I'm a member of a small group of singers. There are just twenty of us, and we sing 'a capella' music. This means that we sing without any form of musical accompaniment. We did a concert recently entitled 'The Four Elements': a number of short pieces which were based on the themes of Earth, Air, Fire or Water, interspersed with poems on the same subjects. The most important pieces we sang were Gorecki's Szeroka Woda (Broad Waters) and Lauridsen's Fire Madrigals.

Gorecki's name, for any of you who don't speak Polish, is pronounced Goretsky. People not speaking Polish included not only all the singers, but also apparently everyone in the audience, so we have no idea how well we succeeded with our pronunciation. Polish is quite a tricky language to pronounce, with consonant clusters such as stkwie and wkrótce. The Broad Waters set of songs is very slow with very simple harmonies. It is hypnotic in its repetition of phrases and many people in the audience felt that not understanding the words at all meant they could sit back and be entranced by the music.

The Lauridsen Fire Madrigals are six songs written in Renaissance Italian on the subject of someone losing their loved one. The Fire in question is the passion of love. These have been set to music by a modern composer in a modern style. Lauridsen's method has been described as 'write a harmonious chord and then stick in an extra note that clashes'. That sounds bad, but the effect is breathtaking. Nevertheless, the pieces are very tricky to sing, and we could have done with a little more rehearsal of them. It wouldn't surprise me if we sing them again some time soon.

The poems were a great mix of different styles, suggested and chosen by the members of the choir. They ranged from serious ones such as Walt Whitman's 'Song for All Seas, All Ships' to comic ones such as Hilaire Belloc's 'Matilda, Who Told Lies and Was Burned to Death' or Pam Ayres' 'Global Warming'.

After the concert, performers and audience gathered outside on the terrace for a glass of wine; it was a beautiful warm, dry evening and the perfect way to end a demanding performance.

The idea of there being four elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water, is an old one. It certainly goes back thousands of years, at least to the time of the Ancient Greeks. The theory was that all matter is made up of these four elements in different quantities. So for example, a loaf of bread will have a large amount of earth in it, a small amount of water, and a small amount of fire, since fire is used in baking the bread. This is a mystical theory rather than a scientific one, in that it doesn't make any predictions that can be tested. The Greek philosopher Plato was fascinated by certain geometrical shapes which are called regular polyhedrons, so much so that they are now often known as the 'Platonic solids'. These include the familiar cube, the tetrahedron which is like a triangular pyramid, and more complicated ones such as the dodecahedron. The strange thing about them is that there are only five such solids. Plato devised a wonderful geometrical theory which linked the five solids to the five known planets of the day: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. He also wanted to link the solids to the elements, but he had a problem that there were five solids and only four elements, so he invented a new element, spirit, to make his theory complete.

Saint Spyridon, a wise man of the early Christian church, is supposed to have demonstrated the principle of the Trinity of God (three people but only one God) by demonstrating that a broken piece of pottery (known as a 'sherd') was composed of three elements, earth, water and fire, but that the three elements made up just one pot. Spyridon performed a miracle, causing the sherd of pottery to be separated into the three constituent elements. Perhaps the tale has been improved with age - in the original, he may have just talked about the three elements in the pot.

Spyridon had an interesting history - most of it after he died. He was buried in Cyprus where he had lived, but when the Arabs conquered the island, Christians dug him up and brought the body to Constantinople, which was the capital of the (Byzantine) Empire at the time. The body had not decayed, which was taken to be a sign of his extreme holiness. In the 15th Century, the Byzantine Empire was conquered by the Turks - once again Spyridon was moved, this time to the island of Corfu, which at the time was under Venetian control and unlikely to be conquered by the Turks. The body was laid in an open-topped coffin in a church in the capital, and it is still there to this day. The church is known as the Church of Saint Spyridon and it is the most important church on the island. Visitors and pilgrims alike queue up to see the body of the saint, which still rests in its coffin in the side chapel to the right of the main altar. Nowadays, the coffin is no longer quite open-topped. There is a sheet of glass to protect the remains from damage, but on certain days the glass is removed and believers flock to kiss the feet of the saint's holy body. Once or twice a year on special holy days, the body is removed from the church and carried around the streets of Corfu Town. Rumour has it that the corpse also occasionally walks around the town at night, of its own accord, and the saint has been sighted by believers in various places around Corfu. He is the patron saint of the island and various miracles have been attributed to him over the years. The first name 'Spiro', a shortened form of the saint's name, is still very popular among boys on the island.

Gnomon

03.07.08

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