Klezmer discovered

I woke up to a cold dry day with early cloud dispersing, to give us a day of sunshine at 3C. I spent all the morning after breakfast working on Sway. It's occupying a lot of my time at the moment to produce the extra edition that covers the whole of December. I hope it will be worth the effort to digital consumers. It was a pleasure to receive from Andrew, one of St John's lay leaders, a poster advertising an Advent study course to be conducted as a Zoom discussion group. A marvellous initiative, as we await the coming of a new Ministry Area Leader. The go-ahead has now been given officially to deliver a message from the Bishop to all the congregations of the Ministry Area this Sunday.

Clare bought a salmon yesterday, had it filleted and made the remnants of the bones into a soup that could be stewed with vegetables and butter beans, to make a subtly flavoured dish for lunch. After eating, I set about preparing texts for the first Advent Thursday Morning Prayer the week after next. Then Clare went out shopping so I recorded the Office and Reflection while I had the house to myself, and found images for video slideshow making, ready to finish the job when I have a spare moment. I need to get as much material prepared well in advance, as I can since there are always unexpected distractions in this busy season of the year.

I worked on this until it was time for an early supper. We had tickets for a concert at the Royal Welsh College by Kroke, an unusual trio of virtuoso Polish musicians who have worked together for 21 years, playing a classic combination of instruments used in Jewish Klezmer instrumental music: viola, double bass and accordion. 'Kroke' is Yiddish for Cracow, the name of their home town. Their music initially sounds like traditional klezmer, associated mainly with Eastern European Sephardi Judaism, which had its ancient origins in Andalusia, where its music evolved, influenced by North African culture. After the  fifteenth century reconquest of Spain Muslims and Jews were driven out of Spain. By various migration routes Sephardi Judaism found its way into various parts of Europe and Asia. Influences on melody, rhythms and harmony from all around the southern Mediterranean and Western Asia can be detected. It's a tribute to the international concert touring of this group over the years and their dialogue with indigenous musicians.

It starts from there, but draws inspiration from the music of India, Greece, North Africa and Andalusia, breathing vital energy, making remarkably creative live use of digital technology: echo, reverb, loop pedal, beat boxing, and a device that makes a viola's lower notes sound like a 'cello. Careful amplification brings out wonderful living breathing sounds and rhythms from the accordion too. Both viola and accordion were also used as drums duetting with the bass. The viola player also played tin whistle and sang in a very high full throated voice, reminiscent of Indian and Flamenco vocalists. 

All in all this music imparted a profoundly emotional experience, full of yearning, wonder and delight. We came home much moved by listening to live music, new to us both, brimming with spiritual vitality and hope for humanity. "The world will be saved by beauty." wrote Russian novelist Dostoyevsky back in 1867. I believe that only becomes possible once humanity tires of ugliness and cruelty and all things that divide us.

I finished the day with half hour walking in the darkness of the park, with the temperature below zero. I needed to stretch my legs and immerse myself in darkness, after going through the city centre in an environment invaded by bright headlights and flashing  multi-coloured Christmas illuminations.

State of Alarm - day rwenty nine

After a fair night of relaxed sleep, I woke up at dawn to the sound of rain. Happily the temperature and humidity at night as well as day has risen just enough to take the shiver out of life. I said the Office of Morning Prayer in bed, but then just before nine, the house lost internet connection, and that means phone too, for four hours. Not that I was expecting much digital traffic Easter Monday morning, but it's unnerving to be without a landline connection. 

The cellphone network is pretty robust, to be fair, but being of a generation brought up only on hardwired landlines and coin boxes as dependable infrastructure, it's hard to get used to anything less reliable! In fact, global reliance on the internet and all its children (much as I love it and depend on it daily) still worries me greatly as the infrastructure is so complex and reliant on even more human maintenance. I'm aware that the infrastructure is rendered more robust and secure by multiple copies of traffic servers and built in fail-safes, but that's nothing a giant radiation burst from the sun couldn't cripple. We've built an interconnected web based world, but the concept still owes much to the notion of spider's web, strong, resilient, but still fragile in the face of brute force.

When Jayne came with my birthday cake on Saturday, she also brought a lentil based cottage pie for me. I heated it up for much today. I twas delicious and a welcome change from my own cooking, although it inspired me to make a pot of Ann Marie's butternut squash, lentil and lemon soup, as the half a squash in the fridge looked sad and needed cooking. So now I have three day's ready portions in hand. Yesterday cooked and ate half of the large salmon cutlet which came in last shopping order. That will be very nice eaten cold tonight.

Among my birthday digital goodies was a couple of MP3 albums I didn't have, downloadable from her OneDrive archive. This morning Anto sent an MP3 album of Sephardi Ladino songs by Yasmin Levy, some of them of mediaeval in origin, with a decorative melodic ethos which could even have originated at the time of the Babylonian exile, and travelled west across North Africa into Southern Spain at the time of the Moors, if not earlier. I think these songs come from the tradition of women singers in Morocco and Andalusia whose ancestry was Sephardi Jewish, even though they may have lost their ancient identity. The album was recorded in Israel, and features Andalusian and Oriental instruments and musicians. It's powerful listening. 

Owain also sent me half a dozen very varied MP3 albums using a facility called 'We Transfer' I've never heard of. One of them is 'Disraeli Gears' the first album recorded by Cream in 1967, and one of the first in the 'psychedelic music ethos'. We bought a copy when it first came out, very trendy. I think Owain keeps that original disc, a valuable antique first edition nowadays. Funny how I recall the album sounding much heavier in those days. Sure we played it very loud, but it was many more years before small digital sound systems could reproduce that sound quality.

Ah memory lane! I still have in my wardrobe at home the hand made silk floral 'kipper' ties Clare made for me in those days. Apart from long hair and full beard, that was as close as I got to hippie-dom. No psychoactive substances either. Already having an active creative imagination, I never felt the need. And no regrets!

Cordoba visit

I took the Cercania train to the Maria Zambrano Station this morning to travel on the 11.05 AVE high speed train to Cordoba. It was a lovely experience. The carriages are spacious, the seats comfortable, and I had a window place in both directions, though taking photographs at 120mph was a challenge. Once the train has gone through the mountains up behind the Guadalhorce Valley, it travels across a wide gently rolling plain, fringed with distant hills. Now it's autumn, the arable crops are harvested and this exposes different colours of soil, dark red, black, yellow, chalky white, along a train route which also overlooks citrous and olive groves as far as the eye can see, and only the occasional white village adorning an escarpment. It's a reminder of how big Spain is and how dispersed its settlements.

Cordoba station is a modern building, such as befits the new era of rail trasportation on the main line from Malaga to Madrid. Connections can be made here to travel to west Sevilla, and north east to Barcelona. This is where I'll have to change trains next Monday for my seven hour journey to Vinaros, on the TALGO Mediterraneo. So, I checked out the platform change required, so that I can mentlly rehearse the journey in the week ahead. 

The walk down to the mediaeval town centre took me down an avenue with a wide strip of park and garden in between the roadways took me half an hour. The western section of the ancient town wall and gateways survives, and encloses an area of narrow rambling streets full of bars, restaurants and tourist shops, crowded with visitors. I made my way directly to the Cathedral, former mosque, which has attracted UN World Heritge status for its unque beauty and architecture. The huge courtyard is dominated by a huge high bell tower now hung with church bells, built around the core that was once the mosque minaret.

 There was a 120 yard queue of people waiting to enter, having paid eight euros first for the privelege at a courtyard ticket booth. I only waited 10-15 minutes to get in, and there was lots to photograph meanwhile. There were hundreds of people from all over the world inside, some in organised groups with a guide, families, couples, individuals, most with cameras like me, taking pictures.

The building started its life in the late fifth century as church of the Visigoths, Germanic colonisers of Spain after the fall of the Roman Empire, who adhered initially to Arian Christianity, but hereabouts converted to the orthodox Latin Christianity. The first church, dedicated to St Vincent was built on the site of a Roman temple of Janus. After the muslim conquest of Spain, the building was shared between them, then replaced and extended, reaching its present dimensions in 987, at 180 x 13 metres it is one of the largest islamic prayer halls ever built in the world. Following the fall of the city to Christian forces in 1236, the mosque was converted for use as a church with the addition of several chapels. In 1523, the central section of the mosque was gutted. A renaissance choir and sanctuary was raised to give it the full dignity of a cathedral for the diocese of Cordoba, an architectural imposition commented upon unfavourably at the time.

The simple beauty of the islamic prayer hall with its nineteen naves, each 130 metres long, is impressive. It uses many high value kinds of stone in its columns, and similar designs of arch construction from different periods of expansion with characteristic chequered arches, made of red brick and white limestone. Many costly kinds of stone are used in the supporting columns. Some of them were originally part of the temple of Janus.

On this first visit, I didn't delve into the building's history. I wanted to form an impression of the whole. I took many pictures and watched the crowds of people ebb and flow for an hour of walking around. 1.5 million visitors a year, they reckon, not counting people who come here to worship. In the south east corner chapel, a wedding was going on. It's still an active diocesan place of worship out of visitor hours.. How that's managed in reality is hard to imagine. There are dozens of chapels set into the walls of the building, and some altars in some of the naves. When, if ever they are used, is an open question. I couldn't find a Sacrament chapel - too many places to look. Nor a place to light a candle. The highly ornate south facing mihrab, focal point of muslim prayer, is impressive and seems to invite those who gather before it to gaze quietly.

In many ways, the extensive aisles of columns and hosts of visitors milling around reminded me of an unusual palace, a house of culture rather than a place of worship sacred to two faiths. There were several areas where historical artifacts were displayed in museum cabinets, and one nave on the east side contained a contemporary guide to prominent saints, related to their statues, in a kind of secular catechesis. 

The only shared focuses of activity, taking photos and consuming great historic culture, are both quite subjective in their way. Visitors were subdued, well behaved enough for the security guards to have little to do. Apart from its extraordinary beauty and general quietness, there was no much of what I would regard as a numinous or spiritual atmosphere to the place. Perhaps it's different when it's largely empty, or during a time of worship, than introduces a common focus and intent to the place, fulfilling its purpose. The most visible concession to modernity is the presence of TV screens in the vicinity of the renaissance choir and sanctuary, each discreetly covered with a red dust cover. Does being able to see what's going on at the altar make that much difference.

Afterwards, I walked down to the edge of the old town, where the Guadalquivir river flows, and made my way along its promenade to the place where there's a river bridge from Roman times, with a fortified tower at the far side and a triumphal arch from Renaissance times on the town side, next to a modern Visitor Centre that preserves sections of the old Roman town walls beneath it. Just one street away are the southern and western walls of the mosque. 

I then made my way through side streets into the 'Judia', the Jewish quarter, made famous by the lives and teachings of Jewish phlosophers Mamionides and Averroes. There's a small fourteenth century synagogue here. Under muslim rule there was a place, a strictly regulated place, for Christians and Jews to live alongside. After the reconquista of 1492, the Jews were expelled and the synagogue was turned into a chapel. Thankfully this building is now under the care of the ajuntamiento and has been restored. 

It's decorated with fine patterns and Hebrew scripture quotations carved out of stone. Some of it has suffered the ravages of time, though not all, and the collective mind applied as been able to make all texts identifiable for the benfit of those who visit now. I found this small cube of a simply room, empty of all furnishings save for its carved walls, breathed spiritual atmosphere. I stood and said the 'shemah' (in English) to honour the centuries of gifted thinkers and workers in a community whose origins may be hidden in pre-Christian Jewish disapora.

Across the street from the synagogue is a house which has been converted into a museum of Sephardi Judaism, that rich uniquely Spanish cultural expression of Hebrew religion. I didn't have enough time to take the guided tour, with my train timetable in mind, but chatted with the guide for a few moments before leaving. There was a lovely hospitable spirit about this place, and as I stepped out into the street I found myself moved to tears, touched by something deep down that I was hardly conscious of. What it is I don't know, but here I felt more like a pilgrim than I did in the holiest shrine of the kingdom of al-Andalus.

On my walk back to the station I discovered a huge nineteenth century greenhouse type building of iron and glass in the park garden between the road carriageways. The Mercado Victoria seems to have been some kind of public meeting place in times past, but has been renovated and converted into a market place of small bars and gourmet restaurants celebrating Andalusian food, a very classy undertaking. Not enough time to stop and partake. I was even to busy absorbing the enviornment to stop for lunch, only a beer, at a place with a live guitarist entertaining open air diners.

The train journeys went smoothly, and a was back at home by seven, pondering on all I'd seen and reviewing the photos taken, juggling with two cameras to see which would perform best in the unusual lighting conditions prevailing inside the mosque cathedral. A memorable day. I'm determined to return for longer next time. More photos of the day are to be found here