Dark, sweet and subtle: recovered music orientates us

The alt-folk music seeking inspiration from forgotten hymns.

Jonathan Evens

Jonathan is Team Rector for Wickford and Runwell. He is co-author of The Secret Chord, and writes on the arts.

A woman stand at a mixing desk playing a small keyboard.

Lleuwen Steffan plays.

In 2012, musician Lleuwen Steffan first came across a trove of lost Welsh folk hymns preserved in the sound archive of St Fagan’s Museum. Knowing they were not in current hymn books, she undertook further research and discovered they had been excluded from earlier hymn books by the then all-male hymn book committees of their time. Instead, they had been passed on orally, and, although recorded for St Fagan’s by the historian Robin Gwyndaf, had become lost with time and secularization.

Steffan was particularly attracted to these hymns as many dealt with the dark side of the psyche including addiction and mental distress. She has said that many of these hymns, some of which date back to the eighteenth century, are “conversational and the lyrics feel so current”. She is currently taking these hymns back to where they were born through a tour of 50 chapels in Wales but this is not an exercise in nostalgia as her focus is on their contemporary resonance: “Musically, I’m not interested in recreating something from the past. That’s missing the point. Yes, the words are old but the message is always new. The music is free form.”

Although the subject matter of these hymns will have been part of the reason for their exclusion from the hymn books of their day, that same subject matter has been part of worship songs from the time of the Psalms to the present. The Psalms are the worship songs of the people of Israel as recorded in the Old Testament and are the first occasion in ancient literature where the voice of victims is heard and valued.

The Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann in his book Spirituality of the Psalms provides an insightful and structured overview of the Psalms using three categories: orientation, disorientation, and new orientation. Orientation is the establishment of structure and order. Disorientation is a place of imbalance and nonsense, which is potentially unjust. New orientation is moving forward away from what was and toward new possibilities. As a result, the Psalms provide us with expressions of suffering and hope in the seasons of everyday life. In his book, Brueggemann explains how Psalms of negativity, cries for vengeance, and profound penitence are foundational to a life of faith, and establishes that the reality of deep loss and amazing gifts are held together in a powerful tension.

“This eerie, intriguing and enchanting music... is infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song.”

Rupert Loydell

With such a collection of worship songs as the foundation of worship in churches, and with plainsong in Western churches providing a means by which to chant the Psalms on a daily basis, it should not be surprising that later hymns, such as those being reimagined by Steffan, tap into the dark side of the psyche. The success of albums such as Officium by saxophonist Jan Garbarek and The Hilliard Ensemble, together with Steffan’s own collaboration with pianist Huw Warren and saxophonist Mark Lockheart on Welsh hymns Duw A Wyr (God Only Knows) which is in a similar vein, show how such music can be made relevant to contemporary audiences.

Ghostwriter’s latest album, Tremulant, inhabits similar sonic territory to Steffan’s current Tafod Arian (Silver Tongue) music. Created over several years by Mark Brend, Suzy Mangion, Andrew Rumsey and Michael Weston King, this album has also been borne out of a shared love of antique evangelical hymns and spiritual songs. Using English, Welsh, Scottish and American source material from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the quartet pieced together their reconstructed hymnal through remote collaboration – creating an album that sounds both ancient and modern.

In his review of Tremulant, Rupert Loydell says it is “a strange ambient gospel album, where what used to be called spirituals and hymns are subverted by echo, wheezing organ and spacious musical interludes, which recontextualise, reimagine, stretch and mutate the very idea of song”. This, he says, “is eerie, intriguing and enchanting music” with “echoes of classic Nico (the cold beauty of Desertshore)”. It's ”declamatory poetry, alt-folk, noise and gentle discord” combined with “calm vocals” is “infused with echoes of the past two centuries’ beliefs and threads of spirituality and song”. As such, it's not what you’ll hear the local worship band playing, more’s the pity!

“Something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.”

Lleuwen Steffan

Like buses, other revisiting’s and reimagining’s of old hymns and gospel songs are also coming along together. Hymn Time In The Land Of Abandon by Over the Rhine is “Music that we grew up singing, music as present in our formative years as the air we breathed”. Their recordings of hymns have been described as “spare, sweet and subtle renderings that transform the familiar into something fresh and new”.

The musical reimaging involved in Over the Rhine’s reinterpretations of hymns takes them into the space that Brueggemann defines as new orientation, while the sounds and, in some cases, content of the hymns chosen by Steffan and Ghostwriter are more in the realm of his disorientation category. The music making of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter and Over the Rhine takes us to places not commonly accessed by the music used in many church services. As is indicated by the story of hymn book committees omitting hymns that tap into the dark side of the psyche, much of the music used in church services can be located firmly in either the orientation or, sometimes, the new orientation categories.

Given that the arc of Christ’s life, death and resurrection takes us on a similar journey to that which Brueggemann sees occurring in the Book of Psalms, when our music and liturgy fail to go on a similar journey, we are only encountering part of the meaning and message of faith. The recent music of Lleuwen Steffan, Ghostwriter, and Over the Rhine is therefore profoundly helpful in beginning to redress that loss of balance in worship by taking us back to a fuller appreciation for the original songbook of the faithful, the Book of Psalms.

In speaking about why she has been drawn again and again to church music, Steffan described her teenage experience of drinking with her “mates in Bangor on the Saturday night” then getting “the last bus back home” and rolling “out of bed the following day to go to Sunday School”. She concluded: “That’s a strange paradox but, you see, something kept bringing me back. That something has always been there. For that I am extremely thankful and am listening to it more and more.” It may well be that that something is the arc of orientation, disorientation and new orientation we encounter and experience in the Psalms.

Article

Books

Change

Mental Health

17 June 2024

5 min read

Reading together helps us read our own lives better

The rush and tumble nearly squeezes the life out of the clock’s second hand.

Jessica Brown

Jessica is a researcher, writer, and singer-songwriter. She is studying at Trinity College Dublin, and is an ordinand with the Church of Ireland.

A painting shows two 19th century women in a carriage, one reading as the others snoozes.

The Travelling Companions, Augustus Egg.

Birmingham Museums Trust on Unsplash.

Even ordinary days seem to have frantic edges. A friend of mine, a salesman and father of four teenagers, said the other day that it felt like he was the hamster in the wheel, but so dreadfully exhausted, he’s flopped over, thumping around as the wheel keeps spinning. If we put a finger on the pulse of our current cultural desires, one pulse would be the longing not only for rest — spots of digital fasting or a day hiking — but an overhaul and renewal of what we’ve done with time. Yet it is difficult to know how to slow down, and it often seems that our attempts for self-care and being intentional are not enough to register that desired sense of slowness.

If we managed this, we would not just be able to slow down, but we would figure out how to bring our experience — the texture, the feel — of our paced lives into something like healing. The rush and tumble of a normal day nearly squeezes the life out of the clock’s second hand, and far too often, most of us reach each evening in some state of exhaustion.

Speaking from my own story, a shift happened when we moved from Los Angeles (which was, to be fair, a great place for us until it wasn’t) to East Clare in the Midlands of Ireland. It was a shift that my whole being needed—needed at a limbic and somatic level, in the spiritual self, as an artist, for family dynamics, and for my partner, a sense of freedom in work. It wasn’t that we merely got more time in our day: it was that our immersion in time, our soul’s experience of the clock, found an ‘easing up’ that — though the daily round is still arduous enough — afforded a little more time in every direction to breathe, think, walk, write; be.

It’s been in the wake of this move, nearly eight years ago now, that I’ve pondered why it felt that the hills here gathered me up into their arms and helped me to actually slow down. Is it these hills, the lovely stretches of variant greens and the countless walking paths hidden among them? Is it the congregation of artists — local artists, who refashioned my ideas about artistic success, inculcated as I was into seeing it as only with a large following? Is it the deliberate decisions to keep family overheads as low as we can, freeing up a bit of time from the understandable and ongoing need for wages?

Among the many reasons for the shift in how I experience time — for the sense, not just of slowing down, but of time affording more space — is the grace of reading with others.

The pastor, physician, and poet—this trio of us still are surprised by the deep, serendipitous connections that our poems make, week after week.

In fact, before this shift there was the keenly disappointing realisation of how little time in the land of adulthood could be set aside for reading. In the last few years, though, the regular habit of reading in companionship has grown into one of the most structural elements of my week. With Monday evening comes lectio divina, an ancient Christian practice for reading scripture in an authentically ‘listening’ way. Two lovely pals from town and I meet (often over a WhatsApp call, but sometimes in person) to read together a passage from the Bible, usually what will be read at a service the following Sunday.

On Monday night, my brother in Texas and I unpack whatever book we’re reading at the moment. We started with Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, went onto Michael Foley’s School of Life book on Henri Bergson, and after a few more texts, are now reading the stunning poetry collection The Art of the Lathe by the Texan-Kansan poet B.H. Fairchild.

On Tuesday nights, I gather via Zoom with two other women—a minister in Connecticut and a doctor in Sydney; we met at an online course about Rilke in the winter of 2021, and still meet regularly, each bringing a poem to share and the stories of our lives as we’re living through the week. The pastor, physician, and poet—this trio of us still is surprised by the deep, serendipitous connections that our poems make, week after week.

I think too what happens in this reading companionship is that the muscles we use to attend to words together are the very muscles needed to read our own lives.

As these fellow readers and I weave together silence and articulation, listening and exploration, our time together edges eternity. In this, I think I glimpse how God works to redeem the violence we do to time. When we enter into the invitation to holy spaces—like time spent with the Bible, times in prayer, times of friendship—our usage of clock time becomes secondary to the content within that duration, and certainly secondary to the presence of others (be it the writer of the Gospel of John, Emily Dickinson, the Holy Spirit, or a friend down the road). Our experience of time becomes inflected by the psychological richness and the interplay of spiritual growth with another person or persons.

I think too what happens in this reading companionship is that the muscles we use to attend to words together are the very muscles needed to read our own lives. In this, we can suss out how the longing for slowness is an appropriate one and one to listen to. Using metaphors at hand, reading our lives with the modalities of dialogue, listening, and in-time discovery means that our longing for slowness can help us see that we’re looking for a waypoint, a stop along the road; or a few days at basecamp, patching up and cleaning worn gear; or a longer stretch of wintering in the plains before crossing the mountains; or a period of convalescence in a home by the sea. These images for rest, for pause and restoration, can help us see how to open to God’s care in our living narratives, care that seeks to renew and redeem our often grueling experience of time.

The special grace that reading companionship yields is not just the hour’s content that is spent in shared conversation, though this is nourishing and transformative in its own right. It is how this hour sets the context for all the other hours. The humble stance of reading with attention and cherishing the voices of others models a kind of immersed slowness for the rest of our personhood. At the end of the day, I think it’s a radical counterpoint to what we often ask of a day, an infusion of divine grace into the pumping vessels of time.