Music for Sunday 3 October

We're back to Ordinary Sundays for a week or two.  Habits over anticipating, transferring and ignoring various feasts vary wildly from parish to parish, and I have to admit that having three at a stretch can get a bit wearisome.  After all, every Sunday is special just for being Sunday: add a feast, and it becomes special for other, additional reasons.

Last Sunday was a quiet comedown after the high intensity of end-of-term and the visit of Bishop Andudu.  Four adult choristers joined the sanctuary team and discovered the acoustics of the chancel (where there was once a large set of choir stalls).  It made of a good change of pace!

So this week we're still on holiday personnel, and rehearsals for the youth choir resume next week.

Readings are linked here, and the psalm setting to be sung is here.

The setting will be Philip Mathias's Christ Church Mass (Together in Song, 757).  Hymns are as follows:

Introit: O thou who camest from above [572 ii]
Gradual: Give me the wings of faith to rise [438]
Offertory: Dear Father, Lord of humankind [598]
Communion: Lord, you have been our dwelling-place [144]

Is it just me?

Could it be that the word literally is making a comeback?  I thought it was slain by the rise of impact as a transitive verb, but in the last week I have heard or read the following constructions:

She literally walked by me...

We are literally serious about this.

The athletes' village in Delhi is literally unhabitable.  Toilets are literally blocking up, and there's cause for concern about hygiene.

I suppose we ought to be grateful that Mister Rabbit is not virtually abandoning the project of parliamentary reform through his intransigence over the pairing of the Speaker's vote in the House of Representatives.  No.  He's literally being obstructive.

The combined effects of PR and politicians have a powerful influence on how people use hyperbole in their day-to-day conversations.  You know when words such as impact, illegal, literally, and so on, have reached new or renewed currency by their rapid-fire appearance in the snippets of conversation one hears on the train or in a cafe.  By the time it makes it to the opinion columns of your newspaper of choice you know that the rot has literally set in.  I saw a sentence with a double literally today.  One could weep in despair.

This verbal tic literally grates on one's eye and ear, attesting to the palsied imagination imagination of the one who utters it.  Unfortunately, management types and politicians -- who would normally pass as literate, thinking people -- seem to be the first to take up the word of the moment.  There must be a hormone which responds to the recitation of the word, such is its growing recurrence.  Could it be that some people are (unknowing) serial buzzword junkies, repeating the same thing over and again to keep the endorphins flowing?  Is it possible to die of a buzzword overdose?

Music for Sunday 26 September

After all the excitement of the visit from Bishop Andudu last week, we come hurtling back to earth with St Michael and All Angels.  The youth choir is in recess for the next two weeks, so it's down to the adults in the choir to lead the singing -- this is also an opportunity for the erstwhile director of music to do some work on sight singing among that part of the choir!

The readings for the feast are linked here.  The psalm will be sung to Anglican chant.

The setting will be Philip Mathias's Christ Church Mass (Together in Song, 757).

Hymns are as follows:

Introit: You holy angels bright [108]
Gradual: Christ, the fair glory [tune: Christe Sanctorum, 246]
Offertory: Ye watchers and ye holy ones [150]
Communion: Bread of heav'n, on you we feed [513]

For those keeping the Ordinary Sunday, the readings are linked here, and the psalm setting is here.  Hymns:

Introit: God has spoken by his prophets [158]
Gradual: We find thee, Lord, in others' need [tune: Dominus regit me, 145]
Offertory: Help us accept each other [648]
Communion: Praise, my soul, the king of heaven [134]

An aphorism

From Resisting the Empire?  The Associated Board Comes to Melbourne, a paper I read at a conference over the weekend:

Music examinations were caught in a nexus of cultural and commercial concerns that were bound up in Imperial Federation.  This combined economic and defence policies that favoured British interests with notions of a pan-British identity, culture and destiny.  However, the underlying assumptions of Imperial Federation failed to address the paradoxical situation of the Australian colonies, where reflexive identification with British culture was tempered by a strong tendency to economic independence.

More wedding music

I've just loaded two of the final three remaining pieces on the wedding page.  Mastery of the recording device is proceeding: it'll be time to re-record the lot again soon...

Music for Sunday 19 September

September has been shaping up as a festival-filled month in the Anglican Parish of Jika Jika -- last week was Triumph of the Holy Cross, and this week the parish is keeping St Matthew.  The reason for this is partly to do with observing the red-letter days, but also because there is a visit from Bishop Andudu Adam of the Kagdudgli Diocese in central Sudan.  There is a sizeable Sudanese community in the parish, which means this is a very important event which will cap off a weekend of activity.

This week is also the last Sunday of the school term.  The youth choir will be in recess during the school holidays, leaving the adults of the choir to carry the load.  Three choristers will be promoted this week -- two as head choristers, and one as a full chorister.  This brings the total of full choristers to six, not bad for one term's work.  There will be a little story in the local paper in the next week or two spruiking for more choristers.  We won't have enough robes soon, but that's a good problem to have!

The readings for the week are linked here.

The setting will be Philip Mathias's Christ Church Mass (Together in Song, 757).

Hymns are as follows:

Procession: For all the saints [455]
For the Psalm: The sky tells the glory of God [7]
Gradual: He sat to watch o'er customs paid [tune: Gonfalon Royal, 332]
Offertory: Dear Father, Lord of humankind [598]
Communion: Sweet sacrament divine 

The choir will be singing a communion anthem: Lead me, Lord -- S.S. Wesley

The postlude will be Processional -- William Mathias

For those keeping the Ordinary Sunday, here's what would have been on the menu.

Readings and Psalm setting -- the service setting would remain as above.  Hymns:

Introit: Stand up and bless the Lord [449]
Gradual: There's a wideness in God's mercy [136]
Offertory: Ye watchers and ye holy ones [150]
Communion: Sweet sacrament divine

New stuff

If you visit the wedding music page, you'll find that all but three pieces listed there now have mp3 files uploaded.  Many of these are re-recorded tracks, courtesy of a better-quality recording machine, which I'm still mastering.

Funeral music

Who "owns" a funeral conducted according to the rites of a body such as the Catholic Church?  What is the meeting space between the desires of a grieving family and the requirements of a Church with a prescribed liturgy?

Last week the Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne published guidelines affecting music at funeral masses.  The local press has greeted the news with alarm -- new impositions from on high, according a story in the Herald Sun, which rolled out Fr Bob Macguire to add a splash of colour and wonderment to spice up the coverage.  Now, this is the priest who is said to have floored a congregation at a funeral by walking up to the coffin during the eulogy and knocking on the side, checking to see if the occupant could hear what nice things were being said about him.  Some clergy of a certain generation combine a striking idea of tradition with liturgical crankiness on an epic scale.  Fr Bob's line is that the punters won't like it, but he's got the choice of losing his job and putting people offside, so he'll acquiesce.

The article included a couple of quotes from funeral directors, pointing out that the guidelines put a barrier in the way of their multimedia product, a slideshow of family snaps covering the life of the deceased connected up with two or three pop songs hand-picked to induce an emotional reaction.  While these can be interesting, the scope for the cringe factor is very high indeed.  It left me wondering if it is necessarily true that what works in a funeral home is appropriate in a church, and whether funeral directors really do see the distinction.  It struck me that funeral directors now assume multimedia presentations to be a core part of their routine service, and the quotes in the article didn't do much to dispel that.

Before I get to the general point, it must be said that the guidelines from the Archdiocese don't say anything new.  The document is yet another restatement of the existing rules.  One needn't ask why restating the rules was so pressing.  Having attended my fair share of Catholic funerals (in a professional capacity), all I can say is that it's about time there was more rigour, rather than leaving things to the whims of families and clergy, combined with the commercial impulses of the funeral directors.  Funerals are big business: attending to your clients' needs and wishes is the basis of winning further customers in the future.  Invocare Australia, which owns some of the largest funeral "brands" in the country, is a publicly-listed company.  Their shares are much in demand by superannuation funds.  Being seen as an industry leader is important, hence the growing importance of the provision of multimedia presentations as a core part of the ordinary course of events at a funeral -- part of the product, if you will.  It's all about responsiveness to clients and customer satisfaction.

However, photographs can cross a lot of lines between the private and public faces of the deceased.  This is surely why it was customary for these sorts of things to be shared during the gathering after the public service, because many of the memories associated with photos are essentially personal -- sometimes intensely so.  Funeral directors do not generally organize the reception following the funeral service unless it is taking place at their premises, so it is natural for them to encourage this sharing of pictures to be imported into the service, courtesy of the installation of data projectors and decent sound systems.  The growth of civil celebrant-led funerals has seen the evolution of a service format which dwells on the life of the deceased, much like an extended eulogy.  It is easy to see how a slideshow of family snaps would fit into something like this, however high the potential cringe factor.  These sorts of funerals actively shun the metaphysical beyond the most general sense of passing into the beyond.  When well led they are fine occasions, but when it starts with third-rate poetry recited poorly, you know it's going to be a hard half hour.  The whole focus is necessarily on telling the life of the deceased, and that is the driving force behind the structure of the service.

But what to say about the liturgical reality of Catholic funerals?

99% of funeral services in churches are organized on the hop.  Even among the elderly and terminally ill, it is very rare that the content of the funeral service have been thought through ahead of needing to set things in motion.  Most Catholic funerals are a big affair, because there is a culture of wanting to make a statement, along with that bizarre attitude towards the liturgy which demands a high degree of subjectivity.  (Does arranging a funeral activate the same part of the brain as organizing a wedding?)  The fact that the funeral mass is frequently the only public event associated with a death means that it is invested with a great deal of freight, and there is a certain urgency about incorporating as much of the funeral director's product into the event in a bid to make the service as personal as possible.

The musicians usually get involved within hours of the funeral directors assuming control of events leading to the service.  There is a great deal of pressure to offer a distinctive service, and it is understandable: the company wants to be seen favorably by the family, in the expectation that this will lead to word-of-mouth referrals.  The family wants something tailor-made.  And they want it now, they want control, but they are not really sure about what goes where.  They are seldom encouraged to begin with what the Church provides, a reflection of the generally poor teaching about the role of a set liturgy for weddings, baptisms and funerals among the main denominations, and an especially urgent problem in the Catholic Church.  It is not the job of funeral directors to make up for decades of poor formation in the parishes.

Most clergy are involved in the background during the days before the funeral.  In reality, they exercise an enormous amount of power, with the right to approve or veto anything proposed to be part of the service.  It is a power frequently deferred to the funeral director (who usually produces the booklet).  The result is that the product (sorry, music) for a Catholic funeral is pared down into a fairly predictable menu of the following:

Psalm 23 (often Crimond)
Ave Maria (usually Schubert; rarely the Gonoud setting, and even more rarely the Caccini one)
Panis Angelicus (for communion)
Pie Jesu (Faure, usually used as filler somewhere along the line)
Time to say goodbye (not so bad if performed live, but usually a CD)

It is easy to see that Catholic funerals draw on a highly standardized selection of music for the public mass.  The rite itself is prescribed quite clearly in the Missal, however much the clergy tinker at the edges, and they often proceed in autopilot, moreso among those much in demand for funerals.  This means that where something different to the accustomed pattern is to be sung, it has to be tattooed to the priest's forehead to make sure he stops to allow it to happen.  (How many complaints have arisen because the priest blustered on where the singer was meant to have way?  Clergy don't tend to be blackballed for mucking up the service by preventing the musicians from doing what they'd been asked to do.  Heaven help the organist who plays to the end of a specially-requested piece when the priest is champing at the bit.)  The only way a distinctive product can be incorporated is through the music chosen (which is no more than a substitute for the texts prescribed in the Missal), and the increasingly common innovation of multimedia presentations as an adjunct to the eulogy.  Even the eulogy is an add-in: there is no provision for it in the rite as it is set forth in the Missal, so it is usually takes place before the commencement of the service proper.

I think the publication of the guidelines for Catholic funerals is a good thing.  However, it's not difficult to see that this document will go exactly the same way as its predecessors: it will be ignored as a matter of routine.  Funeral directors are faced with the commercial reality of needing to provide customer satisfaction, which drives them towards solutions which are successful in civil celebrant-led funerals but work against the whole purpose and meaning of a liturgical funeral.  The clergy generally want to get on with their day without being pestered by bishops (it's hard to tell what that says about either party concerned).  The ingredients of an unsatisfactory situation are unchanged by the publication of the document, although it's a relief to know that the rules are still there to be restated once again.

What's an archbishop who cares about the rites of the Church to do?

Some interesting stats

Blogger provides an interesting range of tools to help the erstwhile blogger maximize the performance of his or her pages.  Among other things, there is a rolling compilation of visitor statistics, and I thought it might be interesting to see what this tells me about the people visiting here.

Since April there have been 1,184 hits on this blog.  About half of these came through in July.

The most popular page is A Curious Case of Organological Iconography, which has had 106 visitors, most of whom found it via google searches.  Other pages with good hit rates are the ones discussing choir training activities.  This is a strand of thought which has been a bit subsumed by other worries in the last couple of months, and one to which I do intend to return.

52% of visitors view this blog through Mozilla Firefox, 36% using Internet Explorer.  I have had visitors using iPhone and iPad.

People have found this page through searches to do with organ music, choir training, some of the pieces I've loaded up for your edification and some of my ruminations on the happenings at the VCA.  Google has wended people here from America, Ireland, Britain, and Canada.  Yahoo searches have even sent a few viewers in this direction.  It appears that some of my concert titles have had high value in search engine optimization.

And where are these people?  Over 800 hits have come from within Australia, over 200 from the US, with lesser figures from Canada, the UK, Ireland and Denmark.

So, thanks for reading -- and please keep reading!

Another feline thought

Waaaaaaay too cool!

Nine years ago

Nine years ago I was sitting in a cafe with a book and a coffee.  The spring sun was streaming through the window, a fine Tuesday morning.

I was in the third year of my music degree: the most pressing worry about my exam program was getting Messiaen's Les Anges up to speed (in the event, the examiners didn't want to hear it, and the instrument packed it in halfway through the second piece).  I think I was reading up for an essay when the phone rang, heralding a call from my mother to ask if I'd heard about what was happening in New York.

As the day proceeded I ran across several responses to the events of the night.  Over the days leading to the end of the week I found myself booked to sing at a couple of services in city churches which had been rustled together to give people an opportunity to give shape to their grief.  I sat through a choir rehearsal where people shared their incomprehension at having watched the destruction of the World Trade Centre towers in real time.

The photographs in the newspapers over the week or so following kept events firmly at the front of peoples' minds.  It is said that every American has viewed the footage of the two aeroplanes being flown into the World Trade Centre towers at least a dozen times each year since 2001.  The image certainly has generation-defining power: people will never forget where they were when they first saw it.

Yet I have never watched it.  I have not had a television since September 2000, and it had been about three years before that since I sat before the box without falling into instant slumber.  I know you can get the footage from several different angles on YouTube, but the question has to be asked: why chose to live through those distressing moments for the rest of your life?

We have seen so much grief come out of the last nine years, what with one unnecessary war, another one where the parameters for success have yet to be defined, and the assembly of a legal machinery which poses serious challenges to the Western tradition of civil liberties, embodied in the endless queues one must pass through in order to travel on international flights.  The immediate response to the threat of Al-Quaeda attacks was to move to erode some of the basic principles of Common Law, such as the encroachments on Habeas Corpus endured by so many held captive in Guantanamo Bay, and the attempt to impose martial justice on civilian defendants through the invention of unauthorised enemy combatant status.  Arguably, the revival of Cold War rhetoric that was rolled in with this has seen the old narrative of civilization conflict updated, where Muslim and Islam are chained to the wall where Communism once stood.

Next year will be the big anniversary, although I suspect the good people of New York will be seeing progress rather than completion of the new World Trade Centre complex, which is starting to take shape.

Non-vocal, day two

It all happened very quickly.  On Wednesday, after a couple of days of feeling a bit off kilter, I got in the car after the second choir rehearsal for the week and by the time I arrived at home (c30 min) my voice had gone.  This is the second time for the year -- something of a record for me!

On Thursday I had the three-hour marathon at the AYC, with my voice reduced to a whisper.  No singing, but plenty of rasping.  It was an interesting exercise -- every question was asked in something approaching the vox mystica, and most of the answers came sotto voce.

So, here's a little bit of folk devotion.  St Blaise is the patron of coughs and throat impediments: part of his legend is that, on the way to his martyrdom, he healed a child choking on a fish bone. He is typically portrayed in iconography with two candles held cross-wise.  Go here and here to find out more.

An answer to a question

"So, I suppose you don't have much time for modern music, given that you're classically trained..."

How often do I get that question?  It usually comes in sequence after the one about who one's favorite composers are.  Whenever it is trained on me, I always feel like this question is the equivalent of reaching for the trip-switch to the trap door.  Depending on who asks it, there is a right and a wrong answer which may well frame the rest of your interactions with that person.

It's true.  I don't have a lot of time for a lot of the confectionery one might find on the average 14-year-old's iPod -- hopefully that's no more than a sign of being a well-adjusted early-thirtysomething.  I think I've outgrown the obsessions that drove my musical taste over half a lifetime ago (well, most of them).  I still remember a program long-displaced from ABC FM -- The Listening Room -- with no small degree of affection.  TLR used to feature a variety of things, ranging from radio plays to seriously quirky stuff involving instruments mating, all at about 8.30pm in the middle of the week.  It was carefully presented, with the aim of leaving the listener alone to make his or her own judgment, and formed a good foil to the usual programing.  That's why I find Julian Day's tendency to loquaciousness about "contemporary sound" so incredibly insufferable.  It's a pity no-one's invented a way to listen to the radio without having to tolerate the irritating ramblings of aficionados who do little other than get in the way.

By way of a parenthesis -- a couple of years ago I was listening to the ABC when one of Herbert Howells's early orchestral pieces came up.  The presenter intimated that it had been written for the visit of the Prince of Wales (later George V) to the Royal College of Music, and then went on to opine that the RSCM seemed a strange place for a prince to visit (so many threads to pick up there, but not now!).  Strange indeed -- the Prince was only the President of the College, a position currently held by the present Prince of Wales.  George V's notorious philistinism aside, being regaled with such uninformed rubbish seems to be the lot of the unwary listener on ABC FM.  Presenters are allowed to be unaware of the twisted lines of influence in the London music scene, but the old tale about it being better to remain silent and be thought a fool seems to have passed by some of the present crop of presenters.  But I digress.

Still, one ends up with that question.  It's as if eclecticism in one's musical taste has to be validated by something that connects to the aural world of the average person with their iPod.  One could have the most baroquely transgressive tastes in painting, sculpture and whatnot, but it's possible to ignore these in a way that's generally impossible for music.  So, for the sake of answering the question that came up in about four conversations today, here's a poke at an answer.

You'll have to visit youtube to hear this.  My introduction to Coldplay came via teaching this song to a youth choir for a concert.  I have gone on to explore a little more of their oeuvre, which has some interesting twists and turns.  What I enjoy is the way they play with genre: there's a lot going on under the surface which could take up a lot of time were I to turn to popular musicology (yes, there's a strand of the discipline dedicated to the study of pop music).  There's something decidedly Romantic about Coldplay.

The mark of the quality of a song such as Viva la Vida is that one can listen to it a few times without being bored to tears by the sheer repetitiveness of the ordeal (and believe me, there's plenty of fairyfloss in organ music -- just look at my wedding music page for a quick sample).  Every line in Viva has some sort of historical or mythological reference, and the video clip linked above seems to take place in Jacques-Louis David's Napoleon Crossing the Alps.

So the answer to the question is that "classical training" really doesn't have much to do with preferring one style or genre over another.  I suppose the major contribution is that it makes you a little more discerning and critical in your choice of chart music.  That's quite different from being prejudiced against it.

Juvenile speculation

The Age carried a front-page report today claiming that the first cracks are appearing among the independent and Greens members who have decided to support a minority Labor Government.

Perhaps the silliest claim in this article is the that opposition could pursue a legislative agenda on issues such as mental health, the repeal of Queensland's wild rivers laws and tax.  This would a be a truly unworkable situation, and ignores the historical fact that governments tend to poach good policy from oppositions.  I think this is yet another attempt to undermine the Greens in the public square, given the frame put around some remarks of Bob Brown in the article.

Why is it that we are still stuck with news-as-sports-commentary?  The nature of the new parliament is that no political party will be able to claim absolute paternity on any good that comes out of it.  The nature of politics is determined by the players, and they have collectively decided to change fair chunks of the rules.  This doesn't seem to have seeped through to the good journos of The Age quite yet.

Dismal efforts like this demonstrate precisely what is wrong with the coverage and commentary of the last seven weeks or so, which was simply an amplification of what's been amiss more generally in political coverage for some time.  It is a chicken-and-egg situation, given the sort of stranglehold the previous two governments exerted on the information available to journalists; the marketing-based approach of the Rudd years was just the most extreme expression of this tendency.

The speculative content of First Cracks is just appalling, and so uninformed by any sense of how governments actually operate as to look like a year 7 essay -- full of nice touches of research, but lacking in serious analytical content.  In short, it is just juvenile speculation.

If this is a sign of how The Age intends to treat its readers, then I for one will be taking a book to read with my morning coffee instead of opting for the paper.  I don't think I could handle the headaches The Australian brings on these days.

Playing unnecessarily fast

Devotees of late-nineteenth century German organ music will know that sometimes the composer appears to call for an outrageously fast tempo by metronome markings, which, if followed, frequently leads to chaotic results.  A couple of years ago, I attended a conference where Henrico Stewen presented a paper suggesting that these metronome markings may have been intended as "double click" rather than "single click."  What this means in practice is that where a composer such as Max Reger calls for an Allegro con molto with a crotchet = 148 bpm, what he is asking is that a crotchet be two beats at that tempo, not one.

I have to admit that this intriguing paper whetted my appetite, and sent me back to Reger, but also opened up some new avenues on Karg-Elert (which, being a Melbourne organist, one is rather expected to play).  Henrico has published his findings in various forms, and his work forms an important complement to Christopher Anderson's Max Reger and Karl Straube: Perspectives on an Organ Perfoming Tradition.  You will find Henrico on Youtube presenting a ten-minute discussion of what he calls the Straube Code.




There is also a very fine video of Henrico playing Reger's Op. 59 Toccata.



Henrico has now released a CD of organ music by Reger, which you can order here.

See hatred for what it is

An evangelical sect in Florida plans to observe a certain anniversary by burning copies of the Koran.

I struggle to fathom the justification for acts of this sort.  It exudes hatred, pure and simple.  One act of hatred begets another.  It is a vicious circle.  Are they expecting to be bombed in retaliation, thus providing proof of whatever they're saying?

No Christian pastor worthy of the name could enjoin his followers to indulge in such a gross and offensive act.  It would be better for him to look seriously at the root causes of anti-American terrorism and advocate for a swift end to the war in Afghanistan, and the withdrawal of armed forces from various parts of the world.  One would hope that Mr Obama is thinking very carefully about the viability of that post-WWII American policy of trying to be every brother's keeper.

Amy Goodman offers some thoughts on 11 September.  This is particularly apt:

Right after Sept. 11, 2001, as thousands gathered in parks around New York City, holding impromptu candlelit vigils, a sticker appeared on signs, placards and benches. It read, "Our grief is not a cry for war."

Music for Sunday 12 September

Working for a parish under the care of priests of the Society of the Holy Cross (SSC) means that certain feasts are de rigeur.  One of these is the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, which is the patronal feast of the SSC.  An obvious choice of hymn for the week is Sydney Nicholson's Lift high the cross, with the tune Crucifer.  I once played from a hymnbook where the name of the tune had been changed to Lucifer by some witty but bored organist.  It makes me begin to think twice about providing colouring pencils to small choristers for during the sermon...

The readings for the week are linked here.

The setting will be Philip Mathias's Christ Church Mass (Together in Song, 757).

Hymns for the week are as follows:

Procession: Lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim [351]
For the Psalm: The sky tells the glory [7]
Gradual: To Christ, the Prince of Peace [335]
Offertory: My song is love unknown [341]
Communion: And now, O Father, mindful of the love [519]

There will be a communion anthem: The Call -- Ralph Vaughan Williams.

For those keeping the ordinary Sunday (one must always prepared for any eventuality!), here's what would have come up if it hadn't been displaced:

Readings and psalm setting.  The service setting and communion anthem as above.

Hymns:

Introit: All people that on earth do dwell [59]
Gradual: Jesus, lover of my soul [211 i]
Offertory: Just as I am, without one plea [584 i]
Communion: Amazing grace (how sweet the sound) [129]

Thorny issues

The saying goes that madness consists of doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result.

There are a good number of areas in life where this adage applies very strongly, such as co-dependence behaviours.  I think one could include public policy choices, such as compulsive freeway-building, obsessive pursuit of private-public-partnerships (and my ordering of the first two Ps is deliberate), and general ignoring of the major environmental problems created by our collective lifestyle.  The recent federal election campaign was a study in different types of madness emanating from the choice of echo-chamber policy development.

Kenneth Davidson has written a piece which follows on from last week's 4 Corners, which was titled Crime Incorporated.  The 4 Corners piece was a fascinating exercise, and showed how multifarious the influences of organized crime can be.  The rather dour conclusion -- that one can shut down one band of drug lords only to have another bunch of barons set up the following day -- highlights how murky the whole issue of total prohibition of recreational drugs can be.

I think Davidson's conclusion is a good one: that treating drug addiction as a matter of public health rather than the basis for criminal proceedings would achieve more than the present situation.  He points out that Australia only prohibited opium and cocaine in 1906 and 1913 respectively; the net result of that choice was the loss of tax revenue by driving the market underground, and lack of regulation to monitor the purity of the product.

We know that these two issues remain potent even in the legal and regulated industries of alcohol and tobacco -- it is difficult for the average person to guess what the incidental effects of various preservatives in either of these might be on the level of dependence developed through regular use.  But regulation exists to cover what the basic expectations are, and the government derives taxes from the sales of tobacco and alcohol which help to offset the public health costs of these substances.

Legalization along with the attendant development of public health-based regulation for the sale and use of various illegal substances would do much more to curb organized crime than the present approach.  I think of the perennial argument against safe-injecting rooms: that the very establishment of such facilities is to propagate and encourage a social evil.  Well, we reap the whirlwind without them -- perhaps doing something different would serve to ameliorate the evil.

What Davidson proposes is radical in its simplicity.  Stop doing the same thing over and over again, and instead change the conditions in which the drug trade presently thrives.  Trying to deal with it as a law and order challenge hasn't really worked when high-ranking officers freely admit that cutting one player down leads a further thousand flowers to bloom.  Trying to interrupt the supply chain clearly means that market principles win out.  If the drug syndicates had any of the influence of the mining industry, they would be mounting an advertising offensive.  As things stand, down the present road lies continued madness.

Majorities

I've been trying to write a conference paper this week.  It's the first effort in this direction in nearly twelve months, and I'm finding that the usual rules apply -- I spend three hours chasing a tangent, only to go back to the abstract and get back to the point.  Tangents are interesting, they offer a different way of thinking, and sometimes they bring improvement.  They are still a very high-minded form of procrastination.

I think a similar sort of deal is going on with the negotiations over the federal parliament, with manifestos flying around from the three remaining independents.

Historically, the prime minister and cabinet did not exert the sort of absolute hold on the House of Representatives that we have been used to for the last 70 years or so, as a quick browse of the succession of prime ministers in the first decades after Federation demonstrates.  One thing the last couple of weeks has driven home for me is the extent to which the two-party system as practiced in recent times is a gross distortion of the principle of parliamentary governance.  The sort of atrophied mime of an election campaign is simply the nadir, one hopes.  While I applaud Julia Gillard's obvious negotiating skills -- and she will definitely need them if Labor gets up -- the last couple of weeks has been all about shoring up the outcome when parliament meets to vote on a motion of confidence in the (probably returned) government.


Minority government is not the end of the world, and the status quo ante here would appear to be out of step with similar systems of parliamentary government elsewhere in the world.  Breaking the hold of the two-party system would be a very good thing indeed.

Weasel word

A word that commonly appears in commentary on the public service and judiciary is unelected, usually spouted by conservative politicians.  As in an "unelected judge" made a decision which a particular politician considered unduly "activist" -- in other words, an outcome the politician in question doesn't like.

I think this is a dastardly trick.  Imagine if we had to have a national election every time a senior bureaucrat or a judge had to be recruited.  We'd go from having one of the best electoral systems in the world to a fit of ballot fatigue.

The system works mostly because public servants get on with their job, once the politicians -- those in government being treated as the CEO of their portfolio -- make a decision.  It's true that a poor decision can have bad consequences for a parliamentarian, but this should not be the sole standard of judgment for all matters touching on the public sphere.  Frankly, it's a distortion of the idea of what the public service and the judiciary are in Australia.  And it's invariably committed by politicians and journalists who have some sort of an axe to grind.

It is more accurate to say that public servants are appointed, often following a selection process which is considerably more thorough than pre-selection as a party candidate.

Music for Sunday 5 September

This week the Anglican Parish of Jika Jika is joining together at St George's, Reservoir.  Sunday will be the first outing of the parish youth choir to this end of the parish, so it will be interesting to see how they respond to singing in a more resonant room, and with a more colourful organ.

We will be promoting the next group of light blue level choristers, a very gratifying sign of progress in the choir.  A Sudanese bishop is visiting the parish on 19 September, so that's when the new head choristers will be installed.  Who would have thought these things would be happening even six months ago?  Still, it's a token of the realities of parish life that someone will find reason to grumble.

The psalm setting for this week is here.

The mass setting will be Philip Mathias's Christ Church Mass (Together in Song, 757).

Hymns for the week are as follows:

Introit: All creatures of our God and King [100]
Gradual: O Jesus, I have promised [595]
Offertory: New every morning is the love [tune: Melcombe, 213ii]
Communion: Praise to the Holiest in the height [141]

The choir will be singing an anthem at communion:

Jesu, joy of man's desiring [from BWV 147] -- J.S. Bach

Because this is a joint parish service, there will be an all-in-one service booklet including the pew sheet and the service in its entirety.  This saves having to shift hymnbooks and service books around the various centres to cover the numbers attending.  One of the quirks I enjoy about being a parish musician is that you get to meet people from all walks of life -- in this case, some quite useful.  It happens that a funeral director joined the choir earlier in the year, and he's kindly arranged to have one-off service books printed in his office under the company's community service program.  To cover the copyright dilemmas thrown up by productions like this, when we print a booklet the hymns are taken from a public domain source.

This raises a slightly related question, one that has often vexed me.  I've never understood the bowdlerisation of many hymns, particularly the excision of the thy form pronouns.  In many hymns the verse often scans badly when thy is transformed to you -- it strikes me as bad aesthetics parading as socially-conscious poetics -- and the effect on the sung word is to make it decidedly pedestrian in a case of language which should be aiming for the transcendent.  We live in a culture that values historical objects, and where canonic ideas still exert a hold on the ways in which we organise and imagine the stuff of our shared artistic experiences.  Some art and poetry needs to be harder work than common conversation in order to be worthwhile, and that includes dealing with archaic language forms.  Why must the language of Charles Wesley's hymns be brought up-to-date when it is precisely his location in history that makes his theology interesting and worthwhile for us moderns?

Anyway, here's the organ music for the week:

Prelude:  Cantilene (Op. 148, 2) -- Josef Rheinberger
Postlude: Praeludium [BuxWV 139] -- Dietrich Buxtehude