15. This is The End

We’re Going Home

Welcome back again. This week I’m talking about the final track to be released from ‘You Could Be Happy’. It’s called ‘We’re Going Home’.

At home with the Mahlers

“You know what would be a good way to end this album?” I thought. “Let’s write something like the adagietto from Mahler’s fifth symphony”.

Well look. At least I wasn’t quite daft enough to decide to rewrite Bach’s St Matthew Passion (although somebody else was, and kind of succeeded - more below). But still. One of the best pieces of music ever, and certainly Mahler’s most famous choon (if you don’t count the one that used to be on the Castrol GTX ad when I was a child). It won’t surprise you to learn that I haven’t come close to the sheer nerve of Mahler’s impossibly slow pile up of suspensions. There are some nods (e.g. the harp, and the pizzicato double bass lines), but there’s also a dirty great big tam tam in the middle of my piece, which I suspect Mahler would never have countenanced on the grounds of taste.

To be honest, I was inspired as much by Mahler’s inspiration as I was by his music, although the two are pretty closely related in my mind. The piece was intended as a tribute of love to Mahler’s wife, the long-suffering Alma, who he had just married when he wrote the adagietto. He wrote a short love poem dedicating this movement to her. I went and looked up the exact text of this poem so I could reproduce it here. I was disappointed to discover that it wasn’t what I remembered at all, and also that Mahler, bless him, wasn’t that much of a poet.

In the spirit of these emails, and some of the themes of this album - false memory, nostalgia, and deliberate magical construction - I will print my memory of the love poem rather than the actual version (which is on wikipedia if you want to go and be disappointed in person).

I picture the two of us… in love… existing together through our lives in a perpetual state of happiness and serenity…

Home

I hope this concludes the story in a satisfying way. The question of what to do with your happiness once you’ve found it is one that could take us in all sorts of directions, but I’m offering a simple answer in this case; go home.

There are two homes in this piece, represented respectively by the first half and the second. The first half is home as you would expect it to be; the image is simply of coming home. Quoting Pink Floyd again - “…it’s good to warm my bones beside the fire…”. Simply coming home and finding people you love there is a joyous experience, as is the experience of having a loved one come home to you.

The second home is a little farther away, we hope. And my apologies, but here for the last time we’ll meet another musician that nobody’s heard of (according to my wonderfully direct partner). Enter Michael Tippett.

Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time is modelled in part on the forms of Bach’s St Matthew Passion. Bach’s Passion includes arias (solo singy bits), choruses (choir singy bits), and chorales. Chorales are basically 18th century lutheran hymns, and the idea was that, as an average 18th century lutheran, when you sat down in church on Palm Sunday to listen to all four hours of Bach’s masterwork (lucky you), there would be tunes you knew that you could join in and sing along with.

Fast forward 200-odd years, and in the style of my opening stupid challenge, Michael Tippett is sitting down thinking “…you know what I should do? Write something a bit like the St Matthew Passion…”¹ . The different types of singy bits were pretty easy to think about, but he needed an equivalent to Bach’s lutheran chorales. Something more modern, but still intuitively familiar. Something universal, that could appeal to somebody from any background. Eventually he hit upon using african-american spirituals; religious songs written and sung mostly by slaves.

I should stop at this point and acknowledge a few things. Firstly, Tippett blatantly stole some other folks’ music to use in his own piece. This is fine in my book, as we’ve already discussed, but it feels a little less fine when the composer has gone on record with some slightly patronising comments on his source material (although I struggled to find any on a recent Google expedition, leading me to wonder once again if I dreamt it all). Nevertheless, history is a harsh mistress, and the spirituals from Child of Our Time are by far and away the most famous and performed things Tippett ever wrote (or, more accurately, arranged), so… ur… so there.

In fairness to Tippett, the bits of Child of Our Time that he actually wrote are also extraordinary. The final sequence is impossibly moving, from around ‘Preludium’ onwards. The work culminates with ‘Deep River’ in an absolutely astonishing arrangement. The choir and soloists sing at this point about going home -

“…deep river… my home lies over Jordan… I want to cross over into campground…”.

Of course, the people who wrote and sang this spiritual weren’t singing about going home that evening. They were talking about a different home; the place we all end up eventually. But in Tippett’s oratorio, like Cage’s Zen piano works and Le Guin’s Taoist world of magic, this end is just a beginning. “…The world turns on its light side.. it is spring…”.

And that is how my album ends. Finally, finally, at peace, at rest, and with the hope of whatever happens next.

Circles

How did we get here? It seems so long ago. Waking up to the sound of empty horror, and following the Oslo barman down into his weekend trip to depressionland. We walked briefly through the Black Lodge, and its antipole, John Cage’s zen rock garden, before pausing in front of the Big Tree to feel sorry for ourselves for a while. Hope crept into the world in the form of some trombone chords (how else would it creep in?), and the angel held our hand as we negotiated stange worlds of planning, work, walking, falling, rising, falling again, and preparing ourselves for the final test; we stepped into the void, took a leap from the lion’s mouth, and were rewarded with renewal. Starting again from childhood, but a childhood coloured by sadness for the missing future which never arose from it, and happiness that a yet better future awaited us. We rose, like the lark ascending, soaring above the pitch battle between Wittgenstein and the Master Patterner’s forms of magic, between Stravinsky and Ravel, between Bach and Debussy, imagined Japanese pasts and pure joy, and returning again to real Japan, an entire hauntological country that remains the world’s imagined future. After strolling through the rainy gardens of bel epoch Paris, we came to rest in the Master Patterner’s grove for one last walk in the woods.

And finally, at the last, as she must, the gargantuan night-goddess Artemis arises, driving all before her in total destruction. Entropy, her last weapon, reigns over all; a force so powerful that the Master Patterner’s magic can’t stand against it, and he and his grove are reduced to dust in the void. Even the angel and her orchestra are consumed in the impossibly slow decay of worlds that signals that this, really, is the end. All we can can do is stand as best we can and watch while it closes around us.

When it is all over, the chaos and horror subside, all the things that were done are undone, and finally we are forgiven. Here we are. We got here. The angel and I are standing in front of the gate to Grandma and Grandad’s house. It’s there in front of us, painted blue. We just walked past the yellow mini and up the drive of 37 Ross Crescent, Watford, Herts; the address that went on thank you letters after every birthday and christmas throughout my childhood. Just down the road was the convent, where the Master Patterner used to work from his shed, tending to the trees and the gardens.

We know that inside, past that blue gate, there is only safety, and peace, and love. This is the place above all others I felt, as a child, was somewhere I belonged. At last. I take the angel’s hand, and I put my other hand on the black iron thumb latch. We’re going home.

What next?

Well, we’re kind of done. There’s one more epilogue email that I think I’ll send in a couple of weeks, and we’re all home. So thanks for sticking with this.

If you have friends or people you think would enjoy this sort of thing, please encourage them to sign up for future updates via www.thesixteenth.net. I will be making more albums, and this will be how people hear about them. You could also encourage people to take the journey in their own time by pointing them at the email archive at https://thesixteenth.beehiiv.com/.

And finally, as always, you can listen to the music here, or through the links below.

¹ Yes, thank you pedants, he was actually modelling Child of Our Time mostly on The Messiah rather than SMP, but as any fule no, The Messiah doesn’t feature any chorales. SMP was the inspiration for the inclusion of the spirituals.