The Christian church year begins on the first Sunday of Advent, which falls either in late November or early December. Many traditions mark the occasion with festive pomp as befits a New Year celebration: organ fireworks; choral exclamations; trumpet blasts and timpani thunder. After these joyous outbursts, the ensuing weeks before Christmas were generally a penitential period, often forbidding elaborate music during the liturgy.
Devil capitalism has long since put paid to such pious restraint. Now Advent contends with Black Friday, metastasizing even as I write into full-blown seasonhood. Against its dark advances, even Cyber Monday seems fragile, cloaked in mysticism, a relic of the distant past of 2005.
But human rituals—partly ancient, partly reinvented—hold out against the madness, as at the Advent Carol Service of Trinity College, Cambridge, sixty miles north of central London. Paradoxically, it is in this Disney-esque dreamworld that the real retains its power.
One of many magical moments in the service comes after the organ has concluded its lengthy, multi-part prelude—this year a mini-recital of Advent masterpieces from J. S. Bach. The electric lights are then dimmed and candles are passed down the long, raked stalls that run the length of the chapel. Each congregant lights the candle in holders in the pew in front of them. In slow crescendo, the chapel illuminates, glowing and shimmering as it did after dark when it was built nearly five hundred years ago.
Only two artificial lights remain: one up at the console of the organ that sits on the rood screen dividing the chapel from the ante-chapel; the other just below the organ, a green exit sign with its white arrow and running man. This compulsory blemish appeases the law if not logic. Since everyone entered through that door, one would think that they’d try to exit from it too in case of an emergency. There must be another little white man against a green background at the far end of the chapel, too, but I couldn’t see it from my perch.
The chapel is a palimpsest: 19th-century Pre-Raphaelite stained-glass windows set in 16th-century stone, keeping company with America-born Benjamin West’s 18th-century altarpiece that depicts St. Michael trampling on Satan and about to finish him off with a sharp lance. The organ pipes from the 1970s are housed in woodwork from around 1700.
Sung by the fabulous, compelling choir of undergraduates, the linguistic, chronological, and stylistic diversity of the service’s choral anthems complemented and conversed with these many-layered architectural surroundings, muted and moody in the candlelight. Abetted at dramatic moments by organ, timpani, and descants, the hymns were sung with gusto by the congregation; these carols intermixed with scriptural passages read by a succession of students and faculty.
I had gotten a much-sought-after ticket of admission thanks to a fellow—i.e., faculty member—of the college. Fellow does not now mean male, though it did up until the election of the first woman to the Trinity in 1977, the year before female undergraduates were admitted to the college. My host was the first female fellow in the sciences. Trinity is renowned for its scientists. In the ante-chapel, statues of 17th-century polymaths Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, both former fellows, don’t so much welcome visitors as literally and figuratively look down on them. Tennyson is also there, along with a few other Great Minds: all white men, indeed far whiter than they ever were during their jaundiced, dietary-supplement-free lives, since they have been carved in marble of Apollonian brightness.
We came in by car from the fellow’s house in a village on the Fens, the former marshlands of East Anglia drained by the Romans in the pre-Christian era and Dutchmen a millennium and so later. The flat, treeless farmscape dotted by the towers of churches and scissored by power lines is increasingly encroached upon by business parks and population pressures that push outward from the science-centric university. Fellows and heads of colleges speak enthusiastically of High-Tech Fens. What the English lovingly call “the countryside” is inexorably being paved over by the forces of progress that Newton and Bacon set in motion four centuries ago. An apple drops next to little Isaac and the next thing you know, you’ve got legions of jerkined robots espaliering vast tracts of GMO Granny Smiths in the shadow of glassy Google office blocks peopled by robot-nerds decked out in Casual Friday finery every day of the week and weekend.
In a big Audi moving at significant speeds, the fellow motored into town from her satellite village. She eased her car through the intricate wrought-iron gate that initially allowed slenderer carriages to pass through towards Trinity. That opening barely admits Bavarian muscle cars. Safely onto college property, she proceeded slowly down the tree-lined avenue over the meadows along the River Cam and towards the uplit spires and parapets ahead. The so-called Backs present a pastoral landscape in the middle of the city and on these fields the richest colleges graze their livestock for picturesque effect and as a symbol of their wealth and power. It will be a long, long time before Trinity goes vegetarian, throws open—or is made to throw open—its pastures for free public camping and recreation, community vegetable gardens, and collaborative composting. There is a housing crisis in this country, though the Hereford cattle grazing of a misty morn on the Trinity Backs don’t seem overly concerned about it.
We continued down the avenue past mantled groups walking single file towards the portal into the first of many courtyards. The fellow deftly pulled past them and through the archway into the first enclosure, and the Audi glided into a parking place below Tudor-Gothic crenellations—19th-century retro, rather than the “real” thing, whatever that is. We made our way through the ensemble of buildings to the Great Court, said to be the biggest courtyard in Europe. Or is it the world?
The chapel forms one side of the square. A long line of soon-to-be caroling congregants extended towards the front gate of the college. We skirted the queue and I followed my host through the special fellows’ doorway as the organ began to play Bach.
Trinity was founded in the 16th century by Henry VIII. I haven’t heard folks at, nor fellows of, the college apologize for the crimes of the founder, a maniac and murderer. But then our own aristos and would-be royals, including many Robber Barons and at least one Duke, have avoided posthumous asterisks by their names on charters, sweatshirts, and college coats of arms. Down on Tobacco Row, that asterisk would acknowledge that the Duke’s philanthropic dollars were extracted from his lethal cigarettes and the countless deaths that came with the profits. There’s a reason that Duke University’s chapel, also a site of uplifting music through of the quantity and quality of Trinity’s, was done in Campus Gothic. The ersatz medieval cathedral is not yet even a hundred years old, but its architecture is meant to embody timeless truth and selfless scholastic values. If those ducal stones could cough or the ghosts of the Tudor Terror could scream, you wouldn’t be able to make out a note from the choir or organ, whether down on Tobacco Row or along the banks of the Cam.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
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