It will have been in Primary 4 at Temple School. Mrs McCabe must have noticed my boy soprano voice during singing lessons. The voice itself and the way it held a tune. She had me stand in front of the class to sing the hymn ‘By cool Siloam’s shady rill’. I remember Mrs McCabe’s attentiveness as I sang and as she accompanied me at the piano and how the silence in the room seemed to grow and surround us both as the tears rolled down my cheeks. I knew the words of all four verses, but I was very angry at being singled out and was at the same time moved by the words, the beauty of the melody and by my own voice and these things combined, my anger and the melancholy and resignation of the hymn, brought on my tears.
Dependent on Thy bounteous breath,
We seek Thy grace alone,
In childhood, manhood, age and death
To keep us still Thine own.
There were a great many hymns and psalms and paraphrases sung, both at primary school and later at the High School. At Temple they were often part of Religious Instruction and of preparation for the end of term service, for which we walked in procession, two by two, to a grey church at Anniesland Cross. At secondary school there was assembly, with a hymn or psalm every morning. Except perhaps at Christmas, these were of two main kinds. There were those which, like ‘By cool Siloam’s shady rill’ expressed a resigned trust in God’s will. God is judge of the worshipper’s salvation or suitability to be counted among the elect, and the underlying doubt as to whether one is going to pass the test is captured and reinforced by the vocal line. The most famous example is the 23rd Psalm which, to the tune Crimmond, and as made famous in a recording by the Glasgow Orpheus Choir, was an informal Scottish anthem in the 1940′s and 1950′s. The words speak with conviction but the music is so mournful that it’s hard to be certain of any more joyfulness in the next life than in this one.
Goodness and mercy all my life
shall surely follow me:
And in God’s house for evermore
my dwelling-place shall be.
The other big group of hymns presented God as a warrior king with the martiality of 17th century poetry: “His chariots of wrath the deep thunder-clouds form,/And dark is his path on the wings of the storm.” The congregation, the worshippers are cast in the roles of the Lord’s warriors, confident of having been chosen. Faith is vindicated. The pillar of fire may not actually be mentioned, one may not even see it, but the singers can feel its heat as they are led forward into the Promised Land (or Heaven’s Gates). This is the image evoked in the 100th Psalm, the Old 100, which was sung by the soldiers of Cromwell’s New Model Army before they went into battle.
O enter then his gates with praise,
Approach with joy his courts unto
Praise, Laud and bless his name always
For it is seemly so to do.
If I always think of the 23rd Psalm as sung by an unaccompanied choir, then with this second group I inevitably hear a church organ bellowing and rumbling between the verses and along with the singers, all the stops pulled out. One of the grandest of these triumphant hymns is ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken’, in which “Zion, city of our God” is
On the Rock of Ages founded
What can shake thy sure repose?
With salvation’s walls surrounded
Thou mayst smite at all they foes.
This was sung to the same Haydn-derived melody as the German national anthem, the Deutschlandlied, with its opening line and refrain “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” – Germany above all. The anthem has been misrepresented (and misused) as a call to conquest. It is, rather, a more modest plea, dating from the 1840′s, for national unity as against princely particularism. It is usually played today in a way that brings out its haunting, pastoral quality and is a reminder of its use by Haydn in a string quartet. ‘Glorious things of thee are spoken,’ sung to the same tune by a large congregation to a resounding organ accompaniment rehearsed, for a few minutes at least, a powerful merging of religious and national election through Scotland’s national church.
Blest inhabitants of Zion,
Washed in the Redeemer’s blood,
Jesus, whom their souls rely on,
Makes them kings and priests of God.
And of course it can be an exhilarating pleasure to be singing in church as part of such a congregation: The organ inexorable and echoing in the impressive pauses between the verses, the crowd of voices rising together to fill the nave: “Jesus Christ is risen today-hay, hahaha-layloohoojah!/Our triumphant holy day-hay, hahaha-layloohoojah.”
These hymns and psalms were very different from what had been sung at the Sunday school in Temple I attended for a while when I was seven or eight. It was held in the hall of the red sandstone church at the corner of Crow Road and Strathcona Drive. Here the hymns were as sweet as the scenes on the stamps we got as a reward for attendance and which were stuck in an album week by week. They showed highlights of the Gospel story or scenes from the Parables with appropriate Bible verses below each picture. Here we sang ‘All things bright and beautiful’ or ‘What a friend we have in Jesus’ or
Jesus bids us shine
With a pure clear light
Like a little candle
Burning in the night.
In this world of darkness;
So let us shine,
You in your small corner,
And I in mine.
What we sang at secondary school, at the High School, had to have a tune and an arrangement which six or seven hundred boys whose voices were variously yet to break, were breaking and had broken, could manage in unison with piano accompaniment (Mr Bolling or Mr McGill). These hymns, whether representing the humble, doubting believer or the believer triumphant were part of a predictable, prescribed annual cycle with Christmas, Easter and Armistice Day as its most important fixed points. Just as inevitably, before the summer exams there was always the admonitory Paraphrase 11. (Smiles on the platform as its announced, an audible release of air, a momentary relaxation ripples through the hall.)
Oh happy is the man who hears
Instruction’s warning voice:
And who celestial wisdom makes
His early, only choice.
Friday morning assembly at the High School was an extended one. The school orchestra tuned up and played, the school chaplain gave a brief homily and every four weeks the rabbi was also on the platform to read the lesson, which was otherwise the duty of the head boy or another prefect. The Jewish boys attended then, which usually they didn’t.
The school chaplain (he was minister at one of the city’s churches, I forget which) looked like Karl Malden and in my memory he has assumed Karl Malden’s bulbous nose, which he may or may not have had, or perhaps I’ve simply imposed Karl Malden on the figure of the school chaplain, because Karl Malden so often played a priest (tormented, hypocritical) though not in ‘Double Indemnity’. The rabbi was very short, he stepped onto a stool to read from the big Bible on the lectern; his head was much too large for his body, half of which was a huge protruding hunch.
At Friday assembly we sang a hymn as on other days and on alternate weeks either ‘God save the Queen’ or the school song ‘O, alma mater glorious’. The latter I guess to have been written ‘between the wars’. Despite the references to God its resignation is that of the secularised ritual of Armistice Day. The words imply that confidence in empire (eternal in time and space, “on which the sun never sets”) is fading or gone as is a belief in the hereafter, but a sense of service or duty has to be upheld nevertheless.
To those who follow after,
To fill the place we fill,
Who come with shout and laughter,
For ours that shall be still.
We trust this sacred mission,
Pray God when we are gone,
They raise the high tradition
And pass it glorious on
(And pass it glorious on).
My second and last public appearance as a singer was in first or second year at the High School, just before my voice broke. This time I wasn’t a solo performer, but only one member of a mass choir. Every year the school mounted a concert, organised by the music department and given on two successive evenings in the old St. Andrew’s Hall in the centre of Glasgow. The hall sat more than 2,000 people, but it wasn’t hard to fill it with proud parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, older brothers and sisters. Orchestral pieces were played, suites or movements from symphonies, there were choirs of different ages and soloists, but the climax of the evening was always the combination of orchestra and mass choir. It consisted of 200 or so boys who, unless they also sang in one of the smaller groups, had to wait patiently through the preceding concert, sitting in tiers of seats behind the orchestra platform and below the organ pipes.
That year, the year of my final appearance, the music teachers had chosen a dramatic passage from Verdi’s ‘Aida’. Once again we sang about glory, but though thrilling, this was bombastic kitsch compared to the hymns at assembly every morning. At the conductor’s signal we stood up and straightened our backs. We represented the people of Egypt.
Glory to Egypt’s holy gods
Long may they still protect her
To Egypt’s king most mighty
To Egypt’s king most mighty king
Let our triumphant voices sing
dumdadumdadumdadum – GLORY!
dumdadumdadumdadum – GLORY!
Glory to our king
To his praise we sing…
And so on.
At the end the audience clapped and roared with approval, stamped their feet and we had to do the whole not very long thing again.
The St. Andrew’s Hall was destroyed by fire soon after, in 1962, and subsequent school concerts were necessarily less ambitious. That was just as well, because I was never again picked for a choir. My voice broke, I was probably too diffident when I auditioned and Mr McGill quickly dismissed me with a wave of the hand. And so I had to go to the following concerts with my mother and sit with her in my school uniform on the balcony. At least I think we did, because I have only the most shadowy memories of other school concerts and they’ve become mixed up in my mind with yet other concerts, in the St. Andrew’s Hall or the Glasgow Concert Hall, a temporary replacement in a converted cinema, or the school assembly hall. Perhaps it was too much of a disappointment to my mother that I wasn’t on the platform, playing the cello or some other instrument in the school orchestra and so, after a while, after the next concert or the one after that, school concerts weren’t mentioned any more, and I had no interest in urging her to go, which would have meant me accompanying her and sitting among the middle class Scottish family groups, and because the halls were smaller now, there was less pressure on boys to buy tickets, and so we both passed over the matter in silence. Perhaps it was like that.
***
My mother didn’t write much. Her notes or cards to me were heartfelt but formulaic and had an accent which is not English and not of their time. “My dear son,” she would begin, “you have now reached your 30th year…” or “Son, you are old enough now to know…”
Two days after my mother’s death, going through bills and documents, I found a scrap of paper. It was quite out of place, because it was nothing official, a 3 ½ x 2 3/4″ page torn from a diary, from June 1966, the month and year I left school, with a note in pencil in very small letters. She had written:
“M. told me today
how he had to sing in front of
the class at Temple “By Cool
Siloam’s” Mrs played
piano he says in his soprano
voice tears coursing down his face.
He says he did not have to
sob. they just flowed.
It is his favourite hymn.”
My mother had prepared and typed up the order of her funeral service – and paid for it – more than ten years before she died. It was a funeral to which very few came, but it was her final gesture of propriety. Only the undertaker’s tenor voice saved the singing from being no more than disharmonious murmuring. My mother had chosen two hymns. The first one, relatively modern, I did not know, ‘O Lord my God! When I in awesome wonder.’ Its final verse begins with the lines
When Christ shall come with shout of acclamation
to take me home, where joy shall fill my heart!
The second hymn, following the Lord’s Prayer was ‘By cool Siloam’s shady rill.’
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