gradus defined ..
Gradus, a word from the latin fourth declension. It can mean just one step and it can mean more than one step. For my present purposes I use gradus in the sense of a series of steps. Whether these are footsteps or whether like the treads of a staircase is for the moment of little concern. It can be taken as either – or both.
I’d like to begin at the beginning. But there is no beginning. The steps I describe in my present journey are but part of a much greater series. If all goes well, and in their proper place, I may recall former steps. For now, let me begin with a statement that makes a good deal of sense to me – and to many others who share awarenesses – though it may ring strange to those as yet unconvinced of the reality of existing as an immortal soul linked but temporarily with a mortal physical body, that physical body being the instrument through which the soul gains experience of external life.
I chose to be born in London to parents who were both practising Christian Spiritualists. They were psychics. Clairvoyants. Healers. My mother moved into deep trance, a medium for words of uttermost wisdom conveyed by spirits from far distant planes of understanding. My father, a fine speaker, initiated our séances. My parents were also lovers of music. And that is an important thread in my story.
francis cameron, oxford, 11 september 2011
with minimal revisions, 06 april 2012
Friday, 6 April 2012
05 december 1927 :: here beginneth
writing is magic <> music is witchcraft
writing is magic <> music is witchcraft
francis cameron, oxford, 06 april 2012
Thursday, 5 April 2012
gradus :: westminster 1959 to 1961
I expected it to be a terminus. I was mistaken. It was only a wayside halt.
My two years at Westminster Cathedral were not the happiest of my life. I made mistakes. And that was only partly because I was such a tender new Catholic.
My most crashingly awful mistake was to forget how good I was. I’d been appointed because of my demonstrable ability and experience. When I was asked – ‘commanded’ would be a better word - to conform to my predecessor’s methods I was too overawed to do anything but try my best to obey. It was a pretty hopeless task. My predecessor insisted his way with boys’ voices was set out in the standard textbooks. It wasn’t. So I struggled by trial and error until I discovered his method was the very opposite of traditional English practice. Nevertheless I persisted. Foolishly.
And then there were times when I sat in my office and lamented. ‘Bricks without straw.’ There was money to pay for the interior walls to be lined with marble up to gallery level. When the engines of the west end Grand Organ blew up, a cheque was ready to pay for repairs almost before the contract was signed. Money to pay for desperately needed additional choirmen? No way. The best that could be done was to allow for ad hoc hirings only when absolutely necessary. More practice time for the boys? Can’t be done. Their timetable is already full. I tried to work within those limits. I should have remonstrated. Resigned. Walked out and left them to it. I didn’t even think of it.
Those were musical matters. But the very nature of Catholicism countermanded my better judgement. I was on the verge of sacking a member of my staff for gross misconduct. Then at the morning mass I heard the words of the gospel for the day. It was the story of the disciple who asked how many times he should forgive his brother. Seven times? And the response came. Yea. And seventy times seven. How then could I sack the man? Perhaps that sowed a tiny seed of doubt in my mind. Were the teachings in the books of instruction compatible with real life in the outside world? In real life was it really possible to live by the precepts?
But it wasn’t all like that. We did make some glorious music together. Christopher Tye and Thomas Tallis and William Byrd as well as the obligatory Lassus and Palestrina. And I sang two complete annual cycles of the Gradualia and the Vesperale and few laymen outside the choristers of Westminster can claim that.
Old Self smiles indulgently. Little did Young Self know about the preChristian kalendar with its fixed point of the birth of the god at the Winter Solstice and the ever-moveable days and nights of the dance of the Equinoctial Sun with the Lady of the brilliant Full Moon. The Mystery of Reincarnation in the Springtime of the Year.
Finally. And it needs to be said kindly and generously. My time at Westminster was a catalyst. The cathedral didn’t change. It changed me. And my future.
And on the morning when the notice of my appointment appeared in The Times, the Principal of the Royal Academy of Music invited me to go and see him. Why should Sir Thomas Armstrong do that? Because I had been in his classes at Oxford University’s Faculty of Music.
/* Oh, alright, inner voices. Yes. I’ll write it down. Something about wheels grinding slowly. */
francis cameron, oxford, 05 april 2012
gradus :: london 1952 to 1959
It is the summer of 1952. I am 24 years old. I have a brand new Honours degree in Music from the University of Oxford. I am married. I am unemployed.
It is the summer of 1959. I am 31 years old. I have just been appointed to succeed George Malcolm as the Master of Music at Westminster (Roman Catholic) Cathedral.
If this were an examination question I would add one word. Discuss. It is more instructive to say Explain. And that’s what I am going to try to do. As much for my own satisfaction as for anyone else’s.
/* my inner voices keep on and on. Oh what a tangled web we weave! Now. I’ve written it down. Perhaps the voices will turn their attention elsewhere. To what really matters. To the main threads */
How did I get from ‘over qualified and unemployed in Harcourt Street’ to ‘the Master of Music’s rostrum in Westminster Cathedral’’?
And the first part of the answer to that is the thought that came to my mind in those very early days at Paddington Chapel. As I express it again now the wording may be slightly different but the import is the same. Sundays are special. We put on our Sunday Best and we go to church.
There was another thought that went with it – and I remember actually saying it my parents. Religion shouldn’t be something we put on with our best clothes and put aside when we take them off.
Old Self contributes another vital factor. Musically I was well prepared.
And another. That the religion I experienced in the family circle was often more perceptive than the religion I heard from the pulpit. Not always the most comfortable position to be in.
* * * * * * *
From the first time I played the harmonium for the Children’s Church in the basement of Paddington Chapel, I was no longer simply someone who put on their best clothes and went to church on Sunday. I was part of church music. Often out of sight. But always part of the platform. Singing on the Decani side of St Mary’s church choir was still part of that pattern. Playing the harmonium for Spiritualist services picked up the thread. The vivid anglo-catholicism of St Peter in Fulham made me aware of theatre. By contrast, morning assembly at Mercers’ was mundane. St Barnabas in Pimlico was the Oxford Movement in glorious preRaphaelite setting. We made good music together. The organ contributed to my Fellowship of the Royal College of Organists. The choir made possible my Choirmaster’s Diploma. St Mark in Marylebone eventually turned my feet toward the authority of Rome. And it was music for the Catholic liturgy that sang with each footstep.
But another pattern still ran alongside. This was the spirituality that came from my parents. The certainty of the reality of the Other Side. From the organ loft it seemed to me this certainty was by no means present in some of the services I played for. In others, the words of their prayers were offered up to a distant God scarcely apprehended. Anglo-Catholic churches tended to have a different feeling. The Real Presence was on the altar.
Old Self leans over with a reminder. The immortal soul experiences life through the intermediary of the physical body. We are both public persona and private insight. We are in the workaday world created around us and the world we create with our own inner senses. They cleave together like the strands of a double helix. Interdependent.
* * * * * * *
I go back and re-read the paragraphs I’ve just written. How did I get from there to here? I’d almost forgotten to mention the key in the ignition. It really was one of those significant moments. When I recall it I see myself sitting in a boy’s desk in a classroom – though the reality was nothing like that. The mental image is there to remind me that Young Self’s inner consideration took place on the premises of the Central Foundation (Boys’) Grammar School in Cowper Street.
>> IF you are going to stay in teaching THEN it’s time to start looking for a job as Director of Music in a comfortable Public School. IF you are NOT going to stay in teaching THEN it’s time to move on to something else. <<
It wasn’t by any means the sending out of a thought to achieve a desire. It was simply recognising a situation.
Be that as it may. Within days rather than weeks I opened my copy of The Times to see a display advertisement inviting applications to fill the impending vacancy of Master of Music at Westminster Cathedral. This was a job I could do. From then on it was up to me to pick up my cues. I did. Forwards and backwards. Backwards and forwards. And then one day there was the announcement of my appointment. On the Court Page of The Times. I had achieved an ambition I expressed when Sir Stanley Marchant interviewed me for admission as a student to the Royal Academy of Music. That was 1944.
francis cameron, oxford, 05 april 2012
Tuesday, 3 April 2012
slow down
norreys avenue, tuesday 3 may 2012
.. .. I have to keep reminding myself. This is supposed to be a week off while I complete the process of recharging my batteries. But I can’t help it. The autobiography has reached a very intriguing stage. I mentally explore possibilities. Should I expand on this? And what about that? Then there are some incidents which were nothing to write home about at the time but which had enormous consequences in the long run. The exercise of setting out the bare data of my employment in the years from 1952 to 1959 has shown me how complicated life could get when I had four part-time jobs with timetables which sometimes overlapped. Going into the details leaves me with the need to pick out the most significant threads. And it’s at that point I realise how some of the threads began life in earlier chapters, stayed dormant for a bit, and then came to the surface again years later. I begin to make a distinction between the jobs I did out of necessity and those which I did entirely by my own choice. And there’s plenty of food for thought there. More than one way of going forward.
francis cameron, oxford
Sunday, 1 April 2012
GBG
friday 30 march 2012
.. .. to the Atlantis Bookshop in London’s Museum Street for the launching of Philip Heselton’s long-awaited WITCHFATHER, a life of Gerald Gardner.
It’s now more than ten years since I first met Philip. We shared a platform in Boscastle at an annual meeting of the Friends of the Witchcraft Museum. I was a last minute replacement for someone else. Philip was already an established author and authority on Gerald Gardner and the roots of Wicca. I spoke much more generally on fifty years of legal witchcraft in England.
In the years since then we’ve often been at the same Pagan events in London and elsewhere. Both of us excited at finding new fragments of evidence to fill in some of the gaps in the story. Gaps which are there because some of the most vital witnesses were constrained to keep secret those things which are to be kept secret.
Philip has now gone a long long way to filling in many of those gaps. He is an assiduous researcher : visiting key sites; talking with those still alive who remember; and pouring over page after page of archival material. And when he writes there is an easy clarity of communication between him and his readers.
Wicca has developed grown and changed – sometimes almost beyond recognition – since that wonderful evening in September 1939 when GBG was carried off to Old Dorothy’s Mill House and there initiated into secrets of the religion he had thought long dead.
Thank you, Philip, for once again carrying the past into the future.
francis cameron
oxford