16 Somerville Magazine
Sounds and Sweet Airs: The Year in Music
A new title page to Serenus de Cressey’s 1670 edition of Julian of Norwich’s XVI Revelations of Divine Love, written by an unknown hand c.1675
heavily weighed down with iron… feel compassion for those who are attacked by strong temptations. She should take all their sorrows into her heart and sigh to our Lord, so that he may take pity on them and look towards them with the eye of his mercy.’ Far from being an exclusive space, the cell here – as well as the anchorite’s body – become radically inclusive, welcoming and nurturing. Isolation becomes an opportunity to imagine new communities and new ways of being ‘together’. The anchorite was, in fact, to think of her cell as an open space, a ‘house without walls’ as another medieval text puts it; the architectural equivalent of the exposed stable in which Christ was born. In this context, we are reminded of Somerville’s own mission to include the excluded, a mission which seems more pressing now than ever.
How do musicians make the transition from in-person concerts and rehearsals to the disembodied world of lockdown listening? Somerville Music Society’s Melissa Chang (2018, Music), Trina Banerjee (2019, Music) and Finlay Dove (2018, Music) join us to try and find the answer.
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hat is it that makes Somerville music different? You could say it’s our openness. The Freshers’ Recital hosted by the Somerville Music Society (SMS) at the start of the year certainly reflected that, as new performers were welcomed with an evening of vocal music, jazz classics, hymns and spirituals.
Books of guidance written for anchorites suggest that, through rigorous discipline in the practice of solitude, they were able to become ‘birds of heaven’, soaring freely in the skies while apparently earth-bound and enclosed. While we may not have reached these heights in recent months, many of us have found solace in isolation, and have begun to reimagine ways of living openly and ‘together’. Like the twelfth-century anchorite Wulfric of Haselbury, it may be that, in our lives of unexpected solitude, we have ‘found a vast space within narrow bounds’.
Or you could say it’s our eclecticism. Stemming in equal parts from the inclusivity of our non-denominational Sunday Choral Contemplations and the sheer passion of those involved, eclecticism is, perhaps, our defining trait. Pre-lockdown, our musical forays this year encompassed everything from the upper-voice Shakespeare choruses to Hindustani classical music, by way of the Aseda gospel choir and an evening of vocal music by women composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Dr Sutherland is co-editor with Professor Almut Suerbaum of Medieval Temporalities, a collection of essays on the experience of time in the medieval West by members of the Somerville Medieval Research Group, which will be published by Boydell and Brewer in 2021.
Or perhaps it’s the accomplishment of our players. That includes individuals like SMS Co-President Max Rodney (2018, Music), who brought our Michaelmas programme to a beautiful finale conducting Fauré’s Pavane in F-sharp minor, Op. 50, and Melissa Chang,
