Word & Song By Anthony Esolen podcast

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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"Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone?"

10 hours sitten

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From now through Easter Week enjoy a 20% discount on new paid and gift subscriptions to Word & Song. Click the button below to visit the discount offer page. Easter Paid Subscription & Gift Offer Today we are revisiting at Sometimes a Song , as seems appropriate to the Saturday before Easter, a folk hymn that some of our readers have heard before. My introduction to this week’s song, “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone? will be brief, but pointed. Like many of you here at Word & Song , I have known hymns like this from childhood. And in my childhood, it was very common for famous popular entertainers and singers to release albums of sacred music, most usually hymns. I feel pretty confident when I say that such recordings were not made because the companies in control of what music was produced then were particularly religious. Some individual producers were, and others without question were not. But what they all knew was that such albums as the one our hymn today was recorded for would SELL, and not just to niche audiences. And it wasn’t by far only country and western singers who recorded albums of sacred music. a Still, even though it was pretty common before the 1970’s for mainstream entertainers to do sacred music, today’s recording is not typical of the albums they made. Why? Because Tennessee Ernie Ford decided to record his album, named after the very fitting title hymn, “We Gather Together,” at San Quintin Prison, accompanied by the 40-member prison choir. In all, the men recorded twelve hymns, each specially scored for the album by Mr. Ford’s arranger, Jack Fascinato, who had a full career composing quality children’s music. (Among other things, he was the music director for the television puppet show, “Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.”) Quite a number of popular singers and bands entertained at prisons in the 1960’s and 1970’s, but I believe that Ernie Ford was the first name entertainer to record an actual album in a prison, and the only artist to employ inmates in the production, rather than just recording a concert on site. Later in the decade, Johnny Cash made a series of prison-recorded concert albums, and a number of other entertainers and bands released some prison-concert recordings. But I know of nothing else in the genre of popular music like the album, “We Gather Together.” So here, as we contemplate the great gift of Easter, is Tennessee Ernie Ford, singing “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone?” with the San Quentin Prison Choir (1963). I’ve included a little bit about the history of the hymn below for those who might like to learn more. I hope that this recording will be a blessing to you all at this holy season. Thanks for reading Word & Song by Anthony Esolen! This post is public so feel free to share it. Share Easter Upgrade Special Offer Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Must Jesus bear the cross alone And all the world go free? No, there's a cross for ev'ry one, And there's a cross for me. The consecrated cross I'll bear Till death shall set me free, And then go home my crown to wear, For there's a crown for me. Upon the crystal pavement, down At Jesus' pierced feet, Joyful, I'll cast my golden crown And His dear name repeat. O precious cross! O glorious crown! O resurrection day! Ye angels, from the stars come down And bear my soul away. Note: The hymn text as originally written by Thomas Shepherd (see below) appears in a collection of hymns known as Penitential Cries (1735). But it was heavily adapted and altered over the next one hundred years. The version most used now was first published in a collection compiled by Henry Ward Beecher, who seems to have added a the final two verses (1835). The hymn appears in The Oberlin Social and Sabbath School Hymn Book (1849) by George N. Allen, composer of the tune (Maitland) that we associate with “Must Jesus Bear the Cross Alone.” Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Must Simon* bear the cross alone, And other saints be free? Each saint of thine shall find his own And there is one for me. Whene'er it falls unto my lot, Let it not drive me from My God, let me ne'er be forgot ‘Till thou hast lov'd me home. *Simon of Cyrene…

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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Ben-Hur (1926, silent film)

2 päivää sitten

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Specials on upgrades or gift subscriptions are up now through Easter Week. It is Holy Week, and since we’ve already featured my four favorite films — well, three films and a television series, Jesus of Nazareth (here) — on the death and resurrection of Jesus, I thought, “What shall I do now?” We’ve written about Barabbas (here) , based on Par Lagerkvist’s novel of that name; it was central to his winning the Nobel Prize. I’ve taught that novel to college students. So also with the work of Henryk Sienkiewicz, another Nobel winner, for Quo Vadis? (here) — a splendid and powerful novel for teaching. And then there is Ben-Hur (here) , which I’ve not had the chance to teach, though back in 1987, I was in the hometown of the author, General Lew Wallace, where I saw the General Lew Wallace Hotel. That was in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and I was applying for a job as an assistant professor at Wabash College. I almost got that job, too — the vote deadlocked over four days, till somebody finally said that they ought to go with the other fellow, because he had a good deal more experience than I had. I like Wabash College, but I’m glad it worked out the way it did, because, for one thing, I doubt otherwise that I’d be writing Word and Song right now! Here we are, then, back with Ben-Hur again, but this time it’s not William Wyler’s 1959 masterpiece. Instead, we’re recommending the brilliant silent film from 1926, which Wyler worked on as a young assistant. The first film stays closer to Wallace’s novel, though, like the later film, it ends with the Passion, the miraculous healing of his mother and sister from their leprosy, the conversion of Judah Ben-Hur to a life of peace and forgiveness, not warfare and revenge. The novel goes beyond where the film ends to follow Judah’s life as a Christian, into the reign of Nero, using his considerable wealth to support the Christians of Antioch, and to build an underground church in Rome. I think that the screen writers of both films were wary of anticlimax, and certainly the 1959 film with its score by Miklos Rozsa is stupendous in its rallying into the major key as water from the storm on Calvary comes flowing down in relentless streams of cleansing and life. Easter Special on Gift Subscriptions Ben Mankiewicz of Turner Classic Movies has said that the 1926 film was, in its medium, as great as the 1959 was. You can judge for yourselves, of course. The silent film could not, of course, convey subtlety of ideas by means of dialogue. The words given in the captions had to be concise and suggestive, like a portrait by Rembrandt or Titian, with only the face illuminated, and little else in the painting to speak to us, except perhaps the hands and the posture. So too the actors in the silent films had to rely upon the eyes, the set of the mouth, a gesture with the hands, and posture: see for example Francis X. Bushman as Messala, standing in front of his old friend Judah Ben-Hur, in a pose that makes him appear as if he were himself an imperial statue. Or see Ramon Novarro, as Judah, led off in chains to the galleys, so racked with thirst and so filthy, you forget that he is the star of the film; all that’s left is poor frail man. Then there’s the color palette of the film. If you pinned me down, I’d say it was in black and white, but that’s not exactly so. It’s in tinted and sometimes painted black and white, at times with sepia, or with a gray violet, or, especially in scenes where Jesus is present (but never seen), with the kinds of colors that studio photographers once used, in making photographs that were real portraits and not just snapshots. The color too “speaks,” all the more powerfully because you cannot take it for granted. Easter Special on Upgrades General Wallace once got himself into a long conversation with the notorious agnostic Robert Ingersoll, who in those days made quite a name for himself with what I find to be rather shallow arguments and easy sentimentalism. Wallace had at that time no real religious faith. After his conversation with Ingersoll, he decided to investigate the matter himself, which for him did not mean research into philosophy and theology, but rather into history, and he ended up, because he took the questions far more seriously than Ingersoll did, a Christian believer, though he did not join any church. He sensed, I believe correctly, that it would be wrong to turn Jesus into a character in his novel. In the book, the only thing that Jesus does that is not in the gospels is to give a cup of water to the parching and half-dead Judah, led in chains. Wallace also limited what Jesus is reported to have said to what we find in the Gospels. By the way, that same chasteness with regard to not representing and not characterizing Jesus is to be found in the superb novel by Riccardo Bacchelli, which I’ve translated as The Gaze of Jesus (link to my translation here) ; and I believe that Bacchelli is the greatest Italian novelist of the last century. Think, then, as you watch the film, that Jesus is implicitly present. The Christian viewer is assumed to know what none of the characters in the film knows. We know that pagan Rome is actually tottering; its body is strong but its soul is sick. We know that Truth has entered the world in the flesh, and that Truth will change the world. We know that strength is made perfect in weakness, that the humble shall be exalted, that the meek shall inherit the earth; that, as Dante says, all of existence is brought into being and governed by “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Please share this post! Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcasts on a wide variety of topics. Paid subscribers receive audio-enhanced posts, on-demand access to our full archive, and may contribute comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber. We thank you for reading Word and Song! Learn More About Word & Song Browse Our Archive Note: Our full archive of over 1,000 posts, videos, audios is available on demand to paid subscribers only. We know that not everyone has time every day for a read and a listen. So we have built the archive with you all in mind. Please do browse, and please do share posts that you like with others. Thank you, as always, for supporting our effort to restore every day a little bit of the good, the beautiful, and the true.…

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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The Royal Banners Forward Go

4 päivää sitten

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Specials on upgrades or gift subscriptions are up now through Easter Week. In honor of Holy Week, and our word, holy , I’m presenting one of the grandest hymns in the Christian tradition, a mighty poem that I think pierces to the heart of sorrow and triumph, and shows most powerfully the complete inversion of worldly values that the Cross represents. The poem, in its Latin title, is Vexilla regis prodeunt, and its author is Venantius Fortunatus, the saintly bishop of Poitiers (ca. 540-605). I’m thinking of a scene here in Dante’s Inferno. He and Virgil have descended to the lowest pit of Hell. My students have often been surprised that the place is characterized not by fire, but by ice. Fire, after all, is lively and hot: it can burn, but it can also purge, and it is often associated with the divine. Think of the burning bush that Moses saw. Think of the tongues of fire descending upon the apostles at Pentecost. But ice? The best we can say about it is that it mimics the changelessness and stability of God. In itself it is impotent, and it thwarts the actions of all those treacherous souls who are encased in it — and I do mean treacherous. And the worst of the traitors are those who betrayed their benefactors, returning evil for good; and the worst of those in turn are Satan and Judas. But as Dante and Virgil enter this icy wasteland, Virgil rings a change on the first line of today’s hymn. Vexilla regis prodeunt inferni, says he: The banners of the king of hell advance. It’s thoroughly ironic, because no one advances here; no one can move one inch from where he is fixed in ice. And when we see this supposed “king of hell,” he is a bat-like monster, a parody of an angel, frozen to his waist in the ice, flapping his wings like a machine, and thereby raising the very gales themselves that freeze the River Cocytus and that lock him in place. With every flap of his wings, I tell my students, he says, implicitly, “I am my own, and I rise by my power.” Were he to tell the truth that all created souls must acknowledge, that he is not his own and he does not rise by his power, the sinkhole would melt, and he might move. But he does not tell that truth. Such is the wisdom of the world. Easter Special on Gift Subscriptions Our poet Fortunatus had to tussle with the half-civilized Franks and other German tribes living in what is now France — they were a violent lot, for sure. I wonder, though, whether they were easier to persuade than we would be, to look at the Cross and say, as he says in his poem, that it shines with beauty, that it is dyed in the purple of royalty. Jesus did not say to his disciples that their lives would pass with the gentleness of a spring breeze. He said instead that they would have trouble in the world, but they should not fear: “I have overcome the world.” And where did he overcome it? We might say that it was just when the world was crowing in triumph, on that Friday afternoon at Golgotha. But it had been utterly defeated, not by brute force but by love. Imagine that Cross, a tree stripped of all its branches and leaves, a gibbet for execution: and it is the Tree of Life, and the King’s throne, and the glorious standard before which are united all the hosts of heaven, the hosts of love. And what, after all, does the world boast of? Men of power, or wealth, or glory — such as Fortunatus had to deal with among the Merovingian princes, and I’d rather not get into their murders and treacheries. But the Cross is like a sword that pierces such vanity to the heart. One splinter of the Cross will do it. Easter Special on Upgrades Translations of Fortunatus’ poem are all over the place, so what you find in one hymnal is not at all likely to be the same as what you find in another, even from the same church. I’m giving you here what is to be found, with one well-done revision that doesn’t change the meaning, in The English Hymnal (1933); it is the work of the brilliant translator of hymns, John Mason Neale (and if you sang the great “All Glory, Laud, and Honor” on this Palm Sunday, you sang his translation; we sang it at our chapel, with my son David on the organ). The rendition below is from the choir at Ely Cathedral, in England. The melody itself is ancient, from the eighth century, a plainsong First Mode melody, in a minor key (F minor, in my hymnal). The choir at Ely sing seven stanzas, alternating between the men and the boys; they sing in unison, and the stark simplicity of it is powerful indeed. Please share this post! Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published The royal banners forward go; The Cross shines forth in mystic glow; Where he in flesh, our flesh who made, Our sentence bore, our ransom paid. Where deep for us the spear was dyed, Life's torrent rushing from his side, To wash us in that precious flood, Where mingled Water flowed, and Blood. Fulfilled is all that David told In true prophetic song of old; The universal God is he, Who reigned and triumphed from the tree. O Tree of beauty, Tree of light! O Tree with royal purple dight! Elect on whose triumphal breast Those holy limbs should find their rest: On whose dear arms, so widely flung, The weight of this world's ransom hung: The price of humankind to pay, And spoil the spoiler of his prey. O Cross, our one reliance, hail! So may thy power with us prevail, To give new virtue to the saint, And pardon to the penitent. To thee, eternal Three in One, Let homage meet by all be done; Whom by thy Cross thou dost restore, Preserve and govern evermore. Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcasts on a wide variety of topics. Paid subscribers receive audio-enhanced posts, on-demand access to our full archive, and may contribute comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber. We thank you for reading Word and Song! Learn More About Word & Song Browse Our Archive Note: Our full archive of over 1,000 posts, videos, audios is available on demand to paid subscribers only. We know that not everyone has time every day for a read and a listen. So we have built the archive with you all in mind. Please do browse, and please do share posts that you like with others. Thank you, as always, for supporting our effort to restore every day a little bit of the good, the beautiful, and the true.…

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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HOLY

5 päivää sitten

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If I remember correctly, Harvey Cox, in The Secular City , put forth a certain image as emblematic of his time — and ours too, I guess. It was a billboard, with a scantily clad woman selling a gigantic hot dog. Cox wasn’t criticizing such a society. He was describing it, and he was, with some reservations, its champion. The Frenchmen of the high Middle Ages put up the great cathedrals, astonishing lacework in stone and glass, the very music of the spiritual world wherein they dwelt, rendered in monumental form. And we — this was Cox’s main point — put up billboards of girls selling hot dogs. Specials on upgrades or gift subscriptions are up now through Easter Week. I don’t wish to grumble here, but because holy is our Word of the Week , I feel the need to clear away the brambles in an untended field of meaning. Let’s take a word that is partly synonymous: sacred. Dante called his Commedia a “sacred poem,” meaning that it was somehow set apart from ordinary use and ordinary conventions. He didn’t mean that he himself was a saint, or that you would become saintly if you read it, although he surely did think it might, in God’s grace, serve as a witness to the truth and an encouragement to give your soul to that truth. In other words, he did not call it a “holy poem.” He did call the Muses holy, seeing them as allegories of the work of the Holy Spirit within the poet’s soul. I’ve said that the Lord’s Prayer is a Semitic poem: I can hear the poetic verses that underlie what we’ve got as a translation into Greek prose. That poem I would call holy, because of the holiness of Christ who composed it, and the Holy One of heaven, to whom we address it. What’s sacred, then, is set apart, designated as special, for a sign of God, or for worship of God. The sanctuary of a traditional church is supposed to present itself to us as a sacred space. Since I was never an altar boy, there was a whole area of the sanctuary in our church where I never set foot. In a strange and special way, that space belonged to everyone by its being visible but not approachable; otherwise it wouldn’t have been a sacred space at all, just as the parking lot wasn’t. If you say that one patch of earth is no different from another, I beg to differ: a cemetery is not a ballfield, a church is not a dance hall, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is not your attic. To treat them as such is the proper meaning of the verb to profane: and it’s a sign of our blurry thought that we typically confuse profanity, which involves desecration or blasphemy, with mere crudity or vulgarity. Easter Special on Gift Subscriptions But what’s holy is something beyond the sacred. No human being can decide, “This place will be holy.” You can confer a special status on an object or a room, to consecrate it to God, but properly speaking, we can attribute holiness only to God and to those persons and objects that God makes holy. For holiness implies more than separateness. It implies a kind of perfection that goes beyond our words and our thoughts. You can say, of any tool you’ve just fashioned, that it is “perfect,” meaning that it’s just what you want out of such a tool — it’s finished, and no more fussing with it is required. But the perfection suggested by holiness is a perfection in being: goodness infinitely beyond what we can conceive of by the word “good,” power infinitely beyond what we can conceive of by the word “power,” wisdom that cannot be measured by the thought of any created being, much less by any word. And yet all human cultures have had a sense of holiness, as clouded and confused and spotted with moral error as it might be. You could go to the jungles of the Amazon, and the natives there might look perplexed if you tried to describe a computer — or the billboard that Harvey Cox took to his oddball heart. But you would find it much easier to say that God is holy. They would understand what took the prophet’s breath away, when he heard the angels crying out before the throne of God, “Holy, holy, holy!” — and he shook with fear to the depths of his being. Easter Special on Upgrades If I’ve suggested that with the holy you have a fullness of being, that’s all to the good, linguistically. In fact, English holy is close kin to the adjective hale, or whole (the w is not original and doesn’t belong there), and its derived noun health, and the verb to heal, which means to make whole. Thus we call someone who has recovered from sickness whole and sound . And thus when we pray that God will make us holy, we may keep in mind that, such as we are, we’re incomplete, hunchbacked, rickety, cloudy in the eye and trembling in the hand. That kind of wholeness isn’t a patch on a wound, or a full belly after a hot dog at the ballgame. It is the final aim of every human soul. Please share this post! “Joshua Passing the River Jordan with the Ark of the Covenant,” Benjamin West. Public Domain. Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcasts on a wide variety of topics. Paid subscribers receive audio-enhanced posts, on-demand access to our full archive, and may contribute comments to our posts and discussions. To support this project, please join us as a subscriber. We thank you for reading Word and Song! Learn More About Word & Song Browse Our Archive Note: Paid Subscribers may give gift subscriptions at 50% during our current Easter special using the link below. 50% Off Gift Subscriptons Our full archive of over 1,000 posts, videos, audios is available on demand to paid subscribers only. We know that not everyone has time every day for a read and a listen. So we have built the archive with you all in mind. Please do browse, and please do share posts that you like with others. Thank you, as always, for supporting our effort to restore every day a little bit of the good, the beautiful, and the true.…

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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Revisiting Irving Berlin

7 päivää sitten

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Ask me to tell you what my favorite song is and I will not be able to give you an answer. And that includes hymns. I have probably got fifty “favorite” hymns, maybe more. And those are just my very favorites, among hundreds of hymns I love. So after waiting for nearly three years for Tony to write about the word, “music,” I found myself lost in an embarrassment of riches from which to select our song this week. I mean, every great song is about the music! One of our readers commented on Thursday that she had expected us to feature “The Sound of Music” this week. And we certainly thought of it. But I mentioned to her that my column, Sometimes a Song , often takes me into the realm of songs from musicals. So, not to overlap too much, we chose for this week not a musical, per se, but a very beautiful story in film about the power of — and thoroughly interwoven with — music. And like “Do, a Deer,” that brings me back to where I began, unable to choose a “music” song for today! So I hope that you won’t mind hearing again about the defining music man of the 20th century, Irving Berlin and ONE of my favorite of his many great songs, “Play (for me) a Simple Melody.” But I’m also including below his excellent “Let’s Face the Music and Dance,” which he wrote specifically for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to do in their film, “Follow the Fleet.” If you haven’t seen that film, I hope you will enjoy both the song and the clip from the film featuring Fred and Ginger dancing to it. It’s a great gift for me an excuse to talk about perhaps the most beloved American songwriter of the first half, if not all of the 20th Century, Irving Berlin. That Irving Berlin was a tremendous natural talent goes without saying, but it is notable to recall always that he had no formal musical training and only later in life learned to read standard musical notation. But after all, in music everything is about the ear. Most people who can read and play musical notation with fluency — and this includes the very finest singers and musicians — do not have the composer’s gift of hearing with the mind’s ear music which has never yet been heard, much less written down. But as is the case with artists in other areas, a composer’s ear must be developed by much experience with his art, and for Berlin the significant musical training he did receive was that of constant immersion from earliest childhood on. Irving Berlin grew up in a place and time which was steeped in melodies and music of all kinds and from many lands and cultures. As a child he arrived with his parents smack dab in the heart of that wonderful American melting pot, where as diverse a collection of musical styles possible was percolating in the stew of New York City popular culture. When five-year-old Irving ‘s family arrived in the United States — refugees from the Russian pogroms of the late 19th century — an African-American style called Ragtime was in full flower, with notable music being composed by the likes of Scott Joplin. Vaudeville was bringing show tunes and novelty acts to cities and small towns across the land. And a new style of music called “jazz” was budding and was about to bloom and change EVERYTHING about American popular music. Upgrade to Paid at Easter Discount From youth on, Irving Berlin was in the thick of things, and music was being written, performed, and bought and sold on every street corner. He quit school at age 13 and found work at a music hall, where in his off hours he taught himself to play the piano, and in an ingenious way, using only the black keys, a technique that he employed for his entire career (see video below). By age 15 he was hawking his song lyrics to the many sheet music publishers in Tin Pan Alley and working as a song plugger. In 1911 at age 23, his own “rag” — a little tune many of you surely know, called “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” — took not only the United States but the world by storm. That rag inspired an international dance craze, and attracted the attention of the famed Vaudeville dance team, Vernon and Irene Castle. With them as his stars, Berlin wrote and produced his first Broadway show in 1914, a “rag review,” called “Watch Your Step.” And for that show staring the Castles, he wrote today’s song — a complex piece of counterpoint intertwining two separate tunes, with the ironic name, “Play for Me a Simple Melody.” Variety Magazine dubbed “Watch Your Step” a "terrific hit" and said of Irving Berlin, "That youthful marvel of syncopated melody is proving things in Watch Your Step : that he is not alone a ‘rag composer,’ and that he is one of the greatest lyric writers America has ever produced.” Variety hit the mark with that assessment. And Irving Berlin had at the time hardly begun his career! Discount Easter Gift Subscription I hope you all enjoy this “simple melody” from one of the shining stars of American popular music, and the treat of hearing and seeing a superb performance of his “Let’s Face the Music” for Fred and Ginger. Share this Post Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is a reader-supported online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks . To support this project, please join us as a subscriber. Thank you for reading Word and Song!…

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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Children of the Heavenly King

11 päivää sitten

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As you may have surmised from my essay for our Word of the Week , music , I think there’s a real mystery in why we sing, and how and when and what we sing. Let’s step back and think about it. Suppose you ask a friend who does a lot of driving, “What’s the best way to get to New York from here?” You expect straight information. “Take Route 7 west, then go straight down the Thruway. It’s a little longer in miles, and part of it isn’t highway, but I guarantee you that if you go down to catch this highway here,” he says, pointing to a “map” on the palm of his hand, “the traffic will sludge you up. That’s if you don’t travel late at night.” You may get a little of his personality, but not much. Or suppose you are chatting, trading stories about high school. You tell one story in which you play the buffoon or the hero or both, and then he tells the same about himself. You get a lot more of his personality, and you may get something of what he believes about the whole world, flickering like a star. But you still won’t soar. Or you won’t enter the depths of the soul. Or you won’t shine in complete self-forgetfulness. But suppose your friend is out in the field, raking the hay, and he doesn’t know that you’re approaching, and you hear him singing, at the top of his voice — because nobody is nearby — an old jaunty folk song, like “Juanita,” or a patriotic anthem, like “The Maple Leaf Forever,” or a hymn, like our Hymn of the Week , “Children of the Heavenly King.” Why do you feel just a little bit embarrassed, as if you were blundering into something deeply private? And yet it’s the open air, and he’s singing, so you’d think he wouldn’t expect privacy. And maybe a part of it is just that we’re no longer used to singing, because we don’t know many songs, and we’ve been encouraged somehow to think that singing is just a little bit silly. But still — I imagine that with all the good will in the world, you and your friend might blush a bit, the color that Milton calls “celestial rosy red, love’s proper hue.” Singing, says Saint Augustine, is what the lover does. We sing, and we launch out into the realm of love — somehow or other, if we’re really singing and not groaning or grunting, that’s what we do, and innocence itself will blush. “But the birds sing,” you may say, “and that’s just their nature. They don’t always sing for love, either, but to mark out territory, to give warnings, to tell other birds that there’s food nearby, and other practical things like that.” I don’t know if that’s strictly true. Who can tell how the great universal song of love is projected upon the harp that Mr. Cardinal sweeps, when spring is in the air? I don’t think it’s accurate to reduce what human beings do to what we suppose the animals do; more accurate to see in what animals do a manifestation of what the higher creatures do — what human beings and the angels do. When the old poets looked at the stars in the sky, at those grand creatures that are not even alive, they saw dance there, and the traces of a music only the mind can hear. I think that their sense was right and just. Upgrade to Paid Easter Offer So then, our hymn today is about singing hymns! It was written by a man named John Cennick, a friend and collaborator with John Wesley. He’d been raised a Quaker, drifted away into utter dissolution and sin, returned to God by the Methodist revival, then leaned hard toward Calvinism, and ended up a Moravian, dying at the young age of 36, leaving a wife and two children. He was by all accounts a tireless and courageous speaker, and a founder of dozens of churches. But what I find admirable about “Children of the Heavenly King” is that it can be sung by any Christian, aside from all controversies. Children are not too self-conscious to sing — a little encouragement will suffice. If we sing, if we give ourselves over to sacred music, we have to forget ourselves too, or at least try to forget and so half succeed at it. That is one reason why singing is what the lover does. For the lover isn’t preoccupied with himself; only with the excellence of the beloved. Now then, what if the beloved is Christ, and he is leading you in your journey through life? We may then not only sing about Him, or sing to Him, but also sing with Him. Easter GIFT SUBSCRIPTION Offer The melody I prefer for our hymn is Melling, an air with happy runs of eighth notes, as in a lot of English folk songs. It fits perfectly, as I think you’ll agree. The composer was John Fawcett of Bolton (not the same as a John Fawcett who wrote the lyrics to “Blest Be the Tie That Binds”). Fawcett was mostly self-taught; the boy was an apprentice to a shoemaker, but he learned how to sing in the village choir, and that got him started in a musical career of considerable distinction, as a musician, a teacher of music, a conductor, a choirmaster, and a composer, with more than a dozen books of music to his credit. We may hope, then, that if God could raise up a shoemaker’s apprentice to such heights, He may well stretch a little farther and raise up even a college graduate! Please Share this Post Here’s a splendid version of our hymn, by the Wakefield Choir — and a nice look at some stained glass windows, too. Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Children of the heavenly King, As ye journey sweetly sing; Sing your Savior's worthy praise, Glorious in his works and ways. We are traveling home to God, In the way our fathers trod; They are happy now, and we Soon their happiness shall see. Fear not, brethren: joyful stand On the borders of your land; Jesus Christ, your Father's Son, Bids you undismayed go on. Lift your eyes, ye sons of light! Sion's city is in sight: There our endless home shall be, There our Lord we soon shall see. Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is a reader-supported online magazine devoted to restoring the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, about words themselves, hymns, poetry, classic film, folk music, and popular song. To see new posts please join us as a subscriber. Thank you for reading Word & Song . Thank you for joining us at Word & Song . Special: Upgrade to paid or give a gift subscription through Easter Week. Easter Paid Subscription Offer Easter Gift Subscription Offer…

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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"Turn, Turn, Turn"

14 päivää sitten

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Sometimes a Song ’s origin can be traced back a long, long way. For today, during our week of the “season,” I immediately thought of a “modern” folk song with a lyric from the antiquities. Of course the lyrics, the poetry, we have in English from the King James Version of the Bible, dating to 1611, the time when Shakespeare was coming to the end of writing his great plays. The original text of Ecclesiastes is historically set at the time of King Solomon, presumably then in his old age. Rabbinical tradition ascribes the authorship of the book of Ecclesiastes to Solomon, although (as with both the Old and New Testaments) scholars have opinions about who wrote (or compiled) what portions of the Bible. But when it comes to such debates, I lean toward the side of the rabbis: who better to write one of the wisdom Books than the wise King Solomon? If you recall the song “Turn, Turn, Turn,” you likely know the experience of hearing in musical form a rather broad and, well, wise, summary of how our days and years are marked by “times” or “seasons,” which both physically and figuratively define the life story of every human being. When we hear the words from Ecclesiastes, we cannot help but acknowledge their truth, because in our world birth, work, pleasure, joy, sadness, loss, and ultimately death come to everyone. There’s a sober poignancy about this truth, for at any time of life, every person finds himself or herself somewhere along the way that the Sacred writer describes. That revelation is both unsettling and comforting. From the King James Bible: To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: 2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; 3 A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; 4 A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; 5 A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; 6 A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; 7 A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; 8 A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace. Upgrade to Support Word & Song Folk singer Pete Seeger composed the original tune “Turn, Turn, Turn,” to which he set those verses from Ecclesiastes, in 1959. I’ve included his own recording of the song, released in 1962, to give you an idea of just how much the singers following him in the 1960’s adapted the tune and, I believe, improved upon it, mostly by harmonization, but to a certain extent also by changes in tempo and even melody. But before Pete Seeger’s own version hit the airwaves, a guitarist named Jim McGuinn arranged the song for his own singing group, The Limeliters, who released the song in a very jaunty version in 1962. Shortly afterwards, McGuinn arranged the song for Judy Collins, who released a slower, still lilting but more emotive version of the song in 1963. McGuinn was about to form a very successful folk rock group, with guitarist David Crosby (later of Crosby, Stills, and Nash), brothers Gene and Michael Clarke, and Chris Hillman, known as The Byrds. And with that group of talented singers and musicians, “Turn, Turn, Turn” put eight verses from the Old Testament (verbatim) into the Number One spot in the Billboard top 40 in 1965. I was a kid at the time, and fell in love with the tune, which stayed on the Billboard Top 40 for 14 weeks. And really, it was a hit around the world, reaching Number 2 in Canada, reaching Number 26 in England, charting in Australia twice, by Gary Shearston (1963) and then by The Seekers (1965), and returning to the number 1 spot again in the US by Judy Collins’ second release of the song (1969). But it was the excellent 1965 folk-rock recording by Byrds which was selected in 2001 for induction into the Grammy Hall of Fame. Give a Gift Subscription Lest anyone think that recording a “simple folk song” would be a “simple” task, consider this. Jim McGuinn had been living with the song in his head for several years before he arranged it for his own band. By then, his chamber-style arrangement had established “Turn, Turn, Turn” as a folk classic as sung by Judy Collins. By 1965, he Byrds had considered using a Bob Dylan song as the centerpiece of their second album, when McGuinn’s wife, along for the ride on a long bus tour with the band, asked Jim to play “Turn, Turn, Turn.” McGuinn was a master of the 12-string guitar, but as he told the story, he just couldn’t stay entirely in the folk range when he played the song for himself. The result of that bus trip was his brilliant folk-rock arrangement that hit the heights. “Turn, Turn, Turn” became the title song for the second Byrds album. McGuinn’s guitar and the vocal harmonies with David Crosby are superb, and the result was a far better recording than what he had formerly done with The Limeliters. And for all that, you might be interested to learn that the band spent five days in the studio and recorded nearly eighty takes to get the song just right. I hope you will enjoy it. Share this Post Here is the version of Pete Seeger’s song, arranged for Judy Collins (below) by Jim McGuinn, who would later arrange song for The Byrds (above). Here is the 1966 hit recording by The Seekers (above) and the very pared down original recording by Pete Seeger (below). Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is a reader-supported online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks . To support this project, please join us as a subscriber. Thank you for reading Word and Song!…

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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What Makes a Rockwell Possible?

15 päivää sitten

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I must confess to an intellectual sin. I delight in the paintings of Norman Rockwell. I know I’m not supposed to do this. As a college professor, I have a duty to pretend to others that I derive real satisfaction from poems whose sentences cannot be parsed, from sculptures that look like green blobs from a bad space-alien movie, from spattered canvases… Read more…

Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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Forty Days and Forty Nights

18 päivää sitten

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For a lot of people before the advent of modern medicine, and for many people still, our Word of the Week , season , didn’t suggest blooms on the cherry trees, or corn as high as an elephant’s thigh, or leaves in scarlet and gold, or Jack Frost sending down the wonders of the snowflake, no two alike. Or I should say that it did suggest those things, but it suggested something else too, in this life of ours that feels all too short — and doesn’t it? Certain seasons suggested instead that if you could, you ought to get out of sinkholes of heat and humidity where malaria or other diseases were common, such as the Maremma in Italy, in the lowlands of the Arno River just before its mouth, or in the swampy areas where the mighty Po distributes itself across many mouths before they finally reach the Adriatic Sea. I mention it for two reasons. The first reason is that it applies both to today’s composer and to today’s poet. Martin Herbst, composer of the melody we use in our Hymn of the Week , Forty Days and Forty Nights, died at the tender age of 27 when the plague came through Eisleben, or rather when the plague, which had sunk into Europe three hundred years before, went into one of its periodic or seasonal surges. Meanwhile, the poet and clergyman who wrote the text for our hymn, George Hunt Smyttan, had to retire for reasons of health from his curacy in England, even though he was only 48, and, possibly while traveling to the Alps to get to the cleaner air, he died in Frankfurt in 1870. None of the local German people knew who he was, so they buried him in a pauper’s grave, under the lone name “Smyttan.” Soon, somebody else was buried there, and all trace of the man’s place of rest was obliterated. Upgrade to Support Word & Song When I was searching about for one of the books Reverend Smyttan wrote, a volume of poetry called Thoughts in Verse for the Afflicted , I happened on someone writing, in his church’s bulletin, that Smyttan must have been a man of “grim disposition,” because he wrote this very hymn we’ve got today. I don’t see that at all. The young man grew up in India, where his father was a missionary, and the experiences in that land seem to have given him a heart for the afflicted. That’s not grimness. It’s sympathy : literally, to suffer with someone; that word with the Greek root is an exact counterpart of our word with the Latin root, compassion. And that’s what I think the hymn calls for us to feel and to practice. Our season now, of course, is Lent, and we are encouraged to consider the forty days and forty nights that Jesus spent in the desert, fasting and praying, and to join him there. I don’t claim to be at all good at fasting, and Lord knows, I let myself get a little lazy in prayer. Fast and prayer go against the grain when you live in a pleasure-seeking comfort-demanding world. But when I was a small boy, quite a lot of days were marked out as days of abstinence: as I’ve mentioned here, I remember the calendar my grandmother got from La Rosa’s grocery store, and the symbol of the fish for those days. They included all the Wednesdays and Fridays of Lent, all Fridays generally, the first and last Saturday of Lent, and a few other days. (I hope I have gotten that right; my memory is not clear about the details.) But if you were a workingman, you and your family were permitted to eat meat on almost all of those days, nor did the rule apply if you were a child, or if you were of advanced years, or if you were in poor health. We mustn’t think of it as an invitation to eat fancy seafood. Lobster was hardly available to the great majority of people. Instead, it was a way in which all the people, regardless of their wealth, knew they were sharing the same plain fare, with the same discipline. It is good for the wealthy to feel the pinch now and again. But the real purpose was to follow, in this small but deliberate way, the steps of Christ. He wasn’t in the desert for the sake of his health, or to take photographs of it to show at a party later on. He was there to experience in his flesh a deprivation of earthly food, and he himself would be, as he later said to his disciples, the food from heaven, the manna of eternal life. In his suffering for man, he also suffered with man, and that is one very good reason why we should bind our sufferings to his. I guess it’s what Paul would call “out of season” to say such a thing now, because the main way we deal with suffering these days is to keep it as far away from our eyes as possible. But love, true love, does not turn aside. And that is why I find our hymn today not “grim,” but bold and warm-hearted. We could use more like it — at least, I certainly can! Nor does the season end with Lent. Lent is for Eastertide: its end, but also its fulfillment in glory. Please Share this Post Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published Forty days and forty nights Thou wast fasting in the wild; Forty days and forty nights, Tempted, and yet undefiled. Shall we not thy sorrow share And from worldly joys abstain, Fasting with unceasing prayer, Strong with thee to suffer pain? Then if Satan on us press, Flesh or spirit to assail, Victor in the wilderness, Grant we may not faint nor fail! So shall we have peace divine, Holier gladness ours shall be; Round us, too, shall angels shine, Such as ministered to thee. Keep, O keep us, Savior dear, Ever constant by thy side, That with thee we may appear At the eternal Eastertide. Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is a reader-supported online magazine devoted to restoring the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, about words themselves, hymns, poetry, classic film, folk music, and popular song. To see new posts please join us as a subscriber. Thank you for reading Word & Song . Thank you for joining us at Word & Song .…

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How To Pitch Yourself (And Get A Yes) | 300 27:52