marshalling carols
Nov. 25th, 2004 12:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
incandescensAwayday all over, thank goodness. Now I can get back to doing the minutes from Monday's meeting.
Wait . . . I thought I didn't like doing minutes. Bother.
Hm. Sophistry alert. While I don't let myself put my Christmas music CDs on before the start of Advent, I have just been uploading a lot of my favourite carols onto the computer, and will shift them to my iPod shortly. Just in preparation for Sunday, she says hastily. I haven't listened to them yet. And I've been picking my favourite ones -- no more having to endure a dozen performances of Silent Night. (Not that I particularly dislike Silent Night, but everyone sings it. I'd rather have stuff like the Apple Tree Carol, or Britten's Ceremony of Carols, or Masters in this Hall, or, well, you get the idea.)
(Ah, good, I thought I had a recording of Of The Father's Heart Begotten. I love that one.)
---
Musee des Beaux Arts
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 or just walking dully
along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
-- W. H. Auden
Wait . . . I thought I didn't like doing minutes. Bother.
Hm. Sophistry alert. While I don't let myself put my Christmas music CDs on before the start of Advent, I have just been uploading a lot of my favourite carols onto the computer, and will shift them to my iPod shortly. Just in preparation for Sunday, she says hastily. I haven't listened to them yet. And I've been picking my favourite ones -- no more having to endure a dozen performances of Silent Night. (Not that I particularly dislike Silent Night, but everyone sings it. I'd rather have stuff like the Apple Tree Carol, or Britten's Ceremony of Carols, or Masters in this Hall, or, well, you get the idea.)
(Ah, good, I thought I had a recording of Of The Father's Heart Begotten. I love that one.)
---
Musee des Beaux Arts
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 or just walking dully
along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
-- W. H. Auden
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no subject
Date: 2004-11-25 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-25 09:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-25 05:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-25 05:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-25 09:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-25 01:03 pm (UTC)(Yeah, I don't really know why I sang in the carol concert either... although the songs were nice enough.)
The one I liked best to sing was Ideo Gloria In Excelsis Deo (actually, I'm not sure if that was its name or just the chorus.)
no subject
Date: 2004-11-25 02:07 pm (UTC)Hm. The only carol I can think of offhand with "ideo gloria in excelsis deo" in the chorus is "Personent hodie" in the last verse.
Omnes clericuli,
Pariter pueri,
Cantent ut angeli,
Invenisti mundo
Laudes tibi fundo
Ideo gloria in excelsis deo!
(I'm sure other carols have it somewhere too, though.)