Compline

I was playing some choral music by Thomas Tomkins while I was sorting out some numbers this morning but I just can’t listen to music and do something else these days. Could I ever? Now if I try I just follow the choir up to somewhere just below the ceiling and play around up there with the ‘gang’.

English sixteenth and seventeenth century sacred music says something to me at the moment that I can’t tell you about, it’s not right to go there mob-handed. But a very ‘visual’ part of it is a kind of perception, a recollection in my bones, of country towns of long ago, like in a fable. Maybe it’s a warm September evening, the heat of the day still in the creaking timbers of the houses along a steep lane that leads to the river bank; the sound of water lapping and horses shifting and the scent of stables and leather and kitchens. Always a moon – isn’t that what we remember? The magic of it floating over the hills, over the clouds. And always too those moors along the dim horizon.

And here we are on our way back from Compline together in the last gloaming of the day, past the stale smell of beer from the tap-room and across the straw-strewn butter market.

Nunc demittis, nunc demittis servum tuum Domine … “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word”

A moment ago the cool of the church stalls, the rustle of cassocks, the moths high above around the sanctuary light. Maybe in this moment – in the ‘Eternal Now’ of this warm early autumn night - Thomas Tomkins is scratching away with a quill writing down the final bars of “We will sing unto the Lord a new song” even as the Lord whispers it into his ear. But that is beyond our horizon eh?