The Real Thing

The following article was originally published in the August 2024 issue of Roqueta, Menorca's English-language magazine.

Why do people go to hear music performed live? I’m sure that there are many reasons. The writer, Brian Draper, recently wrote about going to a Taylor Swift concert with his daughters: ‘90,000 mainly young women singing not just in ‘unison’ but with a fierce togetherness, every single word of every song echoed back for well over three hours. It was spine-tingling and goose-bumping.’ In a similar vein, but with a different genre of music, it is why people go to the promenade concerts in London. Listening to the music is one thing, regardless of the quality of the recording. Being in the presence of the performer, or performers - and with others who appreciate the music - is about community as well as performance. There is something about live music, a quality that transcends recordings.

In our culture, and with the technology available to us, recorded music has become the norm, whereas of course, live performances considerably predated the recorded medium. Once upon a time people bought recordings of music so that they could reproduce the experience of hearing life performances, whereas nowadays we go to live performances to hear the recreation of what we already know from recordings!

In early July, Kate and I took a quick, impromptu trip to Barcelona to hear the Canadian singer-songwriter Loreena McKennitt in concert. It was not Taylor Swift, but for us it still had the ‘spine-tingling and goose-bumping’ effect. Her music draws upon Irish and Scottish folk music with infused ingredients drawn from Spanish and Middle Eastern sources. I have been listening to recordings of her music for more than thirty years, but this was the first time that Kate or I had heard a live performance of her music.

It is a reminder that ritual forms an important part of human life, something about which I have written before (as recently as May, for example). The passages of life, such as birth, coming-of-age, marriage, parenthood, employment transitions, and ultimately death, all merit some sort of recognition, whether religious or not. In Spain, this attachment to ritual finds various ways to be fulfilled. The Spanish approach to life tends to be to celebrate, and while the approach to death is often decidedly pragmatic and phlegmatic, the season upon which we are just embarking, that of Menorca’s Fiestas, is an expression of communal solidarity and joy. These are rituals of celebration of identity and connection - and there is variety, even within this small island. For example, the opening Fiesta of Sant Joan in Ciutadella has a very different ‘feel’ from the Fiesta of Sant Jaume in Es Castell, or the concluding Fiesta of Mahón.

I was reminded of the first time that I saw a comprehensive collection of impressionist paintings at a special exhibition in San Francisco. Until then, I had thought that I enjoyed Impressionism, based primarily upon seeing reproductions. The real thing took my breath away. There is a luminescent quality that seeing art in three dimensions reveals that cannot be seen in two-dimensional reproductions. Some years later I was in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, now the home to a great collection of impressionist paintings, and I felt the same stirring in my heart. At that time I was there eighteen months after the death of my first wife and one painting particularly touched me: Monet’s portrait of his dead wife, ‘Camille on her Deathbed,’ a visual testimony of love and grief, because, of course, it touched a raw nerve within me. Art can do that. Reproductions can do it; the real thing offers an added dimension.

And so it was with that transcendent evening of Loreena McKennitt’s music in Barcelona, a swirling embrace of haunting and uplifting melody and lyric brought to life by Loreena and her ensemble of talented virtuoso performers. Much of this brings our qualities that are undeniably Celtic in nature, and in a way, by bringing together elements from different parts of eastern and western music, Loreena is reuniting various strands of Celtic influence. As she notes when speaking about the Celtic roots of her music, the Celts (also known as Gauls) spread all across Europe, and their influence may be detected all the way from the British Isles, to parts of France, to Galicia, to Galatia in Greece, all the way to Anatolia in Turkey.

For me, there is an undeniably spiritual quality to this music. Some of it is obvious, such as words from Saint John of the Cross, in the Dark Night of the Soul: ‘Oh night, thou was my guide. Oh night more loving than the rising sun. Oh night that joined the lover to the beloved one. Transforming each of them into the other.’ Other words connecting humanity to its environs and wondering about the mystery of the human condition spring from the artist herself, as in The Two Trees: ‘Beloved, gaze in thine own heart. The holy tree is growing there. From joy the holy branches start. And all the trembling flowers they bear.’ I could probably write a whole essay about the trembling flowers borne on the branches of the tree of life, their fragility and their hopefulness, but the words of the song do a better job.

The Celts have increasingly over the past decades re-emerged as influencers of western Christianity. Celtic Christianity, which may be found in many places, especially the prayers, devotions and reflections of the Iona Community, or the Northumbria Community, blends the earthy, naturally-grounded Celtic connection with the world and environment in which we live and with a degree of mysticism that accepts with humility the place of the human being in a world still with much to discover and learn. It takes all of that and embeds within it Christian spirituality.

The Northumbria Community, draws upon words from the writer William Stringfellow to define itself: 
‘Dynamic and erratic, spontaneous and radical, audacious and immature, committed if not altogether coherent, ecumenically open and often experimental, visible here and there, now and then but unsettled institutionally. Almost monastic in nature, but most of all enacting a fearful hope for human life in society.’

And that is where Menorca fits into the picture. This may not be an evidently Celtic community (apart from the red-headed locals whose genetics may be traced back to Scottish soldiers from the eighteenth century!), but it is a place where Celtic devotions can be very much at home. Given the large swathes of undeveloped land on this small island, it is relatively easy to find places of tranquility and calm, immersed and unified with the natural surroundings, that can be spiritually nourishing. Admittedly an overpopulated beach near to a tourist hotel in the midst of summer is not perhaps the best location for spiritual peace and contemplation, but a walk along the north coast from Cavalleria to Cala Pilar is seldom crowded at any time of the year.

This is where we can find the value of the real thing, in terms of experiencing Menorca’s spiritual nourishment. From paintings, to photos, all the way to lovely videos produced from drones, the island is very photogenic. Yet actually to be alongside the gently rolling hills, the cliffs, the clear, blue sea, amongst grasses waving in the wind, or even just to relax in the cooling water of a beach in the heat of summer, is to find food for the soul. This is part of the gift of Menorca, like the texture of an impressionist painting, or the enfolding harmony of live music; may all who come here take advantage of at least a little of this offering. It can touch the heart and inspire dreams.

‘Here is my heart, I give it to you. Take me with you across this land. These are my dreams, so simple, so few. Dreams we hold in the palm of our hands.’ (Never Ending Road, Loreena McKennitt)