Levity and levitation
Robin Holloway
Hard on the climactic goal of the academic year — exams, marking them, eager students clustering round the noticeboards outside the Senate House to find their place on the class-list, boozy parties — come more rarefied university rituals. Within the Senate House a select congregation witnesses honorary degrees conferred upon a chosen few from the world's great and good, with Latin oration, choir and organ, a burst of trumpets as the doors open and the doctored emerge, deafened and dazzled by the bright air, flags and bells and the gaudy scarlet gowns.
Last Monday this annual festivity was bizarrely enhanced by a small if vociferous protest. Banners saying 'Cambridge University Shames Our Lovely City' were displayed, shrill voices disseminated incoherent tirades from adjacent loudspeakers, bold dissidents in chimpanzee costumes jerked and gibbered as the Duke of Edinburgh, preceded by Dickensian beadle with silver mace, followed by pretty pageboy got up as Cherubino, led the bemused procession through the gate and down King's Parade. I and my boss in the music faculty trailed along in the rear, followed by more monkeys, while stolid East Anglian police kept the indifferent passers-by in their place. Our aim was to greet just-dubbed John Adams, reputedly the most performed living composer, taking a few hours out of a busy rehearsal in London for his Christmas oratorio El Nino to be honoured in our Lovely City. Once past the posse of porters (as bad as at an airport), we headed for the musician as he conversed with his lookalike, one of the leaders of the Human Genome project, who'd also been doctored.
Lively, unpretentious, humorous, Dr Adams was not fazed by it all and proved delightful to chat with. He took in his stride my facetious suggestion that the demo, rather than animal rights, should have protested at the repetitive strain injury induced in orchestral players by his earliest minimalist triumphs, as hard on the bowing-arm as they are easy on the listener: 'Aw, I was very young when I wrote that!' The hope that after Nixon in China and Klinghoffer he would do another brilliant zeitoper about Clinton and Monica (I leave its title to the readers' imagination) was evaded with grace and patience. I left him and his wife to sweat it out under the royal glare in the lunch marquee, a feeling of pleasure radiating from a composer who gets such fun from his professional life.
Four days later came an utterly different occasion, tucked away (though not closed to the public) in the Provost's Garden at King's, where a slightly sheepish huddle of distinguished academics sat at the front of a little throng of spectators, apprehensively awaiting their fate. For what confronted us (I and my boss were again included) appeared to be a sort of scaffold. And its actual function wasn't much less daunting: being deemed to have helped in whatever field to allay the weight of the burden borne by a groaning planet, we were ourselves, in a ceremony quaintly entitled 'Lifting the World with a Oneness-Heart', to be weighed in the balance and (hopefully) be found not wanting. Under the apparatus sat a humanitarian Guru swathed in shimmery light blue satin, eyes wide shut, improvising a wandering monody on a sort of Bengali viola da gamba. To his left were ranged some of his paintings: to his right a small but fervent chorus stood tirelessly at the ready to hail each recipient in words and music of his own composing.
The initial tendency to snicker was greatly increased by a tacky video showing the sage in close encounters with some of the usuals — Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, the Pope etc. After this the gathering subsided into uneasy silence. The Provost of King's, followed by his wife, were invited to ascend; their weight in pounds was ungallantly displayed: the Guru, eyes still closed, exerted muscle physical and spiritual — and behold, the platform bearing the human booty rose a couple of inches as the chorus, faces strained with superhuman uplift, sang a lilting jingle whose ingenuousness makes Adams seem quite Boulezian, to hold the elevated moment. Down to earth, each honorand in turn was presented at the foot of the scaffold with a large, somewhat vulgar medallion, hung round our neck on its rainbow-ribbon of peace by Sri Chinmoy himself, eyes open now, and bearing an expression of benevolence at the other end of the gamut from Prince Philip's royal glare.
Easy enough to find all this, albeit touching, perfectly absurd. I can't vouch for any save one of my colleagues in agreeing that never for a moment did one 'leave behind the limitations of the mind' to enter 'an experience of inner peace in the calm beauty of our own inner being'. On the contrary, defensive facetiousness is stretched to the limit; glinting irony and satirical mischief take over; the only thing heightened is the sense of one's consciousness as hopelessly and for ever fragmented, double-edged. devious, distractable, dirty-minded. Anything but weightless! (Perhaps a minimalist composer would do better?)
And yet .. . The little poem that came with the initial handout — without its tune, alas, no doubt as elegant melodically as the text is metrically subtle — surely says in its fashion something true:
Music knows no frontiers.
It is free all-where.
Its contribution to emotional integration. Human and divine.
Can never he fathomed.
'That was a way of putting it,' as Eliot said (but not of putting it down).
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