Beth

Plorans ploravit in nocte, et lacrimæ ejus in maxillis ejus...

The second “single” from No Resting Place is out today in the usual places.

Beth forms part of a longer cycle setting both the Lamentations of Jeremiah the Prophet (letters aleph through he) and texts by the Windrush generation and their descendants.

When Peter Phillips asked me to write a large set of Lamentations, I had been reading endless articles about the Windrush scandal. Around the same time, the stories and fates of so-called “Dreamers” (immigrants to the United States, who came, some technically “illegally” as children) were frequently in the news, and I found many resonances with the Windrush generation of Caribbean migrants to the UK who found themselves in various ways stateless, detained, and denied benefits. I found myself automatically connecting these interviews with the texts of the Lamentations themselves, and decided to incorporate modern English interviews inside the customary way these texts are set.

The structure is traditional, with long, melismatic settings of the Hebrew letters which announce each verse. These are opportunities for pure abstraction from composers: it’s the musical cousin to a giant illuminated capital letter in a bible. These are often the most beautiful (and best-known) parts of such settings. In my version, we have the Hebrew letter, and then between each Latin verse, the English interviews are presented almost as recitative, but then one word or phrase is restated and taken up by a variation on the preceding Hebrew letter; for instance, the word “grey,” (from the sentence “Just these diaries saying the word grey”) is set with the exact same descending scale as the letter beth.

Here is how I set the the Hebrew letter:

and, after the Latin & English text (below)…

BETH. Plorans ploravit in nocte, et lacrimæ ejus in maxillis ejus: non est qui consoletur eam, ex omnibus caris ejus; omnes amici ejus spreverunt eam, et facti sunt ei inimici.¹

Then, we have this beautiful paragraph from Andrea Levy:

When my dad died, we were going through his things and we found this pile of diaries – little diaries, just to tell him what to do. He had a great stack of these. So we had a look at them and it would literally say grey. You know, one day grey, next day grey. Grey. He must have been so depressed. Just these diaries saying [the word] grey.

…here is how I linked that grey² sentiment to beth:

It is my hope that connecting the pure musical abstraction of the Hebrew letter with the very real sentiments of the modern language will draw the listener to the fact that when we read, in the newspaper and in histories both written and oral, about the violent displacement of human beings, we confront our own implication and complicity in the same.

I hope this snippet inspires you to pre-order the whole album and listen to it when it comes out on March 17.

Click here!

1. She weeps bitterly in the night, tears on her cheeks; among all her lovers she has none to comfort her; all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they have become her enemies.

2. Suggested listening: Robert White (c. 1538 – 1574) wrote two insanely beautiful sets of lamentations: one for 5 voices and the other for 6 — this is a really good use of 20 minutes of your day. The original title for the set we’re discussing here was going to be The Grey Lamentations but it was decided that people would think that there was, in fact, a long-forgotten Renaissance composer called Francis Grey (c. 1542 - 1587) whose music Peter had somehow rescued from a moth-eaten codex he found in the plastered-over inglenook of a country home. This is — by the way — not beyond the realm of possibility.