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Last night I went to a concert at the Sorbonne given by the Sorbonne Scholars, a university society that recreates the music of 16th and 17th Century England (vraiment on trouve de tout à Paris…). It was my first visit to the Sorbonne, and the concert was held in the rather magnificent Amphithéâtre Richelieu.

The concert was a hommage to Henry Purcell, probably England’s foremost Baroque composer, and a particular highlight was a couple of “catches” – rounds written for male voices with popular and occasionally profane lyrics. Here’s one called Julia:

(Yes, you heard the words correctly. Once the Puritans left for America, life in 17th Century England was AWESOME. Apart from the plagues. And the fires. And the wars.)

The catch Sir Walter Raleigh is lyrically far more explicit than Julia, and you can watch and listen to it here.

Of course, Purcell’s more spiritual music was featured heavily, including this Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis with a rather lively Nunc Dimittis section (more recent composers tend to use slower tempos for the Nunc Dimittis, which after all are the words of a dying old man).

The only drawback to the evening was the rather cramped and hard seats in the amphithéâtre. The room is an interesting architectural setting for early music, but the rather antiquated seating was designed evidently for 18th century students less than 5 foot 4 tall, (or hobbits) and it took all of the length of my walk to the metro station afterwards to uncoil myself…

Our gonzo tourism adventures in Paris continue. This morning we set off to explore an often-hidden and seldom-mentioned face of modern France: traditionalist Catholicism and the practice of the Tridentine Mass.

The church of St Nicolas du Chardonnet is located in the 5th arrondissement, in between rue des Ecoles and the eastern end of boulevard St German. It would just be another typical parish church in Paris, were it not for the fact that since 1977 it has been illegally occupied by the Society of St Pius X, a conservative Catholic organisation that rejects the reforms of Vatican II.

Performing the Tridentine Mass – Image: Lawrence OP (Creative Commons)

Without going deeply into ecclesiastical arcana, essentially St Nicolas du Chardonnet is the only place in Paris where the Mass is still said in Latin in its “Extraordinary Form” as laid out by the Council of Trent of 1563.  Unfortunately, the parish is also associated with extreme right-wing politics.

So it was with some trepidation that we turned up on Sunday morning for the 10.30 Grand-Messe Paroissale. We hoped an attitude of  respectful curiousity would see us through.

Image: Joethelion (Creative Commons)

The service itself was solemnly executed and very beautiful, requiring a robed contingent of about 20 priests, acolytes, and altar servers. Even in Latin the service was largely recognisable to anyone familiar with the Eucharist in French or English, (although the “extra bits” such as the sung Asperges Me with the priest sprinkling the congregation with holy water were novel to us).

The choral singing was generally fairly good, bar some wobbly bits. Unless you brought with you your own copy of the Latin Missal, there was no order of service: the people were clearly expected to know the Mass by heart and respond in Latin (with kneeling and standing and sitting and crossing themselves at appropriate moments).  It was as if the regular attendees were members of a special club with secret handshakes and nods and winks that rapidly distiguished those of “true faith” from the curious interlopers.

Tridentine Rite at Oxford Blackfriars – Image: Lawrence OP (Creative Commons)

The sermons and Bible readings were the only parts of the service in French, and the sermon was particularly robust – a 32 minute admonition to chastity and “mastery of one’s body“, with frequent reference to papal encycicals and the lives of saints. Hell was mentioned as a consequence of bodily sin. Not only was the tone marginally threatening, the message seemed explicitly intolerant and offered a very narrow view of the world we actually live in.

The overall impression of the morning was that we had travelled back sixty years in time: even the few children and families at the service looked like they were dressed out of a Jean Renoir film. Outside the church after the service, we emerged blinking into the bright spring sunlight.  A man was distributing FN tracts denouncing the European Union, another was selling copies of the royalist newspaper Action Française.

We decided we had had enough, and quickly repaired up the hill to a café for a quick lunch of croques-monsieur. Our brief encounter with radical Catholicism and narrow religiosity was deeply fascinating, but unlikely to repeated.  Sometimes, there are better things to do on a Sunday morning.

Chris Lydon’s interview this week on Radio Open Source is with composer Yehudi Wyner. It’s a fascinating hour spent with an American “classical” composer  – he spends time discussing his influences, the way he approaches composition  and deconstructs some of his works on the piano.

Image: Boston Globe

As with many 20th century American composers, Wyner is open to the influence of “popular” forms on his work – particularly gospel and jazz. But as Stravinksy and Ives did with ragtime and marching band tunes, Wyner’s compositions refract these sources through his own personal tonal lens.

Wyner has been writing music since since his childhood in the 1920s, so he’s learned a thing or two about how creativity happens. I particularly liked his description of the compositional act – and the responsibility that comes with inspiration:

“When you stumble on these thickets of interesting material, you’re confronted with the most terrifying task of all, which is somehow living up  to it, continuing it, recognising not only that nugget is of value, but that nugget is of no meaning unless it’s in a proper context, unless it’s really enveloped in understanding and development.”

Wyner’s insight could apply to all creative acts – writing, painting, creating a business, raising a child. Most of us only experience very short and occasional moments of true inspiration. The real work of creativity is how we put context and create flow around these small original ideas.

I commend this conversation to you – the music is wonderful, the conversations surrounding it are enlightening, and Wyner’s critique of contemporary popular music is penetrating without being bigoted.

Thelonius Monk Quartet in Paris, 1969, playing “I Mean You“. Charlie Rouse on tenor is particularly strong on this performance: melodic and concise, never overpowering Monk’s composition. He reminds me a little of Dewey Redman… in fact, it would’ve been awesome to hear Redman play with the Monk Quartet!

Thelonius Monk (pn), Charlie Rouse (ts), Nate Hygellund (b), Paris Wright (d)
Salle Pleyel, Paris: 15th December 1969

About ten years ago when I first lived in France, my friend Yann lent me a lot of his collection bandes dessinées, or BD. Of course I’d grown up with Astérix and Tintin (and even Lucky Luke) in English, and had even read most of these in French, but there were gaping holes in my knowledge.

It’s hard for anglo-saxons to fully comprehend the importance of BD in francophone culture until you’ve lived in France or Belgium. It’s a multi-million Euro industry, and there are many masterpieces that will never (and probably could never) cross the linguistic and cultural divide into English.

By far my favourite of the series I borrowed from Yann was Le Génie des Alpages by F’Murr. The series of 14 albums recounts the lives of a flock of sheep, their shepherd and sheepdog in the French Alps (apparently the pastures of the Drôme département.)

A simple description makes Le Génie des Alpages sound like a French version of Footroot Flats. But the alpine setting is just a backdrop for a neverending series of absurdist comedy, surreal sight-gags and loopy stories that barely make sense even to the hard-core fan.

The shepherd, Athanase Perceval, is most notable for his endless wardrobe of colourful pullovers. He is barely able to control his flock, who run off to the local bar (La Buvette des Cimes) at any opportunity, stage bowdlerised versions of plays by Corneille or pole-vault from one hillside to the next. The sheep are ostensibly led by Romuald the black ram, whose vanity knows few boundaries.

The Dog, (who has no name), is a novelist and inventor and generally spends more time philosophising than looking after the sheep.

Of course, none of this is really translatable, and it’s almost impossible to explain (even in French) why these books are so much fun. Everything in the Alpages is flexible, fluid and bends to the whims of F’Murr’s imagination. Even the landscape itself is impermanent: best illustrated by the episode in which a bear shows Athanase how to rearrange the countryside by flapping it up and down:

The shepherd and his flock receive visits from hapless tourists, foolhardy aviators, a sphinx, various mythological deities, a bus that suspends itself in mid-air between the 8th to the 13th album, and F’Murr fills the frames with all the usual wildlife of the mountains: snakes, marmots, bears, ladybugs, foxes, wolves, elephants, talking letterboxes, whales and extraterrestrials.

In short, life in the mountains is exhausting, and never dull. No wonder the sheep head off to the pub at the end of the day.

Finally I got out of town today: I caught the RER C to the end of the line at Dourdan, and then (with the help of an IGN carte de randonnée) walked across the fields to Saint-Chéron: 14 kilometres of sunshine, snow and open space.

I love winter days like this.

Mixed tracks in the snow

The pylons had cold feet

The bees seemed to be asleep…

A wonderful day to be out beneath a big sky!

Garrison Keillor – The News from Lake Wobegon, February 4th 2010

This is radio at its best: Garrison Keillor delivers one of the wittiest homilies on 1 Corinthians 13 that you’ll ever hear. Well worth 14 minutes of your life.

As usual, Keillor tells his story with the sort of humour that is only found in small towns in rural Minnesota. This was performed at the Prairie Home Companion show last week that was cinecast in HD nationwide across America.

The News from Lake Wobegon is available as a weekly podcast.

Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon feels and looks like a return to an earlier era of European cinema. From a visual and narrative standpoint, the film recalls the work of Bergman and Tarkovsky in the 1960s and 1970s, and much of its power comes from its recourse techniques of these masters.

The use of black and white,  the juxtaposition of claustrophobic interiors against the vast open plains of northern Europe and the fine-grained focus on characters faces are a  hommage to Sven Nykvist, the cinematographer for many of Bergman’s films and for the last act of Tarkovsky’s career (The Sacrifice, 1986). Indeed, Haneke’s cameraman Christian Berger studied Nykvist’s work in preparation for filming The White Ribbon.

While it could be argued that Tarkovsky and Bergman used film to explore psychological or spiritual themes, The White Ribbon is by contrast a tale of sociology and politics.

To take just one example, the severe Protestant pastors in Bergman’s works serve to lay bare the impossibility of belief in God, whereas in The White Ribbon, the pastor (alongside the village baron and the doctor) is portrayed as the agent of a sick society where absolute truths are used to dominate through fear.

Haneke has been quite explicit about the message of his film. He claims it as an exploration of the origins of terrorism in all its forms. Haneke’s village of Eichwald is haunted by repression, abuse and violence of all imaginable varieties. It’s matrix of sadism, deliberate and unintentional, in which children and adults alike are victims and participants.

Ostensibly The White Ribbon is a film about Germany. By setting this story in 1913 and 1914, the viewer knows that the children in this film are the generation who will, as adults, oversee the rise of Nazism twenty years later. Just as the feudalism of Eichwald dissolves in paroxysms of fear and recrimination, so the seeds are sown for new forms of control and repression that will follow.

Hannah Arendt invented the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe how easily violence and tyranny can become a commonplace among men. With The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke has provided us a sharply-focused (and, yes, beautiful) vision of Arendt’s words come to life.

John Dankworth passed away on Saturday. Here’s a recent performance of his arrangement of Duke Ellington’s It Don’t Mean a Thing, still going strong at 81 at the 2008 North Sea Jazz Festival, and only hung up his saxophone in December.

This clip epitomises a lot of what Dankworth’s music meant to me – his close partnership with his wife Cleo Laine (one of the great voices of the 20th Century), his penchant for tight, witty ensemble writing, and his consistent ability to connect with a wide audience well beyond the regular jazz public.

The Café de la Danse in the Bastille district was full to capacity last night for Laura Veirs‘ first show in France for a very very long time. It’s a slightly odd venue – terraced seating make it feel like a high school auditorium, and the fact the audience had to sit on the floor added to the impression of being on a class trip.

One way to keep the costs of touring Europe to a minimum is to ensure that half your band is the support act. The show resembled a showcase for the Pacific Northwest’s indie-folk scene, opening with short solo sets by Nelson (of Old Believers) and Eric Anderson (Cataldo) before they both joined Laura and Keeley Boyle (also of Old Believers) onstage as a quartet for the main event.

To my ears, Nelson’s solo songs lacked lustre and gazed largely shoe-wards. But Eric’s set picked up the pace a bit with some well structured songs and clever melodies: his band recording Signal Flare is well worth checking out.

Laura’s set rolled out in an atmosphere of relaxed bonhomie, without ever quite catching alight. It seems a challenge for anglophone artists to really cut through to French audiences, although the audience sure liked the music, and even taught Laura (6 months pregnant with her first child) how to say “Je suis enceinte.”

The set-list understandably centred on material from the new album July Flame (see my earlier post). Carol Kaye was an unexpected choice of opener, but it worked well.  And the immediate follow-up with The Sun is King and Where Are You Driving (two of my personal favourites of this new crop of songs) kept this particular audient happy.

The quartet provided a remarkably rich sound, with all four musicians rotating between bass, guitars, banjos, percussion and keyboards – and when an extra layer was required (for example on To the Country), the crowd was split in two to sing the backing vocals. The Paris audience played along with the game, although they preferred clapping along when Laura and Keeley stretched out on hoedown based around Cluck Old Hen.

Songs from earlier in Laura’s career were spread out through the set, including a solemn version of Spelunking, with its disturbing and slightly desperate plea (If I took you darling/to the caverns of my heart/would you light the lamp dear/and see fish without eyes/and bats with their heads hanging down towards the ground/would you still come around?).

Although she didn’t play Parisian Dream (from 2005’s Year of Meteors), there were a few nods to French culture: Rapture, which references Monet and his gardens at Giverny, as well as Sleeper in the Valley, a new song inspired by Rimbaud’s Le dormeur du val. The gesture was appreciated, but I think the audience would have equally liked another hoedown instead.

I may be getting old, but there’s one feature of gigs in Paris I really appreciate: they start early, and finish early – I was home by 10.30pm, in time for a good night’s sleep before orchestra rehearsal. An evening with Laura Veirs is an evening well-spent, and there are few things on stage more beautiful than a pregnant woman with banjo.