The most direct source for this piece was an actual event in 1998. Every Sunday morning the news on BBC Radio Four is preceded by a christian service, and in June 1998 this came from the massed bishops of the anglican synod then being held at Canterbury. (What struck me was the detail that the bishops were singing in the gym of the University of Kent, and this has gone into the song.) More important, it was during that week the gay age of consent law had been debated in Parliament, and these god-praising bishops had been busily attacking the case for equality. (In the event, the so-called Lords Spiritual were able to delay law reform for two years, but in the end the Commons overruled the Lords and the law was changed, despite pleas from anglican and catholic archbishops, on 30 November 2000.)

In 1998-99 I would sometimes have conversations on this topic with the chaplain at Wadham College, Giles Fraser, who always took my gay-rights side. Where we would disagree, however, was on questions of more basic christian theology. Giles would say that intellectually I might be right, but was wrong in terms of human emotion, commitment, etc etc etc. So I thought I should write something which showed my irrational. emotional, committed, dislike of the doctrine of salvation and redemption. Where better to start than with Newman's poem and Elgar's dramatisation of it? And what better medium could there be than music itself?

By chance, I discovered in my garden shed a vocal score of The Dream of Gerontius signed by my great-uncle Cyril in 1924.

The inscription says 'Albert Hall, March 1/ 24'

Now he was not only a catholic convert (I think as a young man injured in the first world war), but (as I am quite sure) a gay man who quite possibly never had any physical sexual experience. So this song, like the opening and closing songs, makes a curious link through music with my roots and with the history of the past century.

Then I thought of making a connection between Elgar's setting of Newman's version of the Sanctus: the hymn of the heavenly host, and the standard Anglican hymn using the same words Praise to the holiest in the height... By doing this musically, the themes of the Synod and of the Dream of Gerontius fit together into a suitable formal scheme.

But around this I wanted to set something much more positive: the sweetest moments of true human communion both in actual sex and in pillow-talk afterwards; also the real moral feeling of gay people that that actively pursued love and friendship are what makes life worth living, a holy height deserving social support and not attack. Thus, it would extend the theme of sacred and profane love as introduced in Heavenly Bodies.

All this I have done, yet it has not turned out quite as I originally intended. The reason is that the bishops are such paper tigers that it is pointless portraying them as evil enemies. Everyone knows that the church of England is full of gay clergy, and always has been; I was brought up in it and know the whole thing. So there is a strong whiff of CAMP about the whole drama, just as there is at church services, and at the end of this song, the organ and the singing bishops are more in secret collusion with the lovers than real enemies.

Note added in 2001: I learnt from an article in The Guardian that Newman himself was buried with a male friend.

The song is for a single male singer. He narrates, but also sings the words of Gerry and of the boyfriend who initially is lying asleep in bed beside him...

Birds tweet and the harp plays arpeggios which anticipate the heavenly hymn, in a harmonic milieu something like Delius who is the one composer I know who actively tried to oppose the uncritical use of christian theology in music by writing A Mass for Life...

Sunday morning...
Gerry awoke in bed
He was a serious young man who...
cared for justice and truth.

During the week the bishops...
...had attacked gay rights
in their synod.
He switched on the radio to hear the news

A church bell starts tolling outside (as indeed church bells do so very arrogantly intrude on Sunday mornings). Then we hear the click of the radio, and immediately the organ playing the hymn Praise to the holiest in the height... Gerry sings: his words, accompanied by cheeky woodwind, hold to F and common time against the bishops' 3:4 hymn in G. (I was rather thinking of the way Peter Grimes sings against the evensong in Britten's opera, but with the opposite moral in mind.)

ah ha! it's their service!

A thousand bishops in a gym
Singing along in praise of Him
Who rose, and having risen
Instructed his devoted flocks
To put all teenage boys in prison
If they should suck each others'...

The organist here interrupts with a vicious voluntary, but Gerry turns off the radio: a bare B flat is left... then suddenly the aural texture is full of a much greater awe and excitement, with music that first suggests Vaughan Williams's Thomas Tallis...

He realised...
there was a angel in the bed...
horny!

...and then with plunging sevenths suggests a variation that Elgar wouldn't have thought of... However the horns taking up this theme launch a tone poem that has more in common with Richard Strauss, as an extremely explicit lovemaking scene develops in A flat minor...

take me away!

... complete with condom opening, penetration, repetitive beats and a tremendous tension as the harp sweeps up to a climax in C major with music which is not a million miles away from Elgar's vision of heaven. The climax subsides in Wagnerian fashion:

Gerry felt a new man!
and so did his lover.

but then the bell starts again and a second climactic passage begins, this time not totally unrelated to the music Elgar wrote to express the idea that at the sight of God Gerontius consigns himself to 'the depths'...

but the bell brought back the hatred and hypocrisy

Go to your hell and take your nightmare with you.

Now there is a return to the Delian birdsong and harp of the opening, and the pillow-talk is the sweetest music in the whole of the Queer Spirituals. The word 'love' is drawn out as the pedal note for a modulation into G major that closes the song on an added sixth. It anticipates the Mahler world of the closing song: the secular enlightenment of love, beauty, knowledge and responsibility for one's own life until death.

Gerry's boyfriend rolled over and said:
oh, why do you worry, it's just politics!
Sod the synod, love the sin.

The movement from G and B to G sharp and B flat then opens the next song, Cockles and Muscles.

© 2000 Andrew Hodges

Note added 2003: Giles Fraser writes on the Battle for the soul of anglicanism over gay bishops.

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Songs: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10

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Introduction to the Queer Spirituals

email andrew@synth.co.uk

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