The New Potato Eaters: Van Gogh in Nuenen 1883–1885

In December 1883 Vincent van Gogh went to live with his parents in the Dutch town of Nuenen, where his father was the pastor at the Dutch Reformed church. Having spent three and a half years struggling to forge a viable career for himself as an artist, Vincent arrived home hungry, impoverished and emotionally spent. His immense efforts had so far yielded nothing of substance, and the retreat to Nuenen was intended to give him time to repair his health, improve his finances and calmly pursue his art. When he left Nuenen two years later, in November 1885, he had amassed a large body of work, including The Potato Eaters, his first accomplished and original large-scale canvas, but his time there had been fraught with incident. The New Potato Eaters looks back at Van Gogh’s Nuenen period, tracing his artistic development and setting his work in a broad historical context. Two pieces in verse and a set of new portraits of present-day Nuenen residents reflect creatively on Van Gogh’s achievement. Innovative, original and beautifully designed, The New Potato Eaters takes a fresh and distinctive look at Van Gogh in Nuenen.

The New Potato Eaters: Van Gogh in Nuenen 1883–1885
Edited by Paul Williamson

Contents
1 Introduction: Before Nuenen
Paul Williamson

2 Van Gogh in Nuenen, 1883–1885
Ton de Brouwer

3 Vincent and the Gospel of Work
Paul Williamson

4 Head of a Peasant Woman
Colin Wiggins

5 Towards The Potato Eaters: The Long-Awaited Genesis of a Masterpiece
Laura Prins

6 Van Gogh’s Colour
Stephen Hackney

7 Fields: Vincent to his Brother
Simone Kotva

8 Self-Portrait with the Pastor’s Boy
Martin Huxter

9 In Many Places
Catherine Pickstock

10 Van Gogh and the Camden Group: Reflections and New Directions
Stephen Hackney

11 The Trouble with Rembrandt: British and Dutch Portraiture in the Eighteenth Century
Robin Simon

12 Bacon and Potatoes: A Marvellous Vision of the Reality of Things
Amal Asfour

Afterword
Hugo Ticciati

To read Paul Williamson’s introduction to The New Potato Eaters click here.

The New Potato Eaters
Edited by Paul Williamson.
Published by Festival O/Modernt, Cambridge & Stockholm 2015.|
General editor for O/Modernt publishing: Paul Williamson.
Paperback with wrap, 272 x 240 mm, 136 pages, 100 illustrations.
Designed by Teresa Monachino.
Paper by Fedrigoni.
ISBN 978-0-9928912-1-3

Vincent van Gogh, The New Potato Eaters, 1885.

Vincent van Gogh, Head of a Woman. 1884–5.

Detail from the wraparound dust jacket of The New Potato Eaters.

Galileo 24

Galileo 24 by Debbie Loftus

Preface by Ian Stewart
Introduction by Paul Williamson

Draw two concentric circles, one twice the size of the other, and fill the inner circle with an infinite number of radii. Now extend each radius to the circumference of the outer circle, and gaps appear between the extensions. But, if the radii filling the smaller circle are infinite in number, how can more be needed to fill the outer one? Infinity means infinity … doesn’t it? Outlined by Galileo in Dialogues concerning Two New Sciences (1638), this is the starting point for Galileo 24 by Debbie Loftus, a remarkable series of images based on the problem known as Galileo’s Paradox or Aristotle’s Wheel. Galileo 24 includes Paul Williamson’s essay ‘Infinities’, and a preface by Professor Ian Stewart, author of Infinity: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2017).

Galileo 24
Published by Festival O/Modernt,
General Editor Paul Williamson,
Cambridge & Stockholm, June 2017.
Paperback with jacket wrap, 320 x 235 mm.

Designed by Dmitriy Myelnikov.
Paper by Fedrigoni.
Printed by Pureprint, Uckfield, UK.
ISBN: 978-0-9928912-4-4

To read an extract from ‘Infinities’, Paul Williamson’s introduction to Galileo 24, click here.

One Last Little Sin: Rossini’s Petite messe solennelle

Photo of Rossini taken in 1865 by Étienne Carjat.

‘Napoleon is dead; but a new conqueror has already shown himself to the world!’ wrote the novelist Stendhal, describing the meteoric rise of Rossini, who took Europe by storm in the early decades of the nineteenth century with his melodic, full-hearted, unfailingly ingenious music. Born into a musical family in Pesaro in 1792, Rossini was precocious to a degree that almost bears comparison with Mozart. He began by studying harpsichord and singing, and soon started to compose. Having completed his first commissioned opera in 1810, he wrote eleven more during the next three years. Il barbiere di Siviglia, composed in less than three weeks in 1816, was an instant hit. ‘Above all, make lots of Barbers!’ the cantankerous Beethoven wryly advised when Rossini visited him in Vienna a few years later. La Cenerentola, conceived in a haze of Jamaica rum in the early hours of 23 December 1816, had its premiere little more than four weeks later. But could Rossini’s incomparable powers of invention sometimes be mistaken for laziness? Composing in bed on a cold day in Venice in 1813, he dropped a sheet of paper on which he had written a duet. Unable to reach it and loath to get up, he blithely wrote a new one.

Between 1810 and 1829 Rossini composed thirty-nine operas, collaborating with librettists, performers and production staff in what has been called a ‘factory system’. From the conveyor belt of his prolific imagination flowed a marvellous succession of works, created according to a flexible pattern that refined and modernised the form. Comic or serious, Rossini’s operas are based on situazioni: standardised dramatic moments (the serenade, the soliloquy, the oath, for example) that regulate the action and give rise to a numbered sequence of vocal set pieces – arias, duets, choruses, and so forth. A two-act opera by Rossini is built on approximately fifteen such ‘numbers’, linked by recitatives and framed by an overture and a finale.

Rossini applied creative modifications of his method with astounding artistic and commercial success until 1829, when his immense Guillaume Tell (based on Schiller’s play) was premiered in Paris. Thereafter, ailing and exhausted, at the age of just thirty-seven, he retired from opera. For the next twenty years he spent his time in Italy and France, accompanied and cared for by his mistress (eventually his second wife) Olympe Pélissier, a woman described by Balzac as ‘the most beautiful courtesan in Paris’. In 1855 Olympe persuaded Rossini to settle in the Paris suburb of Passy, where the couple built a villa that became their home until Rossini’s death in 1868. These were comfortable contented years, during which the Rossinis hosted weekly musical gatherings (their esteemed samedi soirs) that attracted a like-minded crowd of artists and intellectuals. In these convivial surroundings Rossini began to compose again, producing 150 chamber pieces: ‘péchés de vieillesse’ or ‘sins of old age’, as he called them, to be performed at his soirées.

Horace Vernet, Study of Olympe Pélissier for Judith and Holofernes, 1830.

The Petite messe solennelle is the ‘final sin’ of Rossini’s old age, dedicated to Comtesse Louise Pillet-Will, and first heard in the private chapel of her newly built house in Paris on Sunday 14 March 1864. It is a chamber work, scored in its original form for four soloists and a chorus of eight, accompanied by two pianos and a harmonium (a versatile compact reed organ). The manuscript score is prefaced with a prayer in French, in which, begging God’s forgiveness, Rossini contemplates the scriptural significance of the number twelve and draws a comparison between his twelve singers and the twelve apostles in Leonardo’s fresco of the Last Supper in Milan. But, Rossini continues, ‘there will be no Judas at my supper … mine will sing properly and con amore your praises’. At the end of the manuscript Rossini addresses God again, this time with a play on the French adjective sacré, which means ‘sacred’ when it follows the noun, but can mean ‘damned’ when it precedes it. Is this unassuming act of musical reverence ‘de la musique sacrée’ or ‘de la sacrée musique’?

Dear God, there you have it, finished, this poor little mass. Is it really sacred music or is it damned music that I have created? I was born for opera buffa, as you well know! Little technique, a little heart, that is all. So may you be blessed and grant me Paradise.

The mischievous mix of tones in these remarks should not distract from Rossini’s serious purpose in the work. The structure of the Petite messe follows contemporary French practice by adding to the usual order of the musical mass an instrumental ‘Prélude religieux’, played during the offertory, and a hymn by St Thomas Aquinas, ‘O salutaris hostia’, sung by the solo soprano after the Sanctus. Rossini, who considered boys’ voices ‘sour and out of tune’, unsuccessfully petitioned Pope Pius IX to revoke a papal ban on mixed choirs in church with a view to having his Petite messe performed in a full ecclesiastical setting. So, while there can be no doubt about the sincere intentions of the Petite messe, the issue Rossini raises is whether his pleasing and sensuous brand of music – born, as he says, from his genius for comic opera – is capable of achieving sacred ends.

The mood of the Petite messe solennelle is quizzical, a little unsettling, and by querying the spiritual credentials of his music, Rossini alerts the listener to an oddity that lies at the very core of the piece. With its twelve singers, two pianos and a harmonium, Rossini’s ‘poor little mass’ aspires to occupy the same sacred ground as (to cite a redoubtable namesake) Beethoven’s tremendous Missa solemnis, with its formidable arsenal of musical forces and its indomitably sublime ambitions. Reflecting on the spiritual capabilities of his own cherished approach to his art, therefore, Rossini dares to ask whether the truly sacred might not best be expressed with nothing more than ‘a little heart’. What kind of music pleases God? That’s the serious question that Rossini asks, and it’s one to which there is, of course, no definitive answer – at least not in this life. Rossini’s response is La Petite messe solennelle, breathtakingly and audaciously poised between the delightful affirmation of religious optimism and a gorgeous paradoxical blend of serene unease and cheerful melancholy.

View of Paris, c.1865.

THE DREAM OF CONSTANTINE

The Dream of Constantine, a fifteen-minute oratorio for unaccompanied SATB choir, was commissioned for a series of concerts in Serbia, France, England and Germany, organised by the Serbian Council of Great Britain to commemorate the 1700th anniversary of the Edict of Milan (313). The piece was first performed at the Philharmonic Orchestra Concert Hall, Niš, Serbia (formerly Naissus, the birthplace of Constantine the Great) on 28 October 2011. Subsequent performances took place at St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, London (18 February 2012) and St Saviourgate Unitarian Chapel, York (19 February 2012).

With an infusion of poetic licence, the story told in The Dream of Constantine is based on the Old English poem Elena by the poet Cynewulf (fl. 9th century). Cynewulf’s account of Constantine's vision is derived from the legend of Judas Cyriacus, who was tortured by Constantine's mother, St Helena, when she travelled to Jerusalem in search of the true cross. It was Judas Cyriacus who revealed the location of the cross. Another version of the legend, in which Constantine's vision takes place on the eve of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (in the year 312) is related by Eusebius of Caesaria in his Life of Constantine, left uncompleted before 339, the year of Eusebius’s death.

Music by Malcolm Bothwell
Words by Paul Williamson

1. Prelude
2. The appearance of the angelic herald
4. The vision of the holy tree
5. The battle
6. The glorification of the cross

Live recording
The 24, St Saviourgate Unitarian Chapel, York, 19 February 2012.

Video artwork
Head of the Colossus of Constantine, 312–15. Musei Capitolini, Rome.

Giotto di Bondone (1266–1337), Angel (detail).

Piero della Francesca, Madonna del Parto, completed c.1460 (detail).

Debbie Loftus, Jewelled Trees (detail), © 2017.

Peter Paul Rubens, Triumph of Constantine over Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, 1623–5. Detail from the tapestry now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1959.

Martina Kolarien (aged 6), Constantine the Great and St Helena, © 2011.

Haydn: The Creation

William Kent, ‘Summer’, engraved by Nicolas Henri Tardieu (1674–1749). Frontispiece to James Thomson, The Seasons (London, 1730).

1. Origins

The London music scene that Haydn experienced during his two triumphant visits in 1791–2 and 1793–4 was very different from that which had dominated his professional life in Austria up to that point. To take one example, concert culture in Vienna was, broadly speaking, private and exclusive, with music being performed in palatial residences for select audiences made up of aristocrats, courtiers and other members of the upper classes. By contrast, music-making in London was driven by market forces, with concerts organised by canny entrepreneurs who turned a profit by staging events that appealed to the prosperous middle classes. More generally accessible and certainly more commercial, music in London was also managed on an altogether larger scale. To quote one basic fact, London in the 1790s had a population of about a million, nearly four times that of Vienna, which was home to approximately 270,000 people. In an upwardly mobile mercantile society the English urban middle classes had money to spend and they demanded to be entertained.

Haydn felt these cultural contrasts acutely in May 1791, five or so months after his arrival in England in January of that year, when he attended the Handel Festival in Westminster Abbey. More than a thousand musicians (1,068 to be precise), including the foremost singers and instrumentalists of the time, gathered to perform Israel in Egypt, ‘Zadok the Priest’, Messiah and numerous extracts from Handel’s other works. The latest in a series of festivals that had taken place annually since the groundbreaking Handel Commemoration of 1784, this was a markedly national occasion, patronised by George III, who regarded Handel’s music as a ‘dynastic soundtrack’ (to quote Matthew Head). Its roots stretched back to the benefit performances of Messiah in the Foundling Hospital that Handel himself staged every year from 1749 until his death in 1759.

Edward Edwards (1738–1806), Interior View of Westminster Abbey on the Commemoration of Handel, Taken from the Manager’s Box, c.1790.

Haydn was deeply affected by what he heard and saw, both as a musician and also as a patriot who was able to witness at first hand the immensely powerful role music could play in the life of a nation. As one early biographer records: “when he heard the music of Handel in London, he was struck as if he had been put back to the beginning of his studies and had known nothing up to that moment. He meditated on every note and drew from those most learned scores the essence of true musical grandeur.”

The sacred oratorios current in Haydn’s Vienna were nothing like Handel’s Messiah. Employing Italian libretti, and originally designed to be performed during Lent, when the opera houses were closed, these were essentially unstaged opera seria (operas on serious subjects) with biblical plots. As in eighteenth-century Italian operas more generally, the main musical interest of these aristocratic entertainments lay in the virtuoso solos, framed by recitatives; the role of the chorus was consequently much reduced. Haydn’s own two-part Il ritorno di Tobia (1775), with a narrative derived from the Book of Tobit, is typical: it has only three choruses (two more were added in 1784), just one duet, lots of lengthy recitatives and a great deal of ornate coloratura.

The contrast with Handel’s English oratorios could hardly be greater. Feeling the lack of virtuoso Italian singers, Handel turned a potential weakness into a monumental strength by developing a genre that exploited the accomplished English choral training available in the cathedral schools. In the process, he also supplied a market primed to consume musical works that were unabashedly nationalistic and populist in tone, an aim that was aided by the choice of Old Testament subjects capable of sustaining contemporary political meanings. The ironies are manifold! Here was a German composer, writing music interpreted by the Hanoverian royals as their very own ‘dynastic soundtrack’, which was otherwise universally regarded as the quintessence of Englishness.

This combination moved Haydn greatly and left him with the desire to write a work on a comparable scale, charged with similarly comprehensive emotional power. The glimmer of an opportunity arose in August 1795. As he was leaving London at the end of his second visit, an English libretto was thrust into the composer’s hands by Johann Peter Salomon, the impresario whose blandishments had tempted Haydn to visit England in the first place. This was the text that was shortly afterwards bilingually reworked to form the basis of The Creation.

This is the first part of a four-part programme note: 1. Origins, 2. The Words, 3. Ethos, 4. The First Performance. To read the full note please click here.

Bernardo Bellotto, View of Vienna from the Belvedere, c.1760. The domed church on the left is the Karlskirche; the large building to the right of that, facing the lake, is the Palais Schwarzenberg; central, in the distance, is St Stephen’s Cathedral; at the end of the alley to the right of the lake is the Lower Belvedere; the building with the domed tower on the extreme right of the picture is the Convent Church of the Salesians.

Twofold

Cover image: George Levantis, Leda and the Swan I (2008).

Twofold  An anthology of new works in verse and prose, by Simone Kotva and Paul Williamson, inspired by themes of binaries and doubling.

Published under the auspices of Festival O/Modernt 2015, Twofold includes eight drawings from George Levantis’ Leda and the Swan suite (2008) and two specially commissioned images by Debbie Loftus, Etruscan and Miwoks (both 2015).

It also contains a new setting by composer Malcolm Bothwell of ‘Take, o take those lips away’ from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. 

Paperback with flaps, 270 x 210 mm
48 pages, 13 illustrations
Paper by Fedrigoni
Designed by Dmitriy Myelnikov
Cambridge & Stockholm, June 2015
ISBN 978-0-9928912-2-0

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Contents

Paul Williamson
Don’t Read this Book! (After D.H. Lawrence)
Anamorphosis
Two Ledas 

Simone Kotva
Devices (For W.H. Hudson)
The Twofold
Endpoints (Illinois–California–Illinois)

To download the press release click here. A copy of Twofold may be available here.

Illustrated London News

ILN Playbill.  Designed by Dmitriy Myelnikov, 2016.

Viv Kristina Leon
Genie Ingela Lundh

Images Debbie Loftus
Words Paul Williamson

Violin Hugo Ticciati
Percussion Evelyn Glennie

Viv is giving an illustrated talk on the Victorian attraction known as Mr Wyld’s Model of the Earth. Her alter ego, Genie, steps in to liven things up. Semi-dramatised performance, lasting approximately twenty minutes, including fifty projected photos by artist Debbie Loftus. 

World premiere performance with Kristina Leon and Ingela Lundh of the Stockholm English-Speaking Theatre at Confidencen, Ulriksdals Slottsteater, Stockholm, for Festival O/Modernt 2016, ‘Handel and the Art of Borrowing’, 12 June 2016.

The Stockholm performance featured Hugo Ticciati on violin, playing variations on ‘Meet Me in Battersea Park’ (1954) by Petula Clark, and Dame Evelyn Glennie on percussion, performing ‘Clapping Music’ (1972) by Steve Reich.

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Mr Wyld's Model of the Earth.  From The Illustrated London News, 7 June 1851. 
Photo © Debbie Loftus 2016.

Illustrated London News.  Performed at Confidencen, Ulriksdal Royal Palace, Stockholm.
Festival O/Modernt, 2016, Handel and the Art of Borrowing.

Battersea Bridge from Battersea Park. 
Photo © Debbie Loftus 2016.

Pedro Serra fl.1346–1405

Pedro (Pere) Serra, St Peter Preaching, c. 1400. Tempera on panel, 125 x 101 cm. Bilbao Fine Arts Museum.

Bilbao’s Other Serras

Exterior view of the Guggenheim, Bilbao, by Frank Gehry. The museum opened in 1997.

‘The idea of this looking like a boat was my response to the river,’ Frank Gehry explained when the Guggenheim Bilbao Musuem, opened in 1997. ‘The other side, more fragmented and covered with stone, is more in scale with the city. The whole thing is about fitting the building into Bilbao. So for me it's about the imagery of the river and the imagery of the city’ (New York Times, 24 June 1997).

The star exhibit in this spectacular structure, the catalyst for the regeneration of Bilbao’s former port district on the bank of the Nervion River, is Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time, installed in 2005. Absorbed in the space of Serra’s sculptures, ‘pacing out their convolutions’, Robert Hughes remarked when the sequence of works in steel was unveiled in 2005, ‘you feel suddenly free’ (The Guardian, 22 June 2005). This is the paradox of Serra’s work. Despite the immense size and weight of the steel plates, as well as the directed movement that these huge pieces demand, all of which might induce a fearsome sense of claustrophobia, it’s hard to disagree with Hughes.

The other unexpected fact about these sculptures, whose consummate newness is beyond question, is the effortless way in which they forge links with the art of other ages. Hughes quotes Johann Winckelmann on ‘noble inwardness’ and ‘calm grandeur’. Numerous classical connections are traced in Paul Williamson's Ekphrasis (2014), which sets itself the task of placing Serra’s achievement in a tradition stemming back at least as Homer. A more fortuitous link with the art of a previous age can be found in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, a short walk from the Guggenheim. These are Bilbao’s other Serras: two paintings made 600 years ago by the Catalan artist Pedro Serra (Pere Serra in Catalan), which are discussed in an article in The London Magazine that can be downloaded here.

Richard Serra, The Matter of Time (2005). Guggenheim, Bilbao. Installation of seven sculptures made from weatherproof steel.

Echo and Narcissus

Echo

There's a rule of echoes,
Bouncing off reflective surfaces
Like a nymph in the woods,
Crying, crying, crying.
Voiceless sounds rebounding through the trees
For the want of her love: Echo.

Music and Voices: Malcolm Bothwell
Words: Paul Williamson
© 2011

Detail from John William Waterhouse, Echo and Narcissus, 1903. Oil on canvas, 109.2 x 189.2 cm. Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

NOW WHEN SHE SAW NARCISSUS wandering through the fields, she was inflamed with love and followed him by stealth; and the more she followed, the more she burned by a nearer flame; as when quick-burning sulphur, smeared round the tops of torches, catches fire from another fire brought near. Oh, how often does she long to approach him with alluring words and make soft prayers to him! But her nature forbids this, nor does it permit her to begin; but as it allows, she is ready to await the sounds to which she may give back her own words. By chance the boy, separated from his faithful companions, had cried: ‘Is anyone here?’ and ‘Here!’ cried Echo back. Amazed, he looks around in all directions and with loud voice cries ‘Come!’; and ‘Come!’ she calls him calling. He looks behind him and, seeing no one coming, calls again: ‘Why do you run from me?’ and hears in answer his own words again. He stands still, deceived by the answering voice, and ‘Here let us meet,’ he cries. Echo, never to answer other sound more gladly, cries: ‘Let us meet’; and to help her own words she comes forth from the woods that she may throw her arms around the neck she longs to clasp. But he flees at her approach and, fleeing, says: ‘Hands off! embrace me not ! May I die before I give you power o'er me!’ ‘I give you power o’er me!’ she says, and nothing more. Thus spurned, she lurks in the woods, hides her shamed face among the foliage, and lives from that time on in lonely caves. But still, though spurned, her love remains and grows on grief; her sleepless cares waste away her wretched form; she becomes gaunt and wrinkled and all moisture fades from her body into the air. Only her voice and her bones remain: then, only voice; for they say that her bones were turned to stone. She hides in woods and is seen no more upon the mountain-sides; but all may hear her, for voice, and voice alone, still lives in her. 

Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book III, ll.370–401, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 3rd edn, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1977).

Thomas Gray

John Giles Eccardt, Thomas Gray, 1747–8. Oil on canvas, 40.3 x 32.7 cm. © National Portrait Gallery, London. This portrait was commissioned by Horace Walpole who was Eccardt’s principal patron.

Gray's Elegy

Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, published in 1751, was an instant hit, and it has ever since remained one of the best-known and best-loved poems in the English language. Gray (1716–71) shunned the limelight, and the poem’s publication came about almost by accident. He had written a first version of the piece several years earlier, either in 1742, as a reaction to the untimely death of his very close friend, Richard West (1716–42), or perhaps in 1745. He then set the poem aside until 1749, when he seems to have picked it up again after the death of his mother’s sister, Mary (1683–1749), to whom he was also extremely close. The first eighteen stanzas of the two versions are substantially the same. The first version then concludes with four stanzas that were later abandoned and replaced with seventeen new ones. This was a momentous change because it turned a poem that was essentially a conventional eighteenth-century Christian meditation on death into something quite new and original. Gray began with a popular genre of reflective verse, known as graveyard poetry, and ended up writing a piece about mortality whose antecedents stretch all the way back to Virgil and beyond.

John Giles Eccardt, Horace Walpole, 1754. Oil on canvas, 39.4 x 31.8 cm. © National Portrait Gallery, London. The house in the background is Strawberry Hill, Walpole's Gothic extravaganza, remodelled between 1749 and 1776.

In June 1750 Gray sent the finished ‘Elegy’ to his friend Horace Walpole (1717–97), the brilliant son of a Prime Minister. Walpole, who was a great admirer of Gray’s verse, circulated the manuscript among his circle of friends. The idea of copyright being almost non-existent, a copy of the poem ended up in the hands of the publishers of the Magazine of Magazines, who wrote to Gray in February 1751, informing him that ‘an ingenious Poem, called Reflections in a Country-Churchyard, has been communicated to them, which they are printing forthwith.’ Gray wrote to Walpole in a panic on 11 February, asking him to have the piece printed anonymously and without delay by the bookseller and publisher Robert Dodsley (1704–64). It appeared four days later on 15 February as a quarto pamplet, priced sixpence.

Gray and Walpole first became friends when they were at school together at Eton College, where they formed a ‘quadruple alliance’ with West (mentioned above), whose father was a Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and Thomas Ashton (1715–75). Gray and Walpole both subsequently went to Cambridge, where Gray matriculated at Peterhouse (1734) and Walpole at King’s (1735). In 1738 Walpole invited Gray to accompany him on the Grand Tour. They set off in March 1739, spending several months in France, before crossing the Alps into Italy, where they spent the whole of 1740, mainly in Florence, Rome and Naples. In April 1741, en route to Venice, they quarrelled. The reasons are unknown but their radically different circumstances and temperaments, and the long period spent on the road together doubtless conspired to cause friction. Gray returned home, and the two men were not reconciled until 1745.

Two extracts from Gray’s letters give some insights into his character. The first, from a letter to Richard West, sent from Turin in November 1739, describes the journey through the Alps via the Carthusian monastery, the Grande Chartreuse:

In our little journey up to the Grande Chartreuse, I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation, that there was no restraining: Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other argument. One need not have a very fantastic imagination to see spirits there at noon-day; You have Death perpetually before your eyes, only so far removed, as to compose the mind without frighting it. I am well persuaded St. Bruno was a man of no common genius, to choose such a situation for his retirement; and perhaps should have been a disciple of his, had I been born in his time.

And now a letter to West, sent from Rome in May 1740, describing a ball. Among the guests was Il Serenissimo Pretendente – the exiled son of King James II, known as the Old Pretender:

Figure to yourself a Roman villa; all its little apartments thrown open, and lighted up to the best advantage. At the upper end of the gallery, a fine concert, in which La Diamantina, a famous virtuosa, played on the violin divinely, and sung angelically; Giovanni and Pasqualini (great names in musical story) also performed miraculously. On each side were ranged all the secular grand monde of Rome, the Ambassadors, Princesses, and all that. Among the rest Il Serenissimo Pretendente (as the Mantova gazette calls him) displayed his rueful length of person, with his two young ones, and all his ministry around him. ‘Poi nacque un grazioso ballo’, where the world danced, and I sat in a corner regaling myself with iced fruits, and other pleasant rinfrescatives.

To read ‘Gray’s “Elegy” and the Logic of Expression’, a detailed discussion of the two versions of Gray’s celebrated poem, click here.

A Golden Tree

Image: Jesse Tree Window, Chartres Cathedral, 1140–50 (detail from the bottom section, showing the sleeping Jesse).

A Christmas Carol

Music: Thomas Hewitt Jones
Words: Paul Williamson
© 2014

Commissioned by Manvinder Rattan and the John Lewis Partnership Music Society for first performance at the society's annual Service of Nine Lessons, Westminster Cathedral, 23 December 2014. Premiered by The Cavendish Singers, directed by Manvinder Rattan.

'A meditation on Isaiah 11.1 … a mystical text, evocative of William Morris.’ Rebecca Tavener, Organists’ Review, June 2016, p. 66.

To download the score of A Golden Tree from Boosey & Hawkes click here.

The upper part of the Jesse Tree Window at Chartres Cathedral, showing Jesus at the apex, with the Virgin Mary below him, and beneath them a generic Old Testament king.

A Golden Tree

I dreamed I saw a golden tree
With lustrous branches swaying;
And pictures painted on each leaf
Of kings and prophets praying.

Rise, rise the tender shoot,
The tree that springs from Jesse’s root.
Crown, crown sweet Mary’s child,
Who in her arms lies waiting.

A boy of lovely countenance
And pure of heart was chosen.
A gorgeous queen brought priceless gifts
To bless a king’s great wisdom.

Strike, strike the shepherd’s lyre
And fill each heart with heaven’s fire.
Crown, crown sweet Mary’s child,
Who in her arms lies waiting.

A star and sceptre lit the sky,
The beast gave up its burden.
A child subdues the lion’s roar
In peaceable dominion.

Praise, praise the son of kings
With angels’ songs that mortals sing.
Crown, crown sweet Mary’s child,
Who in her arms lies waiting.

Words: Paul Williamson © 2014

Three Blind Mice

Pythagoras (bottom left), detail from Raphael, The School of Athens, 1511. Vatican Museums.

On Harmony

Once upon a time, when the smiths were beating their anvils, sweating profusely by their blazing forge, under the heat of a hot summer sun, a young man passed by on his way to meet some friends in the shady colonnade in front of the temple. He was an ardent scholar, going to meet a group of other young people who shared his passion for knowledge. There were patterns in the world – this much they did know – but there were countless questions to which they had no answers. Geometry, numbers, the motions of the sun and moon, the sea, the stars – these were some of the subjects the earnest band of students enthusiastically discussed as they strove to comprehend the symmetry and order that might provide a rational framework for the bustle, noise and seeming chaos of daily life.

John W. Ivimey, Ye Three Blind Mice, illustrated by Walton Corbould (1909).

On this bright morning, when the sound of the hammers striking the anvils reached his ears, the young man suddenly paused. He fixed his eye on the slender line, far off in the distance, where sun meets sky, and strained his hearing to catch the varying sounds that rang out as metal struck metal. He’d heard these noises a thousand times before, but this time they seemed somehow different, making patterns he’d never noticed before. He listened: doh-low, doh-high, doh-low, doh-high … doh, soh … doh, mi … doh, fah … doh, re … mi, re, doh … mi, re, doh … Just at that moment three mice scuttled blindly by. The young man followed them into the blacksmiths’ yard, and while the smiths stopped to eat their bread and cheese the mice feasted on crumbs and the young man examined the hammers that lay on the dusty ground.

To cut a long story short, Pythagoras (for it was he!) discovered that the relationships between the different sounds depended on the relative weights of the hammers. He dashed home and plotted the weight ratios he’d observed on a string pulled tight like the string of a guitar: 1:1, the octave (doh-low, doh-high); 3:2, the perfect fifth (soh); 4:3, the perfect fourth (fah); and 5:4, the major third (mi). The story is apocryphal, of course (and who let those pesky mice in?) but somewhere in the mists of time someone did discover the fundamentals of western music in the ambient sounds that filled the world, millennia before the air was invaded by recorded music.

From Festival O/Modernt 2016 programme booklet. To read more click here.

Incarnation

The Adoration of the Magi by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640). Lyon MBA | Photo Alain Basset.

Incarnation: A Suite of Songs for Christmas

Music: Thomas Hewitt Jones
Words: Paul Williamson
© 2012

1. Advent
2. Falling
3. Wandering
4. Nativity
5. Planting
6. Revelling
7. Epiphany

The Typology of Christmas (from the UK premiere programme note): Three hundred years after it burst into the world as a new faith the spiritual and intellectual exhilaration generated by Christianity was manifested with extreme force and in unusual ways among Syriac-speaking Christians living in a region that now lies in eastern Turkey and northern Syria. Their spiritual fervour is witnessed by the ascetics who went out into the desert, chaining themselves to rocks, wearing heavy weights around their necks or having themselves sealed up in caves in order to mortify the flesh and live out what they believed to be a truly Christian way of life. A notable example was set by St Simeon Stylites (c. 389–459). Simeon spent thirty years living at the top of a stone column (stylos in Greek) that was gradually made taller to separate him from the ever-increasing hordes of visitors who came to ask for his guidance, seek a holy relic or simply to sightsee. Surprising though it may seem, Simeon inspired so many impersonators that column-dwelling became recognised as a distinct mode of monastic life and special rules were drawn up to regulate the conduct of the stylites.

Less obviously spectacular but fired by a similar degree of enthusiasm and excited sense of Christian purpose is the theological vision of St Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306–73), who lived all but the last ten years of his life in the city of Nisibus (now Nuseybin) on the present-day border between Turkey and Syria. As Sebastian Brock explains, a key concept in Ephrem's thinking is that of the insuperable 'chasm' between the creator and creation – between the divine nature on the one hand and the subordinate quality of all created things on the other. The fact that the 'chasm' is impassable is indicative of the inability of limited human intellects to know or to describe God. To know a thing, says Ephrem, is to contain it within the mind. How can the finite human mind contain the uncontainable – the infinite and omniscient? The answer is that it can't, but that God has allowed aspects of himself to be revealed in nature, in Scripture, and most importantly (though still not fully) in the Incarnation, where Christ is made man. Accordingly, human knowledge of God is composed of a flowing multiplicity of partial views that never leads to completeness of understanding but nonetheless provides a dynamic ever-changing vision of that which cannot ever be finally defined or understood. The components of that vision are paradoxes, symbols and types. Its most natural modes of expression are not the definitions and arguments of discursive theological prose but the rhythms and images of poetry, notably poetry combined with music in the form of Syriac madrashe or hymns.

Ephrem's approach to Scripture is symbolic and typological, which means that the greater significance of Old Testament symbols, events and persons is deferred until they are related to their New Testament equivalents. This is a method of juxtapositions, where, for example, Eve's birth from Adam's side in Genesis prefigures the piercing of Christ's side by the Roman soldier during the crucifixion, recorded in John 19:34. From this single association Ephrem weaves what Sebastian Brock calls a 'vast and rich web of exegesis' that connects Adam's rib with Christ's wounded torso; the Roman soldier's lance with the flaming sword that bars the way to Eden after Adam and Eve have been expelled for eating the forbidden fruit; and Eve herself both with the sacraments administered within the Christian church and also with the Virgin Mary. Some of these correspondences can be seen in a brief passage from Kathleen McVey's translation of the eighth of Ephrem's Hymns on the Nativity:

Blessed is the Compassionate One Who saw, next to paradise,
the lance that barred the way
to the Tree of life. He came to take up
the body that would be struck so that by the opening in His side
He might break through the way into paradise.

To read the full note from the UK premiere click here.

5. Planting
Buried in dirt, the seed baptised in rain
Revokes the muddy darkness to release
Quick motion from the shades of formless ease
And stir the shoot that's shrouded in the grain.
Time changes now. The rhythm of the year
Breaks off. Now ancient chronicles achieve
Their purpose in accomplished unity.
In an instant the long night still and clear
Suspends its passing, staying to conceive  
Its lovely tribute to eternity.

Text: Paul Williamson © 2012

To view Incarnation on iTunes click here.
To read a review of Incarnation in The London Magazine click here.

Extract from 6. Revelling
Old Noah's been drinking,
He's florid and flushed.
Buon anno! he pledges,
As nodding he snores.
The children come laughing
With crayons and glue
To crown him with paper
And paint him a face.
Good health to our sovereign:
Cheers! Prosit! Zum wohl!
The Lord of Misrule is our master tonight!

Text: Paul Williamson © 2012

A little secret: despite being devoted to Christmas and entirely based on Biblical typology, the text of Incarnation never mentions God or refers to Jesus by name. 

J. S. BACH

Elias Gottlob Haußmann, Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach, 1746. Oil on canvas, 78 x 61 cm, Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig.

Christmas Oratorio, 1734

Moving to Leipzig in May 1723, the Bach family was made up of Johann Sebastian, his second wife Anna Magdalena (1701–60, 16 years his junior), their baby daughter (who did not survive into adulthood) and four children from his first marriage (a further three had died in infancy). Bach had been married for the first time in 1707 to his cousin Maria Barbara, née Bach (1684–1720), who died suddenly in Cöthen in July 1720 while her husband was away from home with Prince Leopold. Bach’s obituary (1754), co-authored by his and Maria Barbara’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel, recalls the shock of Maria Barbara’s untimely death:

After thirteen years of blissful married life with his first wife, the misfortune overtook him, in the year 1720, upon his return to Cöthen from a journey with his Prince to Carlsbad, of finding her dead and buried, although he had left her hale and hearty on his departure. The news that she had been ill and died reached him only when he entered his own house.

The following summer (1721) Bach was given permission to engage a young soprano for Leopold’s Cöthen Kapelle. Anna Magdalena Wilcke was taken on as a chamber musician, at the top of the musical hierarchy, earning an excellent salary that exceeded those of her father and brother (both musicians). Later that year, in December 1721, 17 months after Maria Barbara’s death, she and Bach were married. They were a devoted couple, who had 13 children, six of whom reached adulthood. In addition to running the rapidly expanding Bach household, Anna Magdalena continued to sing professionally (though no written records exist after 1725); she also worked as a copyist on many of Bach’s best-known works and took keyboard lessons from her husband that resulted in the two books of practice pieces that Bach dedicated to her (1722 and 1725). In the same letter to Georg Erdmann quoted above, Bach gives a little insight into the musical life of their family in Leipzig in 1730:

The children of my second marriage are still young; the eldest is a boy, aged six. But they are all born musicians, and I can assure you that I can already form an ensemble both vocaliter and instrumentaliter within my family, especially since my present wife sings a pleasing soprano, while my eldest daughter joins in too and not at all badly.

By comparison with Cöthen, Leipzig was a big city, with a population of more than 30,000 (contrast London, however, which in 1715 had 630,000 inhabitants). After Dresden, Leipzig was Saxony’s most important urban centre, a commercial hub that had been hosting regular trade fairs since the twelfth century. It was the home of a venerable university, founded in 1409, which in Bach’s time was one of the largest and most illustrious in Germany. The city was also pre-eminent in the book trade. All these factors combined to endow mid-eighteenth-century Leipzig with a very high degree of progressive intellectual and cultural prestige. With its thriving music scene, numerous distinguished art collections amassed by wealthy mercantile families, opulent new buildings and a flourishing coffee-house culture, Leipzig became known as ‘Little Paris’.

Prospect of Leipzig, viewed from the south-east, showing the Thomasschule and Thomaskirche in the centre (nos. 12, 13) and the Nikolaikirche to the right (no. 20). Engraving published in 1749 by Joachim Ernst Scheffler.

The extract above is from a programme note for Sloane Square Choral Society, 7 December 2014. To view the full note click here.

Benjamin Britten

Britten on the beach at Aldeburgh, 1959. Photo by Hans Wild.

Britten: The Trials of Innocence

Three-part programme note for Sloane Square Choral Society, 8 December 2013, discussing Jubilate Deo in C (1961), Canticle II: Abraham and Isaac (1952) and Saint Nicolas: A Cantata (1948).

On Canticle II, Abraham and Isaac (1952): There is surely no more heart-rending passage in all of Scripture than the tale of Abraham and Isaac, recounted in Genesis 22:1–14. Out of nowhere Abraham hears a disembodied voice calling his name, 'Abraham,' and without pausing for thought he responds to it: 'Behold, here I am.' No indication is given of where the speakers might be in time and space for this is a landscape of the mind, in which the only fact of importance is Abraham's readiness to obey the commands of the mysterious power that he can hear but not see. The voice is everywhere and nowhere, and Abraham conceives himself, in every respect, bound to do its bidding without question.

The voice continues: 'Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.' Abraham, it will be remembered, was nearly a hundred years old and his wife, Sarah, only a little younger when the couple's only child, Isaac, was miraculously conceived. The ancient man loves Isaac with all his being; the boy is the flower of his long existence, his present delight and his hope for the future. In any event the death of Isaac would be a dire calamity. Now Abraham is instructed by a voice whose words emerge from the void to commit the most unimaginably awful deed: to murder Isaac and offer up the child's body as a burnt sacrifice.

Every feeling of human warmth and affection recoils in horror from this hateful injunction, yet Abraham is impassive and submissive. He cuts wood for the fire, loads up his donkey, and sets off with Isaac until they arrive at the place of sacrifice, which he recognises by uncanny intuition. There he takes his knife and a flame, and builds an altar on which he arranges the firewood. Finally, Abraham binds Isaac, places him on the altar and reaches for his blade. Then, just as he is about to strike the fatal blow, he hears another voice, the voice of an angel, that calls to him 'out of heaven': 'Abraham, Abraham.' Again, the Patriarch responds, 'Here am I.' Now the tension is released and the story comes to its familiar conclusion. Abraham has passed the test that God has set for him by proving his unstinting obedience; therefore Isaac's life can be spared and a ram that happens to be caught up in a nearby tangle of undergrowth is sacrificed in place of the boy.

Biblical exegesis accounts for Abraham's actions by seeing in him a type of God the Father, 'who so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life' (John 3:16). The intended sacrifice of Isaac prefigures the redemptive death of Jesus and in the context of this overarching narrative the story of Abraham and Isaac acquires a long-range happy ending. Stripped of that explanatory framework, however, this is an intensely disquieting episode. Translate the events into daily life and Abraham cuts a deeply troubling figure. What kind of awful compulsion could make a man behave the way Abraham does? What thoughts pass through his mind as he sets out on his journey, knowing he intends to murder his innocent child? What does he feel as he is about to kill the person he loves most in the world? In ordinary life, if a person fulfils a terrible command of this sort, delivered by a faceless voice (something that regrettably happens all too frequently), he or she is condemned as a lunatic and a criminal – morally, emotionally, and intellectually ruined. If Abraham escapes that judgement, it is because the human tragedy of his story has been so smothered by doctrine that it is barely discernible.

To view the full programme click here.

Hello World

Kitagawa Utamaro, Grasshopper and Cicada, from Picture Book of Selected Insects with Crazy Poems (1788).

Hello World

Music: Thomas Hewitt Jones
Words: Paul Williamson
© 2014

Recitative and aria (8 minutes) bringing together themes from Plato’s Phaedrus with the Python programming language code sequence that produces the introductory phrase ‘Hello World’. The piece was performed by Benjamin Williamson (countertenor) and Thomas Hewitt Jones (piano, cello, electronics) at The Poetics of Verticality, curated by Simone Kotva, an event held at Robinson College, Cambridge, 21 January 2014. Other contributions included Sue Henderson’s Formation and Triptych (two sets of works on paper) and a reading by Robin Kirkpatrick.

From the programme note: In the dark interior of the devices on which we work and play, millions of tiny signs are at work. They scurry about like blind ants performing their thankless tasks, except that they are invisible and apparently motionless. Nothing more than the presence or absence of electrical pulses, these little bursts of energy are perceptible in themselves only when they are working so hard that their efforts spill out into the world as heat. Then the annoying fan is activated. For, despite its magic, the laptop is the great grandchild of the steam engine, toddling along the arrow of time with the rest of us, making its minuscule contribution to the disorder that is gradually and ineluctably settling on everything.

From the text:

Crick, the cicadas from above
Compose enticements to your love:
The pleasing green is deep and wide,
Come nestle softly by my side
And gather while we may a kiss.
Reminding is forgetfulness,
And love is madness, frenzied bliss:
Crick the cicadas sing of this.

[…]

Here follows the source code to generate
The standard introductory sequence,
Hello World, in Python, a general-
Purpose, high-level programming language
[Open-source software, multi-paradigm,
Object-oriented, imperative,
Functional and reflective …

Two Extracts from Hello World © 2014 

A Gainsborough Drawing

Thomas Gainsborough, Landscape with Wooded Path, 1749–50. Pencil on paper, 21.8 x 26.9 cm. Private Collection.

Mimesis and Musical Abstraction

It is well known that Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88) was a passionate musician, but the degree to which ideas about music influenced his artistic practice has not often been clearly understood. Commenting on the excellence of Gainsborough’s drawing, his close friend, the organist and composer William Jackson of Exeter, stressed Gainsborough’s ‘facility’:

Perhaps the quickest effects ever produced, were in some of his drawings – and this leads me to take up again his facility of execution. Many of his pictures have no other merit than this facility; and yet, having it, are undoubtedly valuable. His drawings almost rest on this quality alone for their value; but possessing it in an eminent degree (and as no drawing can have any merit where it is wanting) his works, therefore, in this branch of the art, approach nearer to perfection than his paintings. (The Four Ages, 1798, pp. 157–9.)

Jackson’s enthusiasm is sparked not by Gainsborough’s capacity simply to represent natural forms, but by the brilliance of his performances with pencil and paper. And this is the key to understanding Gainsborough’s graphic art. In the drawing illustrated here, for example, representing the landscape is not Gainsborough’s only or (we might even say) his primary concern. The landscape provides him with an opportunity to create a pleasing ensemble of abstract forms – arabesques, scallops, patterns of light and shade. In addition, he is interested in the physical properties of the materials with which he is working – the quality of the graphite and the surface texture of the paper. To understand the way he balances these factors – mimesis, abstraction and materiality – it’s necessary to examine the intellectual and aesthetic milieu in which Gainsborough was working in order to discover contexts for what he was doing. In Gainsborough’s case, the aesthetic principles that underpin his artistic practice are closely comparable with ideas about the nature of musical structure and expression that were current around the time in which he lived and worked. Eighteenth-century music theory adds a fascinating dimension to the appreciation of Gainsborough’s art.

The following extract is adapted from Gainsborough’s Vision (1999), Chapter 5, in which links between art and music are traced in detail.

What is noticeable about the tonal stresses in the Landscape with Wooded Path (illustrated) is the deep-seated awareness of the act of performance or execution evinced in Gainsborough’s use of the pencil. The paper, for example, is not treated as a transparent medium; rather, the material qualities of its surface are used to contribute to the range of visual effects. Note where, for instance, in the far bank to the left of the path, pressure is taken off the pencil, allowing the chain lines or wire marks in the paper, along with the maker’s crest and initials (‘LVG’), to break the flow of graphite. The texture of the paper helps to propel the eye in ways that both complement and counterpoint the directions taken by the dominant hatching. As this suggests, the effects of the pencilwork serve a function that is independent of any mimetic intention that they also have. Individual lines and marks achieve a presence that is separate from their descriptive function and can appear as pure flourishes.

Aside from the effects of hatched lines – for example on the extreme left of the picture, the curly lines of the foliage, and the sharp zigzag lines to the right of centre in the immediate foreground – one may isolate the leftmost of the series of trees at the back of the picture. There, jutting out to the left of the curlicue that registers the tree trunk, is a mere squiggle, a z-shaped flourish that lies so emphatically parallel to the surface of the paper that it insistently draws attention to its intrinsic physical presence. Hardly readable as branch or foliage, it remains a line made by a pencil on paper. In such moments, where the flourish is pushed to the point at which it might jar with mimetic expectations, the formal texture is not ruptured. On the contrary, such lines enact a harmony of tone and shape with other elements in the composition that maintains the sense of a coherent whole because the drawing contains abstract patterns, unconstrained by naturalism, that have more to do with the relationship between artificial forms than with the ability of the pencil to record a moment experienced in nature.

Jackson of Exeter

Thomas Gainsborough, Portrait of William Jackson of Exeter, 1770. Oil on Canvas, 78 x 56 cm. Private Collection.

William Jackson of Exeter
(1730–1803)

Musician, painter and writer, Jackson of Exeter was one of Thomas Gainsborough's closest friends from the time of their first meeting in 1763 until at least the early 1780s. Their animated correspondence, fired by Gainsborough's passion for music, shows Gainsborough receiving help with musical problems, and in return giving Jackson advice on drawing. In the late 1760s Gainsborough tried to persuade Jackson to move from Exeter, perhaps to join him in Bath, but Jackson remained in his native city, and in 1777 was appointed organist at Exeter Cathedral, a post he held for the rest of his life. Around 1770, the year Gainsborough's portrait of his friend was shown at the Royal Academy, Jackson's interest in art developed to the point where he considered taking up painting professionally, and in 1771 he exhibited two of his own paintings at the RA.

Extract from a letter from William Jackson of Exeter to his son Thomas (1759–1828), dated 18 October 1783.

It's thanks to Jackson that we know of Gainsborough's visit to Antwerp in 1783 – a trip Gainsborough made in order to see works by Rubens. 'To say that he entertained me by a relation of his travels,' Jackson wrote to his son Thomas, 'would be saying nothing – if I could have writ as fast as he spoke, I could then present you with a second Sentimental Journey not a bit inferior to the first.' This letter, which turned up in the Vienna archive of Gertrude Jackson, a descendant of William, helped to transform our understanding of Gainsborough, who had previously been thought of as epitomising Englishness almost to the point of insularity.

Jackson himself undertook a fairly grand tour in the summer of 1785, when he travelled with a lifelong Exeter friend through France to Turin, where Jackson's son Thomas (diplomat and accomplished artist, who later escaped the clutches of Napoleon and ended up living in Vienna) was then chargé d'affaires. The narrative of this trip, accompanied by an interesting set of sketches, forms a substantial part of Jackson's autobiography, A Short Sketch of My Own Life (1802).

In his day, Jackson enjoyed a reputation as a composer of songs and church music, particularly a Te Deum, known simply as 'Jackson in F', which 'rang through every village church in England'. His most attractive songs include 'Time Hath Not Thinned My Flowing Hair' and 'Where the Bee Sucks' from Shakespeare's Tempest, an adaptation of a setting by Thomas Arne. His very successful comic opera, The Lord of the Manor, op. 12, with a libretto by General John Burgoyne (1722–92), was produced by R. B. Sheridan at Drury Lane in December 1780 and remained a favourite with the theatre-going public until the mid-nineteenth century.

To read the article on Jackson in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography click here.

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Two pages from A Short Sketch of My Own Life (1802) by William Jackson of Exeter, published as a special issue of Gainsborough's House Review 1996/97.

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'Hence reveller of tinsel wing' from Jackson of Exeter's comic opera, The Lord of the Manor (1780), performed by Malcolm Bothwell in 2010. Images: George Bickham, The Musical Entertainer, vol. 1 (1740).

Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh 1903–66

Evelyn Waugh's First Eight Books

Waugh's travel books are, as is to be anticipated, principally about Waugh. Their leitmotifs are boredom and discomfort. One is tempted to borrow a term from Sterne and call him a Splenetic Traveller, but this would not be quite accurate. In Waugh's case it is not the traveller's ruling sentiment that characterises the journey, but the unerring determination with which the sentiment is discovered in every situation. Waugh is a dogmatic traveller, and the dogma he carries with him is boredom, an attitude perfectly consistent with his comprehensively sceptical outlook as it developed during the late 1920s and early 30s. 'I am constitutionally a martyr to boredom,’ he declares in Remote People, the journey to Africa, organised as an account of two empires and three nightmares.

The London Magazine
December 2011 /January 2012

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Waugh's first eight books are:

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1928)
Decline and Fall (1928)
Vile Bodies, 1930
Labels (1930)
Remote People (1931)
Black Mischief (1932)
A Handful of Dust (1934)
Ninety-Two Days (1934)

To read the full article click here.

An Etruscan Acrobat

Martin Huxter, Etruscan Figure (2014)

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A recipe for verse: mix together a phrase from Henry James with a little bronze statue from Etruria, a mention of Keats, and some exasperation. Now add a clever woman, a sprinkle of hard words, a children's bear, and a few notes from an air by Bach. When all of that is thoroughly combined, place the resulting compound in a receptacle made of Roman streets, the Spanish Steps and the Borghese Gardens. Leave to rest in a warm place for an unspecified amount of time (you'll know when it's ready). Serve viva voce, with improvised accompaniment if desired. 

An Etruscan Acrobat uses 345 lines of blank verse to tell the beguiling tale of an artist’s evening walk through the streets of Rome. Produced in a limited edition, the book is hand-stitched by designer Simone Kotva and includes a specially commissioned frontispiece by artist Martin Huxter.

And now, if you’re sitting comfortably, let’s begin …

"It’s not like Clapham Junction …" Yes, it is!
I thought (never having been to Clapham),
It’s very like that, with its human hordes
Forever on the move: nowhere to sit,
Nowhere quiet to work, nowhere to think!
"Passing through Rome requires a week or two,"
I read. Bien sûr, if you’re an English gent,
I thought, with a linen coat and straw hat,
Swanning around after some drippy girl!
I crumpled the leaflet and let it drop.
Who in their right mind could have written that?