Inspired by the 17th and 18th century custom of the Grand Tour, where young men and women travelled to broaden the mind, Big Big Train have made an album of songs set in distant lands and beyond.
Grand Tour will be released on May 17th 2019 and is available to pre-order now on double heavyweight gatefold vinyl (featuring a 24 page booklet), digipack CD (featuring a 52 page booklet) and on standard and hi-resolution (24/96) download. Grand Tour will be available on all good streaming services on release day.
— Read on www.bigbigtrain.com/
Tag Archives: St. Cecilia
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
22 November, 2018
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
Why Spirit of Cecilia?
For six years, I was one of five folks who founded and ran a website dedicated to reviewing and promoting music.When we formed in October 2012, we originally wanted to be a fan site for the English (and now Anglo-American-Scandinavian) band, Big Big Train. We broadened our reach almost immediately, attempting to review music of all forms.
We ended up having a blast, to be sure.
After six years, though, several of us thought it was time for a change. That is, time to take us not just into music but into all of our cultural loves: music, art, poetry, fiction, history, biography, and film. Certainly, we could’ve done that with the old site, but that site had taken on a life of its own. We wish them nothing but love and success! We’re certainly not leaving music behind with the Spirit of Cecilia, but we are adding quite a bit to it. So, not just Big Big Train, but Big Big Train plus Margaret Atwood, T.S. Eliot, Willa Cather, Miles Davis, Leo Strauss, Philip Melanchthon, Sir Thomas More, Edmund Burke, Alfred Tennyson, J.R.R. Tolkien, Kevin J. Anderson, Christopher Nolan, and Alfred Hitchcock.
We threw around a number of titles for this website, knowing all along that our inspiration was St. Cecilia, the Roman Catholic (and Anglican) patroness of music and the arts. Traditionally, St. Cecilia is depicted as a young woman, holding and performing on some kind of instrument, with an angel or two watching over her. Though quite Catholic, such depictions are most likely Christianized updates of the muses inspiring a Mediterranean musician.
Kevin McCormick finally came up with the name, “Spirit of Cecilia,” and it stuck. Indeed, more than just stick, it seems perfect for what we want to do.
And, this brings us to a second form of inspiration for the title–arguably the greatest album of any type of music of the last six to seven decades, SPIRIT OF EDEN by Talk Talk. With all due apologies (and praise for) to James Marsh, the cover artist, I did my best (and, sadly, my best is pathetic!) to create an icon something akin to the original 1988 cover to that album.
Well, as is natural for all human institutions and works, this website will evolve over time as well. No matter what, though, we promise to write our best, to think our best, and to give you. . . you guessed it. . . our best. Thanks for joining us. We hope you enjoy the ride.
–Brad Birzer
Spirit of Cecilia 
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