November is a magnificent month. The low sun silvers the heavens, the tall trees adopt a menacing mien, and darkness comes early.
When I was younger I thought it was the best month to be in Dublin. I liked how the street lights were reflected on the damp streets and the cold prompted you to turn up your collar as you made your way to a Victorian pub where, in a snug if you were lucky, you could find early evening company and indulge in a few pints of the capital city’s great contribution to the gastronomic heritage of the world.
Quite why it was such a satisfying time in the Dublin year was something I thought involved a number of ingredients, among which was the contrast between the warm amber of the pub and the black and white cold outside, the comfort of being in a city, and the atavistic idea that another year has been bested, the metaphorical harvest was in, and there was little reason to fear the coming winter. Persephone might take up residence in Hades, Demeter, in her anguish, might allow the earth to become temporarily barren, but you had company, some cheese and onion crisps, and enough money to stand your round. Smug in the snug.
I was obviously not the first person to think like this. Samhain, November in Irish, can be translated as the post-harvest coming of the winter. It was a time when the Celts believed the veil between the living and the dead was less substantial than when the gathered apples were still hanging from the trees. But it is also a word for a festival. That mix feels about right to me.
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Back when I was more given to early evening pints than I am these days, HMV had a shop on Grafton Street, where the Massimo Dutti clothes shop is now. There were two floors given over to vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, etc, with the front half of the first floor, looking out on to Grafton Street, devoted to classical music.
A glass wall and glass doors separated this part of the shop from the rest of the first floor and when you closed the door behind you, you moved from the beat of the pop music playing in the rest of the shop, to the calmer atmosphere of the glassed-in section. It had a bit of an oasis quality to it, much like a Victorian pub on a November afternoon.
I was there one morning in what must have been 1994, around this time of year, when the music playing over the sound system made me stop and listen. It was different from anything I’d heard before and it seemed to go with the time of the year in the way a gourmet might feel a particular wine goes with a favourite dish.
There was a friendly young man behind the counter who, when I asked him what the music was, gave me the information asked for, and commented that it was nice winter music. I thought he was right then, and I still do.
The recording, Officium, by jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek and the British male vocal quartet, the Hilliard Ensemble, was made in a monastery in Austria in 1993 and the fifteen tracks comprise liturgical songs or chants from centuries ago, and Gabarek’s responses to them.
The songs are in Latin and have names like Parce Mihi Domine (Spare Me Lord) and Pulcherrima Rosa (the Most Beautiful Rose). It’s easy, when listening to the music, to imagine monks in some cold, stone monastery facing into the coming winter and finding within themselves the urge to sing.
Ever since I first encountered the recording, I remember it around this time of year and take it out for a spin. I’m sure I’m not the only one. It was a huge hit, selling over a million copies.
Recently, for work reasons, I found myself in border, drumlin country, driving on a narrow, hugely uneven road barely the width of the car, with flooded fields and flooded patches of wood on either side.
The sun was low, the sky was grey or mauve or silver, or a mix of all those colours, and the autumn light was reflected in the still waters of the flooded land. It was just gorgeous.
And it reminded me of Officium, and liturgical chant echoing down Europe’s centuries, and Jan Garbarek wrenching from his saxophone the sound of the mothballed earth.
There wasn’t a sinner, or a cow, or a horse, to be seen, and it would be hard to think of a location more different from a cosy Dublin pub. But I was glad I was there in November. The years pass and our tastes change.
