The Chelmsford Cathedral Festival is on at the moment and on Sunday night the Husband and I want to a concert at the Cathedral by Opus Anglicanum. This is a group of six unaccompanied male singers, somewhat in the style of the King's Singers, complemented by a reader who was a former announcer from the BBC World Service. The term Opus Anglicanum (English Work) originally described early medieval English needlework internationally prized for its intricacy, workmanship and brilliance. The name mirrors the type of music produced by the group, which tends to be complex, intricate and beautiful. I understand that the group tends to travel around music festivals.
The performance was called "The Seeds of Love" and is based on the activities of (what I think was called) the English Folk Music Society which from the end of the 19th Century until the 1920's was working to record many of the old traditional English folk tunes, before they disappeared forever. The concert comprised readings of exerpts from the proceedings of the Society and also information from the diaries, letters and writings of Ralf Vaughn Williams, George Butterworth, Cecil Sharp and Percy Grainger which frequently described how some songs were known by one generation but not the next. The musical element of the programme comprised some extremely well executed and beautiful versions of the folk songs. The performance was light and witty but at the same time also made me think seriously of how easy it is for some arts, crafts and pasttimes to become extinct from one generation to the next. One tends to forget how ephemeral parts of our lives can be.
2 comments:
As to the festival: it sounds wonderful. Perhaps, just as we make the mistakes of our grandparents rather than those of our parents, we also enjoy more the arts of our (figurative) grandparents. Fortunately, it has become harder and harder to lose anything forever, what with all the media that are useful for preserving the arts. Of course, it is not an un-mixed blessing. Too many media are wasted on too much trivia. (Just let me do the deciding what is art and what is trivia, please!)
Cop Car
To my mind beauty is something that should be appreciated and treasured forever. The thing is that the concept of what is an art or craft and what should be recorded changes over time. Not just the old folk music of the past. Another example is the BBC. Many, many classic tv series of the past (i.e. some episodes of classic comedies like Dads Army etc) have been lost forever because the BBC at that time decided that it wasn't worth keeping them and so wiped the tapes. So, a few years ago a plea went out to anyone who had kept copies of programmes, with a promised amnesty against prosecution for illegal taping of BBC programmes (this was, of course, before the arrival of videos). That cry for these programmes is still out and occasionally programmes thought lost have been found - like that episode of Dad's Army that surfaced recently which was originally lost because the BBC didn't think there was any need to keep it.
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