Category Archives: Poetry

Music, Poetry

Cecilian Ode #2: “Welcome to All the Pleasures”

In 1683, a new organization, the Musical Society of London, commissioned a setting of Christopher Fishburn’s ode Welcome to All the Pleasures for performance on St. Cecilia’s Day — November 22nd.  The Society chose Henry Purcell, 24 years old and already the organist at both Westminister Abbey and the Chapel Royal, as the composer.

Welcome to All the Pleasures proved a hit, with Purcell’s innovative use of the ritornello (a riff for strings punctuating a section of the work) and the ground (a repeating bass line anchoring vocal variations) causing quite the sensation.  Not only it was published the following year  — a rarity for an extended work in Restoration England — it became the first in a series of Cecilian odes commissioned by the Musical Society for their annual celebration.  Purcell wrote three more such odes before his untimely death in 1695, as did contemporaries like John Blow and successors like George Frederic Handel, often setting libretti by renowned poets such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope.

This year, St. Cecilia’s Day is also Thanksgiving Day in the United States.  Why not give thanks for the gifts of music and poetry by spending 15 minutes with Welcome to All the Pleasures?  The text of Christopher Fishburn’s ode follows below the playlist.

Welcome to All the Pleasures:

Symphony

Alto, tenor and bass: chorus: ritornello
Welcome to all the pleasures that delight
Of ev’ry sense the grateful appetite,
Hail, great assembly of Apollo’s race.
Hail to this happy place, this musical assembly
That seems to be the arc of universal harmony.

Alto: ritornello
Here the Deities approve
The God of Music and of Love;
All the talents they have lent you,
All the blessings they have sent you,
Pleas’d to see what they bestow,
Live and thrive so well below.

Two sopranos and bass: ritornello
While joys celestial their bright souls invade
To find what great improvement you have made.

Alto, tenor and bass: chorus
Then lift up your voices, those organs of nature,
Those charms to the troubled and amorous creature.
The power shall divert us a pleasanter way,
For sorrow and grief find from music relief,
And love its soft charms must obey.
Then lift up your voices, those organs of nature,
Those charms to the troubled and amorous creature.

Tenor: ritornello
Beauty, thou scene of love,
And virtue thou innocent fire,
Made by the powers above
To temper the heat of desire,
Music that fancy employs
In rapture of innocent flame,
We offer with lute and with voice
To Cecilia, Cecilia’s bright name.

Tenor: chorus
In a consort of voices while instruments play
With music we celebrate this holy day;
Iô Cecilia!

(This is the second in a series exploring the Cecilian Ode, a uniquely English poetic and musical genre that spans the centuries from the late 1600s to the present.  Check out Ode #1 here; look for a new ode on or about the 22nd of each month!)

— Rick Krueger

 

 

Poetry

St. Cecilia’s Day

St. Cecilia’s Day

Annals of the ages
preserve no evidence,
not a trace esconced
in the walls of titular tombs.

‘Twas her spirit that guided
the hand of history
to the bones of her testament

in her name,
carved in stone
of a sepluchre in the catacomb.

she lives,
enlivened by the virginal joy
not given over
to earthly ecstacy.

Hers, the empassioned embrace
of the sacrificial body.

Hers, the voice
ringing out the sweet sounds
of certainty.

A life, emboldened to stand
firm in the face of gallows,
flourishes,
runs free
into welcoming elysian fields.

The haunting gaze of conviction
urges us to run abreast,
yet fixed souls stand in awe
of such simple,
wondrous,
radiance.

This, the heart of the saint.
This, the incantation of eternal love,
a wordless aria
soaring to heaven.

And so she is here,
as present as you and I
as we, in unearthly voices,
sound the passing knell

to cast the thundering waves
of joy—the light engaged
to cast aside the trappings
that sustain the worldly
mammon and the madness

Faith and light and trembling
hope—the voice
sung out to angels,
the censorial sonance to the cold
hand of the rex legem

Condemned now,
the responding smile
opens the heart
to the flowing blood of truth.

There, the bejeweled
backdrop of gilded stones,
reveals the maiden betrothed,
not defiled.

Eyes cast aloft,
her soul ascends
through winds divine

and just below,
the angelic gaze,
a perfect alabaster nape
which twice and again
the henchman cleaved
but could not sever.

A final sign
of love revealed,
of three in one—
her love now sealed.

Kevin McCormick
22 November, 2018

Art, Biography, Faith, Film, History, Music, Poetry, Politics

Music and the Arts Over Partisan Politics

Named for St. Cecilia, patroness of music and the arts, this blog, Spirit of Cecilia, highlights music, art, poetry, fiction, history, biography, and film. These fields of enjoyment and expression are creative and interactive, requiring both a transmitter and a recipient to achieve their fullest potential and profoundest effects.

It’s my hope that these fields, which we might usefully and with slight reservation label the humanities, can accomplish far more than partisan politics to expand the frontiers of knowledge and deepen our understanding of ourselves as human beings created by an awesome God.  Anger is not a constructive starting point for connecting with strangers or political opponents if the goal is mutual understanding. Hard logic puts strangers and political opponents on the defensive, causing them to question the logician’s motives and work through whatever problems and challenges the logician has presented.  But aesthetics: they provide pleasure and the kind of sensory experience in which people of diverse backgrounds and beliefs share and delight. This is not a grand claim about the universality of standards of beauty but rather a plain statement about the obvious draw of humans to phenomena that stir in them strange and wonderful emotions, that cause them to think about the timeless questions that the greatest minds over the centuries have contemplated with differing degrees of gravity and intensity. The fact that we have music, art, poetry, fiction, history, biography, and film at all suggests a certain commonality among human likes and desires across places and cultures.

I am an administrator in a law school, a recovering lawyer you might say, who happens to have earned a doctorate in English.  I am grateful to Dr. Bradley Birzer for including me as a contributor to the Spirit of Cecilia and have high hopes for what it can achieve. Life is difficult for everyone at some time or another.  Wouldn’t it be great if this site were a forum where friendships are built, ideas are exchanged civilly and in good faith, and a profound awareness of our shared humanity served as the predicate for our interpretations and communications?  I look forward to writing in this space. May it flourish.

–Allen Mendenhall

Faith, Music, Poetry

Cecilian Ode #1

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A Hymn for St. Cecilia, composed by Herbert Howells [1892-1983]

Sing for the morning’s joy, Cecilia, sing,
In words of youth and praises of the Spring,
Walk the bright colonnades by fountains’ spray,
And sing as sunlight fills the waking day;
Till angels, voyaging in upper air,
Pause on a wing and gather the clear sound
Into celestial joy, wound and unwound,
A silver chain, or golden as your hair.

Sing for your loves of heaven and of earth,
In words of music, and each word a truth;
Marriage of heart and longings that aspire,
A bond of roses, and a ring of fire.
Your summertime grows short and fades away,
Terror must gather to a martyr’s death;
But never tremble, the last indrawn breath
Remembers music as an echo may.

Through the cold aftermath of centuries,
Cecilia’s music dances in the skies;
Lend us a fragment of th’immortal air,
That with your choiring angels we may share,
A word to light us thro’ time-fettered night,
Water of life, or rose of paradise,
So from the earth another song shall rise
To meet your own in heaven’s long delight.

— Text by Ursula Vaughan Williams [1911-2007]

This is the first in an occasional series exploring the Cecilian Ode, a uniquely English poetic and musical genre that spans the centuries from the late 1600s to the present.  More to come!

— Rick Krueger

Art, Biography, Faith, Film, History, Music, Poetry, Politics

Coming Soon. . .

A verve-acious blog pursuing the good, the true, and the beautiful and taking seriously music, art, poetry, fiction, essays, and film.

Guided by the Spirit of St. Cecilia, patroness of the arts.  Featuring the writing of Carl Olson, Father Jay Watson, Paul Watson, Dedra Birzer, Bryan Morey, Kevin McCormick, Stephen Catanzarite, Tad Wert, Erik Heter, and more.

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