Bruckner
Motets

I have had to skip back – it’s Sunday afternoon, I thought I would take a break from presentation notes (presentation a week on Monday, the fear…) and drink my detox tea, light a candle, eat a wholemeal pita with laughing cow spread (which I am alarmingly addicted to at the moment) and read the newspaper while listening to this. The first track, the one I know the best plays and I was swept away, again. Os Justi was sung by the Bolton Youth Choir a number of times when I was a member, and we all swooned collectively each time we sang it. I don’t know what the words mean, my Latin has survived enough to pick up the odd phrase only. I have sung it as a second soprano and alto. I know which way the lines move inside it and I know the way it is going overall. Caroline and I grabbed each others hands once during a singing when we reached the “ejus in corde” section and found the lines lapping over one another, round and round and the voices climbing. I remember the big cathedral/performance hall thing at Bolton School (private and posh but useful for concerts) and the town hall in Paderborn and many coach journeys where we also sang it. I sang it at York and was so staggered and overjoyed to find I could say “I know this” (I have always loved recognition in this way). I think of John with the beard who died of a blood clot in 1997. I don’t know any other choral piece that affects me the same way. I want to put my head on my knees and sit in a dark room.

I dreamt last night at “Amen” and “Ejus” meant the same thing, that it meant “I am” and in that way, the resounding full stop of Christianity really falls more into the lap of humanism. It was just a dream though.

I know the next one from performances too, Locus iste, but it never got me the same way. I think of the rehearsal room at Dean School where I ran from the room holding some-one’s remarkably exotic mobile phone as I was told unsympathetically that my Dad had had another heart attack. I wonder now if it was panic. There was no sympathy from anyone, anywhere. I found the abstract lines of these motets a comfort at the time.

Today feels heavy in a kind of gold and velvet way…I am wearing a new slightly glamorous purple jumper and burning a delicious caramel-smelling candle. The shops and the newspaper are full of Christmas and my plans are up in the air again. The heady church-like atmosphere clearly fits the music. Apart from the opening two I don’t really know the other pieces, there’s one I’m sure I recognise from singing at York. I know very little about Bruckner… late Romantic. Removed from the Wagner/Berlioz or Tchaikovsky style sparkling Romanticism – I have Bruckner instead with Brahms in my head, who I know even less about, but I did like his violin concerto. I went to hear Bruckner’s 4th Symphony at York but I heard it only the once. It had the same feel to it that these motets did though, all the cellos deep and wonderful. I sat next to Robin and he sat muttering about how it was all “so over-emotional”. I shushed him and tried to lose myself in the music again – what’s wrong with that emotion? I normally admire the lines and structure so much (and so much more now) in “classical” (I hate that I conform to this HMV classification too) in music; Bruckner feels special in this way for alighting the clenched-fist-eyes-shut feelings I usually feel elsewhere.