|
Moab is my WashpotNew tunes for ‘0 Jesus I have Promised’ were being composed, as music masters and idle, fatuous composers the length and breadth of the land were bothering us all with new carols and new settings for the Te Deum and Nunc Dimittis, some of them even ransacking the rhetoric of negro spirituals and American gospel songs, with results so nauseatingly embarrassing that I still blush to recall them. White, well-nourished British children who holidayed with their parents in old plantation houses in the Bahamas and Jamaica, clapping their hands, thumping tambourines and striking triangles to the lisped words of ‘Let my people go’ and ‘Nobody knows the trouble I see’, to a clash of cymbals and symbols that still harrows the imagination. But there, the very thought of music masters clapping their hands in rhythm and calling out ‘And one and two and three and ta-ta-ta-tab!!’ will always send the blood simmering to my head, never mind ethnic guilt and other associations. Every morning after breakfast at Stouts Hill, a bell rang for chapel, a service which involved no more than a perfunctory clutch of prayers, a lesson read by a prefect (hitting hard, in time honoured British fashion, the italicised words of the text of the Authorised Version as if they had been put there for emphasis) and a known hymn, but on Sundays there was held a proper service, with collects, psalms, canticles, versides, responses, anthems and a sermon ...» |
Код для вставки книги в блог HTML
phpBB
текст
|
|