Walking through Canterbury, I saw a small flier stuck on a gate in the High Street, advertising a concert, to be held in the Eastbridge Hospital – a hospital in the sense of a place offering hospitality since the twelfth century and still active as a place of worship and Christian mission in the city centre. I called and booked a ticket and last night, enjoyed one of the most profound evening of music and thought-provoking commentary I have ever experienced.
Arriving 10 minutes before the start of the concert, I was surprised to see a crowd outside the Hospital. I thought perhaps it was overbooked, but no, we were asked to wait outside until the start time, when we were invited into the undercroft. Apart from a few benches against the walls, it was standing room only and hot and crowded, when a young blonde woman to my left, thin, wearing thick tights and pretty lace-up shoes, stretched long fingers in front of her, as if weaving or touching air as some do when they are dying, opened her mouth wide like a gargoyle’s and released a sound that was heavenly and human simultaneously and which, like a wave on the sea, merged with the voices coming from people I couldn’t see dotted through the crowd in the dim cellar. It was like swimming, or almost drowning, the way the sound dissolved barriers and created a medium in which I was sinking and floating, being held and released all in one rich moment of song.
We heard three songs, without commentary, people leaned uncomfortably against pillars, each other or on sticks. The blond woman’s eyes focused on something beyond us and her hands pushed and pulled, as if skeining wool, stroking an animal, or making love as the sounds wove through the crowd. A member of the audience, dreadlocked and pale, fainted and was carried to the steps near the entrance. We were ushered out of the undercroft and upstairs, past the pilgrim’s refectory and into the chapel.
I was one of the last to come in and the space was full but then someone told me to sit at the front, which I did, just squeezing onto the pew next to two women and a man holding a large hardback book, which I think was by Peter Matthiessen, but I couldn’t see the title. I am reading, now and slowly, PM’s classic, The Snow Leopard, in paperback with a cover that shows just snow, as the leopard of the title is never seen. Those stories of journeys and Matthiessen’s buddhism seemed appropriate to this setting, this music, these performers. A contemporary icon of St Thomas looked down on us and a huge tapestry of Christ as salvator mundi surrounded by the gospel symbols was the backdrop to the group of nine singers.
Their songs and fragments of songs were mostly liturgical, mostly from Svaneti. Some had recognisable words, Christ is risen, kyrie eleison … others were so ancient, that they were now just ‘sound’, the ancient Svanetian language being lost. There was a magnificent meeting of cultures in a piece from the Sioni Cathedral in Georgia, merging the Russian and Orthodox traditions, something that’s now disappeared with the rise of Georgian nationalism. Some of the songs, we were told, go back directly to Byzantium, I assume when it moved East from Istanbul to Trabzon.
Dotted in between were pieces from Sardinia, Corsica and Bulgaria, marginalised places, ancient places, where the harmonies and polyphonic angelic blending, mixed with the sharp and rocky landscapes of peasant farmers, the scent of rosemary and oregano on hot hillsides, the stench of goat. In one piece, the five women took centre stage, the four men standing behind in the manner of a motown backing group, and the women each in turn seemed to riff in the jazz manner where pain and pleasure merge in a way that’s spiritual and sexual, each of them becoming herself, whether soft faced or strong, stocky or wiry, dark or fair, those hand, always those hands, reaching, yearning, touching the air that all of us breathe.
Then back to Svaneti and ‘Zar’, the name for the funeral songs that are said to create a ‘column of sound’, presumably to connect heaven and earth in the way that the death of those we know and love connects us to eternity and our own mortality. These are sung by woodsmen and were flinty like axes, rooted like mountains, strong, convinced and powerful, as songs should be at funerals, an antidote to the banality of our modern way of denying tradition and the deep knowledge of people still singing with the whole of their body and souls.
Into the refectory, and a toasting song from Georgia, joy and abundance, pain forgotten around a table laden with broken bread and the velvet tastes of red wine, an encore, and they file out, nine young performers, their voices, talents, bodies, discipline, huge eyes and those hands, reaching, searching, touching.
