Lord, thou hast been our refuge

October 23, 2011 - I have anticipated this day for a long time:

At the furthest reach of my plans: Oct. 23, 2011 - "Lord, thou hast been our refuge" (RVW), with the Youth Choir doing the semichorus part. This will be unorthodox, but I believe that RVW, practical musician that he was, would approve. The young people will sing the lines "The years of our life are threescore years and ten..." to the adults; I get chills imagining it, and contemplating a whole semester of living with Psalm 90 and this magnificent music alongside the young people. Singing it will teach them the Psalm more thoroughly than any words could do. (from the Music Box, June 9, 2010)

The Old Testament lesson for today was the last chapter of Deuteronomy, the ascent of Moses to the top of Pisgah, where the LORD showed him “all the land... unto the utmost sea.” The account says that “there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face.”

In response, the Lectionary appointed a selection from Psalm 90, whose superscription reads: “A prayer of Moses the man of God.”

Lord, thou hast been our refuge from one generation to another ...

There are two settings of Psalm 90 that surpass all others: one is the setting by Charles Ives with its incomparable quiet ending, “as church bells, from a distance” (notation in the parts for orchestral bells, measure 93). The entire piece is over a C pedal point in the organ, and is “as evolution: quiet, unseen and unheeded, but strong fundamentally” (notation in choral parts, measure 14). Ives worked on this piece for over thirty years, and “Mrs. Ives recalled his saying that it was the only one of his works that he was satisfied with.”

Shortly before Ives brought this to completion in 1923-24, Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote his setting of the same text: “Lord, thou hast been our refuge.” It incorporates a stanza of St. Anne, “O God our help in ages past,” the metrical setting of Psalm 90 by Isaac Watts. At first this is pianississimo while the semichorus (the youth choir, in our rendition today) sings the first verses of the prose text. The hymn tune returns later, in other guise.

RVW wanted everyone to make music, and he gave options with this piece for performance by limited forces – the semichorus can be replaced by a solo baritone, and the trumpet is “ad lib,” and can be omitted – though with considerable loss to the effect. It seemed appropriate to me for our Youth Choir to sing the semichorus part, with the Adult Choir on the “full chorus,” and both choirs joining for the final pages. It works splendidly in the grandest of settings, but it also works in our little parish church, with our amateur choristers, young and old. Although our performance was far from perfect, I believe that RVW would be pleased with the way that we sang it. I certainly was.

I do not know if I can do this piece again; I barely made it through this day. After our one-and-only combined rehearsal with trumpet, organ, and both choirs, I was an emotional wreck. But I was saved by three things: the children, the congregation, and the trumpet.

After the rehearsal, one of the boys (Tom) complained about how loud it was: “I can't even hear myself.” “Yes. Isn't it grand?” I answered. One of the little girls (Elise) said pretty much the same thing, expressing her delight in it. They brought me back to earth with their reminder of the sheer practical childlike joy of making Real Music that is splendid and overwhelming. This is, I think, what Holy Scripture is expressing in passages such as II Chronicles 5:13-14 and Revelation 5:11-14.

It came even to pass, as the trumpeters and singers were as one, to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking the LORD; and when they lifted up their voice with the trumpets and cymbals and instruments of musick, and praised the LORD, saying, For he is good; for his mercy endureth for ever: that then the house was filled with a cloud, even the house of the LORD; so that the priests could not stand to minister by reason of the cloud: for the glory of the LORD had filled the house of God.

And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands; saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain...

Part way through the piece, I noticed the congregation. The youth choir filled the choir loft, relegating the adult choir to the front three pews. And behind them – the congregation, by this point listening intently. They too were part of the music, as was their inner response to it, a response that for some of them may echo for years to come. Dorothy Sayers explores this at length in “The Mind of the Maker,” to which I have referred in these pages. This is even more important when the audience/congregation and the musicians are one community, as we were today. The listeners enter into the music-making more fully, for they know the people from whom the music comes. Although the performance from Westminster Abbey linked above was from a much grander occasion, it too was “one community,” representing an entire nation on an important day of remembrance. This connects (again) with II Chronicles 5:13-14 and Revelation 5:11-14, where music serves this function on two of the most important occasions in history (past and future), and where, in the latter passage, the community encompasses “every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them.”


The trumpeter does not play until the hymn tune St. Anne returns on page twelve, more than five minutes into the piece. Her part appears to be simple, all of it in long notes, playing once through the hymn tune. But it is not; she needed careful and accurate cues from me, as did the trebles for their entrances, and the tenors for one key passage on page fourteen. And it was the hymn tune and my responsibility for it that carried me through the final pages.

Psallam spiritu et mente – I will sing with the spirit, and with the understanding also (I Cor. 14:15, the motto of the RSCM).

I become emotional at moments such as these, and the “understanding” must remain in control, else I would fail in my duty. A conductor has to do only one thing: give the ensemble what they need to get through the piece. The music-making comes from the singers and instrumentalists, not the conductor.


It was a Good Day. The choirs of this parish made this anthem their own, and sang it from the heart.

[When we sing,] we express ourselves and become vulnerable to God and to one another in our song in a unique way.... [There is] something intangible, something about health and healing that congregations and choirs experience in their innermost beings....

The point is that any music that bears repetition, music on which time and effort are worth being spent, will be fine art. The point is that music in worship, the highest activity of humankind, will of necessity invoke the finest craft and that, in turn, has the potential to issue in the finest art. Precisely because music serves a greater good than itself gives it the best chance to be the finest art. Gregorian chant, Palestrina motets, Bach cantatas, black spirituals, and innumerable hymns with their tunes are prime examples [as is this day's anthem] – amazing art and amazing gifts to the whole human race.
(Paul Westermeyer, “The Heart of the Matter,” p. 50-52)

"Old times there are not forgotten; look away, look away ..."

It's all now you see.... For every southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and ... yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time. [William Faulkner, from “Intruder in the Dust”]

When I was a lad, I often visited the graveyard near home, especially the lichen-covered stone marker set flat in the ground in one corner at the highest point of the yard. In worn letters, it recorded the names of the Confederate home-guard militia soldiers who died on that hilltop, defending their home town in 1862. (There is now a fine modern monument, erected a few years ago by the Sons of the Confederacy. I left some flowers on it the last time I was there.) It was just a skirmish, not worthy of being called a battle, and the handful of boys and old men who fought there were not even soldiers of the regular Army. Their opponents in blue were indeed “real” soldiers, a nineteen-year-old future president (McKinley) among them. Despite opposition they could not hope to overcome, the militia men of the community fought as best they could and did their duty as they understood it. I doubt that slavery, or states' rights, or any of the other reasons given in history books for the war, figured in their minds that spring day.

Our county, at that time so sparsely populated and remote that it was considered a “wilderness,” sent eleven companies of men into the Army of Northern Virginia. I have stood on Seminary Ridge at Gettysburg and read the names of these eleven companies where they waited through the artillery bombardment that July morning. I have stood, and wept, beside the statue of General Lee astride Traveller looking across that field, much as he was that day in 1863 as the shattered army streamed back past him, defeated.

One of my friends, an African-American musician serving a historic church in the South, related his victory in getting the Confederate Flag removed from his church. He threatened them with a lawsuit because, he said, the Flag constituted harassment, creating a threatening and unwelcoming workplace. I did not even try to explain; I could not, not in terms that he would understand. Even my wife, who knows me better than anyone, does not understand. Her take: “The war is over. You lost. Get over it.”

I will never get over it.

The legacy of the Confederate States of America is a mixed bag. Yes, slavery was part of it. The racism of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan that followed the war must be counted as part of it. In this, the CSA was no better, and in my opinion no worse, than the USA, or any other nation of the earth. For every nation and people of the earth, history and culture amount to a mixed bag, with shameful deeds alongside moments of glory; men and women who would be better forgotten, and those whose names should live forever.

A certain indescribable freedom was lost when Old Dixie went down. I have felt the evanescent spirit of it lingering among gatherings of my older relatives, and in conversation with neighbors and co-workers “back home,” especially the more backward and uneducated among them. I have tasted it in the moonshine at my uncle's funeral, and in my mother's corn bread and beans, made just the way her mother, and her mother's mother, made it. Some of it can be heard in the old “hillbilly” songs, and to a lesser degree in the bluegrass and country music that descended from them, or in the “shape-note” singing that has survived mostly in the Old South.

The victory by the North was a victory for Yankee capitalism, for centralized government, for the “robber barons” that would follow the war, for the tenement and factory over the hardscrabble hill and delta farms of the South. It was, as well, the emancipation of a people who should never have been enslaved. It was when the United States became a nation. Shelby Foote noted in his three-volume study of the War that before 1860, people would say “the United States are . . . .” After 1865, it became “the United States is . . . .” We are no longer a collection of states, but one nation, and I am glad of it.

I came to better appreciate the men who fought to save the Union by reading Walt Whitman, and from a courthouse monument in northern New York. The men from that little town and the countryside around it were among the men who were behind that stone wall across the field from my people on that July afternoon. One can read it there on the monument, where the names of battles were engraved. Almost from beginning to end, these men of the Army of the Potomac were badly led, driven off battlefield after battlefield, or sent to their deaths in ill-conceived assaults that should never have been attempted. One can read of those horrors graven on the monument in names such as “Fredericksburg. . . Chancellorsville. . . Cold Harbor. . . .” Yet, they persevered, and almost in spite of their commanders, won the war.

And above all, there was Abraham Lincoln.

But my heart will always be in the South. I will always revere Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart, James Longstreet, A. P. Hill, Dick Ewell, “Allegheny” Johnson, Albert Sidney Johnston, Patrick Cleburne, Bedford Forrest, William Lamb, Raphael Semmes, Jefferson Davis and his cabinet, and many others who were faithful in their duties to home and country. I will try to live up to their example. But it is not only leaders such as these, the ones whose names are in the histories, whose example I emulate. . . .

In the South, there was no money for monuments after the War. Confederate monuments are almost always smaller than those in the towns across the North. The one in the county next over from where I grew up is smaller even than most. It can be found behind an old church on the edge of the little town that is the county seat, and dates from about 1910, when the people of the county finally scraped up enough money to hire a local stonecarver to make it. It is a boy, a teenager, in slouch hat and ragged clothes, barefoot, musket in hand. He looks across the field to the hills that he doubtless loved, and perhaps never saw again after he marched off to the war. I will try, as well, to live up to his example, and the example of those home-guard militiamen buried on the hill near my home, stubbornly persevering in duty and love of country even in defeat.

Inscribed on the monument is just one sentence, a quote from Lee: "There is a true glory and a true honor: the glory of duty done -- the honor of integrity of principle."

Northern politicians will not appreciate the determination and pluck of the South, and Southern politicians do not appreciate the numbers, resources, and patient perseverance of the North. Both sides forget that we are all Americans. I foresee that our country will pass through a terrible ordeal, a necessary expiation, perhaps, for our national sins....

The truth is this: The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope. - Robert E. Lee

----
I wrote this several years ago on my LiveJournal page. It is perhaps worth revisiting today in honor of Mr. Lee, who passed from this mortal life on October 12, 1870.

O God, who hast brought us near to an innumerable company of angels and to the spirits of just men made perfect: Grant us during our earthly pilgrimage to abide in their fellowship, and in our heavenly country to become partakes of their joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen. (BCP p. 198)

Libraries

The library for my home town occupied a small room in the War Memorial Building with a Sherman tank in the front yard by the flagpole, exactly one mile from our house. To a little boy, the War Memorial Building was vast, smelling of times long disappeared, with high ceilings and dark wainscoting and dust and flies buzzing and adults going about their business (for some of the county offices were there, spilling over from the court house across the street). My mother used to bring me to the room in the back that said in black letters painted on the frosted-glass window: “Public Library.”

Inside, there was a small wooden desk with an ancient white-haired lady seated behind it; she must have been at least fifty years old (and closer to seventy by the time I left high school). As I would learn, she was kind to children so long as they were quiet, and I was, partly because I never encountered another child there. Normally, my mother and I (and perhaps my sister) were the only patrons in the room, but occasionally there would be other ladies whom my mother always knew, and they would exchange pleasantries (in whispers, of course). There was one goodly-sized oak table in the middle of the room with wooden chairs around it, and a ceiling fan turned lazily on high.

And there were books. Three walls of the room were shelved from floor to ceiling, with a ladder that could be used for the higher shelves. Tall books, short books, paperbacks (not many of those), hardbacks, most of them old, some of them (I would now realize, were I to return) dating to the mid-nineteenth century.

In the book “Rocket Boys,” which was set in a nearby county and in a time just a bit earlier than that of which I speak, one of the teenage “rocket boys,” Quentin Wilson, had read every book in the McDowell County Library. That made me feel better, for by the age of seventeen I had at least opened and sampled every book in our library, and had been forcibly impressed by my experiences at school that this was Not Done, not by anyone who had hope of a social life.

Some of the books in the library, especially the adult contemporary fiction of the time, I quickly laid aside as “boring.” Some of the books were so far over my head that I found no connection with them. But I believe that many books have their own time and place for us, and wait until we are ready for them, and early experiences may pave the way.

I especially devoured anything that had to do with science or mathematics -- thinking back, I do not recall anything whatsoever about music, my other passion as a teenager, not even a music dictionary. Nor do I recall anything in a language other than English. The card catalogue, guarded by the ancient librarian on her desk, was one unit of three side-by-side drawers: Subject, Title, Author.
In truth, I spent relatively little time in that room, except when I would take one of the reference books over to the big table and read for a while; mostly, I checked books out to take home, armloads at a time.

From there, I went to college. Not just any college, but a school with one of the major research libraries in the United States. My chief memories of freshman orientation are three: the fine gothic Chapel, the quarters of the music department (a dilapidated pile that would be condemned as unfit for human occupation the next summer), and the card catalogue room of the library, with the circulation desk nearby: a roomful of cards, several times the size of our entire library back home. The ancient and kindly librarian at her desk was replaced by squadrons of busy work-study students, processing books in and out and with no time for nonsense from callow freshmen. And the “real” librarians, those in charge? They would no more notice a lowly undergraduate than a gnat.

I spent little time there; it was not a place to linger, and the music library (where I later became one of those busy work-study students) was on the other campus. But I still dream of that place sometimes, usually in one of my frantic-search-for-something dreams. And I found one little corner that I liked. It was the Classical Studies collection, which was in the furthest corner of a sub-basement with utilitarian metal shelving, and at the end of some of the rows against the wall, small metal desks and chairs of (probably) World War II vintage. It was a good place to get away from everyone, for almost no one ever visited these old books, row upon row of them in Latin and Greek, with more scholarly commentaries than there were primary texts, and shelves full of journals, covered with years of dust. I hope they haven’t been consigned to a landfill, for we might still need what is in these dusty old books.

In later years, I used to visit another small town Appalachian library, the only one in the county. It was on the ground floor of what had once been a bank, and had more enthusiasm and space than money or books. Despite their limits, they served as the cultural focus for the county in many and creative ways, which were lost on most of the people in the community. But it was a haven for the score or so of us who cared about books and ideas. When I moved away from that county, I donated most of my books to them, including some that I wish I had kept.

My graduate school was strictly a music school, with an excellent (if specialized) library, clean and modern and efficient, and the finest reference librarian I have encountered. She is retired now, and I still see her at Hymn Society conventions. As always with every library since my first, I lacked the time to do more than sample the riches that were in the collection -- the tall bound volumes indexed in Historical Collections and Monuments of Music -- things like the Denkmäler Deutscher Tonkunst or Tudor Church Music, or the collected works of Beethoven, and Bach, and Mozart, and Haydn, and pretty much anyone else that would come to mind. I remember one fine spring day, my exams complete, every paper submitted, my degree work complete, when I spent the entire day there, browsing. It was heavenly.

Later still, there was yet another small town. Its library was a fine Victorian mansion, donated to the town some years before. The large central reading room on the ground floor, with newspapers and other periodicals, had comfortable high wingbacked chairs. One could settle in with a magazine or book and read for hours, with the tall windows, their glass wavy with age, overlooking a flower garden and tree-shaded lawns sloping down to the river. It was on the way home from work, and I stopped there almost every day to read the news, both in print and online. For they had computers, two of them, with Internet connections, something we did not have at home or at the church.

This library was an unmatched place to browse, for the collection was divided up into the many rooms of the old house, all with their tall windows and wide windowsills. One room that was perhaps unique was what the librarians called the “Little Boys’ Room.” It was in the basement, and housed books that had been bequeathed by an engineer in the town and maintained as a special collection in his honor. I loved it: a whole room of books on science and technology, with special emphasis on architecture, boat-building, automobiles, motorcycles, airplanes, and space travel.

Nowadays, I have cards for two libraries. The one close to the church is larger and has an excellent collection; the one in the nearby town where I live is friendlier. I love that place, and wish I could spend days there. It is filled with comfortable places to read or work; there is a little cafe right there, and a natural-foods cooperative five minutes’ walk away with excellent sandwiches. It is a sufficient collection with pretty much anything I would want -- and if it doesn’t have it, I can try the larger library by the church.

Finally, there is our own library at home, or I should say two libraries -- for my office at the church is more library than office. At home, my wife and I each have our own desks, both of which she made. Hers is a genuinely fine piece of furniture; mine is smaller and utilitarian, but still, being from her hand, priceless to me. There are plenty of books within reach without rising from my chair, and my computer (on which I write most of these Music Box essays) is to the right. There is almost always a cat nearby -- as I write, she is sleeping on the cherry chest to my left. There is a fine view of the sky, and all the comforts of home are close at hand.

Most of all, there are books. Many of these books are my old friends -- though there are, when I think about it, far too many books that I own but have not yet read, probably more than I can ever read. I still want to read them just as much as the day I bought them, but other things have taken precedence.

The books overflow the library into the front room, where the Harvard Classics reside next to my rocking chair. They came into my life after college where I bought the whole (incomplete and somewhat battered) set at a Planned Parenthood booksale. For the years that followed, they were the core of my “collection.” My wife made a bookcase out of scrap wood specifically to fit them, along with my Classics Club volumes. That was a mail-order book club to which I subscribed in the late 1970’s; every two months brought a shipment of two volumes until the set was complete, and at the outset one selected which volumes were desired. I used it to fill in the gaps in the Harvard set. I got behind on the Classics Club books, and still have not quite read them all (six remain, all of them nineteenth century novels), but I did make it through the Harvard Classics and know them well enough to find what I want in them readily enough.

Every good book, even the non-fiction books on technical subjects (such as Strong’s Concordance, mentioned a few weeks ago), takes its reader into its own universe. It may be the world of King David and Asaph and the Sons of Korah which one enters through their language, or (to name a few titles within reach) Marcus Aurelius, or Anton Bruckner (a biography), or Aesop’s Fables, or the Army of Northern Virginia (“Lee’s Lieutenants” by Douglas Southall Freeman, the companion volume to his biography of R.E.L.) and the wider scenes of that conflict (Shelby Foote’s three-volume history, “Civil War”), or A Field Guide to Trees and Shrubs, or the Federalist Papers, or T. S. Eliot, or the fictional land of Chalion, with Cazaril and the Five Gods (Lois McMaster Bujold, with Miles Vorkosigan and his friends beside the Chalion books), or Flatland, or the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or The Food and Drink of Mexico.

In some respects, books make civilization possible. And disdain for books hastens its decline. This puts librarians, along with booksellers, readers, and others who love books, on the front lines.