The Train for the Oxus is departing at 10.51 today from Taunton. Or is that the train to Oxenholme? The one where I need to change at Birmingham New Street. Or Istanbul. Either way, although it might be different rolling stock, it is the same width of track wherever we go these days. Yes, it is Bus-ness As Usual: I am getting on my way.
Or better put, I am getting on with getting out of the way. For one thing, I notice I have not been given the return ticket. I know I booked the return online, and I am sure They were issued. Yes, that’s right, there was a whole stack of them together. But somebody took the return ones off me before I got on. It wasn’t any official. She said she would look after it for me. So it goes on the Basra line.
Then I can also hear that there’s music playing: Monteverdi’s Silva Morale and Spirituale, first published in 1643 in the same year as the great maestro’s death, but probably mostly written in Venice when he was still a young man and on the way up in 1613 or 1614. Thereabouts, for all I know it could even be exactly 400 years ago to the day when it was first performed at one of the great religious occasions at San Marco. Nobody had heard anything like it before.
These days accomplished professional singers like ‘The Sixteen’ can perform the magnificent pieces out of the 1643 published song books, and large audiences flock to hear them sing. But I’d imagine for most of the last four centuries the songbooks have had to sit on shelves of the choir schools of the Serenissima and elsewhere gathering dust. The singing was too demanding to perform for them, and for audiences to listen to, so they went out of fashion.
Anyway, when they first heard them people said they didn’t like them, and that the many voiced songs broke all the rules. You can sense that already in the first word of the songbook’s title, Silva. Whatever that really means, the impression is of songs coming out of the woods and thickets, pouring out, torrents of sound, the syllable of the words getting jumbled, harmonies clashing. Chaos to the ear.
How bipolar! Of course these days that is not what we hear, not listening to The Sixteen anyway. How beautiful we all say!
Out of the woods: or next to them, after all it was only the other day, last Saturday, I was sat with friends at a sunny garden table trying to hear myself think while the engine of a small cement mixer chugged away over a hedge nearby. I can’t hear what you are saying, I said to my friends, You will all have to speak up.
It is like listening to trauma, the friend to my left said when it was his turn in the round, you hear it best when it stops.