Sunday Playlist - August 23rd

For 48 hours this week, I went offline and into the woods. Sammy and I camped at the Devil’s Tombstone, where we encountered no demons dead or alive. But we did hear owls and warblers and the waterfall at Plattekill. That waterfall is featured in the first short video on this week’s playlist. As we watched and listened, I remembered this stanza from W.S. Merwin’s poem “Hearing,” in which he and a companion climb to a falls and dip a tin cup into it:  

I could feel it move
I could feel it ring in my foot in my skin
everywhere
in my ears in my hair
I could feel it in my tongue and in the hand
holding the cup
as long as I stood there it went on
without changing

There is resonance between the sensation he describes and the feeling in the lyrics from another tune in this week’s list:

I stepped in the water one day
I stepped in the water
And the water was cold
It chilled my body, but not my soul
I stepped in the water one day.

The performance of the Heavenly Gospel Singers, as much as the lyrics themselves, communicates the power of this simple metaphor. I feel similarly about the descants in the two English anthems included in the list, though I could find no substantive information about either arrangement or recording. Ralph Vaughan Williams named the first tune Kingfold when he collected it near a town by that name. The melody may be hundreds of years old. “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” is Wesleyan, and the rendering here is straightforward until we reach the final, stunning measures. Wait for it…

Almost 200 years separate the two instrumentals, from Bach to Satie. But they share a contemplative spaciousness, melancholy, and unease. In the Satie, this mood is created by the frequent modulations, and in the Bach, by the minor key, though note the final resolution in the major. Again, a remarkable ending, but this time, in peace rather than astonishment.