Small Brown Birds - Asides (XV)
He drops the silver chain of sound
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake ...'
*
Tuning into Radio 3 at the weekend for a BBC Symphony Orchestra performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, threw in an added bonus of the premiere of Deborah Pritchard’s Calandra. Not only was the latter a bewitching twin to Vaughan Williams’ ‘silver chain of sound’, but it also had me combing my memory for where I might have heard the word calandra before? Earlier in the year, or perhaps, owing to the pandemic’s ‘Magic Mountain’ influence on the way that we’ve been experiencing time - long and drawn out as we sense it, swift and fleeting as we remember it in retrospect - even further back than that? It came to me the next day. I’d first encountered the word calandra some twelve hours before listening to the concert, in Saturday’s Times Nature Notebook. Feeling sheepish at my premature senior moment, and then thrilled with the serendipity, I read John Lewis-Stempel’s entry again. It was all about the corn bunting.
“Once upon a time in the west of Britain, bunting meant plump, and the bunting family do tend to stockiness. (Bunting as in decorative flag is likely to derive from sailcloth that “bunted” out in the wind.) In Yorkshire, corn buntings were chub larks, which was doubly blunt about their looks, the lark here referring to the corn bunting’s skylark size, not its song, which is an escalating jingle-jangle of car keys. The calandra, or lark, in the scientific name also notes the corn bunting’s large lark-like corporeality; the corn bunting is the biggest British bunting. This is one help in identification; the other is the dangling of legs in flight, as if it were too tired or absent-minded to raise the undercarriage.”
 |
| Shore Lark, John James Audubon (1827) |
What a gorgeous entry that had resonated for a number or reasons. I loved the speculative etymology about ‘bunting’. One of my jobs that took me away from my typewriter on the Royal Yacht Britannia, involved pulling a rope that lifted up bunting whenever we were called on to ‘dress ship’, so I certainly bought into bunting deriving from sail-cloth. But it also reminded me of the time that I’d made the short trip down to Walthamstow Wetlands to see if I could spot a corn bunting that had been lurking in a copse. Except, on looking this up, I’d got that wrong as well. The bird that I hadn’t seen that day, was a little bunting. I’m definitely something of a bad birdwatcher.
Of course, returning to Pritchard’s wonderful piece of music, a calandra isn’t quite a corn bunting, but rather another species of lark native to Eastern Europe and Ukraine. Pritchard talks about her composition as a work of darkness and light, seeing it through the prism of the current conflict in Ukraine and about the hope for peace. As she says, “there is a moment in the centre of the work where we sense the dawn and the horizon.” I played it again on the bus into work this morning, and against the backdrop of a bad-tempered North London commute, felt a shift in mood from the dark atonality and abrasion of Jennifer Pike’s violin notes, to - at around four minutes in - a burst of dazzling sunlight that made me turn my gaze up and away from the dirty, snow-slurried streets towards the horizon. The music then returned, temporarily, to a darker place, but that glimpse of hope had been set free and had taken flight. You just know it will return.
 |
| A calandra lark (not a corn bunting or a chub lark) |
Vaughan Williams’ lark was composed right at the start of World War I but didn’t get its first airing until 1920. You can’t help, then, but see it through the prism of a world that has been lost forever. It is elegiac and therefore it always serves as a balm. What I love about this new piece, though, are its challenges. And ultimately it prescribes the need to look forward rather than back. That’s always the desire at this time of the year (and as I subscribe to John Donne’s calendar I’m calling it the ‘year’s midnight’ today). Even more so east of the Vistula, and the prospect of that darkness and cold combining once again with Putin’s atrocities.
Small brown birds as symbols seem paltry in the face of that. As does music and poetry and art and all the other tokens and consolations. But this is sometimes all that remains to reach for. Thin ice on an English pond or the barbarous ego of a slowly dying dictator, won’t hold up or be held at bay by a soaring violin, but it will eventually be something that we can return to. George Meredith passes it on to Ralph Vaughan Williams, and he in turn passes it on to Deborah Pritchard …
Our wisdom
speaks from failing blood,
Our passion is too full in flood,
We want the key of his wild note
Of truthful in a tuneful throat,
The song seraphically free
Of taint of personality,
So pure that it salutes the suns
The voice of one for millions,
In whom the millions rejoice
For giving their one spirit voice.
Comments
Post a Comment