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Delphian
Symphony No 2
Three folk settings
Scenas I & II
Miracles
877C
David Wilson-Johnson
Scottish Chamber Orchestra & Chorus
Garry Walker
Edinburgh Quartet
Edward Harper
Anna Jones
Louise Paterson
The music of EdwardHarper
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Delphian
DCD340692/23
Miracles
The music of EdwardHarper
Edinburgh Quartet
Edward Harper piano
Anna Jones flute
Louise Paterson cello
David Wilson-Johnson baritone
Scottish Chamber Orchestra & Chorus
Ruth Crouch leader
Garry Walker conductor
The Cold Dancer: Contemporary String Quartets From Scotland
Edinburgh Quartet
DCD34038
Rich and personal contributions to the quartet tradition from four contemporary Scottish composing voices, ranging from the lyrical profundity of Kenneth Dempster’s meditation on a George Mackay Brown poem to a characteristically idiosyncratic and yet songful work by Judith Weir. Under their new leader Charles Mutter, the Edinburgh Quartet deliver blazing, committed performances celebrating the immense variety and vitality of work on offer.
‘… the Edinburgh Quartet has never played better. It’s nothing less than a landmark’
– The Herald, February 2007
Giles Swayne: Convocation
The National Youth Choir of Great Britain; Laudibus
Mike Brewer, conductor; Michael Bonaventure, organ
Stephen Wallace, counter-tenor
DCD34033
When a powerful team of new music exponents come together, magic will happen; when the music is by Giles Swayne, a composer whose light shines brilliantly in its own unique direction, the results will entrance. This disc offers a bracing sonic experience - vividly communicative music performed with rare verve, passion, and youthful vibrancy.
‘Swayne pushes at the boundaries’
– The Times, October 2006
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Eddie McGuire: Music for flute, guitar and piano
Nancy Ruffer, flute and piccolo; Abigail James, guitar
Dominic Saunders, piano DCD34029
Over the past 40 years, Eddie McGuire, British Composer Award Winner and Creative Scotland Award Winner, has developed a compositional style that is as diverse as it is concentrated. This disc surveys a selection of his solo and chamber works, written for his home instruments, flute, guitar, and piano. The writing, whilst embracing tonality, focuses on texture and aspects of colour, drawing on a myriad of folk influences. At once bold and playful, the listener cannot help be drawn in to McGuire’s evocative sound-world.
‘… this is quite simply beautiful music ... Performances are excellent, the overall playing as expressive as the music itself requires; Delphian’s sound is spot-on.’
– Gramophone Editor’s Choice, Awards issue 2006
Robert Crawford: Music for piano and strings
Edinburgh Quartet
Nicholas Ashton, piano DCD34055
The elder statesman of Scotland’s music scene, Robert Crawford has throughout his life lavished intense care upon every one of his compositions. The Edinburgh Quartet and pianist Nicholas Ashton are intimately acquainted with Crawford’s music, and mirror the composer’s attention to detail in a long overdue survey of this lovingly crafted oeuvre.
‘Beautifully-crafted music’
– The Herald, February 2005
Three folk settings for string quartet
1 The Lowlands of Holland[3:36]
2 The Ash Grove[4:20]
3 Mairi’s Wedding[2:57]
4 Scena for solo cello[3:59]
5 Scena II for flute, cello and piano[6:20]
Symphony No 2
6 Overture[7:17]
7 The Turnen Stile[7:28]
8 Them! Not us![11:38]
9 Miracles[4:16]
10 Epilogue[7:08]
Total playing time[59:00]
World première recordings
Recorded on 8 May 2006 at Colinton Parish Church (Three folk settings), 20-21 June 2007 at the Reid Concert Hall, University of Edinburgh (Scenas I & II), and 27-29 August 2007 at City Halls, Glasgow (Symphony No 2).
Producer: Paul Baxter
Engineers: Adam Binks & Thomas Hewitt Jones
24-Bit digital editing: Adam Binks
24-Bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Design: John Christ
Piano: Steinway Model D, Serial No. 527910 (1995), maintained by Norman W. Motion, Consultant to Steinway & Sons
Photography: © Delphian Records Ltd
Photograph editing: Dr Raymond Parks
Cover image: Louise Paterson
Miracles begin with the human. Transfiguring everyday existence, they are the revelation of God in the world of men. Composers begin with the human, too. All of the music on this recording does so, both technically and expressively, and in every piece here human content runs up against something mysteriously other. This is, arguably, one of the things music does most persuasively: it takes human experience and makes it not universal as such, but open to the idea of something beyond itself.
Each of Edward Harper’s Three Folk Settings places a familiar tune – one English, one Welsh, one Scottish – in the context of music for string quartet which enhances or in some way amplifies the folk-tune’s expressive content. ‘The Lowlands of Holland’ is based on a sad ballad sung by a girl who is disowned by her family for marrying a sailor. The sailor drowns at sea, and she is left alone. The rocking figuration of the opening suggests both the movement of waves and the girl’s love. The tune, when it arrives, is heard in a condensed form in the middle of the texture, and repeated in stark block chords against which a chromatic rising line in viola and cello represents the girl’s anguish.
The second piece, ‘The Ash Grove’, is in a sense two settings in one. The fragmented textures of the opening gradually coalesce
to introduce a falling pentatonic motif which sounds as if it could be the incipit of a folktune. But in fact this music is an instrumental version of Harper’s setting of a poem by Edward Thomas, from his song-cycle Lights Out (1993; for soprano, recorder, cello and harpsichord). The folk melody of the same name arrives later, introduced as though in response to the words of the poem (‘… I heard a girl sing / The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed’). [Thomas’s poem is reproduced at the end of this note.] In the quartet version, of course, we do not hear the words sung, but the sense remains of the folk-song quotation as separate, set apart from the prevailing texture in cello harmonics and muted high violin and viola. Ghostly transcription of what was already a ghostly moment in the song, this music is twice haunted. ‘Mairi’s Wedding’ is the brief, rousing conclusion to the set: ‘Step it gaily, off we go / Heel for heel and toe for toe.’
The two other chamber pieces recorded here, the Scena for solo cello and its sequel for flute, cello and piano, both relate to Harper’s opera The Spire (1993). Based on the novel by William Golding, The Spire is another story of the human reaching for the divine. The Dean of a cathedral believes that God has come to him in a vision, instructing him to add a spire to the building. The master mason tells him that there are no foundations to support it, but
Biographies
Louise PatersonLouise Paterson was born in Scotland and studied music at Edinburgh University. After gaining several travelling scholarships, she studied cello with Professor Valentin Erben at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik. A planned two-year stint turned out to last twenty-eight years, during which time she taught at the Vienna Conservatoire, gave many solo recitals, especially in the Czech Republic, Germany and Austria and was a member of a clarinet, piano and cello trio, and a teacher and accompanist at summer courses.
She married the teacher, composer, conductor and pianist Edward Harper and now lives once more in Edinburgh.
Anna JonesIncreasingly in demand as one of Scotland’s finest freelance flautists, Anna Jones was a student at Edinburgh University and later at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama where she studied flute with David Nicholson. Anna, who is based in Edinburgh, pursues a varied career as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestral player. She frequently plays in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and makes regular guest appearances with the Scottish Ensemble. She has played with the Hebrides Ensemble and was a founder member of the contemporary music group One Voice.
As a soloist, Anna has performed concertos with the Virtuosi of London and as a recitalist has performed with many distinguished pianists including Peter Hill, Alexander Taylor and Ingrid Sawyers. Working with Edward Harper and Louise Paterson, both on this CD and in recital, has been a particular source of pleasure.
the Dean drives the project through, oblivious to the consequences for all around him and finally for himself.
The impassioned solo cello piece ranges from the bottom C with which it opens to high E flat above the treble stave. Simple, lyrical music represents the hopeless love of the Dean for the daughter of the cathedral caretaker. The faster passage that follows –brutal music of double-stops and high glissandi – represents the murder of the caretaker by an army of angry workmen. After a return to the very low bass register where it began, the mood quietens, and the piece concludes with a lullaby for the daughter, who has died in childbirth.
Scena was written in 1996 for Clea Friend. It was subsequently taken up by the composer’s wife, Louise Paterson (who performs it on this recording), and in early 2006 Harper completed a second chamber work based on material from the opera, this time for the slightly unusual trio line-up in which he himself gives occasional concerts with Paterson and with the flautist Anna Jones. The opening of Scena II represents the Dean praying. His joy at the vision is expressed as the music accelerates through a passage of rising trills and lands suddenly on octave B flats whose propulsive energy is characteristic of Harper (and can be heard
again on this disc in the Symphony No 2). Cello and piano refer to the violence of the opera before yielding to the quiet close where, from his deathbed, the Dean can see the spire in all its beauty. ‘Was this what I was for?’ he wonders.
Harper’s second Symphony, completed in 2007 (although partially premiered in Glasgow at the end of 2006) and presented here in Delphian’s first ever orchestral recording, is a remarkable, powerfully communicative work for chorus and orchestra, its diverse parts unified both by subject-matter and by a tight motivic design and yet able to incorporate the extended text-based drama of the cantata-like third movement as well as the more abstractly driven dance of death of the second and the lighter, scherzo-like fourth movement which lends this disc its title.
The first movement, for orchestra alone, is weightier and more substantial than its heading ‘Overture’ might suggest, and serves both to introduce motifs on which the later movements will be built and to establish a dialogue between radiant stillness and a joyous propulsion which will return in the symphony’s last two movements.
With the second movement we are back in folk territory, the solo violin’s open strings and the speech-like inflections of the vocal
line making a sort of intimate imaginary folk music, as if the baritone soloist were accompanying himself. The text, two stanzas from a nineteenth-century poem in Dorset dialect, describes a family of four passing through a turnstile on their way to church, until one day the stile stands still after only three sad turns: the young son has died. Harper divides the poem not between the two stanzas, but unevenly, into ‘before’ and ‘after’, and this allows him to expand the movement on to a symphonic scale by means of a purely orchestral waltz which in fact takes up a full half of the movement’s duration. Growing outwards from the open fifths of the opening accompanimental figuration, and seeming at first to represent the constant turning of the stile, this music becomes fuller and fiercer until climaxing in a frenzied alternation of strings and brass. When it subsides, the baritone re-enters now with a muted solo viola in place of the earlier violin, and tubular bells tolling for the sad loss.
Although ostensibly very different in style and subject, the third movement is again a response to what Harper has called ‘the particular tragedy of death involving children’. Uniquely for Harper, it takes its cue from two real-life incidents that have happened in our own time. In 2002, news reports told how the family of a Jewish student from Glasgow, killed by a Palestinian suicide bomb while
visiting Tel Aviv, had donated his organs to save the life of a Palestinian girl. Two years later, in a separate incident, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy was shot dead by an Israeli soldier while playing with a toy gun, and in an act of astonishing generosity, his family donated his organs to a number of beneficiaries including two Israeli children. In dramatising a situation based on these incidents, Harper’s third movement opens the symphony out from tragedy and grief on to the possibility of reconciliation which is its real message.
The text, commissioned specially for the symphony from the writer Ron Butlin, starts out in a mood of apparently intractable tension and violence (‘Them! Not us!’), matched in the music by the shouts of the choir, urged on by the baritone as ringleader. The unison string line which opened the movement returns, slower, on a solo violin, and develops into a rocking lament as the baritone now takes the part of the Palestinian boy’s father, mourning the death of his son. The rising intervals of his solo line are taken over by the cellos, and the singer moves from grief into reflection, his meditation gradually taking on a universal aspect. ‘Let us reach across the terror,’ the choir sing; and, together with the soloist: ‘Now is the time for miracles.’
The briefer scherzo looks from a different viewpoint at the relationship between the
McGegan and regular soloist/directors include Christian Zacharias and Piotr Anderszewski.
The Orchestra plays a prominent role in the Edinburgh International Festival. It also enjoys close relationships with many leading composers and has commissioned more than a hundred new works, including pieces by Composer Laureate Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Judith Weir, Sally Beamish, Karin Rehnqvist, Einojuhani Rautavaara and James MacMillan.
The SCO has led the way in music education with a unique programme of projects. SCO Education provides workshops for children and adults across Scotland and has attracted interest and invitations from overseas. The Orchestra broadcasts regularly and has a discography now exceeding 140 recordings available online at theshop.sco.org.uk.
Edinburgh Quartet
Charles Mutter violin
Philip Burrin violin
Michael Beeston viola
Mark Bailey cello
The Edinburgh Quartet is one of the UK’s leading string quartets. Resident at the Ian Tomlinson School of Music, Napier University, Edinburgh and at Glasgow University, it also plays an important role in the musical
activities of the Universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Founded in 1959 by Professor Sydney Newman, it is one of the UK’s longest established university-based quartets.
Its repertoire is firmly rooted in the great classical European tradition of the last three centuries, and it is active in the promotion and commissioning of new music. Having worked closely with Michael Tippett, the Edinburgh Quartet’s recording of Quartet No 1 was selected by the composer for release shortly before his death. Close relationships have been established with some of the most distinguished composers of our time, and indeed, the quartet’s work in this field earned it the first PRS award from the Scottish Society of Composers. Kenneth Leighton and Hans Gál worked intimately with the Edinburgh Quartet in the preparation and performance of their works, of which the quartet has released recordings.
Further recent recordings for Delphian include The Cold Dancer, a disc of contemporary string quartets from Scotland (DCD34038), and the piano quintet of Robert Crawford (DCD34055).
Biographies
In 2006 he returned to Edinburgh to conduct a new opera by Stuart MacRae, The Assassin Tree, a co-production with the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and in 2007 he conducted the critically acclaimed production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw for English National Opera.
Garry Walker holds the positions of Principal Guest Conductor of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Permanent Guest Conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Principal Conductor of Paragon Ensemble.
Scottish Chamber Orchestra
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra is internationally recognised for its innovative approach to music-making and programme planning. Formed in 1974 with a commitment to serve the Scottish community, it is also one of the country’s major cultural ambassadors. The Orchestra performs throughout Scotland, including annual tours of the Highlands and Islands and South of Scotland, and appears regularly at the Edinburgh, St Magnus and Aldeburgh Festivals and the BBC Proms. Its busy international schedule has recently included Germany, Spain, Belgium, The Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland and the USA. The Orchestra’s international touring receives support from the Scottish Government.
The SCO’s long-standing relationship with Conductor Laureate Sir Charles Mackerras, has resulted in many exceptional performances and recordings over the years, particularly at the Edinburgh International Festival where they established an enviable reputation for concert performances of opera. Their recordings together include seven Mozart operas, a Grammy-nominated set of Brahms’ symphonies, the full cycle of Beethoven symphonies (with the Philharmonia Orchestra), four CDs of Mozart Piano Concertos with Alfred Brendel, Mozart’s Requiem, a disc of Kodály and Bartók and, most recently, a doubledisc featuring Mozart’s last four symphonies.
Following nine successful years as the SCO’s Principal Conductor, Joseph Swensen became the Orchestra’s first Conductor Emeritus in 2005. Swensen has developed a unique relationship with the SCO as soloist as well as conductor and he and the SCO have released five CDs together through the Orchestra’s partnership with Linn Records.
The young Estonian conductor Olari Elts joined the Orchestra as Principal Guest Conductor from the 2007/08 Season, and other conductors who appear regularly with the SCO include Andrew Manze, Frans Brüggen, John Storgårds, Thierry Fischer, Louis Langrée, Andrew Litton and Nicholas
miraculous and the everyday. The choir sing just one word throughout, repeating it over and over again as the baritone voices Walt Whitman’s discovery of ‘wonderfulness all around’. The jazzy ostinato which underpins the opening gradually seems to infect the whole orchestra with joy, rising through pizzicato lower strings until it tumbles back down at the climax like a peal of bells.
After this, the Epilogue begins with the orchestra recalling the violence of the middle movement, but now with a surer sense of the calm which must replace this agitation. The luminous diatonic scales of the opening movement are spread once more over the music. The chorus utter a prayer for peace, and, with the sense again that our children can inspire our salvation (‘and a little child shall lead them’), the baritone soloist ushers the work to a close with the utmost gentleness, in a Biblical vision of reconciliation and harmony.
© 2008 John FallasJohn Fallas is a writer and commentator on contemporary music
The Ash Grove
Half of the grove stood dead, and those that yet lived made Little more than the dead ones made of shade. If they led to a house, long before they had seen its fall: But they welcomed me; I was glad without cause and delayed.
Scarce a hundred paces under the trees was the Interval –Paces each sweeter than sweetest miles –but nothing at all, Not even the spirits of memory and fear with restless wing, Could climb down in to molest me over the wall
That I passed through at either end without noticing. And now an ash grove far from those hills can bring
The same tranquillity in which I wander a ghost With a ghostly gladness, as if I heard a girl sing
The song of the Ash Grove soft as love uncrossed, And then in a crowd or in distance it were lost, But the moment unveiled something unwilling to die
And I had what most I desired, without search or desert or cost.
Edward Thomas (1878-1917)Montgomery and Enescu’s Oedipe at the Holland Festival. He sang in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony under Leonard Slatkin at the Last Night of the Proms in September 2001 to a worldwide television audience of 340 million. Future plans include Elias in Strasbourg under Heinz Holliger, the title role in Owen Wingrave in Tapiola with Stefan Asbury, and Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius under Vladimir Ashkenazy with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
David Wilson-Johnson taught for 21 years at the Summer School Ferrandou in The Dordogne. He now teaches at the Amsterdam Sweelinck Conservatorium and lives between houses in Amsterdam, London and France.
Garry Walker
Born and educated in Edinburgh, Garry Walker took up the cello at the age of seven and became a member of the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland. He studied at the Royal Northern College of Music and Manchester University and was awarded a Junior Fellowship in Conducting at the Royal Northern College of Music in 1997 to study with Edward Warren and Timothy Reynish. This enabled him to conduct a wide repertoire from the baroque to the contemporary, performing with many celebrated musicians.
In November 1998 he conducted a highly acclaimed performance of Henze’s opera Pollicino which opened the ‘Henze at the RNCM’ Festival, and subsequently conducted the RNCM Sinfonia at the Montepulciano Festival in Italy. In May 1999 Walker gained the first distinction ever awarded by the RNCM for conducting and in July 1999 he won the Sixth Leeds Conductor’s Competition. In October of the same year he made his notably successful London debut replacing at very short notice an indisposed Daniele Gatti in the opening concert of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s season at the Barbican. In January 2000 he took part in a masterclass with Pierre Boulez and the London Symphony Orchestra as a result of which he was invited to take part in the Conducting Academy with Pierre Boulez at the Aix en Provence Festival in the summer of 2000.
Walker has worked with a large number of UK orchestras and chamber orchestras, as well as with orchestras in Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Luxembourg. He has appeared regularly at the Edinburgh Festival since 2002, conducting concerts with the Edinburgh Festival Ensemble, Paragon Ensemble, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Royal Scottish National Orchestra including a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No 2 in 2003 and a much acclaimed production of Curlew River in 2005.
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Biographies
His works include three novels, a collection of poetry, short stories and radio plays. The Sound of My Voice was the winner of the Prix Mille Pages 2004 and Prix Lucioles 2005, both for Best Foreign Novel.
He has been commissioned to write texts for the SCO, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Hebrides Ensemble and Edinburgh Quartet among others. His most recent is an opera, The Perfect Woman, with Lyell Cresswell, commissioned by Scottish Opera. Previously he contributed to Edward Harper’s The Voice of a City.
He lives in Edinburgh with his wife, the writer Regi Clare, and their golden retriever.
David Wilson-JohnsonThe British baritone David Wilson-Johnson was born in Northampton, and studied Modern Languages at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge and singing at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Over a career already spanning thirty years he has been a guest of the major opera houses and orchestras and festivals worldwide. He has sung under many distinguished conductors and has recorded works by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Ravel, Frank Martin’s Jedermann Monologues, Schubert’s Winterreise, and songs by Gerald Finzi and Roger Quilter.
Opera repertoire includes Le Rossignol, L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, Boris Godunov, Turandot, Werther, Arianna and Così fan tutte (all at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden), Peter Grimes (Amsterdam, Brussels, Geneva, Madrid), Billy Budd (ENO, ROH, Opera Bastille), La Damnation de Faust (Berlin, Turin, Tanglewood), Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Amsterdam), Die Zauberflöte (Opera Garnier), Tristan und Isolde (Monte Carlo), Rameau’s Les Boréades (Salzburg Festival), Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King (Opéra Comique), Sir Michael Tippett’s A Midsummer Marriage (TV film) as well as title roles in Tippett’s King Priam (Nationale Reisopera and BBC Proms), Albeniz’s Merlin (Teatro Real Madrid), Shostakovich’s The Nose (Netherlands Opera, under Gennadi Rozhdestvensky) and Messiaen’s St François d’Assise (London, BBC TV, Lyon, Amsterdam, Brussels, New York and Edinburgh Festival).
Concert performances have included Parsifal, Mahler 8 with the NYO under Rattle at the BBC Proms, Henze’s Elegy for Young Lovers under Knussen at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, Ravel’s L’Heure Espagnole and Brahms’ German Requiem under Previn in Carnegie Hall, Pittsburgh and Oslo, Haydn’s Seasons under Rattle and The Creation (educational projects in Amsterdam and Paris) with Brüggen, Britten’s Death in Venice under
Biographies
Edward Harper
Edward Harper (b. 1941) studied music at Christ Church, Oxford and the Royal College of Music, London, where his teachers included Gordon Jacob. He later studied with Franco Donatoni in Milan. Like many composers in the 1960s, Harper worked with 12-note and serial techniques, but the orchestral piece Bartók Games (1972) marked a return to tonality.
Harper has written in most genres, including symphonic, choral and chamber music, but has a particular interest in opera. His five works in the medium include Hedda Gabler (1985) and Fanny Robin (1974), both performed by Scottish Opera. His first Symphony was written in 1979 for Alexander Gibson and the (then) Scottish National Orchestra. Other important works include the Clarinet Concerto, for the 1981 Llandaff Festival, and two orchestral song cycles –Seven Poems by ee cummings, commissionedby the BBC to celebrate the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, and Homage to Thomas Hardy, a Cheltenham Festival commission. Fantasia V was written for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and performed at the 1985 St Magnus Festival.
More recent commissions include Elegy for horn and orchestra, for the BBC, and two
works written as part of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s education programme: Music for King Arthur (2002) and The Voice of a City (2003). The latter work was written in celebration of the installation of the new Usher Hall organ, and its premiere in 2004 featured a children’s choir and adult education choir alongside the forces of the organ and orchestra. Harper wrote the test piece for the 2004 Scottish International Piano Competition, and has more recently composed his Symphony No 2 for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Chorus. Future plans include performances of his opera The Spire, based on the novel by William Golding.
Since retiring after forty years teaching at Edinburgh University, he plans to expand his activities as a performing musician (he was Director of the New Music Group of Scotland from 1973-1991) and recently formed a duo with his wife, cellist Louise Paterson.
Ron Butlin
With an international reputation as a prize-winning novelist, Ron Butlin is one of Scotland’s most acclaimed writers. Before taking up writing full-time he was, variously, a lyricist with a pop band, a barnacle scraper on Thames barges, a footman attending embassies and country houses, and a male model.
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DCD3406914/11
Texts
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, Every foot of the interior swarms with the same. To me the sea is a continual miracle, The fishes that swim – the rocks – the motion of the waves – the ships with men in them, What stranger miracles are there?
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’s den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord, as the waters cover the sea.
From the Latin Mass and Isaiah 11, vv. 6-9
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Texts
8 Them! Not us!
The turnèn stile, a-painted white, [do sheen by day an’ show by night.]
Vor always there, as we did goo to church, thik stile did let us drough, wi’ spreadèn arms that wheeled to guide us each in turn to t’other zide.
An’ vu’st ov all [the train] he took my wife, wi’ winsome gait an’ look: An’ then zent on my little maid, a-skippèn onward, overjay’d to reach ageän the pleäce o’ pride, her comely mother’s left han’ zide.
An’ then, a-wheelèn roun’, he took on me, ’ithin his third white nook. An’ in the fourth, a sheäken wild, he zent us on our giddy child. But eesterday he guided slow my downcast Jenny, vull o’ woe, an’ then my little maid in black, a-walkèn softly on her track.
An’ after he’d a-turned ageän to let me goo along the leäne, he had noo little bwoy to vill his last white eärms, an’ they stood still.
From The Turnen Stile William Barnes (1801-1886)Them! Not us! Not me! Not you! Who are they?
They are the worst! The cursed!
Who are we?
We are the first!
We are the best! The first! Killing them to love our own.
My son Ahmed –his eyes, his skin. His twelve years. My son Ahmed. Playing the game he saw around him. His plastic gun. The soldiers. My son Ahmed –Shot!
All his years to come … All his unborn children’s lives to come … Stopped. Dead.
We cannot raise the dead. We cannot begin again. History never stops.
History never stops –but each child’s birth and death. So many children –so many heartbeats flicker on the monitor. Arab/Jewish monitors.
Arab/Jewish heartbeats. Listen to the heartbeats.
Listen to the silence between the heartbeats. That silence where terror begins. Yours. Mine. Theirs. Ours.
Let us step across this silence, Let us reach across the terror, bearing gifts.
Now is the time for miracles: the gift of Jewish life to Arab, the gift of Arab life to Jew. Let my/our dead child/children bring life to yours. Our dead children bring us their gifts. Life and hope.
Ron Butlin (b. 1949)Why, who makes much of a miracle?
As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles, Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water, Or stand under trees in the woods, Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love, Or sit at table at dinner with the rest, Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car, Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon, Or animals feeding in the fields, Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright, Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring; These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles, The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,