AUG
Introducing
AUGUST
August is the eighth month in the Gregorian calendar (see mention Gregorian chant in the Merulo composition in NOTES AND JOTTINGS). It is a month in the northern hemisphere ever associated with the apex of summer weather, with ripeness, with harvest and the celebration of thanks when all is safely gathered in.
‘August’ as a word has another use, as an adjective. This use matches the rich, ripe feel of the word in your mouth, I find: other words encapsulating some of that feeling might be ‘majestic’, ‘noble’, ‘venerable’, ‘grand’, ‘dignified.’
Words like these I associate with the often awe-inspiring sound of the organ, ideally played under an echoing vaulted ceiling of a great cathedral or Abbey – for me, a service without organ accompaniment would always lack gravitas. STS’ NOTES AND JOTTINGS this month shares facts about this, our largest and most complex musical instrument, celebrating it in all its magnificence.
I’ve chosen Vincent Van Gogh for ART OF THE MONTH: one of his many harvest paintings. His short life with its focal burst of creativity was at its very highest point of achievement, despite the anguish of his personal suffering, when in 1887 he captured so sublimely, iridescently, the gold, blue and green of a Provencale wheat harvest.
Van Gogh’s inclusion of poppies’ red brilliance splashed among the gold wheat, and his juxtaposition of the waving full growth high against the sky against the destruction of the stalks’ shorn down into stubble could be jarring – that is if one gives oneself permission to pursue the symbolic references – and to be reminded that 4 August is the anniversary of the declaration of World War 1.
Travelling recently through the UK’s West Country I was struck how little jubilation harvest time must have brought with it in summer of 1914. Added to the trepidation of loved sons, brothers, husbands and fiancés having been summarily called up and despatched to the battlefronts in Western France, for those left on the farms there was the loss of their working horses which were requisitioned, needed by the artillery and transport lines. This meant the grinding burden of bringing in the crops without equine help to transport the loads from the fields. About 25,000 horses identified in advance and obtained from farms and businesses at the outbreak of war made up the initial reserve, but this figure rapidly increased to 165,000 and a year later there were 368,000 horses on the Western Front.
Dramatist Brian Friel and singer-songwriter-composer Patrick Wolf take up the LITERATURE and PEOPLE slots this month, sharing their very particular takes on harvest time, featuring in both cases the pagan festival of Lughnasa.
A certain madness marks both their accounts in which the annual luxuriating in nature’s abundance, firelight revels and wild abandon have their place – is it the warmth of the nights and the fullness of the harvest moon that are responsible?
AI tells us this year’s August moon is known as the ‘Sturgeon’ Moon, a fishy descriptor derived from its Native American nomenclature, due to this valuable fish being most easily caught at this time in the North American lakes.
This moon will apparently serve to encourage individuals to trust their instincts, embrace progress and lose their fears about change ahead. Well, thank you – gratitude for that spiritual support, for sure – given the many deeply concerning fronts about which we’re currently challenged to identify any positivity at all in the prospect of forward progress.
Finally, to PLACE, which admires the long history and handsome profile of the ruins of Reculver Fort on the Kent coast, one of those liminal places which Patrick Wolf is attuned, and to which an eponymous song on his new album directs us.
Striking by day, but truly magnificent floodlit by the moon at night, photographs suggest. I have yet to visit – perhaps now’s the time? should 9 August’s harvest moonlight succeed in luring me there.
ART OF THE MONTH
WHEATFIELD WITH POPPIES AND A LARK by VINCENT VAN GOGH 1853-90
In the calendar: Harvest festival, the Christian denomination’s celebration of thanks for the provision of food and the fruits of the earth is held at the completion of harvest, usually late September/early October to coincide with the autumn equinox. In the Old Testament the feast of Pentecost in late May is called the Feast of Harvest, ‘the first fruits of your labours which you have sown in the field’ Book of Exodus, Chapter 23, vs 16. The pagan harvest festival, Lughnasa, is celebrated around 1 August (see more under PEOPLE)
The frame of reference: Van Gogh started painting in 1880 and left Paris for Arles in 1888. During his year there he completed 300 works, ‘working every day, all day’, glorying in the revelation of the light and colour of the south of France, saying ‘If you truly love Nature, you will find beauty everywhere.’
The painting: With this beautiful landscape, Wheatfield with Poppies and a Lark, post – Impressionist in its outdoor colouring and its mixed brush strokes, Van Gogh returns us once more to the wheatfields he represents in so many guises. Some wheatfields he painted as ripe but moody, some ethereal and unsettling under stars – but this is a lyrical rendering of a high summer day. The crops with their wild-flower interlopers are at the peak of their pre-harvest fullness, depicted with a poetic tenderness, while the work’s mood is airy and light, capturing a windy day it shows the clouds and the slender wheat blown in the same direction as the flying bird.
The simplicity of the work’s division into three bands: sky, wheat, and foreground is deceptive. Van Gogh’s artistry establishes the marked difference between the flecking of the sky and the touches with which he renders the sinuously waving wheat, the poppies, and the dense stubble, each with its own distinctive shape, texture and direction.
With regard to the colour scheme, again there are variations. Although overall it displays a typical Van Gogh landscape mix of luxuriantly buttery yellow-gold, green and blue, within the canvas different tones of blue, lighter and darker, are used. The wheat meanwhile is depicted by passages from cool to warm, yellow-green to blue-green, with minor touches of the red, blue, and white of the field flowers. In the foreground, there is a warmer prevailing tone of bright yellow with lavender touches also apparent.
The artist: Van Gogh’s short 37-year lifespan was one largely of anguish, effort, alienation and deprivation. And yet he endowed the world with approximately 900 extraordinarily innovative works of art – and although in his lifetime the genius of his brushwork and emotionally-charged painting style was barely recognised, he has since become venerated as one of the most towering figures in modern art’s evolution.
At his death, reportedly by suicide, as well as being highly disturbed, he had been living on a knife-edge of poverty, was malnourished and ill from alcohol abuse. So much myth and supposition has built up about the why and how of Van Gogh’s demise perhaps, realistically, one can only assess the evidence for oneself.
A wealth of resources can be followed up via the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam website: www.vangoghmuseum.nl and the Kroller-Muller Museum website: www. krollermuller.nl while the 2017 film Loving Vincent (available on DVD) is an intriguing and superlatively conceived supposition/re-telling of the artist’s last few months of life.
SUGGESTED SOUNDTRACK FOR THE ABOVE:
CD FROM DECCA:
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS THE LARK ASCENDING
Iona Brown, violin
One of the UK’S absolutely most popular classical works with its ‘sublime solo violin, splendidly secure and refined as played by Iona Brown, soaring and drifting high above the orchestral landscape.’
LITERATURE
BRIAN FRIEL 1929 - 2015
Theatre critic of The Guardian Michael Billington nominated Brian Friel as ‘the finest Irish dramatist of his generation’ writing that Friel’s work covered a wide variety of themes: exile and emigration, the political Troubles of Northern Ireland, the subjective nature of memory. But, he noted, Friel’s diverse output, spanning a fifty-year period, was bound together by his passion for language, his belief in the ritualistic nature of theatre and his breadth of understanding.
Billington concluded Friel’s greatest achievement was that, in a vast variety of plays, he explored the condition of Ireland and embodied the idea of theatre as a vital secular ritual.
Originally from the Tyrone village of Dromore, Friel moved to Derry at the age of 10. He once described himself as the ‘son of a teacher and grandson of peasants who could neither read nor write.’ In Derry Friel attended the same Catholic boys’ grammar school in the city as two Nobel laureates: Seamus Heaney and John Hume.
The biggest influence on Friel as a dramatist was Chekhov, whose work he often translated (most of the major plays) plus dramatizing many of the short stories, He was described as ‘always in thrall to the Russian master’ while also achieving a beautiful adaptation of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Becoming known as ‘Ireland’s Chekhov’ Friel’s plays were responsible for nurturing Irish acting talent, including Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea, who both later became Hollywood stars.
Friel’s professional career had begun with short story writing, for which his aptitude was immediately recognised. However, it was the two months in 1963 spent watching theatre director Tyrone Guthrie at work in Minneapolis that alerted Friel to the possibilities of theatre.
This time spent in the USA led directly to one of his most innovative plays, Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), in which he gives voice to the alter ego of a young man about to leave small-town Ireland for the joys of America: a stock situation to which he gave vivid new life.
Although Friel was always fascinated by the insistent Irish dream of escape to elsewhere, he also responded directly to the Northern political crisis. In 1980 with Stephen Rea he founded the company Field Day to tour plays that responded to the violence in Northern Ireland, and eventually to publish anthologies of Irish writing. This led to a number of very fine plays including Translations (1980), which explored the use of language as an instrument of colonial power, and Making History (1988) which dealt with a Gaelic revolt against British power in the 16th century, showing how the interpretation of history must always submit to the preoccupations of the present day.
On moving away from Field Day, Friel began to work on more personal plays drawing on themes of myth and memory. In 1990 he wrote what was to be the most internationally popular: Dancing at Lughnasa (1990).
This enchanting play was based on Friel’s own recollection of five Irish sisters. Against a backdrop of grinding rural poverty, he shows their survival tactics and the disturbing impacts occurring due to outside influences such as their priest-brother returning from a lifetime spent in Africa and the intermittent appearances of the (unwed) father of one sister’s child.
The film’s denouement is when, influenced by the fires of the early August pagan celebrations flaming in the hills surrounding their cottage, the five sisters unforgettably – and bewilderingly – find themselves, despite the repressions and privations of their narrow rural existence and the social/religious constraints that fetter their self-expression, able to spontaneously break into ecstatic dance.
Dancing at Lughnasa won a Tony award in the US for Best Play in 1992 and was later turned into an evocative and poignant film starring Meryl Streep and Michael Gambon, directed by Pat O’Connor.
Among Friel’s admirers was former US President Bill Clinton, who described him as ‘as an Irish treasure for the entire world.’ Friel died after a long illness in 2015.
SUGGESTED SOUNDTRACK FOR THE ABOVE:
CD from SONY:
DANCING AT LUGHNASA
ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK FROM THE FILM composed by Bill Whelan
BREAKING NEWS: SEE A FRIEL PERFORMANCE IN ITS ORIGINAL SETTING
August in Northern Ireland sees the inauguration of ‘FrielDays’, a month-long celebration of the playwright’s work.
Thirty five performances of Friel’s plays will be held across Donegal and Derry during August, starting with a unique interpretation of Dancing at Lughnasa.
This performance is to be staged in the village of Glenties, where Friel himself is buried, the performances’ dates coinciding with the celebration of Lughnasa: a 1 August preview and the official opening night on 2 August.
FrielDays co-creator, Sean Doran of DoranBrowne, says ‘We are thrilled to begin our FrielDays on the first day of Lughnasa – and in Glenties, County Donegal, the place of Friel’s childhood summers, and where he now finally rests.’
Glenties is where Friel’s mother and aunts lived, the very individuals taken by Friel as inspiration the characters of Dancing at Lughnasa’s five sisters, with the original play is set in the family’s kitchen.
The innovative FrielDays production invites audiences to witness a recalling of the lives of these 1930s rural Irish women, uniquely staged in the canteen of Glenties’ Saint Columba’s School.
For details of performances and to book tickets: artsoverborders.com
PEOPLE
PATRICK WOLF 1983 -
The image above shows singer-songwriter Patrick Wolf in 2007 age 24, early in his career. Wolf’s nearly twice that age now, with his eighth album, Crying The Neck just released. Fans welcomed him back with this work after a gap of some years with praise of the album’s ‘maximalist sound and grandeur.’
Wolf’s writing talent, extending to poetry, goes in combination with mastery of instruments that include his own very fine baritone voice along with the piano, Celtic harp, viola, guitar, dulcimer and the kantele, a traditional Finnish plucked-string instrument.
Wolf’s roots are Cornish and Irish (he studied music at Trinity College, Dublin) and much of his work’s subject matter has drawn on his Celtic fringe heritage.
I first encountered his repertoire of songs and anthems fairly late in the day, by 2021 that is, via a chance hearing of the music credits to Francis Lee’s film God’s Own Country. The title of the song that so struck me was The Days and included lines such as
I remember I had your love once
Seized my body whole
And in our first dance
I thought by chance
God had matched my soul
But time brought its travelling
Its distance and solitude
And in that travelling
My self-damaging
I took my love far, far from you
But don’t you
Long to be carried on?
Once more I could lift you strong
Out of the loneliness
And the emptiness
Of the days
Wolf’s soaring orchestral melody and haunting, esoteric lyrics haunted me until I tracked down the 2011 album Lupercalia, from which it came. I discovered Wolf’s flamboyant personality and the erratic development of his idiosyncratic style, career and personal life, while liking every track on the album. On repeat, for me Lupercalia became the anthem of a long Cornish summer.
In 2017 Wolf was awarded the Emund Burke Medal from Trinity College Historical Society Dublin for Outstanding Contribution to Discourse Through the Arts, becoming the first LGBT artist to do so. Coincidentally, God’s Own Country in the same year won LGBT Film of the Year for Francis Lee from the Society of LGBT Entertainment Critics.
I would draw your attention to Wolf’s recently released work.
From study of the lyrics of 2025’s Crying The Neck we learn that he’s no longer an inner-city dweller, having de-camped from London to the Kent coast where he’s deriving comfort from rural isolation and proximity to the sea while in recovery from an extended difficult period of financial problems, alcohol and dug abuse, a car accident and the loss to cancer of his mother.
The album’s lyrics indicate that Wolf’s immersion in local folklore abides. In the track The Curfew Bell grief prompts him to write in the first person as though speaking to his dying mother, linking the harvest’s end’s declarative ancient custom – and its showcasing of the solitary stook remaining behind when all is gathered in – with his terror and sense of abandonment due to her departure from life.
As all the words
Leave me
Go on you there to
The ever and after
The farmer yells out into the field
To announce the end of his harvest yield
Crying the neck
I have ‘n
I have ‘n
I have ‘n
Wolf’s research into folkloric literature shows itself as exemplary. In The Story of Cornwall by AK Kenneth Hamilton Jenkin (Edinburgh, Nelson 1948) the practice (currently being re-introduced in West Country locations) is described, ‘In those past days the whole of the reaping had to be done either with the hook or scythe. The harvest, in consequence, often lasted for many weeks. When the time came to cut the last handful of standing corn, one of the reapers would do so and then, lifting the bunch high above his head, he would call out in a loud voice, ‘I ‘ave ‘un! I ‘ave ‘un! I ‘ave un!’
The onlookers would then shout, ‘What ‘ave ‘ee? What ‘ave ‘ee? What ‘ave ‘ee?’
The reply would come, ‘A neck! A neck! A neck!’
Everyone would then join in to shout, ‘Hurrah! Hurrah for the neck! Hurrah for Mr —’ (calling the farmer by name.)’
Retaining the theme of summer and harvest – but this time in Ireland – Wolf makes reference to the festival of Lughnasa in the title of the album’s following track, in which he instructs us with the lines
Be sure the purpose of your ritual
Without purpose you’ve no magic at all
And then with Reculver, the album’s opening track, Wolf takes his listener to another landscape. This time we are with him in his new neighbourhood, as he takes a mystic, oblique stance in regard to the East Kentish coastal fort of the same name whose towering ruins, dating from Roman times, are a striking landmark open to the sky on their strip of cliff and shingle beach, (see PLACE below for more.)
PLACE
RECULVER FORT, KENT
Reculver, let’s put the ghost to rest
writes Patrick Wolf in the opening track of his new album (see PEOPLE)
But whose ghost is it you speak of, Patrick?
Reculver is a place with many stories to tell. Its ghosts are there for you to discover.
Thought to be the site of the very first incursions by the Roman army when conquering Britain in AD 43, it could well be the ghost of one of Emperor Claudius’ pioneer centurions, crack troops tasked with travelling to the Empire’s very rim to found a fort and subdue and control a savage foreign northern land. Sea mists swirling chilly in from the wide sweep of Herne Bay, he very probably yearned for his former life in the soft south.
Or later in the 2nd century maybe ghost of another Roman, a legionnaire, member of a larger occupational force, one who would have massively reinforced the fort (it has 10 feet thick walls) to help in patrolling the perimeter of what was now known as the ‘Saxon Shore.’ They were on the outlook for the warships from across the North Sea bringing the fearsomely hostile Scandinavian marauders who were subsequently to prevail with their invasion and rule Britain from 410-1066 after the Romans withdrew.
In the 590s the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity, initially due to Celtic missionaries. Perhaps Patrick Wolf’s Irish heritage responded to a folk-memory of one of the hardy souls who set out in small boats to cross the North Sea to convert Britain’s heathen – and whose ghost may still haunt where he paced the cloister, rosary in hand?
By the C7th Reculver’s status was that of a landed estate of the Kent’s Anglo-Saxon kings. It would have sustained a flourishing coastal trading settlement. In 669 a church was built and a monastery dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
In 1086 Reculver was named in the Domesday Book. By the C13th it was a wealthy parish. The fort’s distinctive towers that remain today (crying out for an al fresco performance of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, wouldn’t you say?!) were added in the C12th as part of a re-modelling of the church.
Coastal erosion was to change things from 1460 onwards when the strategic channel the fort was sited on silted up and the sandy cliffs began to crumble. Something too perhaps eery here about its prescience in regard to rising seawater and the devastation of settlements and livelihoods that we’re experiencing due to climate change today?
By the C18th the village settlement was largely abandoned, St Mary’s Church was largely demolished, the two towers however until today remaining as a daymark highly visible for shipping, and maintained as a navigational aid since 1809 by Trinity House.
Noble and of an undiminished grandeur – spectacular, breath-taking even, still in its night-time silhouette – despite the ravages of time, Reculver still stands proud. Today the site is managed by National Heritage and can be visited free of charge.
NOTES AND JOTTINGS
ELEVEN THINGS YOU PERHAPS DID NOT KNOW ABOUT THE ORGAN – AND AN ACCOLADE
Drawn, with grateful thanks to author and organist Professor David Baker (1952 – )
from The Organ
Shire Publications, Oxford 2003
- According to legend, the organ developed from the Pan-pipes of myth, a hand-held instrument whose pipes ranked in different lengths, each playing one note when blown
- By AD 120 Roman organs were being constructed with simple bellows to supply the wind. These early organs were secular instruments, organs only appearing in churches from C10th onwards
- The Benedictine monastic order was the first to install organs in their monasteries and churches
- Organs sound best when the pipes are enclosed at the back, sides and sometimes even the top by a case, usually made of wood
- King’s College, Cambridge and Tewkesbury Abbey, Gloucestershire are among the few C16th and early C17th organ cases to survive in England
- The poet John Milton is supposed to have played on the organ from Magdalen College, Oxford which Oliver Cromwell had removed to Hampton Court during the Commonwealth period (1649-60.) It was returned to Oxford in 1661
- Sir Christopher Wren FRS (1632-1723) architect, was the designer of the case of the Grand Organ being built in by Bernard Smith in 1694 for Wren’s masterpiece, St Paul’s Cathedral. Wren referred to the organ as ‘a kist (box) of whistles.’
- The largest organ built in C19th was made for the Royal Albert Hall, London and re-built in 1920
- The biggest pipe of an organ may be 32 feet (9.8 m) or longer, while the smallest may be only a few inches in length
- Before the advent of electricity organs were hand-blown via a set of bellows; other ways of producing wind included men running on a treadmill
- All organ pipes are ‘voiced’ by a ‘voicer’ before installation, and adjusted to ‘speak’ evenly, balanced with all the organ’s other pipes
David Baker concludes, ‘No other instrument has the same dynamic range, the same multiplicity of colours, the same rich and varied heritage as the organ. No other instrument stretches the mind and body of the player in the way that the organ does. It is a unique instrument, which continues to fascinate, whether as players or listeners. It is truly the King of Instruments.’
SUGGESTED SOUNDTRACK FOR THE ABOVE
CD from NAXOS THE ORGAN ENCYCLOPEDIA:
CLAUDIO MERULO ORGAN MASS of 1568
performed by Frederic Munos
Merulo (1533-1604) was employed at St Mark’s Venice for thirty years, regarded as the greatest organist of his time. His Mass alternates the organ with Gregorian traditional chant.