Memorial Day

Today in the US we memorialize those who have been claimed by war. It's usually celebrated as a great patriotic event, with martial songs and chest-thumping nationalism, all about the glory of dying for your country. What egregious nonsense! As any battle-scarred veteran can tell you, war isn't glorious; it's a gory, bloody, loud hell of a meat-grinder, and the meat being ground is the young of the nation, fed into it by old men who hold grudges or who see a profit to be made, win or lose. I've always said that if the fat old men who declared wars actually had to fight in them, we'd have world peace overnight.

Here are some potent quotes about the reality of war:

"And I can't help but wonder, now Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you 'The Cause'?
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain.
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again."
– Eric Bogle, "No Man's Land" 

"Either war is finished, or we are."
– Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance 

"War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children."
– Jimmy Carter, Nobel Lecture, December 10, 2002 

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity."
– Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, January 10, 1946 

"If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both."
– Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Probably the greatest antiwar poem ever written is "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen, an Oxford scholar and poet who enlisted at the beginning of WWI, and who was killed just one week before the armistice which ended it. During the war he wrote his poems in the letters he sent home, and as the conflict continued he used these poems to vent his anger and cynicism at the futility, the barbarity, and the stupidity of it all. "Dulce et Decorum Est" could just as well have been titled "The Lie", the lie in question being the quote from the Roman poet Horace that is fed to soldiers in time of war: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori"; the English translation is "It is sweet and proper to die for one's country". Obviously Owen disagreed, and I'm with him.

Dulce et Decorum Est - Wilfred Owen 

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And toward our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. 

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. 

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. 

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obsceneas cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.

Today we lament the deaths of young people killed by adherence to an anachronism, and pledge to end the scourge that killed them. Here are two songs that lament the deaths of soldiers - Eric Bogle's "No Man's Land" and Mark Knopfler's "Brothers In Arms".

Photo © 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger 

Beltane 2020

Today is Beltane (aka May Day), the gateway to Summer. Fertility is the central theme of this sabbat, for humans, plants, and animals. May is when farmers begin to plant their fields, and the season for their children to pair up; it's said that May Day romances make June weddings. I went on a Beltane walk in the Dykeman Spring Nature Park this morning. Everything is greening up and blooming, and bird song filled the air - Cardinals, Robins, Yellow Warblers, Red-winged Blackbirds, Catbirds, and both House and Carolina Wrens were the dominant voices, but I heard a couple of Orioles and some Red-bellied Woodpeckers as well, and saw a few Goldfinches. And the turtles have emerged! I saw about three Painted Turtles (and got a nice close-up shoot with one of them) and a couple of big ol' Snapping Turtles in the bog pool next to the north duck pond. Mama Gaia was celebrating Beltane with a lot of panache today! 

Gray Catbird

Lilacs by the north duck pond

The Painted Turtles have emerged from hibernation

Mama Redwing was busy building a nest...

... and Papa Redwing stood by to supervise.

An Eastern Kingbird sat quietly in the Kentucky Coffee Tree and allowed me to take his portrait.

And I have some Beltane/May Day music for you as well. Loreena McKennitt's "Huron Beltane Fire Dance" is a welcome addition to any Beltane celebration. This video is from her 2006 concert at the Alhambra, and that's Hugh Marsh on the frenzied violin!

One of my favorite songs for Beltane/May day is "Hal-an-tow", a tune from Cornwall sung to welcome the first day of May and the start of Summer, as well as a farewell to Winter. This is my favorite version, sung by the Glasgow Madrigirls.

Have a blessed Beltane and a happy May Day!

Photos © 2020 by A. Roy Hilbinger 

Earth Day 2020

Do you want to improve the world?
I don't think it can be done. The world is sacred.
It can't be improved.
If you tamper with it, you'll ruin it.
If you treat it like an object, you'll lose it.

— Tao te Ching # 29, Stephen Mitchell translation 

Photos © 2008 - 2020 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Sunday Bach - Easter Oratorio

Bach wrote five cantatas for Easter Sunday, but for me his Easter Oratorio, BWV 249, Kommet, eilet und laufet  (Come, hurry and run, Leipzig 1725) is the best. First composed as a birthday tribute to one of his patrons, he re-purposed and expanded it in 1725 as an Easter Oratorio. This is a beautiful work, by turns reflective and triumphant. And as musicologist Simon Crouch points out, it dances. Here's his commentary on the work:

It may seem odd to include a work titled as an Oratorio amongst the cantatas but there is considerable justification for doing so, if one considers the origin of the piece. The original composition was the laudatory cantata BWV 249a written for the birthday of Duke Christian of Saxe-Weißenfels. The music from this cantata was then re-used for a sacred cantata for Easter Sunday 1725. Then came the secular cantata BWV 249b for Count Joachim Friedrich von Flemming and finally, in the early 1730's, Bach revised the score of the sacred version, titled it Oratorio and gave us the work that we so love today.

The work opens with a wonderful two part sinfonia-and-adagio. The former is gloriously upbeat and uplifting, the latter contemplative and spiritual. An introduction that promises one of Bach's finest works. The excellent first chorus (originally a duet) turns the tempo back up calling us to contemplate the empty tomb of Jesus. In the first recitative, Mary Magdalene, Mary (the mother of Jesus), Peter and John bemoan their loss and Jesus's mother (soprano) continues the theme in her quietly beautiful aria accompanied by a fine flute line. In the next recitative, Peter (tenor), John (bass) and Mary Magdalene (alto) find the stone moved aside and the sepulchre, leading Mary Magdalene to understand what has happened. This introduces one of the highest points of Bach's inspiration: Peter's aria Sanfte soll mein Todeskummer (Softly now my fear of death). This is simply one of the most gloriously beautiful pieces of music ever written. A gentle and evocative melody woven through with delicate tendrils of accompaniment. The next recitative sees the two Mary's sighing in thirds and Mary Magdalene asks where Jesus is in her more urgent, upbeat aria. John affirms Jesus's resurrection in the final recitative and the final chorus ends the oratorio with a glorious song of praise.

This outstanding work is suffused with the spirit of the dance. The fifth movement is a tempo di minuetto, the seventh a bourée, the nineth a gavotte and the eleventh a gigue. In addition to this, the opening three movements may well have been adapted from lost concerti. Hidden delights indeed.

Copyright © 1999, Simon Crouch

I've chosen a magnificent performance on period instruments by the Netherlands Bach Society under the direction of Jos van Veldhoven for your Easter morning pleasure. Enjoy!  

Photo © 2020 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Bach on Good Friday - The St. John Passion

Last year I posted one of Bach's greatest works, his St. Matthew Passion (BWV 244), for Good Friday. This year I decided to post his other Passion work, the St. John Passion, BWV 245. This was his first Passion, written for his first Good Friday after becoming Cantor (music director) at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. This was his first version, in 1724, and he reworked this constantly through the rest of his career. Arguably the best revision is his second one in 1725, which is the version performed in today's recording. One of the best essays I've ever read for this piece of music is by American composer and conductor John Harbison, who has been music director and conductor for Emmanuel Music since the untimely passing of Craig Smith in 2007. I'm posting it here to give you some great background on this wonderful piece of music:

The Gospel of John, apparently the last of the four Gospels to be written (after 70 A.D.) is very different from the three synoptic gospels.  It presents a transcendent, mystical, philosophical Jesus, aware of the Old Testament prophecies and of his fate as a sojourner who came from above and will soon return there.  According to John, Jesus warns his followers that their eventual persecution will mirror his, and that it will come from their own:  “they shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God service.”  (John 16:2, used by Bach as a text in Cantata BWV 44).

The Gospel of John, as it enters the Passion narrative, mutes Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem.  Absent are the “multitudes” mentioned in the other Gospels.  It then transcribes a three-chapter long instruction to the disciples, delivered after the Passion Supper that moves between the terrifying realities of a hostile world and the rapture of the world to come.  These chapters, all of which precede the beginning of the Saint John Passion text, hover over Bach’s composition.  With John:18, the tone of the narrative shifts to reportage: stark details, urgent pacing, stories intercut like film, threads dropped and quickly picked up.  And we notice the recurrent labeling of “the Jews” (rather than, as in the other gospels, “they,” “the crowd,” “the people”) as the enemies of Christ.  This is, at best, paradoxical, since Jesus and his followers conceived of themselves as thoroughly within Judaism, and since Jesus’ thought moves not only away from, but also radically back toward, the Law (“Did not Moses give you the Law, and yet none of you keepeth the Law,” John 7:19).  By attempting to transform Jesus and his followers into non-Jews, the book of John becomes a path to the racial caricatures in medieval passion plays, Hitler-era posters, and even a recent popular motion picture, The Passion of the Christ (2004).

Many mistakenly believe that the author of the last Gospel was the apostle John, referred to throughout as “the apostle whom Jesus loved.”  Others, because of the author’s demonization of the Jews, believe him instead to be a radical Gentile convert.  It is more likely that he was a Jew who initially expected, as did the early followers generally, that most adherents would come from within Judaism, and who was bitterly disappointed when that did not happen.  It is interesting to remember that one of the principals in the Passion narrative, Peter, the first pope, emerges in Acts as the staunchest advocate of keeping the movement strictly within Jewish practice, losing out in early church councils to the proselytizing instincts of Paul.

In performing this piece, and other Bach works based on John (for example, Cantata BWV 42 that begins with the fearful apostles in hiding after the crucifixion), it is valuable to try to understand something about the attitudes of both author and composer.  What is Bach’s stance?  He is certainly of his time and place.  He sets an inflammatory Reformation Sunday Luther text with vehemence in Cantata BWV 126, “Deliver us, Lord, by your Word from the Pope’s control and the Turk’s murders.”  In the texts from John, he goes where they take him, more with the instincts of a dramatist than an ideologue.  In the Passion, he invests fully in both the fierce irony of “Hail to thee, King of the Jews,” by means of a perversion of the most elegant eighteenth-century dance form, the minuet, and in the extraordinarily pliant tenderness of Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus when they come to bury Jesus “according to Jewish custom,” where the Gospel writer suddenly reminds us that these events all transpired in the context of Jewish observance.

“About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters,” says Auden in his poem “Musée des Beaux Arts.”  And in an era when we confront torture as national policy, we must engage with torture as part of this narrative.  The recent movie previously cited reminds us that much of our modern artistic sensibility is numbingly literal-minded.  Bach seeks metaphors, and never merely the mimetic, for the extremes depicted here.  With the help of the strangely lurid aria texts, he forces us to look into our own inner abyss and suggests this might be the consequence of such a close view of the unthinkable.

   About suffering they were never wrong,
   the Old Masters: how well they understood
   its human position;  how it takes place
   while someone else is eating or opening a window  […]

Auden cites the obliviousness to suffering of the ploughman in Breughel’s Icarus, going about his business unaware of the distant splash.  Auden might have just as easily mentioned the three aristocratic men conversing in the foreground of Piero Della Francesca’s Flagellation, or the uninterrupted musicians of Donatello’s Salome.  Bach’s gambling soldiers, gaily dominating the sonic foreground, are part of that tradition.  As they shake their dice (in phrases fourteen measures long!) we are struck by how tenaciously the composers locks onto the smallest details.  The wood-fire,  the high priest’s servant’s name, Malchus – they haunt because they are so actual.  The name, the very specific weather report, the anxious interjections:  “and his witness is true,” “we tell you this so you can believe” – these are peculiar to John’s narrative, and Bach refuses to present them as asides.

But two climactic elements that Bach includes in the Saint John Passion are missing from the narrative in the Book of John:  Peter’s penitent weeping, and the earthquake marking Jesus’ death.  Bach borrowed them from Matthew.  In his third version of the piece, with scriptural scruples, he takes them out.  Then in the fourth version (this performance), the dramatist prevails, and they are back in.  The multiple versions (there is also an incomplete fifth version) speak of the composer’s difficulties in venturing upon such a large-scale project.  The magnificent second version, which introduces three elaborate chorale-prelude style pieces into the structure, represents the most drastic re-conception.  After reassigning large portions of it to the Saint Matthew Passion and Cantata BWV 23, Bach moves back toward his first, tighter conception, a series of cantata-like scenes, usually concluded by “simple” chorale settings, the whole framed by madrigal choruses.

The strangely haunted character of the opening chorus suggests the anxiety of the disciples immediately after the crucifixion (Crucifixion:  an ignominious and unexpected ending not yet illumined by Resurrection).  If before hearing it, we read this text by an unknown author (perhaps the composer), would we guess the desperate quality of this setting?  The final lullaby-chorus, its cascading bass patters, so similar to the conclusion of the Saint Matthew Passion of a few years later, but less able to suggest closure, asks for punctuation in the form of a chorale end-stop – tensions and ambiguities that remain unresolved even by an epilogue upon an epilogue.

© John Harbison

Today's performance is a live performance recorded on March 11, 2017 in the Grote Kerk, Naarden, by the Netherlands Bach Society under the direction of Jos van Veldhoven. This is almost two hours long, so sit back, relax, line up a beverage or two, and enjoy some of the greatest music ever written.

Photo © 2015 by A. Roy Hilbinger 

Bach for Christmas

Bach wrote a lot of music for Christmas. Today we'll be listening to his earliest cantata for the festival, BWV 63, Christen, ätzet diesen Tag (Christians, etch this day, Weimar 1714). And festive it is, the grandest and most ambitious of his works from the Weimar period of his career. Here's the late Craig Smith of Emmanuel Music on this grand Christmas cantata:

Bach Cantata BWV 63 is the grandest and most ambitious of all of Bach's Weimar cantatas. Both Bach and the poet Salomo Franck pull out all of the stops to produce a work of monumentality and power. The work opens with a large-scale chorus with an orchestra of 4 trumpets, tympani, 3 oboes, strings and continuo. Franck, who was also head of the Weimar Mint, uses a metaphor of engraving on metal and stone to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Just as the first chorus shows the ultimate in outgoing exuberance, the alto recitative is full of the profoundest inward feeling. This is perhaps the greatest accompanied recitative in all of the Bach cantatas. The middle section of the cantata is made up of two duets. The first, for soprano and bass with oboe obbligato, is austere and otherworldly; the second, for alto, tenor and strings is earthy, bumptious and dancing. Throughout the cantata the two elements of Christmas, the mysterious and the down-to-earth, are constantly juxtaposed. A bravura bass recitative with brass and winds leads us into the glorious final chorus, a work as brilliant as the opening but with even more detail and character. 

© Craig Smith

Today's performance is from a recording by the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists under the direction of John Eliot Gardiner. Enjoy! 

Photo © 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Christmas 2019

Photos © 2009 & 2018 by A. Roy Hilbinger 

Winter Solstice 2019

The Dykeman Spring wetland at the Solstice

O Winter! ruler of the inverted year, . . .

I crown thee king of intimate delights,

Fireside enjoyments, home-born happiness,

And all the comforts that the lowly roof

Of undisturb'd Retirement, and the hours

Of long uninterrupted evening, know.

– William Cowper

A joyous Winter Solstice greeting to all my friends and family throughout the world! May you enjoy whatever Winter holiday you celebrate surrounded by warmth and light and love.

© 2019 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Thanksgiving 2019

Happy Thanksgiving!

This year my Thanksgiving time is a particularly thankful one. As you probably know, I had a cardiac crisis in September and October, and I owe a great deal of thanks to my nearby family, my brother Don and sister-in-law Terri, for being there and getting me to the doctors and tests and all that I needed to get to. I am also grateful to all of my family and friends for the support and well wishes I received. And of course to the doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals who made sure I'm still around to enjoy the rest of the blessings I'm thankful for. What would those blessings be? The wonderful Earth we all live on, with all its beauty and brilliance and mystery. It's a blessing just to be alive!

This year I'm going to give you a bunch of music to celebrate the holiday. "All Good Gifts" from the movie version of Godspell; my "Simplicity" slideshow featuring the Shaker Hymn "Simple Gifts" performed by Alison Krauss and Yo-Yo Ma; Peter Mayer's Thanksgiving song "Coming Home"; and Mary Chapin Carpenter's "Thanksgiving Song". Enjoy! And enjoy your Thanksgiving!

Photos © 2008 & 2019 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Samhain 2019

Today is Samhain! The modern celebration of Halloween gets most of its traditions from the old Celtic New Year celebration of Samhain (pronounced SAH-win), including costumes, Jack O'Lanterns, trick or treating, and the like. The original holiday was all about honoring those passed on, celebrating the ancestors. There were other celebrations with the theme of honoring the dead (the Roman Feralia being one of them) at this time of year throughout Europe, so in the seventh century Pope Boniface IV declared a two-day festival honoring the dead to replace the pre-Christian celebrations - All Saints Day on November 1 and All Souls Day on the 2nd. In England All Saints was known as All Hallows, and the celebrations starting on the night before became known as All Hallows Eve, which through the years became Halloween. The pre-Christian traditions survived the transition and we still follow them today. 

Some of those traditions include wandering the streets to beg for soul cakes, special little cakes baked for this holiday; this tradition was called souling and eventually became the modern day trick or treating. Our ancestors would also carve out turnips and place a candle within, making "turnip lanterns" to light the way for those souls coming to visit at this time when the veil between this life and the afterlife was believed to be at its thinnest; when pumpkins were discovered here in the Americas they were deemed to make much better lanterns than turnips! And of course those who wandered the streets a-souling wore costumes, supposedly to scare away the evil spirits who would also take advantage of the thinner veil between the worlds, although I suspect the costumes may go even further back into time and were originally meant to represent the spirit totems of this time of year - Raven, the Horned God Cerunnos, Owl, and other spirits of the dark half of the year. Nowadays those costumes are more likely to be humorous and light-hearted rather than serious.

Anyone who has been following this blog for a time will know that I always include music in my Samhain posts. There's quite a bit of music over the years that I've used to represent this time of year, both for Samhain and the modern Halloween, and last year I put together a playlist on YouTube to collect my favorites in one place, which you can visit here - these include the 1980s PBS animation of Saint-Saëns' Danse Macabre, Loreena McKennitt's All Souls Night, one of my favorite versions of the A-Souling song by New Zealand ensemble Lothlorien, some old British folksongs dealing with some of the more unpleasant characters who might be wandering about, and some assorted modern tunes associated with Halloween these days. Definitely give it a visit.

This year I'm also posting a slideshow here that I put together of my best gravestone photos, set to a breathtakingly beautiful musical setting by Natalie Merchant of British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem Spring and Fall: to a young child, written for a young girl facing mortality for the first time. This piece, more than anything else I've posted here, exemplifies the spirit of Samhain - honoring the departed, and placing death in its necessary place in the cycle of life. Have a blessed Samhain!

© 2019 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Seasonal Touches in Shippensburg

Walking through town today in search of good subjects for tomorrow's annual Samhain post, I caught these seasonal scenes.

Episcopal Square on North Prince Street

A scarecrow family on Orange Street

Richwalter Street in Hollar Heights

Ivy overruns a sign in one of Shippensburg's back alleys

A seasonally decorated planter along King Street

Branch Creek from the King Street bridge

A front stoop display along King Street

© 2019 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Memorial Day 2019

[Note: I wrote this piece last year for Memorial Day, and I like it so much I decided to reprint it this year.]

Today in the US we memorialize those who have been claimed by war. It's usually celebrated as a great patriotic event, with martial songs and chest-thumping nationalism, all about the glory of dying for your country. What egregious nonsense! As any battle-scarred veteran can tell you, war isn't glorious; it's a gory, bloody, loud hell of a meat-grinder, and the meat being ground is the young of the nation, fed into it by old men who hold grudges or who see a profit to be made, win or lose. I've always said that if the fat old men who declared wars actually had to fight in them, we'd have world peace overnight.

Here are some potent quotes about the reality of war:

"And I can't help but wonder, now Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you 'The Cause'?
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain.
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again."
– Eric Bogle, "No Man's Land" 

"Either war is finished, or we are."
– Herman Wouk, War and Remembrance 

"War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other's children."
– Jimmy Carter, Nobel Lecture, December 10, 2002 

"I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its stupidity."
– Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, January 10, 1946 

"If civilization has an opposite, it is war. Of these two things, you have either one, or the other. Not both."
– Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Probably the greatest antiwar poem ever written is "Dulce et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen, an Oxford scholar and poet who enlisted at the beginning of WWI, and who was killed just one week before the armistice which ended it. During the war he wrote his poems in the letters he sent home, and as the conflict continued he used these poems to vent his anger and cynicism at the futility, the barbarity, and the stupidity of it all. "Dulce et Decorum Est" could just as well have been titled "The Lie", the lie in question being the quote from the Roman poet Horace that is fed to soldiers in time of war: "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori"; the English translation is "It is sweet and proper to die for one's country". Obviously Owen disagreed, and I'm with him.

Dulce et Decorum Est - Wilfred Owen 

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And toward our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. 

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. 

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. 

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obsceneas cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.

Today we lament the deaths of young people killed by adherence to an anachronism, and pledge to end the scourge that killed them. Here are two songs that lament the deaths of soldiers - Eric Bogle's "No Man's Land" and Mark Knopfler's "Brothers In Arms".

Photo © 2009 by A. Roy Hilbinger 

Sunday Bach - Easter Sunday

Bach wrote five cantatas and an oratorio for Easter, some of which I've posted here on Easters past. This year I've chosen one of his earlier ones - BWV 31, Der Himmel lacht! Die Erde jubilieret (Heaven laughs! The earth rejoices, Weimar 1715). It's very appropriate music for the central celebration of the Church, complete with trumpet fanfares and jubilant choruses. Here's the late Craig Smith on this most majestic of Bach's cantatas:

Bach Cantata BWV 31 is a work from Bach's first great maturity. Written in 1715 in Weimar, it is one of the most majestic of the Weimar cantatas. It opens with a brilliant, energetic sinfonia, setting the stage for a wonderful, vibrant chorus. As is typical of Bach after the outgoing opening, the work goes inward. The bass recitative and aria have a starkness in contrast to the chorus. The tenor aria is much warmer and friendlier. It has a marvelous jaunty tune which curiously only appears in the strings, the tenor always singing an obbligato. The high point of the cantata is the heavenly soprano aria: only Bach could lead us to this transcendent, inward spot on Easter Day. A simple, almost folklike tune in the oboe is mirrored in the soprano. Against that, all of the strings play the chorale "Wenn mein Stündlein vorhanden ist" which is then sung in a rich, five-voice setting to bring the cantata to a quiet close. 

© Craig Smith

Today's video is from a performance in 2017 by the Ensemble Pygmalion under the direction of Raphaël Pichon. Enjoy!

Photo © 2016 by A. Roy Hilbinger 

Bach on Good Friday - The St. Matthew Passion

Serenity

Bach wrote his greatest work for the Good Friday of 1727, his monumental St. Matthew Passion. This description by musicologist David Gordon says it best: "The massive yet delicate work, with its multiple levels of theological and mystical symbolism, its powerful and dramatic biblical teachings, and its psychological insight, is one of the most challenging and ambitious musical compositions in the entire Western tradition." [Note: You can read Gordon's excellent essay on this great work here. I highly recommend it!]

I've chosen the beautiful performance of this, Bach's greatest work, by the orchestra and chorus of the Collegium Vocale Gent, under the direction of Philippe Herreweghe. A warning: Save listening to this until you're settled for the day or night; it's almost three hours long. Enjoy!

Photo © 2006 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Sunday Bach - Palm Sunday

Bach composed one cantata for Palm Sunday - BWV 182, Himmelskönig, sei willkommen (King of heaven, welcome, Weimar, 1714). This is one of Bach's earliest cantatas, and as such it's written for a very small chamber ensemble; the effect is very simple and very intimate, a surprising thing for the celebration of Christ's triumphant entry into Jerusalem. One wonders how Bach would have written this during the peak of his career in Leipzig. In any case, here's the late Craig Smith of Emmanuel Music on the subject:

Bach Cantata BWV 182 was one of the earliest works written in Weimar and is thus one of Bach's earliest cantatas. It has a charming chamber-sized orchestration of recorder, one violin, two violas, cello and organ. The opening sinfonia has the sound of early morning about it. The recorder and solo violin trade off piquant dotted lines against the pizzicato of the other strings. The opening chorus is delightfully child-like in its portrayal of Jesus' entrance into Jerusalem. The solo bass intones a line from Psalm 40 as an introduction to the stirring aria with the strings. The solo recorder returns as the obbligato to the poignant alto aria. This is the beginning of the transition of the cantata from the joyous entrance into Jerusalem to a meditation on the Passion. The continuo aria with tenor is a further passion-like piece. It would not be out of place in one of the Passion settings. After the penultimate            chorale prelude on the tune "Jesu Kreuz, Leiden und Pein," the light chorus "So lasset uns gehen in Salem der Freuden" ends the cantata.

© Craig Smith

Today's performance is from a new offering from the J.S. Bach Foundation of Trogen, Switzerland, under the direction of Rudolf Lutz. Enjoy!

Photo © 2019 by A. Roy Hilbinger 

Getting Sentimental

I took part in an interesting conversation on Facebook the other day. A friend was complaining that her significant other was objecting to doing something special for Valentine's Day, saying that the holiday was invented by commercial concerns looking to make money, and my friend was asking everyone else's opinions on the holiday. My own contribution was that considering that the celebration of the saint's day as a holiday dedicated to love was a fairly recent development, one has to wonder, and repeated the widespread opinion that it's a "Hallmark holiday". After considering that for a while and reading others' responses to her query, I decided to take a closer look at all this.

It appears that I was partially right. One of the two Valentines celebrated on February 14 was an early bishop who performed Christian weddings at a time when the powers that be in the Roman Empire objected to such a thing, and he was executed for it, thus making him a "hero for love". But the holiday was never really celebrated as such until medieval times, and then really only among the aristocracy as part of the cult of chivalry. Among the peasantry and the developing middle class it was pretty much ignored. Until the Victorian era in the 19th century. And therein lies a tale.

In 1861 Victoria's consort Prince Albert died, leaving the queen heartbroken. And in 1860 in the US the Civil War broke out, ending up decimating a large part of a whole generation of young men in the bloodiest conflict ever fought on American soil. The reaction to these events was the rise of a cult of sentimentality on both sides of the Atlantic.

I've written about this before on this blog, in reference to the change in cemeteries that took place at this time. In the US especially, graveyards were crowded, unpleasant places where the dead were basically dumped; they weren't called boneyards for nothing! But after the Civil War cemeteries became park-like, with shade trees and monumental sculpture, and benches for the mourners to rest on. They became restful places for the living to come and spend time with the beloved departed, and families even began having picnics there.

But this sentimentality wasn't restricted to cemeteries. Christmas benefitted from this; Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" and Clement C. Moore's poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" were reflections of this mood as well, creating a sentimental, nostalgic, family-oriented holiday. Christmas wasn't the only holiday; holidays like Valentine's Day and Mothers' Day, holidays built on sentiment, also popped up. And the rise of spiritualism, the belief in communicating with the dead, also started during this time. If the Victorian era had a watchword, it was "sentiment".

I have a theory about why this happened, one that is based on an already widespread theory about the modern celebration of Christmas in cultural history studies. In Great Britain and consequently its colonies in North America, radical Calvinist Protestantism came to dominance, toppling the Catholic royalty and enforcing their own rather dour version of Christianity on the land, even going so far as banning Christmas and Halloween, calling it "papist heresy" and "pagan frivolity". Catholicism and the Church of England, which retained much of the Catholic liturgy and church calendar, were seen as the realm of the royalty and aristocracy, while the dour Calvinism of the Puritans and their heirs was considered the realm of the working classes.

Then in the mid 19th century the middle class became tired of the joyless attitudes of the Calvinist dominance, and the Oxford Movement arose, a "nostalgic" movement to reintroduce more liturgy and celebration to the Church of England. This movement inspired many, including those involved in the Arts and Crafts movement, the Pre-Raphaelites, and poets like Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins. And while the working class remained in their chapels and didn't accept the theology of the Oxford Movement, they did pick up the sentiment of the movement, and thus Christmas and Valentine's Day came back into fashion. And of course Americans, especially those on the East Coat, Anglophiles that we are, picked up on this and exported it to the US in the wake of the Civil War. People were done with trudging through a joyless life; it was time to love and celebrate!

Of course, it's not all as simple as that. There are a lot of other factors involved. But the main thing was that by the 19th century life had become a dull drudgery to a majority of the population, and the natural movement of the pendulum started to swing back to a more joyful, lighter approach to life. Nowadays those celebrations have been taken over by mercantile interests and have made the holidays more commercialized than a lot of people are comfortable with, but the original sentiment still hangs in there. We still need love, and family, and cozy fires, and roses, and chocolate, and we still look for ways to celebrate them. Maybe we'll get so tired of the commercialism that the people will once again take control and celebrate in the "good old-fashioned way"!

© 2019 by A. Roy Hilbinger  

Happy New Year!

I raise my glass and salute you all for the New Year. Slainte!

Photo © 2014 by A. Roy Hilbinger 

Christmas 2018

A merry and peaceful Christmas/Yuletide to all my family and friends. Here's some music appropriate to the celebration season to enjoy.

© 2018 by A. Roy Hilbinger 

Winter Solstice 2018

Photo © 2008 by A. Roy Hilbinger

Thanksgiving 2018

Happy Thanksgiving!

Photo © 2018 by A. Roy Hilbinger