Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

Excellent Catholic music in Göteborg sometimes

The quality of music in the Catholic church is remarkably variable. The singing is shared between several local choirs, supplemented by visiting ones. The singing is generally of a high standard. This is a good arrangement as it allows plenty of preparation and takes off the pressure of having to produce something every Sunday. One of the features of the Swedish liturgy is the widespread use of traditional Gregorian tunes, but set to Swedish. Music written for Latin texts can be used for Swedish translations with little adaptation required, which is not the case with English. However, the sound of the language is very different, with more consonants, mixed vowels and some back-of-palate sounds specific to the language. During the Easter Triduum, much of the liturgy was in Swedish sung to the Gregorian tunes.

There is a bit of a fashion to sing in English, which probably should not be happening in the context of a Catholic liturgy, but works by the earlier composers such as Tallis are perfectly acceptable. As always, more problematic are some the twentieth century composition, whether they are the difficult material written from the 1920s onwards, or the English settings with banal words and music in the popular idiom, written more recently. A visiting choir last week, from Oslo were competent singers but their choice was questionable - a rendering of something that sounded as if it had been turned out by a composer who had earned his livelihood from writing jingles for 1960s TV commercials.

On the other hand, there is the local Gossekör, a junior group, who are consistently good. A couple of weeks ago they sung music by Byrd and Palestrina, but unfortunately it was a concert performance of music that really belonged in the liturgy, where it would have gone down much better. Today they did everything right with a rendering of a Haydn Mass setting that would have done credit to the London Oratory, and an English piece by an Elizabethan composer at the Communion.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...