THINKING OF CHRISTMAS

Hello, Music Lovers!

I have it on good authority that today is the birthday of the founding artistic director of the Elora Festival, Noel Edison. Congratulations, Noel, and Happy Birthday. It is also on good authority that I stick out my neck and say that the music on which this next square is based is a favourite of Noel's, Like as the Hart, by Herbert Howells. Noel, I hope you enjoy this flowery quote from a BBC music reviewer, who will remain nameless because I'm afraid I have lost the reference.

“Herbert Howells has probably touched more lives more deeply than any composer with twice his standing in the hierarchies of modern music. Howells was central to the Oxbridge Anglican aesthetic: a supreme manipulator of the theatre of transcendent ceremonial and dignified nostalgia that the Church of England does like no one else.
 But what makes him interesting is that he gave that market more than it bargained for. Scratch the surface of a typical Howells choral work and you find decidedly un-Anglican qualities. One is smouldering sensuality (the rhythm of Like as the Hart, the most sublime of all Howells anthems, comes close to a slow tango, its harmony is thick with 'blue' notes), another is a lacerating, masochistic pain even in ostensibly joyful music. To understand why they are there you need to look beyond the music to the man...” etc.

And now to another reminder of Christmas, the famously Canadian Huron Carol, originally written in native Huron/Wendat, probably in 1642 by Père Jean de Brébeuf, a Jesuit missionary at Sainte-Marie among the Hurons in Canada. The words were set to a traditional French folk song, "Une Jeune Pucelle" ("A Young Maid"). In 1926 Jesse Edgar Middleton set the well-known English lyrics "Twas in the Moon of winter-time" to the same tune.

The English version of the hymn uses imagery familiar in the early 20th century, in place of the traditional Nativity story, but Kathy (who made this lovely square) and I were not sure how to portray the "lodge of broken bark", when Algonquin long houses were quite large, and the bark was carefully cut in very long strips. So Kathy decided to tell part of the story on a winter teepee, having researched suitable petroglyph images from Peterborough sites. The rest of the story is on the other side, but now you know what Gitchi Manitou looks like!

Starting to think about Christmas, and it won't be long before carols are heard everywhere.

Susan