Gresham Society Soirée, Including Þe Fair Weather Canticle, 12 December 2022

Gresham Professors Singing The Gresham Professors’ Song, With Thanks To Basil Bezuidenhout for the pictures and the “live music” video

Was it really three years ago that we last enjoyed one of these soirées? Yup. Last year’s event had to be postponed at the last minute.

The only good news about that delay was that the Gresham music professor, Jeremy Summerly, who was unavailable to attend in person last year, was available this year. Splendid news in particular because his deep knowledge about and insights into early music were especially welcome in the matter of the piece that I had “uncovered in autograph manuscript form”, just before the pandemic.

Long lost medieval canticle? We’ll return to this later

Fortunately for all concerned, we had professional musicians to entertain us for the first half of the show, before we Greshamistas got the opportunity to ruin everything.

Actually, before the professionals got the chance to entertain us, the noisiest amateur of us all, Michael Mainelli, piped us in to Barnard’s Inn Hall in the now traditional style.

Michael at full blast. Thoir an aire yer cluasan, folks

Someone once asked me if I ever duet with Michael. My reply:

What would be the point? You’d only hear Michael.

Mercifully for all our ears, the professional team of David Jones and Sofia Kirwan-Baez soon established a pleasant tone to proceedings, both treating us to their fine keyboard skills as well as their excellent voices, with Part 1 of the show.

Sofia has a fine operatic voice, which really came to the fore when she sang the Massenet and the Puccini. David always entertains, not least with his “party piece”, Lehrer’s Elements Song, in which he subtly switches from “Harvard” to “Barnard’s” for the punchline. Also a lovely rendition of Misty, although I can never hear that song any more without thinking of the Gresham Society visit to the London Mithraeum and my resulting Mithras version of that song:

Part 2 of the programme was a different affair, of course, with some regular and irregular antics.

Tim Connell updated a couple of literary standards, deliberately lowering our intellectual and linguistic standards in so doing, aided and abetted by Frank Cox & Mike Dudgeon

Maths Professors Wilson & Hart taught us how to sing numerical carols. Turns out, it’s as easy as 1-2-3…as long as 4-5-6-7 and 8 are also in your repertoire, naturally.

Tristis opus non est beatus, as PC Wilson might put it.

As for my little offering, Þe Fair Weather Canticle, it had been long in the process between “rediscovering” and performing.

I supplied Professor Jeremy Summerly with a copy of the “autograph” and a demo recording, the latter you can see below:

Professor Summerly very kindly gave this opus more than its fair share of scholarly attention, helping the audience to understand the historical significance of my “discovery” with a professorial dissertation on the piece. Unfortunately, that mini-lecture, a masterpiece in its own right, was not recorded for posterity on the night, but I do have some of Jeremy’s notes, which I can share with readers:

Of necessity, discoveries of new sources in the field of early music are less and less frequent as time goes on. All musicologists dream of finding a source of forgotten music, even more so a fragment that might fill in significant holes in our understanding of music history.

Yet such a discovery has been made recently. It is hardly surprising that such a fragment might turn up on the site of a medieval coaching inn, and even less surprising that this inn should be located in Middle England.

The musico-poetic gem þe Fair Weather Canticle, like much early music, surprises us through its apparent modernity. Like the brightly-coloured decoration of a medieval ceiling, or the dissonant harmonies and boldly-contrasting texts of a medieval motet, there is something shockingly modern about this ancient canticle.

Scholars will need time to consider the implications of this newly-found piece within the pre-Baroque jigsaw.

Meanwhile, the words and music should be enjoyed for what they represent: a perplexingly polystylistic mesh of jumbled ideologies and opaque thinking.

Professor Summerly then went on to examine the words of the canticle, noticing some astounding…in some cases shocking…similarities between those words and the words of subsequently well-known songs from periods ranging from the 12th to 17th centuries. In one case, even the 20th.

Finally, Professor Summerly, being an expert on early music, provided some historical context to my performance on an original instrument, which he kindly described as:

a rare and fascinating example of a gittern-ulele, an instrument probably of similar vintage to the canticle.

The instrument has an exceptionally sweet sound in the hands of an appropriate musician…or so we are led to believe, if only such a virtuoso performer could be found.

In the right hands, this gittern-ulele would quite possibly be, to the guitar-family, what Paganini’s Il Cannone Guarnerius is to the violin.

As for the gittern-ulele performance you are about to hear, many of you will surely be moved to tears when listening to the sound of this extraordinary old git?”

It was hard for me to follow that introduction, but I tried, after a subdued start. Basil recorded the moment for posterity – for which I am grateful. It is not every day that my work is professorially conducted, but the triumphant chorus at the end benefitted greatly from Professor Summerly’s expertise, as I had my hands full at the time:

For those who would like to study the words or are crazy enough to try singing along with the vids, here are the words:

Sumer is icumen in, þe nymphs and shepherds dance
Bryd one brere, groweth sed and bloweth med
And don’t you know, amarylis dance in green–ee-ee-een.

Lightly whipping o’er þe dales, with wreaths of rose and laurel,
Fair nymphs tipping, with fauns and satyrs tripping
Mister Blue Sky is living here today hey, hey hey.

Mister Blue Sky please tell us why, you were retired from mortals sight, stars too dim of light.

Hey you with þe angels face, bright, arise, awake, awake!
About her charret, with all admiring strains as today, all creatures now are merry…
(…merry merry merry, merry merry merry merry, merry merry, merry, merry merry merry merry merry merry minded.)

Mister Blue Sky please tell us why, you were retired from mortals sight, stars too dim of light.

Hey there mister blue, who likes to love, lhude sing cuccu,
Nauer nu, ne swik thu, sing hey nonny nonny nu.

Mirie it is while sumer ilast, in darkness let me fast,
Flow my tears, fairwell all joys for years,
Never mind, I joy not in early, I joy not in early bliss.

Mister Blue Sky please tell us why, you were retired from mortals sight, stars too dim of light.
Ba ba, ba ba ba ba, ba ba, ba ba ba ba, ba ba, ba ba ba ba, ba, ba x2

After the show, there was plenty of time for eating, drinking, chatting and making merry, as is the case at any good soirée. The Gresham Society Soirée is certainly always a good one.

The 2022 Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Seasonal Dinner, 8 December 2022

With thanks to John Random for several pictures, not least this one: me with Noel Christopher – Caroline is also there, trying to hide in the corner of this picture

Given that Ivan Shakespeare Memorial dinners are principally gatherings of comedy writers, they have not been much of a laughing matter of late, with many of our number having departed permanently. Indeed John Random pondered various re-namings this time:

Ivan Shakespeare Debbie Barham Nick R. Thomas Gerry Goddin Mike Hodd Chris Stanton Memorial Dinner

or

“Ivan to Stanton Memorial Dinner”

Yet plenty of us still survive to dine, chat and play silly quizzes. A dozen or so of us gathered this time.

Random gets busy with his camera phone while Barry looks on and…
…Hugh Ryecroft shows off the new trophy: The Hoddy

Following the departure of Mike Hodd, we toasted our patriarch and played an extra quiz for the above magnificent new trophy: The Hoddy, provided by Mark Keegan, who set the seminal Hoddy Quiz. Professional quiz dude Hugh Ryecroft took that trophy.

Hugh couldn’t win the regular annual Ivan Shakespeare Trophy, as he won it last year and set that quiz this year. Bit of a busman’s holiday for Hugh, setting quizzes for Ivan Shakespeare dinners. Still, it was Keith Wickham who took that magnificent prize, which will no doubt grace his trophy cabinet for most of 2023:

Wickham lands the big one

I was close, but no cigar on both quizzes, in particular one of them on which i only missed out by a couple of points.

But of course all were winners, as it was such a heart-warming and convivial evening, as indeed it always is.

Was that Keith’s classic James Mason impression making me laugh?