38. On Music and Lamentation.

Dearly Beloved,

When I worked in the interior of Oman, a colleague discovered a musician who played a short pipe about 8 inches in length, but to hear it we went at night to a wadi where we sat on the gravel and listened to his erudite playing. It was complex and reminded me of Bach. We were unable to listen at his home because many local people, Muslims, distrusted music as something associated with licentiousness. The Christian tradition, on the other hand, has fully embraced music and yesterday at St Clement's (16/02) we heard that music can express for us the most serious issues in human life. For the Choral Scholars of Jesus College directed by Richard Pinel, came and sang Compline followed by The Lamentations of Jeremiah set to music by Thomas Tallis. The verses lament the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BC.

The biblical text of Lamentations stretch to five chapters of unremitting mourning and hopelessness. There is no rousing finale in the text or in the music. Tallis only sets five of the verses. The twice repeated cry of pain and despair, “Jerusalem! Jerusalem!” has rarely been surpassed in musical composition, to which Tallis added “...turn to the lord your God” which is actually a quote from Hosea 14:1; a book which is also intimately concerned with the destruction and exile of Judah at the hands of the Babylonians and ascribes it to the failure of Judah to follows God's laws.

The singing by the ten Choral Scholars of Jesus College, two each singing one of the five parts, demanded the highest quality of musicianship and produced a unity of voice and consistency of pitch of a remarkable quality. No voice expresses human sorrow more plaintively than the voices of male altos, almost made for keening, and Tallis uses this quality in the lamentations.

The music was especially poignant as we were aware of the gathering of an army on the borders of Ukraine that very night. Humans and their societies can be very compassionate but also change and turn violently upon one another, apparently powered by hatred, by mythic ideologies or mere desire for gain and plunder.

The music brought to mind other recent struggles between humans, whether the destruction of Europe during the second world war, the more recent erroneous attack on Iraq by the US and UK and the dreadfully vicious civil war in Syria which was consequential. We thought too of the terrible, but now mostly forgotten war between Iraq and Iran (1980-1988) and the current invasion of Yemen by its neighbours, which has reduced an already poor country of feisty people to destitution, starvation and disease.

As the first verse of the Tallis text says “How desolate lies the city that was once thronged with people.” We humans have made much progress in science and technology but the making and keeping of the peace between large groups, especially between states, has so far eluded us.

Compline too is a set of prayers for the day and the coming night which requests protection from danger:

“Preserve us O Lord, while waking and guard us while sleeping, that awake we may watch with Christ and asleep we may rest in Peace.”

Paul and Josephine.

Completed: Lent, 17 February 2022.

A food queue amongst the devastation of the Yarmouk Refugee Camp in Syria in 2014. Unattributed UNWRA hand-out (composite?)


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