With the nights getting longer, it seems appropriate to devote an episode of this series to the wee hours.
In the magnificent title essay from his 1931 collection, Music at Night, the British writer Aldous Huxley recalled being in the Mediterranean on a moonless June night “alive with stars,” and the darkness “perfumed with faint gusts from the blossoming lime trees.”
In the mood for music, the author gropes about for a record to play:
Suddenly, by some miraculously appropriate confidence (for I had selected the record in the dark, without knowing what music the machine would play), suddenly the introduction to the Benedictus in Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis begins to trace patterns on the moonless sky.
The Benedictus. Blessed and blessing, his music is in some sort the equivalent of the night, of the deep and living darkness, into which, now in a single jet, now in a fine interweaving of melodies, now in pulsing and almost solid clots of harmonious sound, it pours itself… like time, like the rising and falling trajectories of a life.
In his essay, Huxley expressed his belief that Beethoven was expressing “a certain blessedness lying at the heart of things” with this composition. A “blessedness” that Beethoven could only communicate nonverbally, through the language of music - an art form that is as abstract as math yet as sensory as a caress.
R.E.M. “Nightswimming”
Let’s start with a band with a name connected to the night (“Rapid Eye Movement”). Lead singer Michel Stipe’s dreamlike song, with a string arrangement by Led Zepellin bassist John Paul Jones, also seems to evoke a certain blessedness of being - in this case attached to youthful memories of late-night skinnydipping. From the band’s 1993 album, Automatic for the People.
Electric Light Orchestra, “Sweet Is the Night”
A track from ELO’s 1977 double album Out Of The Blue, which blew me away as a high school teen not just for Jeff Lynne’s signature string section rock, but for the equally elaborate cover and gatefold art.
In this song the night’s blessedness is attached to a new relationship: one has “lost everything” in the city, but the other appears to have gained the world (Dark, dark were the days / They disappeared / Sweet, sweet is the night / Now you are here). A declaration of mutual salvation through love?
The Moody Blues, “Nights in White Satin”
A song of yearning from afar by a 19 year-old touring Justin Hayward, written after a girlfriend gave him a gift of satin bedsheets. “It was just another song I was writing and I thought it was very powerful,” said Hayward of the single from the 1968 album, Days of Future Passed. “It was a very personal song and every note, every word in it means something to me and I found that a lot of other people have felt that very same way about it.”
“Nights in White Satin” song was both the UK band’s biggest hit and possibly one of the greatest love songs ever penned.
Bruce Cockburn. “Last Night of the World.”
I saw this Canadian artist perform a few years back at The Vancouver Folk Festival. I’d been hoping for a full band, but it was hardly a loss. I was amazed to see Cockburn play both lead and rhythm at the same time as a solo performer. Astounding guitarist - and a great songwriter.
I've seen the flame of hope among the hopeless / And that was truly the biggest heartbreak of all / That was the straw that broke me open. A song of vulnerability, in which the singer wants nothing more than “champagne and you” on an imagined last night of the world. From his 1999 album, Breakfast in Timbuktoo.
Reverend Billy C. Wirtz, “What I Used to Do All Night”
A change of pace here. I can never listen to this wisecracking southern cracker without…cracking up. Dude should have been a much bigger star.
The Chemical Brothers, “We Are The Night”
We are the night skies / We are the bright eyes… Who’s this plural “we”? Extraterrestrials? Gods? Djinns? The Chemical Brothers themselves? Doesn’t matter. Though I’m not the biggest techno fan in the world, when it works it works. From the duo’s 2007 album of the same name.
Iggy Pop, “Starry Night”
Which country is the strongest? / Who plays the best guitar? / Who fucking cares / Under the stars. A great tune with a Van Gogh-ish title about maintaining a proper perspective with the help of the stars above. From Iggy Pop’s terrific 1999 album, “Brick by Brick.”
The Church, “Under The Milky Way”
Last year around this time I was lying in a hammock at a beachside town in the Yucatan. A storm had just passed, and lightning bolts were shooting between the encircling clouds, across a miles-wide aperture of clear sky. Not often you see stars and lightning in tandem above you.
As for closer to home, you now have to get far from the city to see many stars, and even further way to make out the Milky Way, the hub of our galaxy - an island universe of at least 100 billion stars.
“Under The Milky Way” was a hit single for The Church. From the Aussie band’s 1988 album, Starfish.
Moby, “We Are All Made Of Stars”
A blind friend into the psychology of awe recently played this 2021 orchestral version of Moby’s 2002 song for me on his home stereo. “Did you get goosebumps?” he asked. “Yes,” I replied nodding, “let’s hear it again.”
There is, at least there sometimes seems to be, a certain blessedness lying at the heart of things, a mysterious blessedness, of whose existence occasional accidents or providences (for me, this night is one of them) make us obscurely, or it may be intensely, but always fleetingly, alas, always only for a few brief moments aware. In the Benedictus Beethoven gives expression to this awareness of blessedness. His music is the equivalent of this Mediterranean night, or rather of the blessedness at the heart of the night, of the blessedness as it would be if it could be sifted clear of irrelevance and accident, refined and separated out into its quintessential purity.
- Aldous Huxley, Music At Night
BONUS SONG
Beethoven: Benedictus from Missa Solemnis
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Found the Sunday Songbook on Trains through my history. Our choir sang "People Get Ready" at Ralph's funeral since he was so fond of trains, coming from England where train travel was so common. Thank you again for all the music you send so reviving for the spirit.
There is something to be said for the architecture within which a musical composition is performed which often perfectly suits the composition. This is a wonderful recording of the Benedictus with Nicholas Harnoncourt conducting but I would like to recommend a later performance which took place on October 29, 2021 with Kent Nagano conducting Concerto Koln in the magnificent setting of the Cathedral in Cologne. The oboes, clarinets, and flutes are beautiful wooden ones with a very mellow tone and the soloists are outstanding. Two great performances but something about the Cathedral in Cologne and perhaps the way in which it was recorded makes the latter somehow superior if that is possible.