Two more titles from the Shelf Lives stable – both with a musical theme.
Gradual: A Renaissance chant book and its role in the Counter-Reformation was inspired by the authors’ discovery in a second hand bookshop of more than seventeen hundred pages of early printed plainchant and some manuscript pages. The printed pages were from an early edition of the Graduale Romanum printed by Jan Moretus at the Officina Plantiniana in Antwerp in 1598.
“While the Dutch War of Independence raged around Antwerp, the Plantin Press spared no expense in creating this important and influential work, dispatching copies throughout the Catholic world to keep the Divine Office alive, and to raise the spirits of the recusant faithful. Among these were the aristocratic Englishwomen who fled Elizabeth’s persecutions for the relative safety of the Spanish Netherlands, and founded a Benedictine convent in Brussels, under the abbacy of Dame Joanna Berkeley.” (Shelf Lives)
Julian Berkeley and Tony Scotland describe the meticulous restoration of their discovery and also the history of Gregorian Chant from its roots in the 9th century to the present day. As a bonus there is a wonderfully over the top description of a High Mass and Procession at St Wandrille, a Benedictine abbey, from Patrick Leigh Fermor’s, A Time to Keep Silence. I would not usually be sufficiently interested in these matters but as it is only sixty pages and rendered even shorter by many colour illustrations it captivated me.
Flèche: Brief Encounter with Stravinsky (75 pages, 2018) imagines a journey on 30th November 1934. Lennox Berkeley, Julian’s father, finds himself on the train with Igor Stravinsky and his entourage; the train being the Golden Arrow from Victoria to Dover; the TSS Canterbury, a first-class only passenger ferry from Dover to Calais: and the Flèche d’Or from Calais to Gard du Nord. It is first class all the way, leaving Victoria at 11.00 am and reaching Calais in time for a late lunch in the Wagon Restaurant on the Flèche d’Or. “The Wagon resembled a Parisian brasserie: an ornate ceiling, light cream walls and mahogany pillars, with delicate golden arrows running vertically up their flutings.” (Flèche) Stravinsky orders Écrevisses à la nage and Magret de caneton à la bordelaise and Berkeley, the perfect guest, has the same. They have a white burgundy with the crayfish and a 1926 Pichon Comtesse with the duck.
I very much enjoyed the description of the journey and of Stravinsky’s life but be aware there is quite high music content. However, like Gradual, it is short. Both books are beautifully illustrated, slim hardbacks: a Shelf Lives speciality.