The Garden of Song: Ceremony of Carols

            OK, now it's officially the holiday season. I am blown away by "A Ceremony of Carols" by British composer Benjamin Britten, as I am every year. This year, however, we got to hear a live performance -- chorus and harp -- by the Plymouth Festival Chorus who, if I cannot promote them to angels, deserve some kind of special recognition for a heavenly performance.

            It was a holiday present in itself to hear the piece performed live as it should be, both strong and sweet with thundering moments of 20th century hijinks. But the performance also provoked my curiosity about why "Ceremony" stirs and pleases us the way it does. I do not have any answers, but it's fun to poke around in the sources.

            The concert program describes the work as 11 movements, two for solo harp, and the others musical settings of nine poems for voices. The texts date from 1300 to 1500, but the music is very 20th century.

            The leads to the question (which I have no intention of answering): wheresoever he got the texts, how did he hear them as song?

            The standard explanation of how the composer came to create a choral piece "that everybody loves" -- evidence: a dozen performances this month in the Boston area; countless in England -- is that while stopping in Halifax, Canada, during a treacherous ocean crossing in 1942 from New York to London, Britten picked up an anthology of old British poetry and spent the days of the hazardous cruise locked up in his stateroom creating resplendent musical settings for these old poems.

            I've recently read another account that traces the source of some of these so-called "carols" to a 14th century manuscript acquired and preserved by the founder of the British Museum, Hans Sloane, that preserves an extensive collection of medieval Christmas carols. Sloane's manuscript is said to be the sole source of some of the best loved songs in "Ceremony" -- “I syng of a mayden” and “Adam lay ybounden.”

            I do not know how to assess either of these foundation tales, but I doubt whether any scholarly or biographical take on the composer's doings can explain where he got the music for settings that manage to sound like: the Middle Ages, the Christmas season, a rousing good choir practice by a heavenly host of thoroughly modern English-speaking voices.

            Looking at the lyrics in the texts, however, tells us something about how different the world that produced them is from that which came after. Lots of Latin here. The English church in these centuries was wholly Roman Catholic, its worship conducted in church Latin. The church Latin of the opening "Procession" is so simple that my eighth grade Latin class still holds up.

            "Hodie Christus natus est." All you have to know is that "hodie" means today and you can figure the rest out. The remainder, a mere five lines, is on the same level.

            Some of the other texts are described as Middle English. To my eye they don't look as "foreign" as Chaucer's Middle English, but they preserve some of the English tongue's old words that are rooted in the Saxon (or early Germanic) and preserve the flavor of the locals' barbaric tongue the Normans looked down on when they took over the place in 1066. Middle English has a lot of French roots and sounds added to the old Anglo-Saxon tongue.

            The second song, "Wolcum Yole," attributed to Anonymous 14th century has that Saxon taste in the ear, though only the slightest of adjustment of the title takes us the modern version of this familiar phrase. But the text is full of references to a religious world-view that is pre-Reformation England. We have martyrs ("Wolcum Thomas marter one"), saints ("Wolcom be ye Stevene and Jon") and  the "Queen of Bliss." These phrases and ideas they refer to would disappear from public discourse when the Protestant reform gained sway over Tudor England.

            Chanted expressions of joy such as that invocation to "Stevene and Jon" bring associations obvious to Anon.'s 14th century audience but not to me. I have to look up who Saint Stephen was (he shows up in Good King Wenceslas's "On the feast of Stephen" as well) and find him described as the "first Christian martyr," stoned to death for teaching an unpopular gospel in Jerusalem. Those medieval Christians sure held on to their martyrs.   

          Anon. 14th century is also credited with "There is no Rose," a carol that sends me groping back to the origins of the English rose. The first two lines are heard often: "There is no rose of such vertu/As is the rose that bare Jesu."

            The rest of the text is doctrinal filler. It's the medieval English fascination (or obsession) with the rose that gets to me. I think the rose symbolizes the mystical something at the center of all things. That mystery appears in nature's rose, in the delicate and complicated layers of the flower's flesh. It's red, like blood. And when you get to the center of the rose, what's there? The inexplicable. That no one home. God is in the world, and yet out of it too.

            One of the most important --in its day -- medieval texts was a long "poem" called "The Romance of the Rose." Other poems or authors refer to it, but nobody teaches it today. When I search it in online references I am rather set down to learn that much of this didactic poem is spent on talking young men out of homosexuality, and that the rose is regarded as symbolic of the the female sexual organ. Sorry I asked.

            Then the whole English medieval period climaxes in "The War of the Roses."

            Frankly, I'm much happier with the two lines that begin the 14th century carol "There is no Rose." And quite transported with what Britten does with it. That's the bottom line as well for the rest of the songs in the "Ceremony of Carols."

            It's music of parts that somehow fit together like a ceremony, an observance, a thanksgiving of the spirit, a work of art that worships the wonder of existence.

            It's a ceremony that evokes nostalgia, peace, and a sense that those higher things we are always supposed to be concerned with turn out to be all around us.

The Last of the Harvest

Thanksgivukkah has come and gone. I think we may have finished off the harvest as well.

            The last tomatoes went into the seasons-ending so-called minestrone soup, my name for any vegetable soup that relies on tomato flavoring of some sort.

            It was Sunday evening, the end of the weekend, the last weekend of the kids' visit. We have planned to attend a big end-of-weekend event, dinner out and a concert by the latest "desert blues" singer I found mention of in the Globe. He has a new album and is performing in a "club" I have never heard of. But it's on Church Street in Harvard Square, a familiar street, so I picture a put-together hall in a church basement. Nope! I am very, very wrong. 

           Sunday afternoon we investigate this venue we have never heard of on a street I think I know. Website indications are this venue is the latest, coolest place, owned by the same company that has opened similar venues in New York City -- in Brooklyn, for god's sake! The website photos show closely packed tables. But one also shows a large crowd standing, people closely packed, below a stage.

            That photo gives us pause. We discuss all the possible permutations. The older participants among the family group hate stand-up clubs. We have walked into other venues and said, "Where are the seats?" The old people clutter against the walls in the back, rubbing elbows with the dust heap of history. Wait a minute [we think], this was our music! We loved this music! What have you done to our music?

            I suppose if you don't go to live popular music shows for 40 years, you have to expect they've changed some. I had been ready to reserve tickets, but I hesitate.

            A little while later I learn that Sonya's cold has slid back on her, a kind of Sisyphean image of what you don't want to happen when you're rolling that stone. "I was out last night," she says. "I need a night in." This surprising piece of self-knowledge me as both a wonderful idea in itself, and a way out of the dilemma of dealing with "standing venues."

            Hence the need to substitute minestrone soup, made from available materials, for a wild night out. It starts off as stone soup.

            We don't actually use stones, but we do have the remains of the tomato harvest that have been ripening, rotting, or merely resting on a couple of kitchen window sills. They came indoors as green tomatoes when the weather got cold enough to threaten all backyard produce with extinction. A few large ones have gone from green to red to old. They go into the pot. Lots of cherry tomatoes are in a so-so state. I inspect them, pass judgment. I cut the winners in half and throw them into the pot. Most of those called but not chosen go into the compost bin.

            The other ingredients are rummaged from the refrigerator while I pretend to consult a recipe. No, we don't have a head of cabbage. But we do have plastic bag with the remains of some homegrown purple kale I picked for another dish I'm not saying when. Kale is hardy stuff; besides the color always draws comment. Any leftover garlic from the few small-sized bulbs we grew this year? Toss it in. Herbs? I devote the last of the rosemary harvest to this project. We dried lots of our oregano; it the annual star of the perennial herb garden. I sprinkle lightly.

            Other ingredients were grown elsewhere, many of them by a farm in Plympton that pays weekly visits to Quincy in the growing season. The sweet red pepper. I like potatoes in vegetable soup; they grow them in Plympton. Oh, and the squash. I like winter squash in -- well -- everything. Not your typical Mediterranean vegetable, but I peel the skin off and chop the flesh into cubes. It will have plenty of time to cook in the soup.

            Meanwhile Anne chops the onion, the garlic, carrots (Plympton again), the potatoes, and anything else I've forgotten.

            The recipe I've largely substituted for on a one-to-one basis calls for a huge infusion of vegetable stock. We have less than half the desired amount on hand, but with the tomatoes and some water I think we'll make it.

            Happily, the soup turns out well. Anne has whipped up a cornbread to go with it. We have a successful, and yes, needed, "night in." Sonya was right. The trendy new music club, with its own restaurant (from which you cannot see or hear the concert), goes on without us. We huddle in front her laptop instead and watch a wicked intense TV spy drama called "The Americans."

            It's somehow satisfying that the last odds and ends of the harvest end up in a family meal some time after Thanksgiving. Well, there still is some pesto from our homegrown basil in the freezer. And some dried herbs.

            And, confess, a few plants -- annuals -- saved from winter's scythe are huddling indoors in quiet corners. Some of these even have flowers.
            (Photo: Top photo is a New Guinea impatiens. The second, a hibiscus annual, was taken outdoors in August. The plant is indoors now, making new buds.)

Hawk on the Feeder

            The birds materialized quickly and in large numbers from -- I don't know where -- as soon we began feeding them once again. We take summers and harvest months off from bird-feeding, times when nature appears to be doing the job without our meddling.

            Some people feed birds all year round of course. And summer days will find many people throwing bread crumbs on the water wherever fowl have gathered to swim and feed and nest. Other parks have signs admonishing "Don't feed the birds."

            There's never a "thou shalt not" sign without a reason. We humans don't have to be told not to feed the birds unless we want to.

            I realize the deeper question is why do so many people, most of us it seems, like birds so much. Oh, we play favorites. We love colorful birds more than plain ones. We like birds with melodic calls or songs more than those that squawk, scold, rasp, quarrel, or pick fights over food. We like birds that are very big or very small. Eagles, hawks, and herons impress us. Finches, chickadees and hummingbirds -- the last especially -- charm us. Others strike us as brown, unremarkable, indistinct, hard to tell apart.

            We like birds that stick around with us all winter -- hence the bird-feeding posse. We like the flash of color from the purple finches at the winter feeder. The tawny grosbeaks. The various red-capped woodpeckers. We adore a cardinal in the snow. But we're also delighted by the return of the summer soldiers and sunshine patriots who return in the spring. When the swallows come back to Capistrano. (Where is that anyway?) And consider the folklore that attends the robin redbreast -- "the first robin of spring"; when you see one you know that winter is over -- even though many robins these days winter over with us yankees.

            We don't have the same feeling for squirrels or rodents or many other of our mammalian cousins, even though they are a lot closer to us on the tree of life than birds. Our feathered friends, after all, are really highly evolved late-stage reptiles, specially adapted to turn skin into feathers. They do not bear their young live. They do not suckle them. They teach them how to fly, or so we are told, and then kick them out of the nest.

            Try that at home.

            You get a better education, certainly a longer one, from Momma Bear. Dogs, it appears, are perfectly capable of welcoming their pups into their pack on an extended basis. Since dogs are such social animals, it's not surprising that people take to them. They exhibit cruder versions of clearly recognizable behavior. They can't wait to get out of the house and go around sniffing for news. So do we.

            But even those of us who do not have dogs wish to "keep" birds around us. Not in our houses, not in cages (a habit preserved more widely in other societies), but nearby so that we can watch them. We like to watch them do the simplest birdlike things: fly, perch, flutter, eat. We have bird feeders so we can watch them dive down, flutter, hover, shoulder in among the others, grab a peck at a tiny portal in a glass feeder. Slobber some extras over the ground for the squirrels.

            It's diverting. Then we try to figure out who they are. Identically flocking, chirping sparrows? A nasty crow? A clumsy, nervous pigeon, ready at any moment to utter a piteous cry and flounder, loudly rifling wings as if to advertise its availability as hawk-food. Then come the smooth, small, neatnicks: black-capped chickadee, smartly crested tufted titmouse, flashing finches, stylish dark-eyed juncos.

            So even though I am also quite impressed by hawks, raptors, broadwings, Accipters, and am perfectly delighted to meet them under other circumstances, I have mixed feelings about seeing them perched on top of my feeder. It's a visual treat to find one there -- so long as it remains a rare treat.

            We've seen hawks swoop through the yard and scatter the peons before, royalty arriving and taking sole possession of the stage, all the lesser creatures doing their disappearance act. Sometimes the hawk perches on a nearby branch, surveying the scene.

            This time the creature, one of the smaller species, perched directly on top of the feeder as if to pose for the viewing audience. When we realized what was on show, we grabbed binoculars and camera, but still utterly failed to make a convincing identification. Sharp-shinned hawk (top photo, from the internet) or cooper's hawk, the smaller entries, were my bets; and those two from what I can gather from the references are remarkably difficult to distinguish. My through-the-window photo was fuzzy, vague, useless. (Photo below; look hard, it's in the center.)

            Obviously we have a lot of learn about hawks, so I wouldn't mind if this preening fellow returns occasionally for a turn on top of the feeder, where we can try to get a more educated look at him.

            But not all the time. We want to see all the little guys do their stuff as well. Besides we're more fond of them as birds than as lunch.

The Garden of the Wild: Winter Walks

            A walk in the winter is like a slap in the face.

            Thanks, we say, we needed that.

            It's stunningly cold in central New York the week before Thanksgiving. We leave in bitter wind and driving snow to travel south and east to western Massachusetts, barely a whiff of traffic the whole way, and leave the turnpike just as the sun begins to fade behind the hills.

            Arctic winds drove frigid temperatures south to northern New York and New England. We don't know inside a heated car how far they have surged into Massachusetts. Winter caught us in New York, but we didn't walk in it. From house to car was far enough for "frigid" to make its point.

            But now the sky is clear as glass, or pure water maybe, or some sort of polished gem, in the golden hour of the fleeting day. The slanted light turns the leaf-stripped brown hills a reddish-gold. The beauty of a familiar landscape revealed in freeze-dried air makes us forget the temperature. The wind is here in force too, as if determined to shake everything from the sky but sky itself, to blow away all on earth not nailed down or rooted in the crust.

            The sky has turned deep pink when we check in to our hotel and when we emerge fifteen or twenty minutes later to walk up an appetite for dinner, twilight has deepened to a last red gash and darkness claimed nine-tenths of the sky. It's a stunning twilight, a winter night, the first one I've been out in this year. Wind has done its work, the chill makes my face, the only exposed part of me, tingle and burn. But the night's deepening burnish drives us wildly on, up one street and down another. Familiar streets, yet never encountered before on a wild early-winter night.

            By the next day I've learned my lesson. Wear a scarf, the others tell me, across your face. I'm out for a brief walkabout before breakfast and a chance to audition various approaches to wrapping a flap of scarf across the lower organs of my face while still permitting some breathing, not to mention the possibility of hearing a little something now and then.While I consider my senses, the wind unwinds it.

            Cloudless and scoured by dry frigid air, the world is brilliantly lit, sun-filled and stereo-clear. Every mere molecule of moisture has been sent some somewhere else on its way to the water cycle. The clarion light makes the world both new and silent. I stop every few feet to register where I am. Is that a body moving behind the glass walls of a shop? Nothing moves on the sidewalk.

            Returning to the hotel I report the day: shockingly cold, stunningly beautiful.

            It gets warmer, under the sun, and we drive to an Audubon Preserve we haven't visited in years. The solitude is abetted here by the big sign that says "Preserve Closed Monday." We lift the chain and step within.

            Do you have a calendar, Tworkis? I ask. No, Boris, Tworkis replies, I surely do not have a calendar. Besides, my name is Natasha.

            It must have been Monday, because no other human being crossed our path.

            It has not snowed on the wooded hills and dells here, but it has already iced. We discover the places and traces of long-ago on summers and autumns, but we have never walked this frozen, leaf-strewn earth of late November when the cold sun is probing the forest for its winter secrets. The running brook crossed by the wooden bridge is nine-tenths frozen, the ice molding the history of its flow, where it rose and overflowed, where it sped fast and narrow.

            We work our way over to the beaver pond, our name for this place when we were stunned and intrigued to find sure signs of beaver habitation long ago. The dams across a narrow arm of the pond, compounded up brush and branches and new green growth. The lodge of pyramided tree pieces, cut from the forest. The telltale pointy surface of cannibalized trees, the exposed tree flesh carved by beaver teeth.  

            We trail-trudge on, impelled by the beauty of the place. Shapes, barks, mosses, predatory twisting vines, canopies of pine and evergreen. Textures and layers. A few of those still red-berried bushes, lighting up a patch of thicket through a spare tangle. Curves beneath our feet, winding us up a hill and back down until we retrace our way back along the beaver's pond.

            Winter hurries its hours through the afternoon. By the time we have returned to our lodging, fed a little, drunk hot tea, thickened our blood with over-rich brownies,and otherwise recovered (cue the snoring), the sun is playing tricks with us, threatening to hide itself again behind the mountain. We dash out once more, this time finding the overview in a nearby nature park open even on Monday. Open to us, at least, since no one else puts in an appearance. We watch sky purple, and a continent of clouds advance slowly over our heads, behind us, surrounding us.

            The next day we our luck is even better. It snows.