EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

1709 Early evidence of ‘friendship and fraternity’ was shown in 1709 when Henry Hall, the Organist of Hereford Cathedral, and his counterpart at Gloucester, William Hine, collaborated in the composition of a morning service, ‘Hall and Hine in E flat’, possibly for a joint celebration at Worcester in 1710. The Te Deum is by Hall, the Jubilate by Hine.

1715(G) The year from which the Music Meetings are counted. It is believed that the annual gatherings were fully established by 1715, albeit that the earliest actually recorded Meeting was held in 1719(W). Wars have interrupted the continuity of the Festival twice, from 1914 to 1920, and from 1939 to 1945. Until the late 1750s only music for services was permitted in the cathedrals, where the Te Deum and Jubilate in D of Purcell, for example, was sung regularly for almost forty years from the inception of the Meetings. Other concerts, including oratorio performances, were held in various secular venues. Even Messiah was not at first admitted within the cathedrals.

1724(G) Thomas Bisse successfully proposed that the Music Meetings should be held for a charitable purpose, i.e. for the benefit of the orphans (later ‘the widows and orphans’) of the poorer clergy of the three dioceses. This remained the principle raison d'etre for the Festival Charity until 1986.

1731(W) William Hayes, a pupil of William Hine at Gloucester and an ardent Handelian, was Organist at Worcester until 1734 but did not conduct at the Meetings during those years. Handel became the dominant composer in the programmes, which from 1733 featured ‘the most eminent performers from the metropolis’. Hayes went on to become Professor of Music at Oxford and to build a national reputation as composer, conductor, singer and organist, appearing at Three Choirs many times in the 1750s and 1760s.

THE 1991 Hereford Festival began on Sunday 18 August. Roy Massey, resplendent in the robes of his Lambeth doctorate, conducted the Festival Chorus and RLPO in a most impressive Opening Service, marred hardly at all by the lady who, during the prayer ‘that through music we may raise man from the sorrows of this world to the joy of Your divine presence’ called out loudly: ‘and women!’ A sign of the times?

The first cathedral concert of the 1991(H) Festival, given in memory of the late Bishop John Easthaugh, who had died in office in 1990, was a performance of the Beethoven Missa solemnis. ‘There was much to admire’, wrote David Hart in the Birmingham Post:

On Monday a tremor of apprehension disturbed the festive atmosphere as news came through that in the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev had been toppled in a leadership coup. Were ‘the sorrows of this world’ again to overwhelm the nascent optimism in a new order? Against this background the performance of Morning Heroes on Monday evening was particularly piercing. The largest of the works by Sir Arthur Bliss included in the Festival to mark his centenary year, Morning Heroes was, for Roy Massey and many in his audience, an overwhelming emotional experience. Written by a composer who had seen the brutality of war at first hand through a soldier's eyes, its impact in performance is greater than can be anticipated from the printed score – especially so when the narration of ‘Hector's Farewell to Andromache’ (from The Iliad) and Wilfred Owen's ‘Spring Offensive’ are entrusted to a narrator of Brian Kay's ability.

BASIUM INTO SONNET: SIR PHILIP SIDNEY AND GILES FLETCHER THE ELDER

When we give Astrophil and Stella its eminent station within the landscape of English poetry, we too often miss out the continental scenery which ought to form an important part of the composition. In general accounts of English literature, Sidney's poem falls easily into place as a major precedent and inspiration for English Petrarchan lyric and the English sonnet sequence, which burgeoned thereafter. More careful attention to Sidney's kisses will help to nourish our sense of his own precedents, which came to him from outside the English tradition, but from sources which to him were obvious, familiar and immediate. In Astrophil and Stella the marks of Secundan influence are considerable.

We know for certain that Sidney intimately knew at least one of the many poems of kissing written in Italian, for his Certain Sonnets 6, though it contains no kisses itself, is composed (so the superscription tells us) ‘To the tune of Basciami vita mia’, an Italian kissing-song. It can be no less certain that Sidney was familiar with the Latin Basia of Secundus. Of the three greatest authors of basia after Secundus, poets of his own generation, it is certain he knew Dousa, and it is highly probable that he was acquainted with the works of the other two, Lernutius and Bonnefons, at some point in his life—perhaps before or during the writing of Astrophil in the 1580s.

The connection of Elizabeth's England to the Low Countries, where Secundanism was at that time most vital, was important and indeed fateful for Sidney. His association with Dousa probably dates back as far as the early days of the Dutch Revolt. The two may have met in the Netherlands, and are likely to have been in contact when Dousa visited England as an emissary to Elizabeth's court, first in the winter of 1572–3, and then at least twice in the 1580s—the period when Astrophil must have been underway. It is worth mentioning also that Dousa's Basia were dedicated to Daniel Rogers, a German-born Englishman who had some Dutch blood from his mother's side of the family.

These songs were collected from Hameed Nasiru Akinlade of Akinlade Cultural Group after the group's performance at Ede Mapo Arogun Day (Ede annual festival held on 30 November 2013).

First song

AS EXPLORED IN THE INTRODUCTION to this study, the decades since the Waldheim Affair of 1986–88 have been marked by a change in attitudes in Austria toward its National Socialist past and its complicity in the Holocaust. This has been reflected not only in the literary and cinematic works explored in the previous chapters of this study, but also in Austria's public spaces, with Austria's increased historical consciousness leading to an increased desire to commemorate victims of National Socialism, and Holocaust victims in particular, in public space. Heidemarie Uhl has termed this “die Wiederentdeckung der Orte” (the rediscovery of place), the refocusing of attention on the concrete places where Nazi persecution occurred. Often springing from grassroots initiatives investigating persecution in concrete places or localities within the cityscape, these memorials draw attention not only to the fact that Holocaust victims lived in streets that one may walk down every day, or indeed live in, but to the “lokale[n] Verstrickung in den Holocaust” (local involvement in the Holocaust), the fact that without the support of ordinary men and women who lived in the selfsame streets and neighborhoods, the Holocaust could not have happened. This, for Uhl, constitutes “die verstörende Dimension der Orte” (the disturbing dimension of places), and accounts for the impact of these local memorial projects.

Public monuments and memorials are symptomatic for how a nation or group of people perceives its past at a given moment in history. As Heidemarie Uhl has traced, developments and conflicts in Austria's attitude vis-à-vis its own history have been reflected in the postwar Austrian memorial landscape.

CHRISTOPHER Robinson was born in 1936 at Peterborough and educated at St Michael's College, Tenbury, then at Rugby, and then Christ Church, Oxford. He was Assistant Organist at Christ Church from 1955 to 1958. During his last year at the university he was Assistant Organist at New College under Meredith Davies, and was then on the music staff at Oundle School for three years before taking the post of Assistant Organist at Worcester Cathedral in 1962. He succeeded Douglas Guest as Master of the Choristers and Organist in 1963, when he also became conductor of the City of Birmingham Choir in succession to Meredith Davies.

In 1966 Robinson brought to Three Choirs not only the impressive and grandiose Grande Messe des morts of Berlioz, but also, and long overdue, the music of Sir Michael Tippett in the year in which he was knighted: A Child of our Time, with Jennifer Vyvyan singing magnificently in the part of the Mother, and with Jean Allister, John Mitchinson and John Carol Case. At the Friday afternoon orchestral concert, Sir Adrian Boult conducted Tippett's Concerto for double string orchestra. There was also the first performance, commissioned by the National Federation of Music Societies, of Changes by Gordon Crosse. Described by the composer as ‘A Nocturnal Cycle for Soprano, Baritone, Chorus and Orchestra’, Changes is intended for large amateur choirs. The title refers to changes from day to night (symbolising life and death) and changes in bellringing, which provide many musical motifs of the work.

This chapter presents different theories and perspectives on national service. It also briefly discusses the philosophical foundations of national/ military service. Some analysts perceive compulsory and universal national service as the ultimate good, benefitting not only conscripts, but also the whole society where such a policy exists. Others view compulsory national service as the antithesis of a free society, because citizens are forced to relinquish their freedom in order to perform the obligation. The exponents of the latter school of thought equate compulsory national service with forced labour or a modern form of slavery. Some analysts also equate compulsory national service with the feudal institution of posse comitatus (the inherent power of the state to call upon its physically fit citizens to serve their country).

Opinions among political theorists and other analysts are so divided that no other topic in social and military history is probably as controversial, and perhaps none arouses such strong feelings of sympathy or antipathy as that of compulsory military and/or national service. Scholarly opinions on national/military service are fervently divided into two mutually opposed schools of thought. One perceives national/military service as a civic duty and as an expression of political and civic rights, which create and reproduce values that are amenable to greater cross-cultural understanding, mutual respect, national unity and greater commitment to the common good. The prominent exponents of this school of thought postulate that well thought out national service programmes engender democratic values, promote good citizenship, national cohesion, a common sense of purpose, mutual trust and commitment to the common good. These values are said to be valuable to the national community and to the individual participants themselves. The latter is said to be due to the changes and transformations servers are expected to undergo as a result, as well as the fundamental contributions they are likely to make to their national communities.

The other school of thought perceives compulsory national/military service as antithetic to a free society, because individuals are forced against their will to undertake compulsory national/military service at the cost of their interests and future careers.

As the last chapter has briefly demonstrated, many early modern poets composed imitations which kept more or less to the channels suggested to them by the original poems of Catullus. This is not to say that an intervening tradition played no part in them. Far from it. Their very existence in such numbers reveals a tradition at work, and some of the changes wrought to the themes during the unfolding of that tradition, from Martial to Secundus, have already been intimated. But now a much more important and subtle change must be investigated. For the kisses of Catullus underwent, throughout the Renaissance, a process of eroticization. This was largely thanks to the early and extensive influence of Pontano, and also to the way in which the poetic theme of the kiss, so tenaciously ‘Catullan’ in the humanist imagination, accrued descriptive and thematic baggage from the humanist poets’ wider reading in Roman poetry. In truth, the Neo-Catullan kiss was also Ovidian, Tibullan and Propertian, as well as Martialian. In order to understand these processes of assimilation and transformation, let us begin where the last chapter left off, with the question of sexual euphemism.

EUPHEMISM AND TITILLATION

The kiss in art and literature has always had a latent euphemistic capability. The sexual subtext can be activated in many different ways, and in different degrees, according to tone and context. But euphemism is not quite the same as innuendo: it can be pitched almost anywhere on the scale of innocence. Often, for example, the kiss may stand for physical love simply (although perhaps never quite simply) by virtue of its basic meaning as a gesture, without necessarily having the appearance of an artfully manipulated euphemism. That is, it can sometimes be mere shorthand, making no particular enticements to the imagination, rather than being the modest face behind which we are meant to intuit and envision the steamier thing really meant.

If kisses were liable to be understood or intended euphemistically, so too were sparrows. Kisses and sparrows were almost certainly the two themes or motifs most commonly associated with Catullus in the Renaissance.

GENERIC HISTORY

Between the middle of the fifteenth century and the middle of the seventeenth, there existed in Europe a ‘poetry of kissing’. Not every kiss which happened to appear in a poem belonged to this family, nor was it merely a class of poems with a common theme. The poetry of kissing was a distinct literary kind.

The great poet of kissing was the Dutchman Janus Secundus, who was born in 1511 and died, still a young man, in 1536. His collection of Basia (Kisses) initiated the basium genre, in which every poem was notionally a ‘kiss’. In his amatory works, of which the Basia were the most famous, the impression of earlier Neo-Latin poets is deep, and his debts are especially obvious when it comes to the theme of kissing. But, after all, it was Secundus who made a genre from a topos. After him came a great many imitators, including several who followed his example in the composition of whole sequences of ‘Basia’.

The kissing-poem had thus become a form in itself. But its mode travelled far beyond the bounds of the kiss-poem proper. It had a wider reach than one would likely at first suspect, and its influence was much more than a matter of the mere theme and its figures; less obvious qualities of tone, register, mood and vocabulary made the poetry of kissing a considerable force. The present study is not a consideration of ‘kisses in literature’, but rather of the artistic development, the rise and fall, of a genre. It is therefore primarily a matter of poetics. And since the genre was, in the widest sense, lyrical in form, this will be a book concerned nearly exclusively with lyric.

Even the parallel idiom derived from the Song of Songs, which tended independently to gather kisses into its atmosphere, and to determine the figures in which the image of the kiss was elsewhere frequently featured (in religious writing primarily), was not allowed to intrude into the basium kind—strangely, one might think, given that the writers of these kissingpoems were at such pains to produce copious variety in their thematic reformulations.

Janus Secundus, who made the lyric of kissing into a genre and thus explicitly adopted the ‘basium’ into the sphere of poetics, made much of the implied relationship between styles of writing and styles of kissing. His connoisseurship of erotic kisses—an amateur's profession of the bedroom humanities—is at the same time also the attitude of the poetic stylist, and of the literary theorist. ‘Diversis varium ludat uterque modis’, he proposes to Neaera: ‘Let us both play varyingly, with diverse styles.’ And so he does, with various kinds of ‘kissing’ in a range of metres and a range of moods.

In talking of his kisses, as even a relatively uncritical reader can see, Secundus was talking about his Basia. ‘Some say I give too luxurious kisses, not like those our wrinkly fathers learned.’ If the objection is valid, Catullus certainly cannot be numbered among these ‘wrinkly fathers’; but neither can Pontano, Marullus or Sannazaro: Secundus had situated himself at the heart of a classical tradition already quite reborn and fully fleshed out. Nevertheless he also claimed the kiss-poem for his own domain. He inherited a Neo-Catullan style which had put everything in place, or nearly in place, ready for him to make explicit the links between the act of kissing and the act of writing, connecting both to the generic fact of the established Catullan manner. These links would hinge on a simple, even a facile metaphor, the notion of the poem-as-kiss. But this straightforward manoeuvre brought into greater relief the poetic inventiveness that had surrounded the original kisses of Catullus—not least the tanglesome relationship between the kiss and the person of the poet, his moral and ‘manly’ character.

The kisses of Catullus were memorable; they attracted imitation. In the same way, through many ramifying permutations, the oscular themes and figures of the Neo-Catullan poets thrived in vernacular imitations. In the first place, the kiss was a useful image: just as classical precedent gave an excuse for licentiousness in verse, so the theme of the kiss allowed further scope for an ambiguous handling of sexual material.

Vessels belonging to British state departments and private individuals were worked by a labour force that was relatively large, cosmopolitan and mobile in the context of early modern Britain. Second only to agriculture with regard to the number of people employed, this occupational grouping was unusually diverse in respect of age, nationality, race and creed, as well as being marked by comparatively favourable career opportunities and spatial mobility. But it was homogeneous in some respects, for it comprised predominantly male labourers who were employed to a large and exceptional extent on a wage labour basis, a characteristic that has led some to claim that shipping was an exemplar of early modern capitalist development.

Engaging with employers through the workings of a labour market, these seafarers possessed, or were acquiring, the skills and experience necessary to handle, steer, maintain, navigate and occasionally fight a wooden sailing vessel. In the technological setting of the early modern era, such abilities were generally needed to operate all kinds of vessels, and were therefore transferable between sea occupations, enabling seafarers to sell their labour to various types of employers. Whereas many thousands enlisted aboard naval and other state-owned vessels, a significant proportion signed up for voyages in the longdistance, short-sea and coastal trades served by the merchant shipping industry, and others found work in private ships-of-war, inshore and river craft, and fishing vessels. Movement between these occupations was not always straightforward. While it depended to some extent on the personal preferences, competencies and circumstances of individual seafarers, it was also constrained or facilitated by international, national and local laws, government policy instruments and private contractual arrangements, as well as customs and practices that had evolved since medieval times.

Such factors reflected the complementary and sometimes contradictory objectives of the three main parties – the state, shipowners and seafarers – engaged in supplying Britain's military and commercial shipping provision. At the macrolevel, during the 1650–1850 period, the British state adopted a so-called ‘mercantilist’ policy towards trade, shipping and international relations.