Virginalists Poem by Michael Maxwell Steer

Throu drafty stone-arched corridors this music
reaches us, fresh as the smell of cooking;
soundtrack for an age of thoughtless faith
(when the fabulous bestiaries of gargoyle and
misericord were still alive)to give us
a snapshot of skilled yet credulous minds
adapting primitive technology, and driving
forward amazing cultural innovation
within the boundaries of a feudal mindset.

Tallis looks up at us from the keyboard, a lusty
bright-eyed man in coarse apparel
amazing his friends with daring improvisations.
Yet somehow his music is always autumnal,
a tinge of melancholy overhanging this
faithful servant of those slow revolving
liturgies of a departing certainty.

Bull, by contrast, (a child of the new age of Dee and
Fludde, a naked individualist
unafraid to challenge laws of God and man)
has all the quality of stormy March.
I sense a gimlet-eyed determination
to satisfy both curiosity
and lust, to whom the title virginalist
was both a challenge and an accolade.

Byrd, tho cut from similar material,
is nonetheless of quite a different hue.
His music breathes the ambience of a courtier
who by shrewd moves treads the dance of power,
and always smiling, neatly bates his step
to parry and block a rival's gambit.
Here in this sunlit music we hear a supreme
craftsman, delighting with nimble and sardonic
wit to obey and disobey convention -
challenging us to catch him cross the line …
astutely negotiating the perilous passage
to a new world, while his heart remains
forever in the old, mourning with fervent
grief the end of an age where prayer had meaning.

Lastly on this dusty carousel
we see Orlando Gibbons by whose memorial
I wandered as a Canterbury boy.
In an age of gulls and ganymedes
he was indeed a silver swan whose song,
arising beneath a misty springtime sun,
was sweet but all too short, matching the fustian
courtesies of Charles's doomed romantics,
yet whose notes ring clear above the melée,
as a chorister's ascending descant
hangs in the air beyond the music's cadence.


05/04/2