The Music of Heaven

On this day in 1685 was born the composer I would now name as the greatest who ever lived – Johann Sebastian Bach.
I didn't always think that much of him. In my early years I knew him only from the various chorales incorporated into English hymns, from Myra Hess's transcription of Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring, an LP of the Brandenburg Concertos (played in the very un-Baroque style that was then the fashion), and the Two-Part Inventions, some of which I could once just about play. It was only later in life that I discovered the Cello Suites, the St Matthew Passion, the B Minor Mass, the Goldberg Variations, the D Minor Chaconne – each of which is, in a word, sublime. I believe now that Bach's music is the greatest musical tribute ever paid by man to God, and surely the closest to the music of Heaven.
To pick up on yesterday's theme – Musica Serena –  Bach created, among much else, music of wonderful serenity. Take this chorale, transcribed for piano by Busoni and here played by the great Murray Perahia –

And talking of serene music – yes, how about Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring? Here played as an encore by Angela Hewitt –

In this time of lockdown, lists of  'happy music' are appearing online, intended to lift our spirits. One list I saw features this Osanna from the B Minor Mass. Here it is, sung in the pre-fire Notre Dame de Paris – if you have spirits to lift...

Musica Serena

'Keep Calm and Carry On' – that tiresomely ubiquitous slogan (I prefer Churchill's wartime motto, KBO, Keep Buggering On) – has inevitably been given a new lease of life by the Current Crisis. I've written before about the Keep Calm phenomenon, which originated in a wartime poster that was intended for publication in the event of Nazi occupation, and so was never released. 
  However, it seems that, poster or no poster, the phrase was in general use during the war. Here is Alan Garner, in his boyhood memoir Where Shall We Run To? (like The Stone Book Quartet a masterclass in the art of paring down), remembering his parents visiting him in hospital in 1941:
[I] kept asking when I was coming home. And they laughed and my father said keep calm and carry on, which everybody used to say...'
There is is: 'keep calm and carry on'. So the government must have been making use of a phrase already in common use, rather than coming up with an inspired and inspiring new slogan – one that, in the event, refused to die.

One of the most effective aids to keeping calm is surely music, the more serene and peaceful the better. Here is Musica Serena, a beautiful piece by the Latvian composer Peteris Vasks. It's best listened to with the eyes closed – but, if you're watching the video, look out for the composer in the audience, listening intently and shedding a quiet tear...

'Where meaning has been found before'

In the current Spectator Douglas Murray ponders a question that he sees hovering, in wait of an answer, behind the lockdown crisis – the question of where we can find purpose and meaning in life, now that we've been thrown back on our own resources.
'I suppose my own answer,' he writes, 'is a doctrine of a kind. Which is that we are most likely to find meaning in the places where meaning has been found before. That what has seen our forebears through, and nourished them, will see us through and nourish us in turn. I don't listen to the news much. If the church is open I will sit in it. I remake my acquaintance with great music. In the evening I read Anna Karenina.'
Yes, it is a doctrine of a kind – a decidedly conservative kind, as delineated by, among others, Michael Oakeshott ('using the resources of a traditional manner of behaviour in order to make a friend of every hostile occasion'). And of course, being truly conservative, it is only 'a doctrine of a kind', not fully fledged dogma or ideology (true conservatism is the least political of political philosophies).
'The places where meaning has been found before' calls to mind the closing stanzas of Larkin's Church Going, which predict that, even after churches have crumbled into ruin and disuse,
                                      '... someone will forever be surprising
                                      A hunger in himself to be more serious,
                                      And gravitating with it to this ground,
                                      Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
                                       If only that so many dead lie round.'

An Old Friend

Taking my morning constitutional in the park today (while it's still legal), I decided to take a couple of photographs of an old friend – this veteran Sweet Chestnut. With its creviced trunk richly encrusted with knobbly burrs, this tree was a beginner's tree for members of the after-school tree-climbing fraternity – one of the first trees to 'learn' after you'd climbed all the easy ones.
  Looking at it now, I wonder how I ever managed to climb it – let alone the other, considerably more challenging trees that I moved on to, with mixed success. I also wonder at the fact that nobody I knew – even the most daring climbers – ever had a serious fall or suffered any significant injury. I guess it was because we began with the 'easy' trees and learnt to climb one tree at a time. Also we didn't climb alone, but with others there to offer help and advice, to guide you down – often harder than getting up – and, in the last resort, break your fall.

Soap

It's rather cheering that our first line of defence against this new virus is old-fashioned soap and water – good news for retroprogressives everywhere. Also good news for those of us who simply enjoy using soap; it's surely one of life's pleasanter chores to work up a good lather with a pleasingly scented soap and wash your hands with it for the prescribed 20 seconds.
  With soap again in the ascendant, it's only fitting that we should mark the birthday of the French writer Francis Ponge (born on this day in 1899), whose most enduring – or perhaps I should say least forgotten – work was Soap (Le Savon). And soap was, most definitely, its subject. Ponge was for a while associated with the Surrealists, but he drew away from them to plough his own furrow. He was in the French Resistance during the war, and in 1947 (a commendably early date) completed his decoupling from the Surrealists by leaving the Communist party. Believing that 'a mind in search of ideas should first stock up on appearances', he developed an art form all his own, consisting of minutely descriptive prose poems on mundane everyday objects, written in paragraph form, like essays. And the greatest of these was the book-length Soap. I had it, and read it, in my youth, when I was fixated on all things French and avant garde, but I can't say I remember much about it, except that it was all about... soap.
  Here is a representative sample –

'Soap has much to say. May it say it with volubility, enthusiasm. When it has finished saying it, it no longer is.

*

Soap was made by man for his body’s use, yet it does not willingly attend him. This inert stone is nearly as hard to hold as a fish. See it slip from me and like a frog dive into the basin again … emitting also at its own expense a blue cloud of evanescence, of confusion.

*

For a piece of soap the principal virtues are enthusiasm and volubility. At any rate ease of elocution. This, which is excessively simple, has nonetheless never been said. Even by the specialist in commercial publicity. And what do the soap-manufacturers offer me—not a penny! They have never even thought of it! Yet soap and I will show them what we can do...' 

Soap owed its inspiration to the war years, when soap of any kind was hard to find, and people began to appreciates its value – none more so, surely, than Francis Ponge.

Oddly enough, the great American writer Stanley Elkin (author of The Dick Gibson Show, The Franchiser, etc) was also a lover of soap, compulsively collecting pieces of it wherever he went. He did this partly in homage to his father, a travelling salesman who also picked up soap wherever he found it. In the title essay of his collection Pieces of Soap, Elkin describes his compulsion, identifying it as a form of 'anal greed' and, like all compulsive collecting, a symbolic way of staving off death. At the time of writing the essay, he had amassed a collection of more than 5,000 pieces of soap, picked up on his travels and hoarded away against... what? Perhaps, like many hoarders, he had a feeling they'd come in handy some time. And it turns out he was right in the end.

Blackthorn

This particular clump of local blackthorn is always one of the last to come into flower, but it's getting there now, and at the right sort of time. We haven't had a 'blackthorn winter' this year – the spell of bitter cold that is traditionally associated with the blackthorn flowering – though there has been a little frost from time to time, once the rains and winds had died down.
  Cobbett was a great fan of the blackthorn, especially its fruit (sloes), the pulp of which he used to eat as a boy, gummy and astringent though it is. 'The juice expressed from this pulp,' he declares, 'mixed with water, in which a due proportion of logwood has been steeped, receiving, in addition, a sufficient proportion of cheap French brandy, makes the finest Port wine in the world.' A large claim, but to Cobbett it was no doubt self-evident that a home-made English concoction would be superior to anything Oporto could produce. For myself, I think I'll stick to sloe gin – but if anyone's tried sloe Port I'd be interested to hear from them... Maybe the dauntless drinkers over at Sediment?

Painted Lady at the Old Bank, plus Schubert

This morning, as I was passing a town-centre pub called The Old Bank – which was indeed a bank, back in the days when every high street had half a dozen or more, often in very grand buildings – I noticed a bit of butterfly activity around the trough of colourful flowers above the pub's main windows. Looking up, I was surprised and delighted to see that it was a Painted Lady – very much my first of the year, and probably the earliest PL I've ever spotted. I guess it flew in on the southerlies that have been blowing these past few days.
I've no idea how this butterfly season is going to develop, but if the trains are still running I hope I'll be finding my way to my usual haunts.

Meanwhile, here is today's dose of beauty – a Spring song by Schubert. I love this video of an informal performance by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Sviatoslav Richter – particularly the way the camera lingers so long on Richter before Fischer-Dieskau appears. And the way the video ends...