THE most frequently asked question about Three Choirs history is a simple one: ‘when exactly did the Festival begin?’ Finding an answer, however, has from the outset proved to be far from simple. The engraver and publisher Valentine Green, writing in 1796, stated that the first Meeting of the Three Choirs took place at Worcester in August 1722, whereas we now know that the inception of the Music Meetings (as they were termed until 1836, when the designation ‘Festival’ was adopted) must pre-date that by some years. Even as long ago as 1812, the Rev. Daniel Lysons, the earliest chronicler of the Festival to write a detailed history, was forced to admit that ‘It is in vain that I have endeavoured … to trace anything like the time of their first establishment.’

Two lengthy suspensions of Three Choirs, both of them caused by war, added to the confusion. The Festival was discontinued for six years during World War I: from 1914 to 1919. In 1920, Sir Ivor Atkins, Organist of Worcester Cathedral, was charged with restarting Three Choirs on the return to peace; he gave official recognition to the year 1715 ‘by reckoning the first Festival after the suspension … as the two hundredth’. This was generally accepted, such that Dennis Stoll, writing in 1938, in his book Music Festivals of Europe, felt able to state with confidence that ‘The three choirs met for the first time in 1715.’ But neither Atkins nor Stoll based his claim upon firm documentary proof. The outbreak of World War II, in 1939, silenced debate on the matter for seven more years: the Festival was again suspended throughout the duration of hostilities.

As late as 1966, in an historical note for a Worcester Festival programme book, the music critic A. T. Shaw pronounced that ‘any attempt to fix the date of the [first] meeting is predestined to failure’. But even so, the search for a start-date has continued. Dr Percy M. Young (1912–2004) – musicologist, writer, conductor, authority on Elgar, frequent lecturer at Three Choirs Festivals, and a distinguished scholar of English music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – contributed a valuable essay, ‘The First Hundred Years’, to a booklet published in 1977 in association with the celebrations at Gloucester marking 250 years of the Festival.

If we conceive of the Theophilus legend through the four scenes of the Ingeborg Psalter, we see the influence and foreshadowing of the miracles of the Virgin tradition. This image sequence, in four compartments, focuses respectively on his weakness, her power to intervene, her power over evil, and her generosity. It is, above all, the Virgin's story. But if we conceive of the legend more broadly, less as a unified or codified story than as a series of visual and textual responses to the anxiety of identity in thirteenth-century culture, we can understand it as a performance of the theological understanding of the imago – one individual's journey from dissemblance to resemblance. While there are many specific and varied iterations of this journey, such as the narrow focus on the Virgin in Ingeborg or the vast trajectory of the Gautier de Coinci version, the legend, broadly conceived, tells an incredibly compelling story that proposes a number of solutions to common problems of medieval identity. In the preceding chapters, I chose to treat the legend as a whole, not a unified or solitary whole, but as a series of parts connected to a large vision, because this broader perspective allows us to see the legend itself more clearly as an important contribution to medieval visual culture. We see it not just as a story of the power and intervention of the Virgin, or as a story of Theophilus's spectacular homage to the Devil, or as an allegorical fall into sin and evil, or as Theophilus's re-formation and return to his community. Instead we see the legend as responding to all these issues, linked through one individual's struggle to see himself through the dark glasses of a fallen world but with the help of the Virgin, the Church, the bishop and the Church community, and the positive actions that he himself could take to reform his deformed image of himself.

If, in theological terms, the trajectory of the whole legend is from dissemblance to resemblance, in literary and artistic terms many different positions and images fill out this gamut. It is worth pausing briefly over the “order” of these positions.

The legend of Theophilus embodies a broad range of the most compelling questions of the medieval era. Above all, it is a story that envisions the individual's and the institution's roles in the rocky path to individual salvation. The story explores the nature of social bonds through its depiction of homage and contracts. It explores spiritual bonds through its depiction of the appearance and intervention of the Virgin. It is a meditation on evil and temptation and whether or not man can see, confront, and control these dark forces. It is a story about the variety of ways the Church provides its flock with strategies to turn away from evil and toward the good. These include the more idiosyncratic actions of prayer, alms, fasting, tears, confession, and the more institutional path of sacraments, priests, bishops, and other members of the Church community, as well as the direct, higher intervention of the saints, the Virgin, and God. While the story can become a quite existential meditation on individual salvation, like the one we see in Rutebeuf, it more commonly focuses on the role of the wider Church and social community in individual salvation. The legend's popularity is a tribute to its ability to make the plight of individual salvation tangible and visible at a time when that salvation must seem highly uncertain.

A quick summary of the legend will help the reader see the connections to these larger issues. The story almost always begins by presenting Theophilus as a good man, a highly placed vice-lord or vidame. When his bishop dies, Theophilus is appointed to succeed him. Theophilus refuses, fearful that the position will subject him to vain glory. Another clerk is appointed bishop and promptly dismisses Theophilus. Theophilus is devastated and impoverished. Ready to do anything to get his position back, he turns to a Jew as an intermediary to seek the help of the Devil. The Jew leads him to the Devil. Theophilus pays homage to the Devil, making a signed contract that is notably authenticated with a wax seal. Immediately he gets his power back twofold. After enjoying his ill-gotten gain for some time, Theophilus has a crisis of conscience and goes to a church to pray to the Virgin.

‘When one goes into Rotherhithe and Wapping, which places are chiefly inhabited by sailors, a man would be apt to suspect himself in another country. Their manner of living, speaking, acting, dressing and behaving, are so very peculiar to themselves.’ This observation by Sir John Fielding certainly has some truth in it. Sailors were indeed ‘peculiar to themselves’, but this does not mean that they cannot be studied by the social historian. They formed one of the largest occupational groupings in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England with numbers rising from rather less than thirty thousand in 1660 to rather more than fifty thousand in 1770, not counting those serving in the Royal Navy. Where did these men come from and how were they trained for their very demanding occupation? How long did they serve at sea and what chances had they of promotion during their maritime career?

Such questions are difficult to answer for any trade in early modern England, since the government was not in the habit of making detailed inquiries into such matters. Some information can be gleaned from the fairly small numbers of surviving ships’ papers, such as logbooks, muster books and account books, and also from the journals and memoirs of contemporary sailors and travellers, especially Edward Barlow whose fascinating Journal opens a window on life at sea in the late seventeenth century. However the most useful indications have been obtained from depositions given by witnesses in the High Court of Admiralty. The majority of deponents in this court were sailors and these men (and boys) were quite often asked to say where they were born, how old they were, how long they had been at sea, what they had been doing for the last three, five or seven years, and occasionally other questions which have produced answers useful to the social historian in that they can to a certain extent be quantified. Information of this sort was most detailed in the years between 1665 and 1720 and especially between 1685 and 1705, which means that developments after these dates, such as the rise of Liverpool, cannot be reflected in the analysis below.

As we saw in the previous chapter, the works of authors such as Soce, Dongala, and Beti approached jazz in a manner that evolved over time and that reflected these authors’ particular place and form of engagement with the racial score articulated through jazz. Ousmane Soce viewed the music with suspicion; Emmanuel Dongala invested it with a profound spiritual power that nevertheless found its limit in the material world of social and ideological engagements; and Mongo Beti began to look at it from a vantage point that combined nostalgia, idealism, and pragmatism. Indeed, in Beti, we already began to see the turn toward an entirely different relationship to jazz. The Cameroonian author made it work in a manner that simultaneously deconstructed the racial score and posited new modalities of reception, deploying jazz not as a ‘thing’ or idea, but as a heterogeneous series of diaspora aesthetics and performative practices.

Kangni Alem: Mirages d'Afrique

Kangni Alem, in his short stories (collected in La Gazelle s'agenouille pour pleurer) and his two ‘Ti-Brava’ novels (set in a mythical place recognizable as Togo), shows a persistent interest in music generally and jazz in particular. Indeed, various musicians from the jazz tradition appear, and meditations on the field occur repeatedly in his writing. Likewise, as is evident if one consults his blog, the author is an avid jazz fan and at one time hosted a jazz program on the radio in his hometown of Lome. There is therefore no question that Alem is committed to the music. However, his understanding of it is not linear, nor is his approach to its practitioners hagiographic. Indeed, one of the most intriguing aspects of his writing is his simultaneously laudatory and critical approach. As the title indicates, one novel in particular offers a full-length meditation on this African-American import: Cola Cola Jazz (2002). In a sense, Cola Cola Jazz, the first of the two ‘Ti-brava’ novels, offers a counter-narrative meditation on Soce's text, which I discussed in Chapter 2.

Up to this point we have seen how the reception of jazz in France – and the subsequent role of jazz in Francophone African fiction – can be traced back to the tension in Western thought between music and literature. Moreover, the argument has addressed how the gerrymandered boundary between these two media has naturalized, among other things, the idea of race. The argument has been that the critical apparatus that creates jazz is the sediment of aesthetic contouring which, over more than two millennia, has been directed toward race's naturalization – a process by which Africa, to cite V. Y. Mudimbe, is transformed into a ‘place of “primitiveness” and “disorder.”’ The orchestrated, that is, scored, tension between music as the exemplary black medium (and indeed, the proof of blackness) and writing as white (and the ontological guarantee of whiteness) has a long history that, in its French incarnation, culminated in the ‘tumulte noir’ of the interwar years and was most dramatically distilled in a French idea of jazz that largely still pertains. This construction/reception of jazz in turn produced a series of distinct responses in the work of French ‘continental’ authors as well as those commonly referred to as ‘Francophone African.’ Among this latter group, the response evolved from Ousmane Soce's very early Mirages de Paris to recent jazz fiction by authors such as Leonora Miano and Fiston Mwanza Mujila. Each case examined has revealed a rich yet strained negotiation between the writer's narrative and the persistent jazz trope. Consistent across the decades is the fact that all these African authors sense in the music something that is both familiar and potentially foreign; beneficial yet fraught.

Yet despite the evident usefulness of distinguishing between white (French) and black (Francophone) texts, what unites these works, whether ‘white’ or ‘black,’ is the notable absence of actual music – at least according to their own expressed or implicit assumptions about what music is.

In the New King James Bible version of the Proverbs it is said that ‘Wine is a mocker, strong drink is a brawler, and whoever is led astray by it is not wise’ (Proverbs 20.1). True to its Hebrew source, the New King James Bible personifies alcoholic drinks and reminds readers of the folly of drinking to excess. This literary technique is absent in the Vulgate version, which states, luxuriosa res vinum, et tumultuosa ebrietas: quicumque his delectatur non erit sapiens ‘Wine is a luxurious thing, and drunkenness riotous: whoever is delighted therewith shall not be wise’. Because of the playful literary genre of which they are a part, Riddles 11 and 27 realise the value of the personification of drink, producing texts that resonate surprisingly well with the New King James Bible version of Proverbs 20.1. The mead of Riddle 27 is a brawler, using warrior-like strength to throw young and old to the ground, whilst the wine of Riddle 11 is more artful and cunning in its use of power, being able to steer its drinkers on unwise journeys. Mocker or brawler, both personified subjects have mastery over humans, a mastery that is rare among the riddles’ obedient subjects. I aim to show how the two riddles diversely depict the mastery of alcohol and how Riddle 27's depiction of alcohol's mastery invites an ecotheological reading. Where Riddle 11 remains largely faithful to the depiction of wine in biblical texts, including Proverbs, describing its allure and the dangers of its consumption, Riddle 27 develops its Proverbs-like personification of strong drink into a resistance narrative, whereby the natural resource, transformed by human hands, asserts mastery over its human users through a physical assault.

Resistance is one of the key principles of ecotheology, a principle that ‘claims that the earth and its components actively resist those injustices imposed by humans’. The principle involves both imagining the earth ‘as a subject capable of agency’ and seeking out those ‘earth voices’ in the Scriptures which resist the construction of ‘earth as victim’. The idea that nature might resist or take revenge on humanity has been discussed by Rudd in relation to late medieval literature, albeit from an ecocritical rather than ecotheological perspective.

ALTHOUGH the committees of the Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester Festivals had met together from time to time, usually to discuss financial problems, no satisfactory arrangements had been made for regular meetings and cooperation until 1946. On 14 March in that year, representatives from the three cities met at the deanery in Hereford to discuss a proposition made by the Dean of Gloucester, Dr H. Costley-White. There was, he said, a real need for a central body to advise and assist, financially and otherwise, the diocese holding the Festival. That need became particularly apparent at Hereford in 1946 when a decision had to be made on whether or not to revive the Festival. A new joint advisory body was formed and continued to meet for the next ten years – and financial problems continued to dominate the agenda.

Alarm bells began to ring following Hereford's small deficit in 1952. Then, in 1953, the LSO put the Festival on notice that its charges would be increased by one fifth. Doubts were expressed about the ability of Worcester and Hereford to continue to hold the Festival unless Gloucester was able to provide a subsidy. The Gloucester balance sheet showed a total surplus of L2,870 at the beginning of 1954 (collections for the charity amounted to L1,292 of this) but the total surplus was down L730 on 1950. Worcester had been obliged to make alterations in the programme of the 1954 Festival in the interests of economy, and Hereford was anticipating a loss of as much as L1,000 in 1955.

Under these circumstances the Joint Standing Committee agreed that a reserve fund was essential, and at Gloucester it was recommended that a quarter of the 1953 Festival profits should be placed to a general reserve subject to the other two Festivals agreeing to do the same in their turns.

MULLER STAGED Der Lohndrücker at the Deutsches Theater in a climate of widespread disappointment within the GDR as its leading party appeared to refuse to acknowledge the need to reform and indeed democratize its political machinery. This multifaceted and multilayered production contained a wealth of material, including texts by Muller, music by Luigi Nono and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and short films by Peter Voigt. During its run of seventy-two performances from 29 January 1988 to 17 September 1991, Der Lohndrücker spanned a period of mass disillusionment with the political structures of the GDR that eventually resulted in the dissolution of socialist society in both the GDR and Eastern Europe as a whole. It is therefore no surprise that the question of democracy and the participation of ordinary East Germans in the governing of their so-called Arbeiter- und Bauernstaat (workers’ and peasants’ state) lies at the heart of Muller's production of this work. In its combination with Der Horatier and Kentauren, Der Lohndrücker scrutinized not only the history of the GDR but also the present and future of a socialist state under SED rule. Muller's concerns for democracy within the GDR were situated within a production that attempted to create a performance in two senses already identified to be crucial to Muller's understanding of the form and function of a democratic theater: first and foremost, it set out to produce the Trennung der Elemente (BFA, 24:79, emphasis in the original; separation of the elements, BT, 65) integral to Brecht's epic theater; and it aimed to engage its audience members with material that would generate varying interpretations from them in an attempt to render the audience democratic. While opening space for criticism of the official SED version of GDR history, Muller's production still, however, refuses to damn the project of building socialism or to teach its audience where the state's failures lie. By the late 1980s Muller's treatment of GDR history exposes a mythological quality to the construction of East German historical consciousness, and Der Lohndrücker therefore sets out to provide an archaeological excavation of it.

IT was a double celebration: the silver jubilee of Her Majesty the Queen and, dating Three Choirs from 1715, the commemoration of 250 years of musicmaking in Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester. In that same year Edinburgh was mounting only its thirty-first Festival and Cheltenham its thirty-third. The occasion was marked with six orchestras, more than thirty soloists, seven conductors, instrumental and choral groups, and a Festival extending over eight days from 20 to 28 August. There was a strong Commonwealth flavour with performers from Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Documentaries on Three Choirs were broadcast on radio and television. There were new works from Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies, Rory Boyle, Ronald Tremain and Tony Hewitt-Jones, and the centrepiece – Mass of Christ the King, a large choral composition from Malcolm Williamson, Master of the Queen's Music – was dedicated to the queen for her jubilee. Certainly, the 1977 Gloucester Festival was an ambitious musical feast.

The programme had been planned to feature the music of composers who have had a major influence on the Festival during its long history: Bach's Mass in B minor; the Verdi Requiem; Kodály's Jesus and the Traders; Handel's Messiah; Holst's The Hymn of Jesus; Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis; Beethoven's Fantasia, op. 80 (the ‘Choral Fantasy’); Britten's Cantata academica and Missa brevis; Penderecki's Stabat Mater, and, of course, Elgar – the Cello Concerto, Caractacus and Gerontius. Herbert Howells was present to hear Hymnus Paradisi and had been commissioned to write a Festival Fanfare for the Opening Service, during which the first performance of Tony Hewitt- Jones's anthem Let us now praise famous men was also given. A wide sweep of musical history was embraced, from French medieval ballads, secular and sacred music of the English Renaissance and anthems by Victoria, Schütz and Gabrieli, to sounds with the freshness of new paint: Peter Maxwell Davies's A Mirror of Whitening Light and Harrison Birtwistle's Silbury Air, both played in a Contemporary Music Network concert by the London Sinfonietta.

English seaborne depredation acquired new energy and direction during the second half of the seventeenth century, paving the way for the alarming, but shortlived, globalization of organized piracy. Drawing on a long tradition of plunder at sea, English pirates and rovers ranged the Caribbean, spread outwards into the Pacific and Atlantic, and infiltrated the Indian Ocean, exposing the vulnerability of international trade and colonial settlements to attack. The development of long-distance piracy deliberately confused boundaries between legal and illegal activity. With official sanction or unofficial connivance, privateering and buccaneering skirted the bounds of legality. In these circumstances the expansion of English piracy, the product of an inherent centrifugal tendency, created fragmented and fractured forms of enterprise. By the early eighteenth century the activities of a group of pirate leaders were beginning to place an intolerable burden on key commercial and colonial networks of the British economy. When this was accompanied by signs of institutional form and organization, including the emergence of scattered pirate settlements, as well as a provocative and threatening outlaw culture, the resources of the state were deployed to destroy the menace of organized piracy. One of the underlying themes of this period, therefore, was a shifting perception of piracy, particularly in its wider relationship with state and community. It was an important development, which effectively forestalled the appearance, in shadow outline, of an anti-empire of sea rovers that preyed on the resources of ambitious, expanding and increasingly powerful metropolitan interests.

Context: sea war and plunder during the 1650s

Although organized English piracy appeared to be in retreat during the 1630s, the civil war led to the revival of widespread plunder at sea of varied and contested legality. Both royalists and parliamentarians resorted to the licensing of privateering. Royalist activity continued after the execution of Charles I in 1649, through the issue of commissions by his sons, Charles and James, to English captains based in French and Flemish ports. These adventurers were dismissed as pirates by the Commonwealth regime and its supporters; if caught, they faced the prospect of trial and execution by the High Court of Admiralty.