Saturday Morning Music - a new tranche of BC on M

For the handful of interested readers; I have just posted a new tranche of posts on the blog Bruce Charlton on Music.   

I am still emerging, slowly, from some kind of Upper Respiratory Tract illness I picked up when visiting Suffolk recently, and which has demotivated me from musical exploration. 

All that I have seriously listened to is a very favourite CD of Michael Tippett's early music for strings, played by Marriner conducting The Academy of St Martin in the Field's which I love more and more every time. 

This links with Suffolk; since the Corelli variations was used for the superb background music of the movie of Akenfield. 

The tragedy of human life? Akenfield... again

From the movie Akenfield (1977) - a horse-drawn reaper binder - in action, from a distance; surely one of the most poetic of Mankind's machines (although very hard work for the horses). 

I am re-reading Ronald Blythe's Akenfield again, this time as an audiobook, and am again finding it a deeply moving experience. 

This applies especially to the earliest section, that has the old farm workers and their wives "speaking" about the span of their lives - memories and experiences which go back to the end of the 1800s, but which especially focus on the early years of the 20th century. The two World Wars loom large, but also the Agricultural Depression of the 1920s and 30s. 

The village is composite, and the people in the book are anonymised - their raw words have been selected and arranged by the poetic-pen of Blythe. It was published in 1968, and stories are from interviews in the preceding years. 

I first read this book when it was recently published and I was 14 or 15 - it was recommended by my favourite history teacher; and it had a lasting effect on me. 

I was made starkly aware of the qualitative transformation in the comfort and convenience of ordinary rural people's lives over the middle decades of the twentieth century. 

Listening again; I can see that my own reflections went beyond those of the author himself, who talked with the people and gave them each a voice and perspective  - and I think they still do, but differently. I suspect that Blythe himself drew rather different conclusions from his own work than I get from it - then and now. 

Fifty years ago; I saw the vast improvement in the security and abundance as having solved the age-long problem of material - or Biblical - poverty reported by the older Akenfield residents - the chronic hunger, insufficient and worn clothes, wet and cold, severe overcrowding; the serious lack of time, drainage of energy, cultural impoverishment, and infrequent fun.

My youthful conclusion from the contrasting interviews with younger people of the village - confirmed by my own experiences and observations - was that the recent abundance, the all-but universal comfort and convenience, was being dissipated in the quest for ever more of the material "goods" that had been had been in such short supply. 

Instead of saying "we have enough", people were saying "we want (even) more".  

Instead, my idea was that we should be striving in the direction of creative achievement - arts, and sciences - and building a world with wholesome (folkish) communal activities such as singing and dancing and crafts. 

I ignored the book's story of the decline of religion - by which Blythe mainly means serious and frequent church or chapel participation - because at that time religions seemed obviously untrue; and the descriptions of the olden-days life of church and chapel were without any appeal to my young self. 

Nowadays, I am more intrigued by the way that people regard their lives, taken as a whole - what they seem to think their lives were "about". 

For many of the villagers, "life" seems to have been about some aspect of the village. Even the religious ones seem to think of it in terms of communally recognized activities. 

I see this now, with a different generation of the oldest - and in my own, now-old, generation - a tendency to look back and seek, bring-forward, various achievements; usually from earlier life, or recently, or perhaps those of family - and to regard these as justification. 

The younger or fitter elderly seem nowadays to be justifying their lives in terms of continuing activities - the "I am busier than ever since I retired" sort of thing. 

In Blythe's 1979 book about old-age - The View in Winter, based on interviews with the elderly (a book which I did not much like) he concluded similarly that the things to strive for in old-age was continued activity and engagement for as long as could be managed. 

Blythe himself lived to the age of 100 and was writing - and writing well - into his nineties; but (as so often happens nowadays) he was apparently afflicted with dementia for the last decade-plus, and dis-engaged from reality. He continued living in his own house and alone (he never married), but with a great deal of essential outside help - as he had advocated as best for the elderly several decades earlier. 

Yet I find this kind of advice about old-age - staying active and engaged, living in one's own home etc - to be better than most alternatives, but merely a temporary and very partial palliative, when it comes to understanding and justifying "what my life is about". 

Such reflections always lead to the solid insight that human life, as such, is tragic. If life is about what happens during life - it cannot help but be sad, one way or another. 

Because real or supposed achievements in the past, or by the now-deceased, do not really mean anything of themselves - no matter how often or vehemently we may repeat or pretend they do. 

But some things that happen in our lives go much deeper than others, and are experienced as much "better". 

Nostalgia for being-active, working-hard, social engagement, or for the fun (of various kinds, including the obvious...); are simply not very profound - no matter how we spin it with words, pictures, or stories. 

Or, if such things genuinely are regarded as the most profound experiences of our lives - as so often seems to be the case (by self-report); then that does seem ineradicably, and finally, tragic.   

Akenfield - the book, the film

The original 2 minute 'trailer' for Akenfield

The book of Akenfield by Ronald Blythe (1969) was recommended me by my history teacher; and made a powerful impact.

It consists of two elements: a set of wide-ranging interviews with old, middling and young adults in a 'composite' Suffolk village of the middle 1960s; lovingly rendered into permanently-memorable, distinctly characterised, subtly-poetic prose by the author.

These are supplemented by a good deal of factual, including statistical, material; the relevance and interest of which has by now considerably diminished.

The movie of Akenfield was made for television and broadcast on a Sunday evening in 1974, when it was watched by more than 14 million people - and is a rare example of a great book being adapted into an equivalently great film.

A great film quite unlike any other; because it was made at the same locations as the book, with an amateur cast of (mostly) working people living in the same places. It contains some of the most beautiful, powerful, and sad scenes of anything I know - again, permanently memorable.

If you watch the film; you will be astonished to realise that such an ambitious, high quality, demanding, spiritually-ambitious work could even be made; and more astonished that it would prove such an immediate success with so many ordinary people.

At the time, this was a source of hope for me. I felt that great matters were stirring in England. As things turned-out, it marked the end of an era rather than the start of anything better. But the work remains.

One of the best books I have ever read: The Glory of their Times by Lawrence S Ritter

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Of course you have to like baseball - actually you have to love baseball (even if you are not an expert on it) - but given that qualification Lawrence S Ritter's The Glory of their Times (1966, revised 1984) is one of the very best modern books I have read - and I mean 'best' from a literary point of view.

It consists of Ritter's edited versions of interviews with twenty-six ball players from the late 19th early 20th century - describing in their own words their lives in and around baseball. I find it beautiful, completely enjoyable, funny, moving and just extremely interesting!

I probably read it about 9 years ago (not long after I got interested in baseball) and it has stayed with me - in terms of a strong flavour, an emotional memory and specific details - ever since. I am currently re-reading, and it is every bit as good as I remembered.

The Glory of their Times has stayed with me, therefore, in way that very few novels or plays ever have (and I speak as someone with an MA in English - thus pretty well-read in that field).

And this fact fuels a conviction - or rather two of them - that has grown on me over recent decades.

1. Much of the best literature is outwith the usual categories of novels, plays and poems.

2. Much of the best literature is the product not of great writers, but one-hit-wonders.

As a further example, Akenfield by Ronald Blythe is a somewhat similar book to GotT - in the sense that the meat of it consists of edited interviews with inhabitants of a composite East Anglian English Village circa 1968 - providing a portrait stretching back about a hundred years of oral history.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/akenfield-and-tippett.html

Blythe has written a lot of other good things, but Akenfield really stands out.

English-speaking literature is in fact full of these (usually) one-off  'non- fiction' first rate classics - The Compleat Angler by Izaak Walton, Brief Lives by John Aubrey, The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, Walden by Henry Thoreau, Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome, Ceremonial Time by John Hanson Mitchell, to mention a few favourites.

I would take a dozen of these and their like in preference to the output of any specific big name novelist you could care to name, whether great or minor.

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Tolkien's influence on my life

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I read the Hobbit when I was, I think, 13 years old; and it was a few months before I moved on to read LotR.

The delay was because I liked the Hobbit so much that I wanted more of the same, especially, more of Bilbo - and I didn't like the idea that he would only be a character at the beginning.

Anyway, when I eventually read LotR I was completely smitten. For the rest of my school days I would re-read and re-read and also looked at everything else by or about Tolkien available to me at the time.

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As I recall, I did not re-read Tolkien so much in my twenties and early thirties - and the return was triggered by Tom Shippey's Road to Middle Earth.

This era of neglect now seems to me a dark time in my life.

My young adult neglect of Tolkien seems like evidence of corruption and decline (certainly not of maturity!).

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Anyway, reading LotR aged 13 opened-up many worlds for me.

Firstly, the world of grown-up literature - the first authors I read were Bernard Shaw, and Robert Graves - specifically the I Claudius and Claudius the God books; because Tolkien also made me want to read more history.

I also read history proper, and especially the history of Anglo Saxon times, and of farming and country life.

Then I became generally interested in the whole business of rural England - for instance the oral history of Akenfield by Ronald Blythe, the work of George Ewart Evans, and the memoirs of Evesham Vale farmer Fred Archer (I didn't realize Tolkien's brother Hilary was at that time still a fruit grower in Evesham).

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Considerations of life in The Shire meant that I became interested in Self Sufficiency (John Seymour), the Small is Beautiful movement with Fritz Schumacher and the budding 'Ecology' (now 'Green') movement - also William Morris's stories of a medieval socialist utopia (Dream of John Ball, News from Nowhere); and Thoreau's Walden.

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Tolkien's 'medievalism' and use of song led to an interest in Folk Music - which included not just watching and listening, but also participation and a little bit of arranging of unaccompanied song and dance; and then classical music, beginning with Bach and Telemann (because of their use of the recorder! which I regarded for some reason as a Tolkien instrument).

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All these strands came together in an interest in myth, legend and fairy story.

And I read other 'fantasy' writers - some written before and some after Tolkien - but only found something of what I sought in Alan Garner and Lloyd Alexander.

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Also, I learned a little of Tolkien's professional work, and this (plus good fortune of having a well trained English teacher) led to me reading Chaucer, Gawain and the Green Knight and some other Middle English poetry. This was, in fact, my first interest in poetry - I went from medieval poems to the more modern.

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There was probably even more in the way of influence. And of course there were other preceding and subsequent interests, not related to Tolkien and often hostile in spirit to the above - for example a love of the 18th century era of England in its architecture and lifestyle, and of PG Wodehouse; and of science.

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But suffice to say that reading Tolkien age thirteen was the door to self-conscious adulthood for me; and I could not have wished for a better door.

My main regret is that Tolkien did not influence me even more, and throughout my whole life; because, of course, I tried to ignore completely Tolkien's Christianity until I was moving into late middle age - not very many years ago - when at last I recognized that this was the deepest element of all in Tolkien's great works.

So, just about the one area of life in which I did not allow Tolkien to influence me at all was religion; specifically my own complete lack of religion.

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Akenfield and Tippett

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One of my favourite pieces of music is the Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, by Michael Tippett (1953) - indeed it is probably the single piece of 20th century classical music which most moves me.

(Indeed I was moved to within an inch of my life! when I saw it done at Tippett's 75th Birthday concert in 1980, by the English Chamber Orchestra, with the composer present.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNqTeQa7MDQ

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And one of my favourite books is Akenfield - an oral historical study of an East Anglian village by Ronald Blythe (1969)

http://www.akenfield.com/

I read this intensively 1973-4 - on the recommendation of an inspirational history teacher named John Reeve (who later became a well known educator and author at the British Museum, London).

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The music and the book come together in one of my favourite movies - Akenfield directed by Peter Hall (1974) - and in particular a sequence depicting the courtship and love of the historical protagonist (Tom) and his wife.

My previously names favourite movie scenes (from Blade Runner, Last of the Mohicans and Return of the King) were all heroic: but this one is extraordinarily tender.

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Buy the DVD, watch the movie. You won't regret it. You will always remember it. 

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