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Polyphony in a Cathedral
Music curls
In the stone shells
Of the arches, and rings
Their stone bells.Music lips
Each cold groove
Of parabolas’ laced
Warp and woof,
And lingers round nodes
Of the ribbed roof.Chords open
Their flowers among
The stone flowers; blossom;
Stalkless hang.
Another chanced-upon scrap of biography:
The local Organists and Choirmasters’ Association, whose president is Mr Lloyd Moore, announces a series of lectures by Mr. H. W. Griffiths (‘The Gramaphone’), Mr. G. A. Tessimond (‘The influence of poetry on the development of modern music’), Mr. Walter Bridson (‘Liszt’), and Mr. W. A. Roberts (‘Modern French Organ Music’).
The Musical Times, October 1st 1921
This mention of the poet’s father in a round-up of musical events from Liverpool offers an intriguing insight into the poet’s background. George Tessimond worked as honorary treasurer for the Liverpool Church Choir Association until its close in April 1930. 
Founded in 1900 by Ralph H. Baker, the Association held a series of fifteen festivals of Church music in the city’s St. George’s Hall and by 1924, once building work had progressed enough, continued them within the unfinished Liverpool Cathedral. The role that this organisation must have played within the city’s musical life at this time cannot be underestimated; it provided the choir when Edward VII laid the foundation stone for the new Cathedral in 1904, and again when George V opened the Gladstone Dock in 1913. The Association ceased work between 1914 and 1921 due to the war and its aftermath, but its highpoint seems to have been the transition of the festivals between the secular St. George’s Hall and the Cathedral:
The experiences of the first Choral Festival in the new Cathedral should hold an incentive to improve on the next occasion. The organ accompaniments, played by Mr. H. Goss Custard, were models of restraint. Of course he was not able to use the Great organ diapasons, which are not yet sounding; but at the next Festival we shall no doubt hear them, as well as the heavy-pressure tubas which are to excel in tone anything previously associated with the master-hand of Willis. To the conductor, Mr. Branscombe, and to the choirmasters concerned, due acknowledgement should be rendered, as also to the Cathedral authorities for the arrangements made for the carrying out of the most imposing and notable choral service yet held at Liverpool.
The Musical Times, November 1st 1924
It must have seemed an exciting time for the Association. Within the city grew a huge building which was to be their home, with an impressive organ at their disposal. As it turned out, Harry Goss Custard was to play at only three more such festivals. It seems somewhat sad that as the Cathedral grew, interest in the Church Choir Association seems to have waned. The 1928 festival was to be their last; cancelled at a late stage after the music books had been printed and learned by the choirs involved. It appears that the Association never really recovered from the toll that the war had taken on it, and the increased burden involved in building the new cathedral meant that the Church could not offer them as much financial support.
That Tessimond's father was actively involved in this world is an interesting fact. That his lecture in 1921 should be titled: ‘The influence of poetry on the development of modern music’, is even more so.
We can see that Tessimond’s poetry is influenced by music in the titles alone: ‘Polyphony in a Cathedral’, ‘Music’, ‘Quickstep’, ‘Song in a Saloon Bar’, ‘Dance Band’, ‘Black Monday Lovesong’, ‘Invitation to the Dance’, ‘Skaters Waltz’, ‘Two Men in a Dance Hall’, ‘Symphony in Red’, ‘The Conductor (Concert Study)’, and so on. The range of this influence is vast, stretching from the popular (poems about the Charleston and Edith Piaf), to sacred and classical works. He is said to have introduced the painter Ceri Richards to Debussy, Ravel and other modern French composers*; and music appears to have been as much a part of the son’s life as it was for his father:
On listening to a piece of music by Purcell
I cast no slur upon the worth
Of modern men and modern ways,
And our no whit declining days –
On modern heaven and modern earth;
Yet in your muse I seem to find
Something our later muse has lost –
A note more sure, less trouble-tossed,
A carelessness and ease of mind –Relic of times when History’s ink
Had scrawled less wantonly the page,
When man had had less time to think,
Less circumspectly flowed his blood:
Trace of a prelapsarian age,
Echo of days before the flood.
‘Less circumspectly flowed his blood’ is a great line; it echoes what seems to be Tessimond’s belief that once there was a time when life was easier for Mankind, but here temporary hope is offered through music’s ability to transport the listener back to that point. In his poetry, music is something that transcends time and that it brings about dance – ‘rituals as old as springtime’ (from the poem ‘Dancing’) – is proof of this. As we will see more closely tomorrow, it is perhaps language that prevents human communication, but music ‘This shape without space, / This pattern without stuff,’ (‘Music’) allows it to happen.
*Ceri Richards Exhibition Catalogue, (London, Tate: 1981) p.23
"We discovered The Muffins, and our lives were changed forever."
I'm still meaning to write on The Muffins at some point Thomas, I've not forgotton. You actually prompted me to put on their latest album ‘Bandwidth’ with your last post which I had previously dismissed (it was in fact put away beneath the coal scuttle in the cupboard) and whilst it is by no means as exciting as the seminal 'Manna/Mirage' or as playful as 'Chronometers' or even '<185>' which I still feel is a little patchy... it is by no means *bad*.
The ninth track on it, ‘Out of the Boat’ opens with much of the spirit of 'Chronometers'; that hammy B movie tone, with synth guitars, hellish moans. It’s camp, trashy, but intelligently so. So much is demanded of you when you listen to them, absurd contrarhythms compete for your attention, sounds not immediately identifiable as instruments (and sometimes not so) come at different directions from the speakers, as if this were a band messing about with stereo because it was fun.
You see, Thomas, writing about this kind of experimentation is somewhat difficult. I’m never really sure what’s going on with them. I couldn’t begin to say why the track ‘Monkey with the Golden Eyes’ holds me quite in the way it does. Why a tune largely composed of different instruments picking up the same phrase Rat-a-tat-tat should be in anyway magical. But it is.
And yet for all this difficulty there is something very immediate about these tracks, something fun, a
bit silly. Though they are structured with such terse plotting, they are at their heart utterly frothy in their concerns. The album ‘Chronometers’ has repeated refrains from The Wizard of Oz or rather members of the band giving poor screeching impressions from the film. It’s the juxtaposition of the high-minded rhythms against the light-heartedness of a band pretending to be the Wicked Witch of the West. It reminds me of The Abominable Dr. Phibes, cheap gaudy horror paired with Hebrew scripture. It’s daft, but it’s not stupid, and that’s what makes it so cheering to listen to. In some ways it owes something to the music of Hermeto Pascoal, and his use of radio recordings in his music is perhaps hinted at in the ‘Chronometers’ track ‘Three days that won’t soon fade’, which takes the narrative of a radio spy drama above a rhythmic snare, the voices of the characters seemingly played out with muted trumpets and other unintelligible sounds; again it is the paring of the apparently ephemeral (the penny-dreadful radio drama) with the most spectacular rhythms beneath it that makes it work.
And listening to it now Thomas, I can actually see that ‘Bandwidth’ the latest album is doing much the same thing. They’ve been away a long time, their reference points have slightly altered, but track 10 ‘East of Diamond’, sounds immediately like the sax backing track to a mid nineties soft porn film. It’s schmaltzy, it’s not what you expect of The Muffins, and then about three minutes in the building raptures of the sax get too much, it fails, there is the sound of scraping metal, machinery perhaps. The sound of a distant Hammond organ. It’s all still there, and you can’t tell after a while whether this is indeed scraping metal or a clarinet being taken beyond the edge of despair. After a minute and a half of this, almost as if nothing happened, the saxaphone and piano resumes. It’s rather brilliant.
So, yes. I will write about The Muffins for you Thomas. I’m just not entirely sure how to.
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