Eye - 02 February 2024
From Sing a song of Swann to On this day
Sing a song of Swann
Rosemary Mathew, of Cambridge Jesus Lane Meeting, popped this piccy in the Eye mailbag after spying a Quaker mention somewhere she hadn’t expected.
She writes: ‘This photo is of part of a small exhibition about Donald Swann in the Music Department at the [Cambridge] University Library, to celebrate 100 years since his birth in 1923. It includes the scores of some of the religious songs he wrote, as well as, of course, his famous musical partnership with Michael Flanders. I mention it as there might be others who, like me, had no idea he was a Quaker.’
Flanders and Swann’s comedy classics – including their famed animal songs featuring gnus, hippos, and armadillos to mention just a few – were the product of a partnership between Donald Swann as composer and pianist, and Michael Flanders as a lyricist, actor and singer.
On the website maintained by his estate, it says: ‘As a convinced pacifist with a life-long quest of religious faith and doubt, he switched from his earlier Anglicanism and found a spiritual home under the tolerant umbrella of the Quakers. Donald registered as a conscientious objector and served with the FAU (Friends’ Ambulance Unit) in Egypt, Palestine and, more importantly, in Greece whose music and culture became a life-long passion and influence.’
But this pacifism permeated his musical work too. Florence Lockheart, in an article on www.classical-music.uk, interviews Clare Stevens about the impact a requiem that Donald Swann composed had on her when she first heard it in 1970s Belfast.
The piece was prompted by a rare hearing of Swann’s ‘Requiem for the Living’, performed in October 2023 by the Gloucester Choral Society: ‘Published in 1962, it is a setting of texts by C Day Lewis. Written around the time of the first Aldermaston March against nuclear weapons, which took place in 1958, the poem reinterprets the liturgical Requiem Mass as a vivid plea for mankind to abolish nuclear weapons and respect the beauty of the world.’
Courtesy of Rosemary Mathew
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