Saturday April 16th 2011
A Marvellous day in St. Mary's Rotterdam, the first practice for the ECS week in Ely Cathedral this coming August. A large choir, and fantastic singing. I have been longing for that. Although the church was chilly, and my feet felt like two solid blocks of ice after an hour or so, it was a heart warming meeting. As usual, the Anglican Singers from Amsterdam had already practiced a few of the new anthems, canticles and other compositions. At least that offered some support to those who were new to the music, myself included. It is such a joy to sing an unknown musical piece and discover its beauty. England has produced a great number of composers, many of them completely unknown to European music lovers. Most of them have also composed music for use in the liturgy. Is it because the Church of England is a state church and so everybody knows the liturgy of the church? A liturgy which owes its beauty to the Roman Catholic church, but because Great Britain has been in splendid isolation for so many years, being an island, it has developed a tradition of its own, not influenced by Calvinism or Protestantism as found on the continent of Europe. I suppose for an English composer it is quite a challenge to compose a Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, a Bible related anthem, the setting for a chanted psalm. The Anglican chants also are typically British, perhaps based on Gregorian chant, but grown into chants for four voices, which have their own logic. They are sung prose versions of the psalms as found in the Bible. It is lovely to sing them, as it is an excellent way of expressing the texts of the psalm, much better than the psalms which are sung in the protestant churches in France and the Netherlands, which are poems or verse paraphrases of the psalms put to popular tunes, and folk tunes. Metrical psalms are still very popular in reformed churches in Holland. In the Calvinist tradition psalms were sung during the service instead of hymns and in some very strict churches in the Netherlands up to this date only the metrical psalms are sung during the service and no hymns are allowed. Calvin himself made some French translations of the Psalms for church usage, but most of the psalms that were sung in Geneva were put to music by Claude Goudimel (see Genevan Psalter). In Great Britain the Coverdale Psalter still lies at the heart of daily worship in Cathedrals and many parish churches.
Apart from a number of psalms, we also sang new Canticles, of which I loved the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in G minor by Henry Purcell.
Ten days
The past ten days have been so filled with activities, nice ones and just uninteresting chores, that I have had no time to write my blog. Music, medical appointments and tests, family reunions, meetings of the "Volksuniversiteit" , writing minutes, acting as a mediator, cycling among the bulb fields and singing , all of that has taken place over those past ten days. But, since I promised myself one day out each week, it includes two interesting and enjoyable days, one in a Dutch town and one in a Belgian city.
The first trip was to Middelburg to use my day of free train travel, connected with my travel pass. The other trip was to Brussels, as I took advantage of a special offer by Dutch Rail for a cheap day return from any station in the Netherlands to any station in Belgium. More of those two trips later.
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