Peace symphony for presidential candidate

'When one is in one's twenties, one tends to see things in perhaps too simple a way. At the time I was very attracted to the peaceful aspects of Christianity - Dona nobis pacem, "turn the other cheek", and so forth. The United States was mired in the war in Vietnam and many churches were active in rallies and other projects of the Peace Movement. I somehow overlooked the history of the inquisition and crusades, and hardly anticipated the trend of very recent history towards church support of capital punishment and various military endeavours. Thus the "Mass without Singers" was for me an anti-war statement, and I chose George McGovern as my dedicatee, believing that his tremendous loss in the 1972 election, his campaign had given legitimacy to the cause of peace' - writes Arnold Rosner in the notes for the new Naxos CD of his post-romantic Symphony No. 5 'Missa sine Cantoribus super Salve regina' from 1973 played by the National Radio Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine conducted by John McLaughlin Williams.

The first ever recording of Rosner's "Mass without singers" is the latest release in Naxos' American Classics series, a project that is making a large amount of previously unrecorded and unfashionable music available. Ignore the condescending views of today's music pontiffs whose attitude has parallels in the Catholic Church's long history of prohibiting translations of the Bible to prevent the masses from making their own religous judgements. Low cost CDs from Naxos and others are disruptive technology in the tradition of the movable-type printing that made translated Bibles widely available and triggered the Reformation.

Forget whether Rosner's Mass is 'cool' or 'uncool' or first or third-rate. It deserves to be heard so listeners can make their own judgement. The coupling on this excellent CD is Nicolas Flagello's 1957 Missa Sinfonica. Flagello was a great artist, both in music and paint. Read more about him here.
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The Glass Bead Game

Yet another interview with Philip Glass in today's Guardian. Appropriately the title is Play it again... A virtual prize for any reader who can send a link to a newspaper interview this weekend with a contemporary composer who is not Philip Glass.

Much more interesting is James Fenton's article on the electric harpsichord which refers to Wolfgang Zuckermann's 1970 book The Modern Harpsichord. Zuckermann was born in Berlin, and became an American citizen in 1938. He was one of the first harpsichord makers in the United States and in the late 1950's created a self-assembly harpshichord kit which sold in large quantities and revitalised interest in this neglected instrument.

In 1969, Zuckermann, in despair over US involvement in Vietnam, left New York to live first in England, and later in France. He sold his harpsichord business to David Jacques Way, who had been the publisher of The Modern Harpsichord. Although Zuckermann continued his musical activities, he became involved in the environmental debates of the 1970s and 1980s, taking an active part in creating small local collaborative projects in England that cut away from the values and patterns of the dominant consumer society.

In 1987 Zuckermann began his collaboration with The Commons, an independent non-profit policy research group based in Paris. He moved to France in 1994 and opened La Libraire Shakespeare in Avignon which is our local bookshop when we are in that part of the world. This gem of a bookshop featured here some time back.

I was in Avignon a few weeks ago. Among the books I came away with were Sophie Fuller's Pandora's Guide to Women Composers and Barry Miles' life of Allen Ginsberg. My copy of Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain also came from La Libraire Shakespeare some years back when I was on my way to a retreat in L'Abbaye de Sainte-Madeleine at le Barroux, and that's a destination that will feature here again in the next few days. My photo shows Wolfgang Zuckermann in La Libraire Shakespeare - much more interesting than another picture of Philip Glass.

The Glass Bead Game is the title of Hermann Hesse's book that influenced many musicians including Karlheinz Stockhausen. And Hesse's poetry supplied the texts for Richard Strauss' Vier letze Lieder which were in the concert I wrote about on Sunday. More passion about books here.
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Why aren't we marching in the streets?

It took me more than three decades to see Joan Baez live, but the wait for tonight's concert in Cambridge was well worth it - what an artist! Here are some thoughts prompted by the concert we've just returned from:

Three decades later, it’s terribly clear that my generation hasn’t changed the world very much. The question is, how much has the world changed us? As young “radicals,” we considered ourselves the conscience of the nation. To us, the Vietnam War was a moral offense, not a question of politics; and we reacted to it in primarily moral, rather than political, terms. Somehow, by the strength of our youth, the nation would be wrenched from the grip of death, cleansed, made new. A “movement” without politics or program, we were defined largely by our shared lives on the campus – millions of us getting stoned and listening to the Beatles – and by our opposition to the war. Now that war is long over, and we inhabit private worlds.

Still when I speak with my old “radical” friends – none of whom are leading noticeably radical lives – I find that our basic values haven’t changed that much. We’re dismayed by the country’s swing to the right and appalled by slashes in social programs. Why then aren’t we heard from? Why aren’t we marching in the streets?

Paradoxically, we felt a more excruciating responsibility for the acts of our nation as 18-year-olds who couldn’t even vote than we do now. We took things more personally. We felt that we were bombing Vietnam, and we were allowing the less well-connected of our generation to die there. Now, we say, it’s those Republicans who have declared all-out war on the poor and powerless.

We no longer believe that we can remake the world. Instead we adapt to it and act cautiously, because we have much more to lose. We have our careers. In the booming economy of the ‘60s, the affluent youth’s greatest concern about a career was how to avoid one. A career was part of the System, within which success and exploitation, work and war, were inextricably linked. ( “Work! Study! Get ahead! Kill!” we used to chant at demonstrations.) Also, embarking on a career meant accepting the constraints of adulthood. I thought if I’d settle down, I could stay young forever. I was wrong. You get old whether you’re wearing a necktie or not.

When I was a “kid” – a word we applied to ourselves well into our twenties – I avowed a profound aversion to wealth. All I wanted, I used to say, was to raise a family in a decent home and be able to spend a few weeks at the beach. That’s all I want now, but I find that these modest ends require massive means. It’s hard to renounce materialism when materialism is renouncing you.

Our middle-class instinct (subliminal, unshakable) to “make something of yourself” and contribute to society, has led almost all of us down the Establishment road – what we used to call selling out. We like to think that our careers give us more effective ways to act on our values than we had as students. We try to do good and do well at the same time.

Meanwhile, people sleep on the streets. We know we really ought to find the time and courage to do something about it. (Things to do today: call insurance broker, add to Individual Retirement Account, smash the state.)

At least we have a past to live up to. We helped end one war, and the continuing effect of our action restrains our country from getting into new ones. It’s good that there was a time when we stood up for what we believed in – which, as you get along and go along, is not something you do every day.

From James S. Kunen’s pre-Iraq 1995 introduction to his 1968 book The Strawberry Statement, Notes of a College Revolutionary. After writing the Strawberry Statement Kunen registered as a conscientous objector and worked as a counsellor at a group home for young offenders in Lancaster, Mass. He graduated from New York University Law School, and became a public defender in the criminal courts of Washington, DC, an experience retold in his book "How Can You Defend Those People". He then left the practice of law and returned to journalism. Kunen's 1994 book "Reckless Disregard" was an exposé of the Ford Motor Company's role in a Kentucky school bus fire which killed 24 children and three adults.

Now playing - Joan Baez's 2006 release Bowery Songs. This album is a product of the 2004 Presidential election. In July and August, conventioneering and electioneering fever grew more heated in the US, as a pall of desperation seemed to grip the country. Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 stirred the pot, and Baez joined Rage Against The Machine's Tom Morello for the West Coast leg of Moore's 'Slacker Uprising Tour.' The tour's ad hoc appearance at Cal S U. San Marcos outside San Diego was banned by the administration. The result was that the students rented the nearby Del Mar Fairgrounds and attracted ten times as many to the event, upward of 10,000 people. The album, which was recorded live at the Bowery Ballroom on New York City's Lower East Side, is classic Joan Baez. Stand-out track for me is Steve Earle's 'Christmas in Washington' ('So come back Woody Guthrie/ Come back to us now ...'), which Baez sang in her concert in Cambridge tonight.

I can only agree with Ezra Pound when he wrote - 'One of the pleasures of middle age is to find out that one was right, and that one was much righter than one knew at say 17 or 23'.

And I was 23 in 1972, so I will end by taking you back to when The Year is '72

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Notes of a College Revolutionary

I started at university in 1968. In March of that year American troops killed hundreds of civilians in the My Lai massacre, and in April student protesters at Columbia University in New York City took over administration buildings and shut down the campus, and student protests spread to France, Japan, Britain, Poland, Spain, Italy and Mexico. Also in April Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech in Birmingham, England, took racism on to the streets and into the headlines, and in that black month Martin Luther King was taken by a sniper's bullet in Memphis. In May student and worker strikes and riots in Paris nearly brought down the French Government.

In June 1968 Robert Kennedy was assassinated on the campaign trail, and in August Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia to end the "Prague Spring" of political liberalization, while in the same month police clashed with antiwar protesters in Chicago, Illinois outside the Democratic National Convention. The emerging women's liberation movement staged demonstrations at the annual Miss America Beauty pageant held in Atlantic City, NJ in September. Under the pretext of progress with the Paris peace talks, in October US President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he has ordered a complete cessation of "all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam" effective November 1.

I have many memories of those extraordinary times, and buried among them is a film called The Strawberry Statement which captured the zeitgeist with a soundtrack featuring Crosby Stills and Nash, Neil Young, John Lennon, Buffy Sainte Marie, Thunderclap Newman, J.S. Bach and Richard Strauss. The film was based on a novel by James Simon Kunen of the same name. The book is now considered to be one of the earliest examples of 'new journalism', and its diary format predates the blog by more than 30 years. Kunen wrote the novel while a Columbia College sophmore in 1968, and after graduation he worked as a journalist in Vietnam.

Subsequently as a conscientous objector Kunen worked as a counsellor at a group home for young offenders in Lancaster, Mass. He graduated from New York University Law School, and became a public defender in the criminal courts of Washington, DC, an experience retold in his book "How Can You Defend Those People". He then left the practice of law and returned to journalism. James Simon Kunen's book "Reckless Disregard" was an exposé of the Ford Motor Company's role in a Kentucky school bus fire which killed 24 children and three adults .

The Strawberry Statement is out of print, but I located a used copy in the Seashells Books in Clearwater, Florida. The book cost me $1.56, plus $9.79, and it arrived by airmail here in Norfolk, UK today.

*During the Vietnam war seven million tons of bombs were dropped on Vietnam, more than twice the bombs dropped on the whole of Europe and Asia in World War II.
* Almost one five-hundred-pound bomb was dropped for every human being in Vietman
* It is estimated that there were twenty million bomb craters in the country
* Poisonous sprays were dropped to destroy trees and any kind of growth, an area the size of Massachusetts was covered in defoliants
* On March 16, 1968 a company of Ameriacan soldiers killed between 450 and 500 people, most of them women, children, and old men, in the hamlet of My Lai 4, in Quang Ngai province. Initially the army tried to cover up the story, and the American press ignored the early coverage in French Vietnamese newspapers.
* US casualties in the war were 211,471, of which 58,226 were killed in action
* Vietnam released figures on April 3, 1995 that a total of one million Vietnamese combatants and four million civilians were killed in the war. The accuracy of these figures has generally not been challenged

* Now playing - The Great Mandala, yes I know that Peter, Paul and Mary (right) are about as unfashionable as you can get, but this is one of the great antiwar songs of the era. Composer Peter Yarrow's explanation that the song 'says our lives present us with a choice, in this case, the choice was to either serve in a war that ran counter to basic American principles, or to take the consequences of refusing to do so; for young men called to service, it was the preeminent ethical dilemna of our time' is a stark reminder that relevance never becomes unfashionable.
* For a full timeline for that extraordinary year of dissent, 1968, follow this link.

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For more on those summers of love, hate, dissent and revolution take An Overgrown Path to I am a camera - St Tropez 1967 and The Year is '72

The Year is '72

What were you doing in 1972, or dare I ask, were you even born then?


1972 was a bad year for violence. It started on 'Bloody Sunday' January 30 when British troops opened fire on civilian demonstrators in the Bogside, Derry, Northern Ireland, killing thirteen people (below). And it continued through the year, and beyond, as the US B-52s (above) unleashed their Christmas bombardment on Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam. The bombing was started by president Richard Nixon against the advice of the U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command, and with opposition from the majority of Congress (does that sound familiar?).

Violence and sport collided in September at the Munich Olympics when members of the Israeli team were taken hostage by Palestinian terrorists. A failed rescue attempt resulted in the deaths of 11 Israeli athletes, five kidnappers, and one German police officer, and sparked a series of Israeli revenge assassinations. 1972 was also a bad year for FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who died in office in May age 77, having held the position since 1924.

Space travel and missiles were much in the news. The three-man US spacecraft Apollo 17 successfully landed on the moon, and the crew took the last moon walk. Back on earth the SALT 1 Treaty between the US and USSR introduced limits on strategic nuclear missiles. And the whole Xbox thing started with the simple paddle operated Pong video game.

In a year of violence the committee for the Nobel Peace prize dediced not to make an award, instead the prize money was allocated to the main prize fund. But the Literature prize was awarded, to German novelist Heinrich Boll for his acute observations of post-war Germany. He produced one of my all time favourite quotations, 'meddling is the only way to stay relevant', and his view on the role of art in society was pungently expressed in his Nobel acceptance speech.

"Art is always a good hiding-place, not for dynamite, but for intellectual explosives and social time bombs. Why would there otherwise have been the various Indices? And precisely in their despised and often even despicable beauty and lack of transparency lies the best hiding-place for the barb that brings about the sudden jerk or the sudden recognition." (from Nobel Lecture, 1973)

The top selling non-fiction title for the year didn’t contain too much intellectual explosive – it was Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull. But the number two title did contain some well-placed social time-bombs, it was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s August 1914 (he went on to win the Nobel Literature prize in 1970). Another sort of revolution was started with the publication of Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution, the first of a sequence of titles that have lived off the fat of the land for the last thirty years.

In rock music the albums were the Rolling Stone’s Exile on Main Street (right), and the Pink Floyd ‘concept album’ Dark Side of the Moon. Also expressing lunar preoccupations was the last album from the tragically talented Nick Drake, Pink Moon. And another last album was Clear Spot, made by the team of Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band before the magic failed and they went their own ways.

In the jazz world Weather Report produced their fusion classic I Sing the Body Electric, while Chick Corea moved in the other direction with his sparse Light as a Feather. Gospel legend Mahalia Jackson died in Chicago, and violence came to the performing arts when talented young hard bop trumpeter Lee Morgan was shot dead by his mistress New York City jazz club.

Change was also abroad in classical music. Pierre Boulez was in his second year as Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and new music ruled in London. UK premieres included Maderna's Julliard Serenade, Stockhausen's Mixtur (version for small orchestra), Ligeti's Ramifications, Crumb's Echoes of time and the river, Sessions Fifth Symphony, Xenakis' Avrova, Berio's Chemin 11b, Boulez's e.e. cummings ist der dichter, and Maxwell Davies' Blind Man's Buff.

I joined the BBC from university in 1972 (see trivia note below). One of my most vivid musical memories of that time is a searing Mahler Ninth at the Proms conducted by Bruno Maderna; I think it must have been 1972 as he was already mortally ill, and was to die the following year. His tragically early death was the inspiration for one of Boulez's most moving compositions, the funeral elegy Rituel in memoriam Maderna. Other personal musical memories for '72 include the trail-blazing Boulez concerts at the Roundhouse in London, particularly the premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies' Blind Man's Bluff.

1972 was certainly a year of violence and change in politics, and new directions in the arts. What an extraordinary time then for the composition of a tonal work using a formal design reflecting the Bach Passions. Yet that is exactly what Edmund Rubbra produced for his Op. 140, his Ninth Symphony, the Sinfonia Sacra. Subtitled 'The Resurrection', it is a setting for soprano, alto and baritone soloists, chorus and orchestra, of words from the New Testament telling the story of the events from the Crucifixion to the Ascension It is arguably his masterpiece and, in my view, is a grossly under-rated work. The scoring was completed appropriately on Good Friday 1972, and the first performance was given the following year by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Charles Groves.

In many ways Rubbra (photo above) defies categorisation. He was born in 1901 to of musical working-class parents. In his early years he was influenced by Holst and Vaughan Williams, but his compositions do not belong to the so-called 'pastoral school' of English Music. Instead his love of the polyphonic music of the 16th - 18th centuries infuses the texture and structure of his compositions. His mid-life conversion to Roman Catholicism was important to his musical development (and forges a link to Bruckner, both composers use cathedral like structures in their music), and in later years he became interested in Buddhism and Taoism.

The initial inspiration for the Ninth Symphony came from the painting of the Risen Christ by the Italian Renaissance painter Donato Bramante (1444-1514). The structure of the work reflects the Bach Passions, although clearly this Resurrection symphony deals with later events. It is scored for soprano, contralto, baritone, chorus and orchestra (S C Bar soloists, chor 2.2(ca).2.2. -4.2.3.1. timp perc str) and takes a contemporary feminist view by stressing the role of the women in the Resurrection story.

Each of the four sections of the forty-five minute work ends with a Catholic hymn set by Rubbra. Three of the four sections end with a Lutheran chorale, which develop seamlessly from the preceeding hymn. The chorales are based on those by Johannes Crüger (1598-1662) - see audio file below, Melchior Teschner (1584-1635) and Hans Leo Hassler (1562-1612). The use of Catholic hymns coupled with Protestant chorales was an important gesture in a year which opened with the sectarian violence of Bloody Sunday.

Rubbra’s encapsulation of the Christian message, and homage to polyphony must have seemed very out of step with the zeitgeist of 1972. But his central themes proved to be remarkably prescient, and were a precursor to a group of composers that can be said to loosely include Arvo Pärt, John Tavener and James MacMillan.

But sadly, even though Rubbra can be identified as a forerunner of some of today's fashionable composers, his works remain resolutely unfashionable in the concert hall, although the Fourth Symphony was performed at the Proms a while back. (His neglect may have something to do with the fact that his scores are published by Lengnick, a subsidiary of a pop publisher, Complete Music).

His Ninth Symphony, like most of his compositions, remains a rarity reserved for the recording studio. Fortunately we are well served by the magnificent premiere recording with Lynne Dawson (soprano), Della Jones (alto), Stephen Roberts (baritone), and the BBC National Chorus of Wales and BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Richard Hickox. Here as a sampler of this magnificent work are three brief audio files:

From the Prelude -

From the Chorus 'Crux Fidelis'-

From the Chorale 'Almighty Lord we pray thee' -

Next year is the twentieth anniversary of Rubbra's death. Thankfully his publisher, Lengnick, is preparing a new edition for the anniversary. It would be good if the BBC could give similar recognition at their Promenade Concerts, or elsewhere. But increasingly the internet driven BBC sees itself as a global brand delivering global music to global audiences. Sadly in this brave new global world local masterpieces such as Rubbra's Ninth Symphony (and Malcolm Arnold's similarly masterly and important ninth symphony) increasingly fail to register on their global radar. Regular readers will know I rate the music of J.S.Bach as one of the pinnacles of Western civilisation. Currently the BBC are putting massive PR efforts behind their forthcoming, and globally bankable, Bach Christmas. But I just wish 1% of those efforts could be put behind spreading the word about the music of Rubbra, Arnold, and other neglected 20th century composers.

Follow this link for the Edmund Rubbra website

Credits:
Audio clips - Amazon
Photos
B52 - Air Force Link
Bloody Sunday - InfoSatellite.com
Rolling Stones - Rocks Off
Rubbra - Paul James
Ninth symphony CD - Musicweb-international
Trivia corner - In 1972 I was on a BBC training course, follow this link for only the fourth personal photograph in 244 posts On An Overgrown Path. Where are they now? Chris Swann went on to direct some excellent TV arts programmes including the documentary (with Humphrey Burton) on the studio recording by Bernstein of his 'West Side Story'. Andrew Mussett was a fine BBC Radio 3 Producer before bailing out, like many other talented people, in the John Birt era. Stewart Taylor moved from a career on the technical side to loudspeaker manufacturers KEF and Celestion. None of us changed the world, but it was fun.
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If you enjoyed this post take an overgrown path to The Year is '42