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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Every afternoon in England, between about three and six o'clock, candles are lit in the great cathedrals and abbeys and college chapels, and the antique rite known as Evensong is observed. "Sung"would be more accurate than "observed”; the choir, boys first and then men, shuffles in at chain-gang pace, enters the carved stalls, and proceeds with what might be a brief concert. There is no need for anyone else, except an organist and a precentor, which is just as well, since often the shadowy nave and transepts are void of worshippers; perhaps a few tourists hover at the very back of the church, foggily attempting to gauge the event's exact religiosity.
This service is mostly music, and the foundation of its repertory is Elizabethan and Jacobean: Thomas Tallis, William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons. Yet the language that is sung--especially the mid-sixteenth-century language of Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer, and the early-seventeenth-century language of the King James Bible--is itself a great music. That these words and this formality of rite endure suggests how traditional the Church of England has remained. But it is a living tradition, too. Just as a Byrd anthem, to our ears, is freighted with all the music it has influenced (one hears not only later English gentleness but a dissonance that has had an impact on twentieth-century composition), so the language of the early Church of England now seems loaded with all its historical bequests.
Suppose the choir happens to sing a setting of Psalm 90, with its grand, desert evocation of life's ephemerality: "For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. . . . For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told."It will be hard not to hear in those words Macbeth's last soliloquy, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,"with its bitterness about "all our yesterdays"having lighted fools the way to dusty death, and its likening of life to "a tale / told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing."(Shakespeare would probably have read earlier versions of the psalm, such as those of Miles Coverdale and the Geneva Bible, which the King James translators adapted very closely and in places word for word.) Or if the reading is from Job, with its verse "Men shall clap their hands at him, and shall hiss him out of his place,"and we hear the wonderful oddity of the verb's transitive use and its unexpected preposition "out,"a reader of D. H. Lawrence might be prompted to recall how fond that intensely Biblical writer was of similarly strange prepositions and pungent transitive verbs: "Again the flash went through him dazing him out”; "Banford turtled up like a little fighting cock”; "following so submissively, gloating on him from behind."Or if the reading that day happened to be from Ruth 1:16--"for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge”--some keen listener might hear Gabriel Oak in "Far from the Madding Crowd,"who proposes to Bathsheba, his future wife, saying, "Whenever you look up, there I shall be--and whenever I look up there will be you.”
The pleasure is not so much in...
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