Royal Music

Someone once, long ago. asked me why I had, when in London for a week, on holiday, attended the ceremony at the cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. I said because of the music chiefly though I did find the marching etc. rather moving. I love Walford's "Solemn Melody" (I suppose he must have written other pieces of music but this is the only work of his I have ever heard). It was played by massed brass bands which is always thrilling.
This came to mind when I found myself, against my will, watching the Royal Wedding: the music would perhaps balance the sentimentality of the occasion. Actually, there was little sentimentallity to experience: the English do these occasions so well, with military precision and effectiveness such that there's no room for tears or shows of public sentiment. I enjoyed it. All of it. I liked the bride - she is a real beauty with a smile that could melt the heart of a knave. The prince is quite likeable too, much more so than some of The Firm. But it was the music that thrilled.
I read somewhere that the music was chosen by Prince Charles and the bride, Kate Middleton herself. Another mark up for the young woman and a great leap up in my estimation for the prince, her father-in-law to be. Obviously the guy has taste. Of course he has taste: doesn't he always get seven eggs boiled for him for breakfast for different periods of time so that he can choose the one done just right for him (the other six probably go in the bin).
So there was no pop music played in spite of Elton John being present (no "Candle in the Wind" thank God!); no light music at all; nothing to make you think "here we have a real, great, modern marriage". No. We heard Hubert Parry, a choral work, Cwm Rhondda and Jerusalem sung with spirit (as if it's a patriotic song, which it isn't), then a short choral work by John Rutter (safe hands there) and at the end when the married couple were leaving, walking the length of Westminster Abbey - which is some walk, especially in the clobber they both had on - William Walton's magnificent march "Crown Imperial". I almost stood up and saluted.
Why was William Walton not made Master of the Queen's Music? He could turn that stuff out like nobody's business: Crown Imperial, Spitfire Prelude and Fugue, Orb and Sceptre etc. All great stuff. Good as Elgar.... why wasn't he too made Master of the King's Music? One of his Pomp and Circumstance marches has practically become the National Anthem.
Ah! I see. Now I know. Elgar was a Catholic.
Just a guess.
Poor Max Whats-his-name, who is Master of the Queen's Music wasn't even invited to write something. He was hurt. He said "I'm not even going to watch it."

The Wedding

If I were a young woman - I'm not a woman or young, by the way - I wouldn't like to be in Kate Middleton's shoes, metaphorically speaking. No wonder she's supposedly not eating these days. God! She'll be joining The Firm is a few days' time and there's no bigger firm - or soap opera - than that. Those palaces where people live! Those large dining rooms where the knives, forks and spoons are laid out military style. The corridors you have to walk to get from one room to another. All those flunkies about the place bowing and scraping to you with, possibly, pervy little smiles on their mouths that tells you that you really are not fine enough to be in this hallowed place with these hallowed people.... and so on.
She seems a nice girl but will she stay a nice girl living the sort of life she will have to live soon. If she decides to continue "being herself" she'll suffer - "we don't want royalty to be anything other than royal, old boy". She's a commoner but she can't stay a commoner because a commoner to some of those soon to be around her is to be common.
Will she survive in the airless atnmosphere of the royal households?
One of two things will occur I believe: she will either start the beginning of a new kind of royalty, the sort that survives in some of the European countries, or she will unconciously wreck it. There are forces in and around The Firm that will not like "the likes of her" to break into the extended family of the whole artificial set-up: flunkies who like to flunk to the aristocrats; the remains of "the debutants" who still linger on the outskirts of royal events like those girls in "Dracula" who wish to suck your blood - sexily; the Duke - enough said; his daughter, Princess Anne, who seems to be more of a robot rather than a human being. They'll probably all play the game for a while but they'll bide their time before they strike with upper-class venom. In the immortal words of Gerry Adams: "We haven't gone away".
Maybe.
Or maybe not. Maybe they won't be allowed to by the British public. Maybe it will be as Matthew D'Ancona puts it in the Sunday Telegraph: "So relaxed, loving and straightforward are Prince William and his bride-to-be that it is easy to forget that the monarchy is about to embark on the greatest experiment in social mobility in its modern history. But it is the Palace that is on trial, not the new princess: the public will not take kindly to the slightest whiff of snobbery."
I'm with them there even if I'm not with them on much else besides regarding royalty.

Fantasy

I have seen a couple of strange films recently: "Unmissable" and "Source Code". Both are fantasies. In "Unmissable" a down-and-out writer who can't get on with the novel he's been commissioned to do, is given a tablet by a man he once knew who is working for a chemical company on a secret formula. Which should have told the hero not to take the pill; but he was desperate so he does. Almost instantly he becomes a sort of high-powered, over-intelligent monster: we are told that the average person uses only about 20% of his brain (didn't know that before) but that the pill he has taken will make available to him 100% of his b rain. So he writes his novel which is great - so his agent believes - and it gets published. Then he finds he can wiz-kid things like helping firms to make money. But people are after him, they want the pill of course. It's all rather unbelieveable. But it's fun. "Source Code" is fantasy made so assuredly and seriously that you almost believe it could take place. A man wakes up on a train and, gradually, in eight minutes, finds he not the man he thinks he is. He is dead but certain brain parts of his have been saved and it is these that inhabit the other man. Get it? No, I didn't either. But again, it was fun though even more violent than "Unmissable". While waiting for the film to start I had to put up with reviews of films to come. They were all fantasies. A man becomes a "green man" who can perform great feats of strength and possesses extraordinary powers etc. Another couple of films were also fantasies. They were all spectacularly full of "special effects" which I find rather boring in that, well, you know they are "special effects" don't you?. I prefer a film to be grounded in reality like "Sideways" which had no special effects. Neither did "The King's Speech" which was an excellent film with three, at least, superb performances. Is this fantasy-film-making anything to do with the general public's dispensing with "old forms" of fantasy like religion? Are people now non-believers but still have a secret desire to want to believe something? As G.K.Chesterton put it: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything."

Wendy Cope

Charles Moore wrote a good piece on the poet Wendy Cope this week in The Daily Telegraph. He pointed out how her use of easy-to-understand words was deceptive because her poems were greater than the sum of their parts - sort of thing. As the Archbishop of Canterbury said (or wrote): "Wendy Cope is without doubt the wittiest of contemporary English poets and says a lot of extremely serious things. I read something a few weeks ago that she is not very popular with other poets. Moore seems to think this is because (a) people like it and buy it without necessarilly being experts on poetry and that upsets "proper poets". (b) Her name makes her sound like "a suburban spinster poet and that brings out the snob in other writers" - a bit loose that! (c) "She writes lines - indeed whole poems - with no unusual words or syntax" which makes other poets think she's no good. She is good. She's subtle and clever and, though you wouldn't think it on first reading one of her poems, quite erudite. But it's love she writes best about. My favourite is, of course: "Bloody men are like bloody buses - /You wait about a year/ And as soon as one approaches your stop/ Two or three others appear." (First verse). Another is rather clever, again about men - they often are about men! "There are so many kinds of awful men -/ One can't avoid them all. She often said/ She'd never make the same mistake again:/ She always made a new mistake instead." (First verse) Here's a fairly new one called "The Widow": I like this piece. I think youd like it too./ We didn't very often disagree/ Back in the days when I sat here with you/ And knew that you were coming home with me./ This is the future. It arrived so fast,/ When we were young it seemed so far away./ Our years together vanished like a day/ At nightfall, sealed for ever in the past./ I can't give up on music, just discard/ The interest we shared because you died./ And so I come to concerts. But it's hard./ Tonight I'm doing well. I haven't cried./ My head aches. There's a tightness in my throat./ And you will never hear another note."