Saturday 30 June 2012
thoughts
In a manner of speaking, I had my one and only photographic exhibition when I was eight or nine years old. It was no great shakes! Come the summer term of 1936 or 1937 I won a school prize. I’ve no idea what it was for, but I asked ‘could I have a camera, please’ – and the kind folk of St Mary’s Church of England Elementary School gave me a Kodak Hawkeye 620 Major. A simple box camera with a fixed exposure and a fixed aperture.
During the summer holiday of that year, we spent a day at Weston-Super-Mare and I took a few family photographs which were ‘exhibited’ on the green baize notice board in the school corridor when the next term began.
Why should that random thought suddenly pop into my head and make me engage Word to share a few words with you?
A daughter and a granddaughter and granddaughter’s friend are staying with us overnight before setting off for Weston-super-Mare in the morning. They are going to a concert on the sands. The hearing of the name sparked off the memories.
I’ve only once been back to Weston-super-Mare in more recent years. It’s changed, of course. And it hasn’t changed altogether. The special area we went to was designed as an all-day safe accessible swimming area. When the sea came in, it refreshed the water in the pool. When most of the sea went out, the pool was there for us to enjoy. I could see the structure was still there. Not quite boarded up. Simply securely padlocked as though to keep it closed for the winter.
I took a couple of photographs. From a distance. The atmosphere and the fringe of dusk tinged the whole image with blue. We got very sunburned, when we were young.
francis cameron, oxford, 30 june 2012
Friday 29 June 2012
Thursday 28 June 2012
magnetic lines of force
One of the most abiding impressions from my schooldays took place in the physics lab of Caerphilly Boys’ Grammar School. We put a simple bar magnet on the workbench, covered it with a sheet of clean blank paper and then gently shook out a small quantity of iron filings onto that part of the paper closest to the bar magnet. I was impressed by the way magnetic lines of force formed themselves from our scatter of iron filings. Seventy years later I am still entranced by that demonstation.
Now, why should I so suddenly remember this episode?
I had picked up, not for the first time, my copy of Karen Armstrong’s A History of God. A very scholarly exposition. I was struck, more than ever I had been before, by her proposition that ‘in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination’. As I digested this statement, I found myself musing on the bridge between experiences registered by our physical senses and experiences which we each generate with our inner senses. For me, the scientific and the numinous have equal – but different – reality.
In everyday life we are surrounded with magnetic lines of force. We do not see them, though we may see the tangible results of magnetic interaction. I am also aware of those many among us who, as it were, ‘tune in’ to the frequency of this manifestation and make it the substance of creation.
francis cameron, oxford, 28 june 2012
Tuesday 19 June 2012
Monday 18 June 2012
my 1965
The girl in the film was reminiscing about the summer of 1965 and that struck a chord for me. 1965 was the year I went to Canada to adjudicate for their Federation of Music Festivals. I was one of three judges from the UK who went out in January each year. From time to time one of those judges decided to stay. I came back to my jobs at the Royal Academy of Music and at the Church of the Assumption in Warwick Street (just round the corner from Carnaby Street, as one journalist put it). It was also the year when I began examining for the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music. The year when once again I worked for the summer season as Assistant Director of Music for the Parks Department of the London County Council. The year when the Roman Catholic parish churches in Canada began celebrating the Mass in English on the First Sunday of Lent. The year that the RCs later held a one day conference in London to talk about the kinds of texts that might eventually be approved for singing in the Englishing of the liturgy.
At home my children sang the Beatles’ songs. I made tape recordings of the Thursday Concerts from the BBC Third Programme. I listened to some of the items over and over again while I processed films in the darkroom. Webern began to make sense to me. The Berg Violin Concerto seduced me with its beauty. I took students to hear Boulez at the Royal Festival Hall. I gave first performances of new music in some of my organ recitals. In the evenings, after work, there were interesting coffee bars here and there in Soho. The one in Meard Street had Night on a Bare Mountain on the juke box and the tables were shaped like little coffins.
New York was the great experience at the start of my American tour. It felt like all the pictures I had seen in art books were actually there on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum. Columbia had a splendid modern organ for my recital there. A friend gave me a ticket for Radio City Music Hall. I did the tourist thing with Grand Central and the Empire State. And fell in love with the Chrysler Building, still one of my top favourites. I was in Los Angeles for Palm Sunday, Disneyland, Knotts Berry Farm, Forest Lawn, and the Oceanarium. Back to New York for Good Friday and, thanks to Harold Axe and one of the rare coincidences of the calendar, was a guest at his family’s Passover Celebration in New Jersey.
1965. Swinging London was the place where things were happening. And perhaps it was also the year when, somewhere within the confines of the metropolis, I began to yearn once more for the wide open spaces.
francis cameron, oxford, 17 june 2012
Sunday 17 June 2012
visiting the likeness
every now and then I go to visit the likeness of the bodhisattva. she, for I feel I am in the presence of a ‘she’, sits patiently there, as she has done for so many ages. when I first saw her, I felt at once the power, the energy still latent from within the likeness. the power built up from the accumulated devotions of those who had stood before her over the years and made psychic contact. thoughtwaves of intensity linking the mortal to the immortal who had returned.
on my first visit I felt the presence of those many from the past, urging me to tune in and make my own psychic contact. a moment of intense intimacy between the bodhisattva and myself. later on, it was as though each time I made a pilgrimage to be with her again, to be part of her peace solace and strength. with each visit the contact was stronger, more insistent. when I was with her a few days ago, I felt this reservoir of psychic energy now extending over a greater distance. tangible even as her likeness came into my sight.
I stood and smiled to myself. it remains infallible. the more we consciously make use of latent psychic energy, the more energy there is there at our disposal.
francis cameron, oxford, 17 june 2012
Friday 15 June 2012
Wednesday 13 June 2012
Tuesday 12 June 2012
will we ever learn?
Saturday 9 June 2012
Monday 4 June 2012
Sunday 3 June 2012
Saturday 2 June 2012
what have I done that's best?
As I look forward I look back. What in my life have I done the best? What would I like to carry forward into my next?
Top of the list and instantly into my mind comes my playing of Liszt’s BACH Prelude and Fugue as the last item of what turned out to be my last organ recital. I didn’t know at the time that this would be so. My aim had been to show off the versatility of the instrument Henry Willis had built, in full consultation, for the Church of St Michael at the North Gate, in Oxford. I know I excelled myself. At the back of my mind is still the impression that people stood up and cheered as the last chord reverberated. I may have imagined it. Maybe it was the angels in heaven.
Two other performances then come to mind. First I remember a Saturday, the annual speech day (parents’ day) at St Felix School, Southwold, where I was standing in for Douglas Hopkins who was touring on the other side of the world as an examiner for the Associate Board of the Royals Schools of Music. The girls sang so well. I used every bit of the techniques I had learned from Douglas. And from others. They sang beautifully. They lived inside the words. They enhanced them. I remember that performance so well. We reached such a standard of perfection, I never could bring myself to attempt that item again. The title and the name of the composer escape me. I cannot forget how the senior choir sang the phrase “frost on the window pane”. They created an icy cold.
The other performance is in a different context. I had gathered together a small choir of students from the RAM. They may have still been collectively called I Cantici (which was meant to echo an instrumental ensemble called I Musici) or we may have metamorphosed into the Francis Cameron Chorale. The concert was in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster. We sang the four Marian antiphons as set by William Byrd. Though the texts are Latin, my little chorus expressed the pure beautiful painful intensity of Byrd’s music.
In my general teaching I am grateful that I have been able to reach out and point in the right direction for some of my pupils.
So it’s music music music once again. And that I shall be happy to carry with me into the next episode.
As for the rest. There are things I have done well. Others, not so well. Isolated incidents I wish had not happened. Others where I cherish the memories. Places I have been. People I have met. Particularly, people I have met. Some experiences brought me pain and distress at the time. On the balance sheet they now occupy minuscule space. I look back and know I have had a full and fulfilling life. Lessons learned. Lessons still incomplete.
Others will write the final verdict.
francis cameron, oxford, 2 june 2012
2012 june 02
Oxford has many trees but few statues. The trees are evident almost everywhere. What statues there are, are placed high up in classical manner on the edges of roofs and pediments. I have yet to find a monumental statue of the kind often seen in other cities. Even the image of Queen Victoria is notably absent. I wonder why.
Si monumentum requiris. That may be the answer. Oxford itself is its own monument. And monuments within monuments.
The greatness of Oxford is in its scholarship. And scholarship is not well portrayed on a plinth. Save when both plinth and scholarship lie within the womb of imagination.
But then Oxford is Town as well as Gown. And Town seems not to have to have indulged in a taste for statuary. Its monuments lie in modest commerce. And an ebullient Town Hall.
The railways were kept away. The central roads are an unsolved problem. Cornmarket and Queen Street. Thronged. The Broad and The High – less so.
Pause for contemplation ..
francis cameron, oxford, 2 june 2012