“We have heard the chimes at midnight…”

When I first read about the film Chimes at Midnight as part of the Orson Welles legend its cast alone seemed to guarantee the perfect maverick independent Shakespeare adaptation. It included a properly famous Shakespearian (John Gielgud), a older British actress of colourful reputation (Margaret Rutherford), a glamorous foreign actress (Jeanne Moreau), a glamorous foreign actor (Fernando Rey), a young British actor who by the 1980s I knew something about (Norman Rodway), a young British actor who by the 1980s I knew nothing about (Keith Baxter) and of course Welles himself, altogether personifying the mix of 15th century English society on an inappropriately continental shooting location.

Whenever in my youth I saw Welles being interviewed, he seemed almost to be boasting, and certainly was flippant, about those of his film projects which were never completed. Gradually I decided that was evidence of his own lack of self-discipline as much as of any timidity or churlishness or philistinism of producers and financiers.

As a modern comparison, Kenneth Branagh, who has the same admiration for Welles as any of the rest of us (shown for instance by the Citizen Kane homage in Dead Again), has got rather more stuff made than Welles did, and has done so, as far as I can judge, simply by hard work. Not all of those films and theatre productions have been great, although a good proportion have been. Branagh is a man with a lot of self-belief, but surely no more self-belief than Welles – although Welles always seemed to possess more than anyone else perhaps because of his precocious early success as well as his large physical size. Welles was perhaps one of the first media boasters in those earlier days of talk shows, but, in the decades which have followed, he has been fully matched by a long contemporary queue of very average writers, musicians and film-makers – their latest product often openly advertised on screen behind their seat – who have sought to persuade us of their greatness. That self-promotion process is now aided by more deferential interviewers who collude with the publicity staff to censor inappropriate questions which might make their man/woman seem too ordinary.

So, Chimes of Midnight, one of those Welles pet projects which got completed: how does it look now – both as part of the Welles canon and as a film version of Shakespeare’s two Henry IV plays? Well, its length is a comfortable two hours – a common practice in those more competitive cinema-going times and which now looks all the more admirable and restrained in these days of fantasy and super-hero movies clocking in at thirty minutes longer.

It is also visually rich, accomplished by the black and white photography, of Spain substituting happily for England, with many attractive landscapes, medieval castles where light pours through the narrow high windows and the Boar’s Head tavern in Eastcheap convincing in its brickwork, rafters and barn-like proportions.

The visuals show the distinctive Welles fondness for sharp angles and for mixing close-ups of faces with equally effective longer shots with people small against large buildings or open landscape; also repeated patterns of vertical lines, of trees in the forest for the robbery in Gadshill matched with rows of spears in Westminster Abbey and on the battlefield and the prisoners’ gibbets afterwards.

That battle of Shrewsbury where Henry IV and his son Prince Hal defeat the rebellious Percy family is noisy and violent, significantly different to the colourful depiction of Agincourt in Olivier‘s Henry V, its smoke and mud more evocative of World War One.

Welles drew from his international cast many fine performances, which for me include particularly all of Gielgud’s scenes as Henry IV and also the Eastcheap scenes involving Falstaff, Hal, Poins, Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, both the carefree ones at the start and the more melancholy at the end. And also from himself, convincingly huge and debauched and old as Falstaff although he was only 50 years of age, ten years younger than Branagh is now…

The navel of the world

In ancient Greece, for several centuries, the community of Delphi, on Mount Parnassus, was regarded as the navel, or centre of the world. This was because it was the location of a temple to the god Apollo, and because some of the women who resided there were regarded as having supernatural powers to pass on advice from the gods.

2500 years later, the place is still one which people travel from long distances to visit.

On the slopes sit the striking ruins of many buildings from those centuries before Christ, such as the Temple of Apollo itself and the Athenian Treasury.

The nearby museum houses many other impressive relics from that time: the Sphinx of Naxos, the Kouros statues of two young men, the group of statues which were the votive offering of the prominent citizen Daochos and the bronze statue of a charioteer.

A sound of the South

One of the features of the Ken Burns documentary series The Civil War which made it so memorable when first screened in the UK in 1991 (alongside its use of archive photos, traditional music and a varied ensemble of narrative voices) was the contributions of Shelby Foote, the Mississippi writer. He seemed so hugely knowledgeable about the American Civil War and his accent and tone were so distinctively melodious – although his opinions were later sometimes judged as controversial because too sympathetic to the Confederacy.

In the years just after the Civil War, as new towns developed further west boosted by cattle-trading, mining and the building of railways, a famous real-life character who originated from the same south-eastern region as Foote was John “Doc” Holliday. He was a dentist who travelled west to find a better climate for his poor health and who later became a professional gambler and all-round adventurer who shared in many of the exploits of the equally famous Wyatt Earp.

Not the actual O.K. Corral, but part of the Little Hollywood Land movie set museum in Kanab, Utah, a district where many Western films were shot from the 1930s onwards. Photographed in 2010.

Two of the early cinema portrayals of Holliday made him relatively conventional – those by Victor Mature in My Darling Clementine and Kirk Douglas in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Since he was secondary to Wyatt Earp in the drama of the O.K. Corral, the sketch of an educated man who had a taste for risk and violent action seemed to provide enough material for the film-makers to work with.

However, in two more recent characterisations – released coincidentally within a few months of each other in 1993 and 1994 – different approaches were taken.

The performances both of Val Kilmer in Tombstone and Dennis Quaid in Wyatt Earp played strongly on his Southern accent and flamboyant delivery and mannerisms, also impacted by tuberculosis and substance abuse. These elements altogether conveyed a personality which was socially markedly different from the men around him, and also alluring and romantic and sinister.

Uncovering some of the archaeology of Alan Garner

Recently I read my first new Alan Garner novel for 40 years: Treacle Walker, which unexpectedly had been short-listed for last year’s Booker Prize.

I was hugely struck by similarities in the plot, characters and language of Treacle Walker to those other famous Garner novels from long ago. Was this evidence of Garner’s distinctive style or simply of my attention to those earlier books during my impressionable youth?

The basic plot of Treacle Walker has a young boy, Joe, who lives on his own, meeting a mysterious newcomer with an unusual name who speaks in a way hard to understand. In fact, two such newcomers: the rag and bone man Treacle Walker, and Thin Arwen, the fantastic creature who lives in a bog. Both speak in puzzling sentences using a theatrical/ poetical vocabulary, a bit like the Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Between them, for example, they use “scapulimancer”, “clanjandering” and “furibund” ; “the craven nidget”, “patience, my amblyopic friend”, “me know that pickthank psychopomp”; “move the dish clout and shut your glims” , “I am no coin of Luxembourg” . That immediately made me think of similar characters from the earlier novels: like Malebron, the soldier from Elidor who recruits the help of the four Watson children, or Huw Halfbacon, the old gardener at the isolated house in The Owl Service.

In the BBC radio documentary Archaeology of a Storyteller , the archaeologist Mark Edmunds says that Garner’s novels are also great examples of archaeological writing because of the attention he gives to objects, which therefore assume the status of characters. Even mundane objects, “the kind of things we don’t really notice (and) often overlook (but which are) fundamental to the way in which people shape a sense of home, a sense of who they are”. Another archaeologist, Tim Campbell Greene, adds that archaeologists often use physical remains to tell stories, but they are “constrained by the science”, whereas an author like Garner is free to develop the story of the object in whatever way he wishes.

Sure enough, certain objects are given a significance in Treacle Walker just as they have been in previous novels. So Treacle Walker appears with a chest of crockery for Joe to choose from – many pieces illustrated with figures and scenes – which is reminiscent of the patterned dinner service whose discovery starts the drama of The Owl Service. The donkey-stone he gives to protect Joe’s house recalls the stone axe-head which links the three narratives of Red Shift – and of course a large stone is also one of the four Treasures of Elidor. That the donkey-stone shows the outline of a horse recalls the illustrations on The Owl Service and also the carved bull inside a hill in The Stone Book.

Another object in Treacle Walker is Joe’s catapult which he uses to kill a cuckoo – which recalls the spear which kills the unicorn Findhorn at the end of Elidor. The death of the cuckoo seems to have an apocalyptic impact – “a flame of fire (which) devoured the dark (and) cleansed house (and) blinded Joe” – similar to the death of the unicorn.

Joe reads a weekly comic called Knockout, which to my surprise turned out to be a real publication which ran from the 1930s to the 1960s. His favourite story features Stonehenge Kit the Ancient Brit. This brings to mind that one of the three linked narratives in Red Shift involved a Roman legion in ancient Britain. Knockout‘s characters come to life and cross over to Joe’s home and world, similar to how Malebron uses a planchette to send a message in Elidor and how the ancient Welsh legends of the Mabinogion influence the three teenage characters in The Owl Service.

One walk-on character in Treacle Walker definitely sounds like he comes from a previous book. Joe has a lazy eye, and an unnamed optician is testing his eyes. The tone of his exchanges as he analyses Joe’s particular eyesight and vision recall the interjections of other authority figures: the stepfather Clive in The Owl Service, the parents of Tom in the contemporary story-line in Red Shift. “There’s not a lot wrong with your eyes…what beats me is your sight,” says the optician, and this insight allows Joe to see out of nowhere a sentence in Latin – which inevitably recalls the Roman legion narrative of Red Shift.

And music. The tune played on the bone which Treacle Walker has carved into an instrument – “a tune with wings trampling things…” – recalls the urgent playing by the fiddler at the start of Elidor and the song of Findhorn at its conclusion.

A lot of minutiae there, already, and more connections could be found. What is striking is not only to be able to locate such similarities in Garner’s narratives over 50 years but to compare the ways in which, as I aged, I have responded to the narratives. Also, to reflect on a creative writer who has been covered so sparingly by the media while others have been so exalted and rewarded. And that fiction which was once marketed as standard fare for children at school is now prize-winning work for literary adults.

References:

Garner, Alan (2022 ed) Treacle Walker London: 4th Estate

Garner, Alan (1974) Elidor London: Armada Lions

Garner, Alan (1973) The Owl Service London: Armada Lions

Garner, Alan (1975) Red Shift London: Armada Lions

Garner, Alan (1979) The Stone Book London: Fontana Lions

A music genre without much music

Fight the Power: How Hip-Hop Changed the World was a recent television series which presented four hours of audio and video about the hip-hop music genre – but with almost no discussion of the actual music.

Instead it covered, in vivid archive sound and pictures, the political and social history of African-Americans over the last 50 years, referencing “black power” and the Black Panthers, the “white flight” from the cities, the poverty and gang violence, the “war on drugs”, Hurricane Katrina, the incidents of white police aggression against young black people and the episodes of resistance and protest. Leaders such as Muhammed Ali, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and various Presidents were featured; also victims of violence such as Fred Hampton, Michael Stewart, Rodney King, Trayvon Martin and George Floyd.

Hip-hop consisted of the four separate activities of rapping, break-dancing, graffiti art and DJing, until the four were brought together, around 1973, supposedly by one DJ, Cool Herc. While dancing and movement are still common accompaniments to any live performance or video by a hip-hop artist, the two key sonic elements are surely the vocal rap and the DJ’s production of some music sources.

Here the rapping was given all of the attention. Almost no information was given about the sounds over which the rap vocals were delivered: how they were chosen, who had originally composed or produced them. My understanding is that this sonic background is usually sampled electronically from tracks produced by other artistes, and we did see and hear a little about the early use of scratching and sampling and mixing from vinyl records. Sampling originated because the first hip-hop artists were recording very cheaply and in a small way, but, later, many artists became hugely successful. Yet a rapper almost never seems to perform with a conventional backing band of live musicians. When I have seen the Glastonbury performances of the famous stars like Kendrick Lamar, Jay Z or Kanye West, it always seems to consist of a man shouting over repetitive backing tracks, accompanied by dancers and a large lights and video show. How and why that early economic necessity became the genre’s standard artistic style was never fully explained.

One rare snippet of analysis about the sound of the genre did come in a comparison between the artists of the east coast of the USA, where it had begun, and those of the west coast. The latter’s lyrics concentrated particularly on life under regular police harassment, but the sound was often more mellow: Ice T’s explanation was “East coast is the train, which is more erratic …LA is low rise (and cars) so is smoother…”

There were some other succinct and striking phrases to help audience understanding, like “hip-hop is the bastard child of disco” from Grandmaster Caz., “DJs initially were like bandleaders, like Count Basie” from LL Cool J and, from academic Jody Armour, that the rap artists who became successful in the genre’s first wave were the secular equivalents of church leaders, providing spiritual and moral leadership and guidance.

The programme accorded prominence to “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five in 1982 as one of hip-hop’s milestones. I remember it well: successful as well as artistically respected because its social issue lyrics were allowed space to be heard within a clean and spare music track. Curiously, an earlier worldwide hit was ignored: “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang, built on the recognisable rhythm of a track by Chic.

There were a number of other unexpected omissions in Fight the Power‘s narrative. Of successful tracks built on the samples of well-known tunes like Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” and P.M. Dawn’s “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss”. Or some 1990s artists, often popular and who moved away from the standard sound, like De La Soul, Arrested Development and the Fugees. Or of the practice which became common of blending sung vocals with rap speech, presumably to provide greater variety for audiences.

One of the major hip-hop groups has undoubtedly been Public Enemy. (An earlier Leaf Collecting post recalled a Scottish radio presenter in the late 1980s who suggested that the group was so creatively genre-defining that, if you didn’t like their tracks, you could reassure yourself that hip-hop was simply not your kind of music!) They earned considerable attention in the UK with their politically provocative persona – with such album titles as It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Fear of a Black Planet – and their rhythmic ensemble shouting over tumbling screeching slices of sound. Their track “Fight the Power” featured prominently in Spike Lee’s successful film Do the Right Thing and New Musical Express rated their first two albums the best of 1987 and 1988.

Chuck D of Public Enemy is one of the writers and producers of Fight the Power, so perhaps it is to be expected that his particular view and experience of hip-hop is one which dominates the programme. As he says at one point, a track with no singing and very little music allows no distraction from the rapper’s shouted lyrics – which usually follow themes of political protest and black consciousness.

Although the tone of the programme was one of celebration and veneration, it was still willing to acknowledge some of hip-hop’s less attractive features. Only well into the third hour was there a mention of the misogyny and aggressive machismo of many hip-hop artists: that included a mention of Roxanne Shante who I first heard played on UK radio around 1987, but nothing about Salt-N-Pepa, popular from 1988 until the mid 1990s. In the fourth programme, there was concession that the music and style which had begun as the voice of the marginalised black youth had become very lucrative for certain artists like Puff Daddy, who were thoroughly involved in business and fashion – even to the extent of being filmed with the later less comradely Donald Trump.

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Neal Ascherson, and thoughts about borderlands

The work of the left-wing journalist Neal Ascherson was a great cultural discovery for me in the 1980s. First, his reports for the Observer newspaper at the start of that decade about the political changes in Poland and other parts in Eastern Europe, then, back in the UK a few years later, a series of columns for the paper, which, among other topics, introduced me eloquently to the argument that an independent Scotland might be both independent and socialist. Separately, it was not a total surprise to find that such a thorough and informed chronicler had, in addition, contributed several of the scripts for the Channel 4 documentary series The Spanish Civil War.

Ascherson recently celebrated his 90th birthday, and an article in the Observer drew particular attention to a book he published in 1995 called Black Sea. It had won an award at the time and was now described as his best book. Although I couldn’t remember its original publication, we actually had a paperback copy in the house – bought possibly during a visit to the always enticing book shops of Wigtown. What better man to explain the background to the Russia-Ukraine conflict which has so fascinated the mainstream news media over the last year?

Black Sea is a stimulating book – but it is certainly not a conventional history of the countries in that region. Its untitled chapters include some dense arguments about archaeology and anthropology and biology as well as more easily followed (by me!) sections on history and 1990s affairs.

Ascherson’s experiences are 30 years old now, dating back to the days when the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Warsaw Pact allowed people to hope that we were entering an era of much reduced risk of world war and of tension between the superpowers of the USA and Russia. Nevertheless, I did find a few quotes which offered some relevant insights about the lands north and east of the Black Sea which are currently being fought over.

“To defend one’s home…against invasion seems a right. But to claim unique possession…is a joke. Crimea…has demonstrated this joke in every century of its history. It has no natives, no aboriginals (and) only in recent times has the Crimean truth – that it belongs to everybody and nobody – been violated…(Firstly) Catherine II (“the Great) proclaimed that the Crimean peninsula was henceforth and for all time to become Russian (and secondly) in 1954, Nikita Khruschev, a Ukrainian, seeking to divert the attention of his own people from their miseries, announced that he was transferring Crimea from Russia to become for all time Ukrainian”.

“The (sea) captain who had been stranded ashore for nine months (in Odessa) shrugged when I asked him what he thought about Ukraine’s new found independence as a sovereign state. ‘We have no history. Only party history. Anyway this place is lawless now and nobody is ruling it.- not Ukrainians, not Soviets..’ ”

“A census of ‘native languages’ in Odessa taken in 1897 suggested that more than than 32% of the population spoke Yiddish, while the figure for Russian was only just more than 50%. The third mother tongue was Ukrainian which – in a city now proclaimed to be ancestral Ukrainian territory – was spoken by a mere 5.6%; almost as many Odessans spoke Polish.”

“(The town of) Kerch, resigned to the idea that its position at the eastern tip of Crimea has always made it a target for bombardment and piracy, takes an ironic southern view of politics. Most of the inhabitants I met were Russian; they were satirical about their sudden Ukrainian citizenship, but equally indifferent to the ‘Crimea for Russia’ campaign banging its drum far away at the provincial capital of Simferopol”

In contrast to Ascherson, the modern generation of journalists – mostly television people wedded to the need to show dramatic pictures, but also including print journalists attached to famous old titles – have tended to characterise the events in Ukraine as a clear good-versus-evil struggle focussed around the personalities of the present-day leaders (one young and charismatic and a former actor and television producer, the other old, less attractive and from a military and espionage background) rather than the wider histories of their countries. They also have a noticeable fascination with military hardware. If I didn’t know better, I might fear that some of them, having been too young for the Cold War but having seen and read the work of Ascherson and his contemporaries, are attempting to recreate what they think was that era’s moral certainties and simplicity.

For example, almost no attention is given to the United Nations, the global organisation of which almost all countries in the world are members and which was set up 75 years ago to prevent exactly this kind of war. Why is it failing so tragically in this instance? Why do the richest and most powerful countries of the world seem to be so reluctant to help it succeed?

And NATO: from the very start, the government of Ukraine has made clear that it wished to become a member. But you have to work quite hard to find any media explanation about why it is not yet a member, and why the NATO countries who have provided vocal and military support so readily seem still so unwilling to allow it to join.

Perhaps part of the answers can be found in some of Neal Ascherson’s comments during the last year, more nuanced than most. For example, “Russians and Ukrainians will…have to find their way back together. These are two densely interlaced peoples, who have no business killing each other” and “(Crimea’s) population mostly feels Russian and regarded the peninsula’s attachment to Ukraine, as, at best, a Soviet-era mistake”.

In 2022 and 2023, the territories and boundaries of Ukraine and Russia are being fought over in a particularly painful and hateful way. But, even in the 30 years since Neal Ascherson researched and wrote Black Sea, there have, regrettably, been similar conflicts in other parts of the world: over Serbia/Croatia/Bosnia, within Israel/Palestine, within India/Pakistan, within Sudan, over Kurdistan, and in many other borderlands.

Reference: Ascherson, Neal (1996) Black Sea London:Vintage

More perhaps of the past than the future

Happy New 2023!

According to David Kynaston in Family Britain, Kenneth More was once described as “our best answer to Marlon Brando so far” by none other than Kenneth Tynan, famous critical champion of the new and bold in UK theatre. An eye-catching statement, considering how the acting careers of More and Brando differed, both in their early days and later. As far as I can tell, Tynan was describing More’s performance on stage in 1952 in the original version of Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea, which helped to energise his film career in the early 1950s.

More became one of the most popular screen stars of the 1950s, and his films were still regularly seen on television when I was young in the 1970s. They still do frequently appear on more than one TV channel. This is despite the fact, or perhaps because of it, that More’s screen persona is of a narrow and particular type: someone always cheerful and honourable, brave and resilient and resourceful, whose relationship with women is always open and straightforward rather than lecherous or devious.

So those films were the comedies Genevieve and Doctor in the House and Raising a Riot and the adventures and dramas Reach for the Sky, A Night to Remember, The 39 Steps, North West Frontier and Sink the Bismarck . And their narratives were usually set in the past, either the Victorian or Edwardian era of A Night to Remember, The 39 Steps, North West Frontier, The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw and The Admirable Crichton or the recently ended World War Two of Reach for the Sky and Sink the Bismarck.

In the 1960s, More was less often the star of his films, but was often included in the multi-starred blockbusters of the same heroic stories like The Longest Day and Battle of Britain.

By this time, many of the cinema stars of the past were finding regular work on television in parts large and small. More’s luck or talent led to being cast in a leading part in one of the biggest and most successful TV dramas of the era: The Forsyte Saga. Again, a story set during the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

A couple of ironies in More’s career. One is that the performance which Kenneth Tynan praised and which helped boost his career so well is in many ways an untypical More role. Freddie Page in The Deep Blue Sea is a former Battle of Britain pilot and now a commercial test pilot of jet aircraft, but he is unsettled within post-war civilian society, a heavy drinker and an adulterer and manipulator of his older lover, Hester Collyer. Rattigan’s play has been frequently restaged and refilmed in recent decades and More’s performance in the film version now looks rather staid and monotone compared to later portrayals by Colin Firth, Tom Hiddleston and Tom Burke. Although that is at least partly due to the artistic choices and commercial sensitivities of the film’s 1950s producers.

A second irony is that in the earlier Chance in a Lifetime, Bernard Miles’ politically progressive drama about the post-war fortunes of an engineering company, it is the character played by More who, among the various managers, workers and trade union leaders, is presented not as a returning hero from the past, or as a loyal and brave follower of duty, but as the bold leader of the modern British industrial future.

Reference: Kynaston, David (2009) Family Britain 1951-57 London: Bloomsbury

Some Leaf Collecting highlights from 2022

Leaf Collecting is now ten years old. Many thanks to all its readers.

Here are a few cultural highlights from its writer’s year.

Theatre: Pride and Prejudice * (*Sort of) – an imaginative adaptation of Jane Austen, with an energetic cast moving in and out of their various characters as well as singing and playing, reminding a few of us older ones of the glory days of the 7:84 and Wildcat companies – this one will surely come back again and again like The Steamie or Educating Rita.

Theatre: two fine productions at Dublin’s two historic theatres, Translations at the Abbey and The Steward of Christendom at the Gate.

Music: at the returned Girvan Folk Festival, a great opportunity to hear some of the distinctive young musicians innovating within the folk music tradition: Evie Waddell, Burd Ellen and Inni-K.

Music: Harry Styles’ album did nothing which wasn’t done before by a dozen artists like George Michael, Phil Collins, the BeeGees and Sade, but, by the standards of the 21st century’s pop music generation, it struck me as an unusually competent collection of songs and arrangements.

Music/Television: a theatrical Glastonbury performance by Self Esteem: sounds like Kate Bush and PJ Harvey plus some big diva singing and some Madonna-esque dancing.

Television: A very decent documentary about James Joyce’s Ulysses, in the best traditions of Arena, with significant contributions from Salman Rushdie.

An older film: Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You, where the same righteous anger of I, Daniel Blake, perhaps because it was shared within a number of central characters, seemed to me a little more nuanced and effective.

Journalism: whenever I read The Tablet, it happily reminds me of reading The Observer or The Sunday Times or The New Statesman in the 1980s…

The end of a long wait

Christina Rossetti is famous for the depth of feeling and the vivid language of her love poems, whether about a love for God or for human beings.

The narrative of “Advent” emerges only gradually because Rossetti employs such recognisably earthly details.

The poem’s title makes clear it is set at this time of year, Advent, and we are in a house of some sort, waiting. The night is “cold and clear (and) long”, and there is a later mention of snow. Other people are also waiting, identified as “the Watchman”, “the servants”, “the Porter” and “the patient virgins”.

Rossetti uses conversation, as in “Up-Hill” and “Amor Mundi”, to convey drama and anticipation. Questions are asked, but the answers at first are not encouraging : there are no signs in the sky, no evidence yet of daylight. The past has been “evil” and the future looks “dim”. Later, though, a fire is mentioned, then laughter and singing. People lost in the past are found again, and a door appears which “we (can) knock at”. Finally, the person who is being waited for can be met, and embraced.

Although the subject is the relationship with God, Rossetti subversively includes some language which might be seen as more suitable for secular romantic love poems. At the start “We (are) heart-sick”, and, at the end, “We hold him fast (and) we will not let him go”. He shall address us “my Love, my fair one”. And, moving boldly into the tone of her famous supernatural sensual fantasy, “Goblin Market”, she describes Jesus Christ as “most sweet, sweeter than honeycomb”.

Music and news, recalling and reflecting

One of the BBC’s better commemorations of its 100 years’ history was Soundscape of a Century on Radio 3, an eight-hour selection of music and news audio.

It included some skilful examples of matching the mood of music to events, such as with Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez alongside news from the Spanish Civil War , Brecht and Weill‘s “Alabama Song” alongside reports of US alcohol prohibition, Messaien’s Quartet at the End of Time alongside the relief of Belsen, part of Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man illustrating VE Day. Other choices were of classical music which either premiered or was revived at key moments, like Britten‘s War Requiem at the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral, Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs at the end of the Cold War, Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma”, forever associated with the 1990 World Cup and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to recall the arrival of the new classical star Nigel Kennedy.

Radio 3 has made a strong point in recent years of drawing attention to (sometimes overlooked) female composers, so perhaps no surprise to find Florence Price and Elizabeth Maconchy and Margaret Bonds and Ruth Gipps and Unsuk Chin next to Stravinsky, Elgar, Ravel, Bartok, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Berg, Shostakovich, Stockhausen, Reich, Maxwell Davies and MacMillan. If Ēriks Ešenvalds and Mason Bates were two of the few male composers who were unknown to me, that must surely confirm that most classical composers of the past century have been male and have been played and written about often enough to be familiar to someone with only a passing knowledge of the genre of music.

The programme did give a lot of attention to the BBC’s own history, so, as well as clips of World War Two, Suez, Vietnam and the many other military, political and financial crises, we got clips of Gardeners’ Question Time, Watch with Mother, Hancock’s Half Hour, Doctor Who, Morecambe and Wise, Basil Fawlty, Strictly Come Dancing and more than one of David Attenborough.

Radio 3 has included more music over the years from outside the standard classical music genre, although, as suggested before, the BBC’s “cutting-edge” popular music station 6 Music never appears required to repay the favour. The non-classical pieces included in this survey were a fair and not entirely predictable group: Bessie Smith, Bing Crosby (singing “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” to illustrate the Depression), the calypso singer Lord Kitchener, Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”, Pete Seeger, the Beatles‘ “A Day in the Life”, Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” , Mike Oldfield, Band Aid, New Order, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Beyoncé Knowles.

It must have been tempting to include one or two pieces of hip hop music (so ubiquitous in both news and culture these last 20 years) but they achieved the same effect more subtly by including snippets of the young black poets Yomi Sode, as part of James B. Wilson’s piece Remnants, and Amanda Gorman, reading at Joe Biden’s Presidential inauguration, over the energetic noise of Jennifer Higdon’s Percussion Concerto.