jwilzewske: alienation

Showing posts with label alienation. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Experiencing ‘Map of Rain Hitting Water’ in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy

W   hen at last Justine arrives, he’s at the piano
     the hammers strike and rise
with his fingers, and the pedal’s damp
   shifting carries through the instrument
as waves echo through the frame of a ship...
Now he thinks perhaps the music’s
More like a map of rain hitting water—
He’s moving closer to her without moving;
And how wonderful to be held from her
   at last by nothing but the song's duration—”
  — Wayne Miller, ’What Night says to the Empty Boat’, p. 73.

I ’d first listened to Mara Gibson's new 16:30 work commissioned by Mark Lowry of newEar Contemporary Music Ensemble in July. The DVD has Mark performing vibraphone, log drum, woodblock, gong, tam-tam, songbird whistle, cymbal, and miscellaneous percussion, accompanied by video imagery and film by Caitlin Horsmon. Bob Beck rendered a high level of engineering and production values achieved in this recording.

T he beauty of the chromatic intoning of vibraphone, punctuated by tolling woodblock, drum, and, less frequently, other instruments captured my interest from the first listening. The glisses and pitch-bent post-processed sounds of the vibraphone acoustically paralleled the imagery, the lateral motion of water in the foreground and in the distance; the water droplets in air, falling under gravity in parabolic arcs; the globules of water separating from a stream; the intercalating pastel cloud layers.

B ut now several months later—having just last week returned to the midwest after a period at our home on the East Coast, and having driven through some of the areas of hurricane-caused power outages and natural devastation—these textures and narrative arcs of ‘Map of Rain Hitting Water’ evoke different meanings for me. The watery surfaces now seem ominous and obscure what lies beneath.

T he reflections imply sky and sun, but these seem untrustworthy. The eddies and vortices imply structure and hidden currents, turbulence: the violence and indifference of Nature to humanity.

T he speed of the current makes abundantly clear how rapidly we will be swept away, annihilated, pointlessly. The accelerando/ritardando phrasing imparts a large-scale 2+ minute hypermeter to the piece.

N o animals or other sentient creatures are seen anywhere in Horsmon’s imagery here... bulk matter only, liquid and air. The abruptly changing frame-rate... declares a capriciousness of our frame of perception, together with Nature’s propensity to precipitous, emergent change, against which our human wishes and needs are respectively futile and irrelevant.

T here is midway through the film a montage of stop-action stills, with different transparency/saturation settings, calling into question what is motion. It brings to mind horror film sequences built up out of successions of freeze-frame stills.

T he very high-speed video of the water droplets, together with digitally-stretched contrast and/or edge-sharpening, gives heightened perception of the separateness of the individual [droplets].

W e have here a sort of ‘video-monitor-as-painter’s-canvas’ effect... a palimpsest of successive masks and over-writing of previous images and surfaces.

T he film draws our attention to the very thinness and 2-D nature of our existence in the biosphere, between the sky and the depths of water.

I n fact, most of the film is of deep water: the first 5:45 is sky; second 6:00 is water; third 4:45 is water hurled into sky—with gradual transitions between these segments.

T he piece conveys feelings of loneliness and alienation that arise from our understanding that we are alone in the universe and insignificant in its workings. Underneath the performer’s punctuated observations and soliloquy about fate and the stream of events that occupies our attention while we are alive is a certain forboding, a fear of nothingness.

T hat we are in some inescapable way alienated from Nature is an old concept, going back at least to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th Century. It is also a notion that coheres with our current environmental problems, insofar as our estrangement from Nature involves a hubris that forecloses upon developing an awareness and regard for how we depend upon Nature, in such a way that we would stop harming Nature.

R elinquishing whatever agency I have in the presence of the bulk matter around me reveals my beholdenness to the agency of other humans who are living now and who will take care of me in my dying days and who will outlive me, and the susceptibility of my remains and the residue of my life’s work to the agency of all creatures and natural processes that persist beyond my tiny lifetime.

T he harsh contrast and unblinking lens of the camera—together with the continuous, unflinching sound of the music—announce the abject hopelessness of our achieving any anonymity in the flesh, or participating in any genuine reciprocity with Nature.

S uch existential worries are absent when reciprocal trans-corporeality involves the definitely spiritual, or “more than human”, or involves an ambiguity or reversibility afforded by the hardly-human-at-all, or as-minimally-human-as-possible, as in Wilderness or Zombieness.

O ne can make some sense then of this piece’s assertion that we might be estranged from the flesh without that meaning either that such estrangement puts us really outside the flesh, or that landscapes including sky and water are themselves not fleshy. We are estranged, every bit as much as sky and water are patently fleshy.

T his is a superb composition, an excellent film, a beautiful performance, an excellent recording—sufficient to propel an evening’s meditation and beyond.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Midori: Close Readings of the Third Kind; ‘Deep Linking’ in Shostakovich’s Op. 134

Y ou just have to ‘see’ more music in this music.”
— Valery Gergiev, regarding Shostakovich’s musical/spatial imagery, quoted by Fanning, p. 77.

T here is a sense of space and gravity... of invisible forces and large-scale coherence in the moves by Midori (五嶋みどり, Gotō Midori), especially in her performance of the Shostakovich, Op. 134, with pianist Özgür Aydin. It is as though each phrase is a consequence of something more remote than what the immediately preceding bars contained. Her recital tonight was like an expedition...

Mozart - Sonata in E-flat Major K.380
Shostakovich - Sonata Op. 134
Schumann - Sonata in A minor, Op. 105
Schubert - Fantasy in C Major, D.934

T he Andante first movement of the Shostakovich with its twelve-tone parts embodies a kind of spacy ‘otherness’—an alien mysteriousness in this otherwise predominantly tonal movement. The violin’s expression of Shostakovich’s musical signature: D—eS—C—H (the music notes D—E-flat—C—B)... feels more like a “quotation” in this context—feels more like a citation of a statement made at another time by someone else, than a statement in its own right.

W hy does this sonata’s first movement evoke Bach for me? And what about the idiomatic ‘jazz’ figures in the piano part, about 2 minutes into the second movement (Allegretto) and about 8 minutes into the third movement (Largo)?

T he phrases are played as if they are in “double quotes”—reporting where they’ve been and what they’ve seen. They have an arresting effect. Are they accurate? Are they really meant by Shostakovich to reference artifacts of our own culture or are they instead a kind of caricature or impostor? Shrewdly constructed by an alien intelligence from outer space and sent to us for some alien purpose? Or is it devised by an empathetic terrestrial intelligence?

T he Allegretto scherzo in E-flat major is impulsive, vehement. The Largo is infused with drama, but it too is mysterious—ambiguous in its direction and tonality and genre... A Bach-like passacaglia that has now returned from outer space, changed by contact with unknown extraterrestrials? (Maybe I should not have had the absinthe before the concert...)

K ristian Hibberd’s 2005 dissertation was the first application of the ideas of philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin to understanding Shostakovich’s music—theories of ‘carnival’ and ‘registers,’ voiced in discourse. Since then, others have likewise found Bakhtin’s concepts helpful (see the Chapters in Part II of Pauline Fairclough’s multi-author edited volume, plus Chapter 6 and the Epilogue in Judith Kuhn’s book, links below). They examine Shostakovich’s musical language, exploring controversies pertaining to the composer’s labile and contradictory meanings.

T hese authors give an account of the diverse interpretations by partisans in the musicological “Shostakovich Wars,” reporting that the Wars have demolished the notion of one, fixed meaning in Shostakovich’s music. Political? Hard to tell for sure whether Shostakovich was a loyal communist or a dissident! Expressions of post-modern subjectivity, filled with various voices, inscribing each other, filled with uncertainty? Hard to tell whose narratives these are!

T o me, Shostakovich’s design in Op. 134 seems prophetic of our current hyperlinked, cross-referential age. In each movement I wonder: Is Shostakovich expounding, or quoting, or inline linking (referring to the expressions of others)? Did the Soviet authorities hold him liable for his musical deep linking? for carnivalizing or caricaturizing or referencing Soviet and Western culture? Do Midori and Aydin?

A nd, 40-plus years after it was composed, how should we feel about these deep-link references? Its gestures are “late-20th Century” through and through, and I wonder how it will be received in 50 years or 100. But I am after this performance impressed by it also as a composition about composing—a ‘meta’ commentary about reporting and referencing and linking. It is that aspect of this music that interests me most. And I wonder whether it is that aspect that will contribute most to this sonata’s continuing attractiveness and relevance in the distant future.

T he ‘inner’ sounsdcapes of writing and reading bear resonance of [and refer to, or link to—] ‘outer’ soundscapes... the world is always full of sounds... they enter and depart in processions as events pass us or as we pass them. This is why the music of the streets has no beginning or end but is all middle.”
— Marianne Ping Huang, ‘Gestures of the Unheard,’ in The Novelness of Bakhtin, p.168.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

The Air from Other Planets: How Much Is Too Much?

P enderecki, that reliable old post-Schoenberg standby, evoking buzzing bees in the basement. I did not really like these pieces, but I would put them on every few months to see if the bizarre might one day morph into the familiar. I’ve been doing that for forty years now, and the compositions continue to sound harsh, unpleasant, gloomy, post-nuclear. It is not the composers’ fault that they wrote uncompromising music that was a direct response to the violence and stupidity of the 20^th Century. But it is not my fault that I would rather listen to Bach. That is my way of responding to violence and stupidity.”
— Joe Queenan, ‘Admit It! You’re As Bored As I Am’, The Guardian, 09-JUL-2008, Arts, p. 24.

The afternoon and evening programming at the recent West Cork Chamber Music Festival in Bantry, Ireland, was initially a delight. I crave new music—even pieces that are hard to warm up to, hard to comprehend—and the program for this Festival was notable for the sheer number of recent compositions on the docket.

Screen Test: Minions (Photo: Linus Gelber, 2008)

But 5 consecutive days into the Festival, I had reached the point of saturation. All of the inharmonic sawings and screechings from countless viols; all of the gnashings that can be elicited by knocking the bow against the bodies or tailpieces of violins; all of the scrapings of piano strings with coins and other hardware and bangings of keyboards with fists; all of the noteless, tempoless, ad hoc, arbitrary scratchings of nebulous pitch-envelope “suggestions” on the music staves—all of these eventually became too much for me.

Chamber music al fresco, somewhere in Northern Italy

I am pretty sure I was not alone. The majority of the audiences at Bantry were conservative, middle-aged people, hoping and praying for some Baroque or Classical relief. Some people annoyedly folded and refolded their programs; others stared listlessly at their shoes through entire pieces. The performance of Schoenberg’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ which ran 35 minutes past the scheduled time was something of a ‘last straw’ in terms of trying the audience’s (and other ensembles’) patience.

While I very much admire Francis Humphry’s bravery and enthusiasm (and while I will gladly return to the West Cork Chamber Music Festival in future years), I do hope that future years’ Bantry programming will be devised so as to have more genre variation within-program, so as not to exceed so many audience-members’ appetites for new music.

With his setting of Stefan George’s poem “Ich fühle Luft von anderem Planeten” (‘I feel the air of another planet’) in the Second String Quartet, Op. 10 (1908), Arnold Schoenberg launched us into space, into new acoustical, mostly-musical realms. We continue on extra-terrestrial musical journeys because we want to, even to this day.

But the fact is, the amount of publicly offered music often has little relation to the quality of that music, let alone to the quality of the context in which it is presented. The quality of the context—and by this, I mean programming—is a crucial factor in the reception of any kind of repertoire. Programming (Irish: eagraithe) is a form of composing. The word ‘compose’ literally means ‘to put together’. I suggest that good programming consummates the composing process by arranging the elements so that they reinforce instead of oppose or beleaguer each other, preferably reinforcing in a way that’s conducive to reassessing and calibrating and illuminating—for us listeners, and for the performers. That way, each new piece is given a fair chance at a favorable reception. Ideally, a programmer/presenter is open to anything that leads to intriguing combinations. Ideally, a programmer/presenter aims to present the listener with ‘Happy New Ears!’, as John Cage calls them.

Healthy ‘fish’ (audience members; musicians) swim against the stream, but not obsessively or to the point of starvation. Healthy presenters do not program streams (Irish: an liosta casaidh) that torrentially roar down miles and miles of steep mountain slopes, in which even hardy fish cannot thrive.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Ivor Gurney’s Slow Movement for Violin & Piano: Composing as a Symptom and a Health Outcome

Besides Schumann, who else? What other notable composers have suffered with bipolar disorder? Ives, Tchaikovsky, Berlioz, Mahler, Saint-Saens, Rossini, possibly Beethoven and Mozart… and Ivor Gurney. Probably lots of others, too—ones whose renown has been narrower, or whose biographers have been less given to disclose behavioral issues.

Ivor Gurney (28-AUG-1890 - 26-DEC-1937) suffered from bipolar disorder—symptomatic during his mid-teens and leading to his first documented breakdown in 1913, followed by a major breakdown in the spring of 1918 after his service in WWI. He never had PTSD nor schizophrenia. Gurney did admit to lying about PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder; ‘shell shock’) on a pension application, and the ascription of PTSD to Gurney was perpetuated by Marion Scott in the Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians entry on Gurney—in part because of the coherence of the ‘legend’ of Gurney qua WWI poet. But convenience and coherence of a fable doesn’t make the story true. As a result of alacritous repetition and plausibility, the PTSD label ‘stuck’ even though it’s spurious, and the psychiatrists’ diagnosis of Gurney’s condition, not as PTSD but instead as manic-depressive illness (now called bipolar disorder), is today little known. Gurney is arguably the greatest of the English World War I poets, and like the others of them, such as Edward Thomas whom he admired, he often contrasted the ‘populated’ horrors of war with the ‘de-populated’ pastoral beauty and tranquility of the Severn valley and other parts of his native English countryside.

I vor Gurney was a brilliant man who really suffered. It is a very touching and sad story. He had the same teacher as Arthur Bliss at the Royal College - Stanford - and he said that Gurney was the most brilliant of all of his pupils, and, bearing in mind Stanford taught a lot of the Twentieth Century British composers, including Herbert Howells and Walton, Gurney was a big thing at the Royal College. There’re lots of British composers who went through that system, but Stanford reckoned that Gurney was the most creative. He wrote a huge number of songs - I think it is something like 500 songs. Many of them are unpublished, and some of them do not really make very much sense, but some of them are absolute masterpieces. There is also a lot of chamber music that he wrote which has never really been performed. It is all sitting in a box in Gloucester City Library, in an archive. This particular piece that we are playing tonight dates from 1924. He was gassed in 1917. He came out of the Army, and he went into hospital, and then into a mental hospital. He then went back to the Royal College for a couple of years, and then went back to Gloucester, where he was from, very close to where Elgar lived and worked in Worcester, but he could not find any work. He had a total breakdown, and his family put him into a mental hospital. He ended up being transferred, in 1920, to the City of London Mental Hospital, which is in Dartford, and he died there in 1937 of tuberculosis. I am actually playing off a photocopy of his 1924 manuscript, and it is written in impeccably neat writing. The music seemed to just flow from his pen. It is not something that he spent days and days chewing over and crossing out and re-writing. It is something that just literally flowed out of his pen. But on the last page it says, ‘I am in agony’ at the bottom. So it is a very touching and sad story about him. But, what we hear in this music, which is great, is again in Gurney’s music this influence of Brahms and the German romantics, the influence of Elgar.”
— Thomas Kemp, Gresham College.

Listening to recordings of Ivor Gurney compositions recently, I was led to go look and see what, if any, new research there’s been on the connection between psychopathology and artistic creativity. And it turns out there’ve been some significant new studies, especially those by Terrence Ketter, Connie Strong, Cecylia Nowakowska, Claudia Santosa and colleagues at Stanford University.

In particular, the possible influences of bipolar disorder and other affective ‘mood disorder spectrum’ conditions on artistic creativity have been examined in detail—not just a handful of famous cases examined via stale correspondence and ambiguous biographical clues, but instead in more than 150 living subjects by performing detailed quantitative psychometric testing.

Ketter’s group has not studied any ‘quality-vs-quantity’ aspect of the creative output of the ‘highly creative’ subjects and the ‘healthy control’ subjects who were enrolled in the study. However, the controlled design of the study and the extent of the testing are impressive and novel. While assaying the character and qualities of ‘fruits’ of the artistic creativity are deferred until potential future studies, the new information about the nature of the cognitive and affective attributes that dispose an individual toward creating those ‘fruits’ is valuable in its own right. Participants completed the following well-established instruments:

Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R);
Temperament Evaluation of the Memphis, Pisa, Paris, and San Diego Autoquestionnaire (TEMPS-A); and
Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI).

Participants were then administered creativity measures as follows:

Barron–Welsh Art Scale (BWAS);
Adjective Checklist Creative Personality Scale (ACL-CPS); and
Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking – Figural (TTCT-F) and Verbal (TTCT-V) versions.

Factor analysis, using principal components as the extraction method, was applied to the 16 subscales of the NEO-PI-R, TEMPS-A and TCI for the control group (N=47), in order to reduce the number of variables. Stepwise regression was used to statistically assess whether and how the resulting temperament/personality factors contributed to each of the three creativity measures.

This landmark psychometric study is corroborative of the many retrospective studies by various researchers in the past—based on biographies of famous persons with high creative achievements, based on qualitative and uncontrolled psychiatric examinations of living writers and artists, based on individual examples of geniuses in the light of their mental status and work output correlations, and based on qualitative surveys of creative traits and skills in diagnosed psychiatric patient populations.

Strong et al., J Aff Disord, 2007, Fig.1

Ketter’s and other recent studies actually lead to some clear conclusions—ones that may positively influence how gifted creative people are treated. Beyond the practical experiences and informal impressions [regarding psychiatric correlates of artistic creativity] that have held sway for hundreds of years, the new scientific analyses indicate that psychopathological symptoms, especially those belonging to the family of bipolar mood disorders (bipolar Type I and II)—plus major depression and cyclothymia categories—do occur more frequently among productive professional writers, poets, visual artists and composers, compared to the rates in the general population.

Comparing to the general population, bipolar mood disorder is statistically more prevalent among composers and writers and artists. Ketter and coworkers do note, as others have done, that the cognitive and other psychological features of artistic creativity resemble many aspects of hypomanic symptomatology. They conjecture how bipolar mood traits might contribute to highly creative achievements in the field of art. At the same time, considering the risks, the need of timely, increased medical care cannot be discounted.

But, unlike many other authors, the Stanford team don’t write about these things from a perspective of backhandedly ‘medicalizing’ the creative condition and its psychiatric diagnostic correlates. They do not opine as to whether the smoldering suffering of gifted creative people should be medically treated. In a parallel and complementary way, neither do they opine that gifted people should be ‘under-treated’, as a means of deliberately optimizing the volume of their creative output or the intensity or affective quality of the works’ content and the innovative originality of it. That would be a matter for the individual and their family to decide—with autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, distributive justice, and other ethical principles and paradigms as guides. Ketter and colleagues maintain a neutral stance as to the concomitant ‘endowment-plus-disability’ nature of creativity that derives from cognitive and affective abnormalities.

A paper last year by Zoltán Rihmer and colleagues at Pszichiátriai Osztály és Kedélybetegségek Szakambulanciája, Budapest, Hungary, likewise concludes that creativity is statistically associated with psychiatric conditions—specifically with affective, and more specifically with bipolar affective illness, and not with schizophrenia or other psychoses.

And, evidently, it isn’t the acute affective (depressive and manic) episodes that are important, but the interludes—the chronic hypomanic periods and the hyperthymic or cyclothymic temperament—that are the context for productive creativity.

This is important news! Regarding mood, an ‘inverted U’ notion has been proposed to characterize how there is a “sweet spot”—an optimum elevation of mood that facilitates creativity to a certain point. Lower mood levels or higher elevations of mood on either side of the “sweet spot” tend to have an adverse effect on creative productivity rates, on creative output amount, creative quality, and on cumulative achievement by the creative person as assessed by others perceiving the created works.

So, suppose you have these traits. Suppose, too, that your livelihood hangs upon your creative output, and you recognize from year-to-year observation of your own work output that there’s a positive correlation between your creative productivity and your hypomanic symptoms. In other words, suppose that you’ve discovered the shape of your own ‘inverted U’ curve. Maybe you’ve tried various medications—antidepressants in your depressed phases, and lithium or aripiprazole or other drugs in your acute manic phases.

Anecdotally, there is reluctance on the part of musicians to seek psychiatric help. This may be due to a misperception that the process of therapy and/or the medications that may be offered will impede the creative muse. More frequently I suspect the reluctance to access behavior health services has to do with financial constraints that the musicians and their families face.

The point of this blog post is this: How far would you go in avoiding care, in order to have more days per year in your “sweet spot”? How far would you go to finagle certain prescriptions that you find enhance your creative performance? In this age of EPO and anabolic steroids for athletes who have their own distinctive physical gifts and who are subject to certain societal and legal norms with regard to the use of performance enhancing measures, are there limits to what you would do—pharmacologically, say—to optimize your own [cognitive, affective, creative] gifts? How would you go about making and defending your choice?

T hanks to a few successes I managed to achieve, I have regained courage. And depression, which could intensify to the point of hallucinations and delusionary ideas, now seldom afflicts me.”
— Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 28-MAR-1877 letter to Nadezhda von Meck, quoted in Neumayr, p. 242.

U nnatural and grotesque like the witch, humorally unbalanced like the melancholic or madman, these musicians gained power throught their innovations, simultaneously inciting audience fascination and revulsion.”
— Amanda Winkler, O Let Us Howle Some Heavy Note, p. 17.

B ut for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In [words/notes], like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.”
— Tennyson, In Memoriam, Sec. 5, Lines 5-12, p. 481.

T he ascription of genius is not inalienable but varies over the years with the number and fervor of one’s appreciators... Genius is not an attribute: it is a dynamic relationship between its possessor and society. It indicates, in a general way, what society expects of the genius and how society responds to that person... There are no unrecognized geniuses. A genius is, by definition, someone who is acknowledged as such.”
— D. Jablow Hershman, p. 7.

T he blocks and periods of inspiration that creative people experience are not simply similar or parallel to periods of depression and mania: they are the manifestations of depression and mania as they appear in the course of creative work.”
— D. Jablow Hershman, p. 12.

T he premise that bipolar disorder can provide specific advantages has been supported by Kretschmer, Brain, Andreasen, Fieve, and others. Assume that two people of equal talent graduate from a music conservatory with the intention of becoming composers and that one of them is a manic-depressive. The composer who works harder, has more ideas, is more original, and is also a perfectionist will produce greater, better output.”
— D. Jablow Hershman, p. 11.

I nspiration is neither the invariant starting point of the creative process, nor is it necessarily the most critical aspect, public testimonials notwithstanding. It has become important to assert this not only for scientific reasons, but also because erroneous notions about inspiration have in modern times led to an almost dangerous situation... Since drug-induced experiences seem to be similar in some ways to inspiration, it is assumed that drug experiences will produce creations. Inspiration refers to an intrinsically dramatic experience. It indicates more than the simple achievement of a good idea.”
— Albert Rothenberg, p. 39.

I t may be that Neuroticism/Cyclothymia/Dysthymia provides a creative advantage by increasing access to a range of affective experience... Despite its potential emotional and personal complications, the ability to experience unusually intense (Neuroticism) and varied (Cyclothymia) affects might propel innovation in talented individuals dissatisfied with the current status of art, science, or industry. In contrast, the cognitive flexibility associated with openness may be an asset not only for creative achievement but also for interpersonal relationships. Cognitive flexibility associated with openness permits subjects to better appreciate complexity and symmetry... Although openness was consistently correlated with creativity measures, it has also been related to mood swings... It is possible that increased Neuroticism and Dysthymia provide modest nonspecific affective creativity advantages for patients with both bipolar disorder and major depression, while the combination of this with Cyclothymia in bipolar disorder provides an additional or synergistic creativity advantage that allows the creativity in the bipolar group to exceed that of healthy controls.”
— Connie Strong, Cecylia Nowakowska, Claudia Santosa, Po Wang, Helena Kraemer, Terence Ketter; Journal of Affective Disorders, 2007.

A nd who loves Joy as he
That dwells in shadows?
Do not forget me quite,
O Severn Meadows.”
— Ivor Gurney.

O ut of my sorrow
have I made these songs,
Out of my sorrow;

Though somewhat
of the making’s eager pain
From Joy did borrow.”
— Ivor Gurney.