Epiphany Carols

Tonight's Epiphany Carols at St Martin-in-the-Fields included the Choir of St Martin-in-the-Fields singing Here is the little door Herbert Howells, The Three Kings Jonathan Dove, Nativity Carol John Rutter, and The Deer's Cry Arvo Part. The theme of the Service was 'The Road Less Travelled' as explored in poetry (The Journey Of The Magi T.S. Eliot, The Road Not Taken Robert Frost, and Extract from 'Little Gidding' T.S. Eliot) and some wonderful reflections by Alastair McKay on the journeys made by the Magi to Jerusalem, Bethlehem and home.

This poem, from my Alternative Nine Lessons sequence, was also read:

Star following Magi look for the Prince of Peace
in the heart of power and opulence
only to find him in obscurity and humility.
Gifts given prefigure his divinity and sacrifice, the servant King
who, in birth and death, gives his life for others

Here are the Bidding Prayer and Intercessions that I used (the intercessions are based on Alastair's reflections):

Bidding Prayer

The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned. God, who is both light and love, we would be a people walking in darkness still if you had not gifted us with your presence through the birth of your Son at Bethlehem. Forgive us for the countless times when we have failed to recognize you, forgotten the wonders of your love, or neglected to serve you with our whole hearts.

Just as the Magi long ago sought your presence in the world, let us do the same. As you reveal yourself in and among us, show us all the places where we get in the way of your transforming love. You have brought us through to another year and given us the choice of roads to follow from here. All that we need for the deepest of joy, you freely offer us. Hear our gratitude now and, accept our gifts, not gold, frankincense or myrrh, but hearts and voices raised in praise of Jesus Christ, our light and our salvation. May our gratitude lead us to your light and love.

So, brothers and sisters in Christ, as we celebrate this great festival of Epiphany, let us prepare our hearts so that we may be shown its true meaning. Let us pray for the world that God so loves; for peace and unity all over the earth; for the poor, the hungry, the cold, the helpless, and the oppressed; the sick and those who mourn; the aged and the little children; and all who rejoice with us but on another shore and in a greater light, that multitude which none can number, whose hope was in the Word Made Flesh, and with whom, in our Lord Jesus Christ, we forever more are one.

Intercessions

We find God in our journeys to Jerusalem, in the midst of our mistaken hopes and misplaced expectations, as we listen for the revelation that God has for us. So, we pray for all who are in a place where they thought their deepest needs would be met only for the reality to prove a disappointment, and find they were mistaken. God of the brightest noonday and the darkest night, no pain is too great for you to bear and no loss can remove your love from us. Pain and brokenness touch us all, holding some more firmly than others. Remove the obstacles of fear and ignorance that we may bring the light of your love to those who for whom physical illnesses are a struggle, those who live with mental distress, those who grapple with addiction, and those who seem lost. Lord, in your mercy hear our prayer.

We find God in our journeys to Bethlehem, in those special places of meeting with God, that we’d not expected, but God had always planned for us. So we pray that, just as the Magi long ago sought your presence in the world, we may do the same. As you reveal yourself in and among us, let us linger at the manger long enough to see you in the world, in friends and strangers, and in ourselves. Remove our fear and our arrogance so that the light we share is your light and the ministry we engage in is truly in service to you. Be with those who lead us, those who challenge us, and those who have not yet come through our doors. Lord, in your mercy hear our prayer.

We find God as we travel back to the place where we started, to the people and places we call family and home, learning to know them for the first time. Almighty and ever-living God, your Son shared the life of his home and family at Nazareth. Protect in your love our neighbours, our families and this community of which we are a part; allow all of us to find in our homes a shelter of peace and health. Make our homes a haven for us all, and a place of warmth and caring for all who come to visit us. Enlighten us with the brilliance of your Epiphany star, so that, as we go into the world, we might clearly see our way to You and discover You in our work and play. Lord, in your mercy hear our prayer.

We find God as we discover what George found and what the sage expressed, that all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Wise and transforming God, how long you have waited for all your people to live in peace. We see difference where you see your children. We resort to violence and war where you would have equity and justice. Many claim you on their side, when in reality you are always on the side of mercy, compassion, and justice. Your wisdom still calls out in the world, waiting for an answer that is more than human foolishness. May all the leaders of the world hear her cry. Show us the way of peace and grant us the strength to pursue it with unflagging passion. We pray for an end to the divisions and inequalities that scar your creation; that all who have been formed in your image might have equality in pursuit of the blessings of creation. Lord, in your mercy hear our prayer.

We find God because the Christ child has come, and we are overwhelmed with joy. Loving God, as we enter into this New Year, grant that we may walk with the one born in Bethlehem and that our worship and our praise may bring to him, to you and to the Holy Spirit, the glory and honour due your most Holy Name. By his coming, give us grace to cast away the works of darkness and put on the armour of light, that our feet may be strengthened for your service, and our path may be brightened for the work of justice and reconciliation in our broken world. Lord, in your mercy hear our prayer.

Almighty and most merciful God, you took on human flesh not in the palace of a king but in the throes of poverty and need: Grant that your holy and life-giving Spirit may so move every human heart; that, following in the steps of your blessed Son, we may give of ourselves in the service of others until poverty and hunger cease in all the world, and all things are reconciled in the reign of Christ. Amen.

These prayers make use of materials from here, here and here.

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Jonathan Dove - The Three Kings.

Grappling with the differences between what we hear and what we see

It is interesting to compare the response to Soundscapes at the National Gallery with reviews of the Richter/Pärt collaboration at the Manchester international festival.

Laura Cumming thinks that, in Soundscapes, 'sound ... is working against art' and Jonathan Jones says that 'great paintings do not need the emotional prompt of music and sounds to make them come alive' but, by contrast, Stephen Pritchard thinks that Richter's paintings 'don’t truly come into their own until you hear Pärt’s response to them.'

Cumming writes: 'Soundscapes is the worst idea the National Gallery has come up with in almost 200 years. It is feeble, pusillanimous, apologetic and, even in its resolute wrong-headedness, lacks all ambition. Invite a sound artist to compose a work in response to a masterpiece from the collection and you might expect something original, given all the precedents in music alone, from Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition to Philip Glass’s piano portrait of Chuck Close. But instead this show feels more like the ambient soundtrack on a pair of National Trust headphones ...

Anyone can (many people do) walk around the National Gallery listening to their own private music. I can imagine how it might focus the mind or block out the buzz of other lives. But paintings create their own soundscapes, which may arrive in the form of wordless thoughts.

Sound here is working against art. Instead of seducing people into staying longer with a painting, concentrating harder, noticing more, it is limiting our free response by filling the gallery with sounds that one has to make an effort to ignore. And this does no favours to the living or the dead.'

By contrast Pritchard writes that Richter's paintings 'are wonderful creations; the deeply subtle Double Grey reflecting the streaked reds, greys, greens and blues of the Birkenau set. And yet they don’t truly come into their own until you hear Pärt’s response to them.

His piece, entitled Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fatima, is sung at intervals throughout the day. On preview afternoon last week there was no warning of its start; the singers of the Estonian choir Vox Clamantis mingled with the crowd and simply sang where they stood – an electrifying moment. It’s vintage Pärt; at first it could be a gentle, lilting folk-song as old as time but it unfolds into a multi-layered, densely harmonised acclamation of alleluia, which both triumphs over the horrors of Birkenau and bestows a profound nobility on the victims of that terrible place.'

Why is one art/music collaboration perceived to succeed when another does not? Adrian Searle suggests that the difference lies in the grappling, which goes on in the Richter/Pärt collaboration, between the differences between what we hear and what we see, what we are told and what we experience with our senses, what is mediated and what hits us directly':

'Pärt’s singers repeat the same song, seven times in succession. Every time it sounds different. Richter’s four grey diptychs, hanging opposite the Birkenau panels, play a further formal game of similarity and difference (the paint hidden from us on the reverse of glass sheets). The grey, paired panels are alike one another, but no two greys are the same, though each pair of panels has one lighter, one darker sheet. Comparisons between the different pairs are difficult to make, and shift according to where we stand, the ambient lighting and time of day. They are filled with murky reflections. Similarly, listening to Pärt’s music, we sense differences in the rendition, even though exact comparisons are difficult.'

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Arvo Pärt - Drei Hirtenkinder aus Fatima.

John Tavener RIP

Where some obituary's tend to simply be a recitation of facts and received critical opinion, the Guardian's obituary of Sir John Tavener seemed to me to be written from the perspective of someone who knew and understood both Tavener's real achievements and what he was seeking to achieve in and through his music:

'... once he had acquired a broadly based audience, his universalist focus continued to result in wonderful works, such as the mass Sollemnitas in Conceptione Immaculata Beatae Mariae Virginis (2006) and the Requiem (2008) for cello, soloists, chorus and orchestra, premiered in Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. Drawing its texts from Sufi poetry, the Catholic Mass, the Koran and Hindu words from the Upanishad, Tavener explained that "the essence of the Requiem is contained in the words 'Our glory lies where we cease to exist'". Like practically all of Tavener's music, it is a story about a "journey" and becoming "one with God".'

In my co-authored book The Secret Chord, Peter Banks and I discuss the popularity of Tavener, Pärt and Górecki in terms of the contrast between movement and stasis noting Martha Ainsworth's argument that 'they reject values typically associated with contemporary classical music.' In traditional classical music the development of musical ideas is expected with this development moving to a climactic denouement. By contrast, the music of these holy minimalists seems not to go anywhere because its overall purpose is contemplation.

Similarly, Nico Muhly writes in The Guardian: 'To study Tavener's music is to immerse oneself in the subtle vocabulary of stillness and slow change.'

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John Tavener - Eternity's Sunrise.

The Rest Is Noise: Politics and Spirituality

After Stalin’s death in 1953, life behind the Iron Curtain slowly began to change – and by the 1970s the Soviet Union under Brezhnev was beginning to modernise. Symbols of the West such as jeans and rock music became popular in Soviet Russia, signalling anew era of cautious thawing of Cold War relations. In the West, the 1970s and ’80s were fast-paced decades – first a recession then economic boom years, where advertising and communications technology rapidly accelerated the pace of modern life.

To counter this materialism, some composers offered a return to spiritual values, and others resorted to overtly political music.

Much of this religious music came from the Soviet Union and its satellite states, where religious belief had been marginalised under the official state atheism. More surprising were the commercial possibilities in this sacred music. The simple, consonant songs of lamentation in Henryk Górecki’s Third Symphony unexpectedly sold over a million copies when it was released to commemorate victims of the Holocaust.

No composer exemplified this turn to the sacred more than Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, whose work conveys an intense and profound spirituality. Hans Werner Henze gave voice to oppressed peoples and political radicals such as Cornelius Cardew who tried to sweep aside the bourgeois norms of the musical establishment.

Politics and Spirituality events at the Southbank Centre include:

• Author Karen Armstrong looks back at the global religious landscape of the 1970s and '80s. This period saw increasing secularism in the West and a return to the spiritual in the Communist bloc.
• Author Alain de Botton investigates how spirituality fitted into an increasingly consumerist world.
• Layla Alexander-Garrett, who worked as Andrei Tarkovsky’s translator on set, discusses the work and vision of the great Russian filmmaker with chair Gareth Evans, writer and film curator’
• Composer and presenter John Browne leads a fun and informal workshop on Sofia Gubaidulina's Offertorium on Sunday.
• Gubaidulina's String Quartets Nos.3 & 4 performed by the Ligeti String Quartet.
• Extracts from Cornelius Cardew's Paragraph 5 of The Great Learning by the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and James Weeks.
• Excerpts from Hans Werner Henze's Voices by musicians from the Royal College of Music.
• Film screenings including Solaris, Tarkovsky's psychological space-race drama and Dekalog.

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Sofia Gubaidulina - Offertorium.

Panufnik on Pärt

There are two beautiful insights in Roxanna Panufnik's brief reflection on Arvo Pärt found in today's Guardian. First, that "the beauty in spirituality lies in just "being" – stillness, meditative blankets of slowly shifting harmonies and letting the reverberant acoustic of churches and cathedrals do the work." Second, that Pärt says two prayers before each premiere: "First, I pray for peace. Then I pray that everyone will feel my love in the music."
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Roxanna Panufnik - Abraham.

Favourite music for worship meme

I haven't been tagged for this meme (yet!) but found it via Banksboy as part of an interesting reflection by Kathryn Rose on the CCM praise songs we have trouble with meme, so thought I would try it anyway. Kathryn's questions are:  

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

1. Currently this would John Bell and Graham Maule’s deeply satisfying hymn ‘Will You Come and Follow Me?’ which sets challenging, thought-provoking lyrics to a well known, upbeat, and very singable traditional tune. John Vincent says that the hymn gives us hints of what discipleship can mean by taking its cues from the following of the first disciples and goes on to make the following points about the song's content:

• "Unpredictable journey. ‘Will you go where you don’t know and never be the same?’ Jesus is on a journey. Disciples go with him. Where Jesus goes depends on his sense of mission. When everyone wants him to stay, he says, ‘Let’s go somewhere else.’ It’s unpredictable. So discipleship is uncertain, open-ended.
• Unpredictable company. ‘Will you let my love be shown, will you let my name be known?’ Jesus is a people person; out on the streets. Disciples have to make friends with those he makes friends with – publicans, outcasts, lepers, people outside legal society.
• Alternative community. ‘Will you risk the hostile stare should your life attract or scare?’ Jesus is excluded from Church: his synagogue does not want him. Jesus creates a new Community, unrecognised and ridiculed by most people.
• Pouring out. ‘Will you let the blinded see … will you set the prisoners free?’ Jesus transforms homes into sanctuaries, sows’ ears into satin purses, and victims into partners, as he ‘pours himself’ out to others.
• Political ministry. ‘Will you use the faith you’ve found to reshape the world around?’ Jesus opposes enemies of the common people. Jesus pioneers and practises an alternative society which begins to change everything around it."

2.  'Freedom Samba' by the Late, Late Service from God in the Flesh. The Late, Late Service was an experimental Christian Community based in Glasgow which began in the 1990s using a mix of ambient, electronic and world music styles in their worship. 'Freedom Samba' is an exceptionally joyful dance track; lyrics and music move symbiotically to its samba rhythms while remaining eminently singable by a congregation through its call and response structure.

3. 'Credo' by Arvo Pärt. This is music which takes the listener on an emotional faith journey beginning with a confident fanfare of belief but then descending into the dissonant chaos of doubt before emerging into a more hestitant state of trust which opens out into contemplative silence. This is music to pray along with as you inhabit the emotional states conjured by this composition.

4. I like those occasions, such as Nine Lessons and Carols, when our choir joins with neighbouring choirs to lead our worship. This is because: doing so cements relationships across parish boundaries; a wider and more demanding programme of pieces is made possible; and they rise to the challenge with passages of real beauty. I do compliment them on their selections and performances after such services.

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Arvo Pärt - Credo (2/2).

Art & Christianity meme

Instead of simply responding to memes I've decided to start one. The instructions for this meme are:

To list an artwork, drama, piece of music, novel, and poem that you think each express something of the essence of Christianity and for each one explain why. Then tag five other people.

• Artwork: White Crucifixion by Marc Chagall - the violence of the world is visited on the scapegoated Christ whose sacrifice becomes the centre around which history revolves.


• Drama: The Singing Detective by Dennis Potter - multi-layered clues in fiction, fantasy and autobiography combine enabling betrayal to be reinhabited which in turn releases the central character from the prison of his own distress and self-loathing.


• Music: Credo by Arvo Pärt - an arc of emotion beginning in the confidence of belief and moving through an agony of doubt before emerging chastened but still trusting. The arc of faith expressed through sound.


• Novel: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky - a rigorous and dramatic exploration of what it means to genuinely live out the Christian faith in the world.


• Poem: The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot - the world viewed in the light of Christ is fragmented, tormented and desolated but in the act of holding the fragments together the presence of Christ - the third who walks always beside you - is glimpsed.

I tag Banksy, Paul, Philip, Sam, and Tim.

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T-Bone Burnett - River of Love.