the symphony was brilliantly bonkers and quite unlike anything I’ve heard before – here, surely, is some of the big-boned Mahler replacement our concert programming needs! And touchingly, Nørgård was there too, though too frail to come down to the stage, marking the event with what looked like a white jacket and flowery shirt.

I was fortunate enough to get a free ticket from a friend to hear the National Youth Orchestra prom, taking me out of my familiar terrain up into the seats. Though I hardly have a right to complain, in truth I found the programme choices for this one a little puzzling and underwhelming. The huge massed ranks of this ensemble and the unconditional goodwill of the crowd cried out for something to really raise the roof, but after a promising Night On A Bare Mountain, the subdued moodiness of Ravel’s left hand piano concerto and Ligeti’s Lontano felt like music fit for another occasion. Even the climactic waves of La Mer couldn’t quite dispel this feeling, despite the excellent playing all round. Perhaps, with the lack of investment that comes with a freebie, I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind, but it felt like a missed opportunity.

As someone who proms in the arena, it remains fantastic value for money and puts you face-to-face with the action. Only being a groundling at the Globe compares, though in one respect the Albert Hall suffers in the comparison. The instigation of bag checks means the queue has to form earlier, whereas on my recent trip to see Othello I was let straight in. I can’t be the only one who is tired of the indignity of all this, and wishes the see-saw of liberty vs security would swing back a little the other way. What’s more, the pre-prom talks haven’t been sufficiently adjusted to make the transition as comfortable as it used to be, with many people heading off during the Q&A to maintain their place in the queue, myself included.

The concrete barriers erected in some places around the hall are, in light of recent attacks, understandable, but their bottle-necking effect at chucking-out time is another regrettable cost. I certainly don’t underestimate the seriousness of these issues, nor do I envy the responsibility of whoever has to to make these decisions, who no doubt want to be risk-averse. But the fact remains that it does take a shine off the experience.

On a more positive note, the arena feels cooler than it’s ever been. I haven’t had any of the sweltering evenings I used to have – marked by constantly sipping from a water bottle, and the one startling time an overcome Prommer hit the deck right in front of me like a felled Sequoia. This is undoubtedly a good thing!

Tonight I’ll be watching the Last Night on TV, and not worrying too much about the politics of it all. I’m looking forward to Roxanna Panufnik’s commission, and it’s great that Parry’s Sirens will be singing to salute his centenary. And if nothing else, I’m always an out-and-out fan of Jerusalem, one of the best marriages of words and music ever conceived, in my humble opinion. I have full confidence that, however they may feel about the quaint Jingoism of the event, the hardcore Remainers I know who will be watching certainly ‘shall not cease the mental fight’ against Brexit Britain. 

P.S. Please note that there’s no Premier League action this weekend, what with this new UEFA Nations League going on, so Gary Lineker’s annual tweet complaining about Match Of The Day being delayed by the Last Night – a highlight of my cultural calendar in recent years – is sadly postponed until further notice.