And for completeness, here's the second London Times piece, an occasional article by the paper's classical music correspondent.
God save our merry, gentlemen Richard Morrison As the notion of Christmas itself as a Christian festival is all but expunged, I do grieve for our ever-receding heritage of carols CAROL-SINGING is a defining apartheid of 21st-century Britain. If you know the words, or even the tunes, of such rollicking British lung-busters as O Come, All Ye Faithful (which, to be unseasonably pernickety, is probably French in origin) or God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, with its exquisitely-placed comma, it�s likely that you are on the wrong side of 40, that you sing in a church choir, or that you went to a private school or �old-fashioned� grammar. For 20 years or more, traditional carols have largely been shunned in state schools, certainly in �multi-faith� cities such as London and Birmingham. But then, the notion of Christmas itself as a Christian festival is all but expunged from the deeds and discourse of the people who run our schools, media and government. Tessa Jowell, who purports to be the nation�s Culture Secretary (presumably as long as �culture� doesn�t include any remnant of the Judaeo-Christian tradition that is the cornerstone of Western civilisation) has rightly taken a bashing for sending out a Christmas card that doesn�t mention Christmas. �Season�s Greetings� is its anodyne message, illustrated with Indian dancers, a TV set, a train, what appears to be a mosque, and the curious word �goal�. Jowell, however, is characteristically only following a general drift towards a gormless, grey, mushy, value-free blandness of thought in all intellectual areas under Government control. This year the words �Merry Christmas� were also banned in cards sent by the Scottish Parliament, because the greeting is not deemed �socially inclusive�. And Buckinghamshire County Council�s thought-police stopped a church from advertising its carol service in local libraries for the same reason. Such nonsense is rife. In Hendon we have received a December newsletter from our local council studiously avoiding references to Christmas, but sporting a festive cover inviting us to rejoice that Diwali is celebrated in such style in the borough. I do rejoice, but I can�t help thinking that Diwali was last month�s big religious festival. Still, I guess that if Christianity can get through 2,000 years of persecution, schisms and wars � much of it self-inflicted � it might just survive being slighted by the likes of Buckinghamshire County Council. But I do grieve for our ever-receding heritage of traditional carols. Many date from pre-Renaissance times (the pernicious notion that they were all written by the Victorians is more anti-Christmas propaganda). And as such they constitute the last body of ancient folksong still in fairly widespread use in modern Britain. Sometimes their melodies are as mysterious in origin as they are memorable in performance. God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, in fact, is a classic case. In medieval Europe, from Bulgaria to Cornwall, the tune linked with those words could have been heard in dozens of different variants. Nobody knows who thought of it first. The shrouded origins of the texts are even more fascinating. Whole families of ancient carols draw on a subtle (and cheerfully unclerical) mingling of Christian and pagan imagery � most obviously the �holly and ivy� carols, which relate to Celtic fertility symbols. Indeed, so complex is the beautiful imagery of The Cherry Tree Carol � another anonymous gem cropping up in dozens of versions � that the editors of the estimable New Oxford Book of Carols are moved to draw our attention to what they call its �Jungian shadow�. Don�t get me wrong. When it comes to carols, I don�t want to make a fetish of antiquity. I have never forgotten how, when I was a student at one of our more pompous universities, those who attended the college carol service were forced to sing all seven verses of O Come, All Ye Faithful in Latin � in a snobbish attempt to prove, I suppose, that we were intellectually a cut above the average Songs of Praise congregation. Not only perverse but disastrous! You try getting your brain round �Adeste, fideles, laeti, triumphantes� by candlelight after drinking half a bottle of port. But if we eliminate all culture from our schools and public life that isn�t instantly understandable, instantly �inclusive� and just as instantly disposable � the lowest common denominator, in other words � we will lose both our roots and our capacity for imaginative thought. As a child I pondered for hours how the �three ships� of the carol I saw three ships could �sail into Bethlehem�, when Bethlehem is on top of a hill with not a river in sight. I don�t think such richly metaphorical carols carried me a inch closer to God (whoever she is). But they did give me a taste of mankind�s genius for using words and music to transport the mind and soul into worlds far beyond the humdrum daily grind. Perhaps that�s why bureaucrats want to suppress the Christian symbolism of Christmas. It suggests there are powers in heaven and hell even greater than those regulating the noticeboards of Buckinghamshire libraries. And that will never do. Allen --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
