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Services this Week
Tuesdays & Thursdays
12.15pm Lunchtime Eucharist
Sunday 28th June Trinity 4
10.30am Choral Eucharist (The Sanctuary Choir)Address: Revd Alan Ramsey
5pm Choral Eucharist (with the University Church Choir) Address: Canon Brian Mountford Readings: Psalm 66, Jeremiah 11.1-14, Gal 1.13 - 2.8 Responses: Ayleward Canticles: Tallis, The Short Service Anthem: Tallis, A New Commandment
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| | On Sunday, we will be joined by singers from the Sanctuary Choir, Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church, Dallas, Texas who will sing during the service.
The singers represent almost half the volunteer membership of the Sanctuary Choir. The choir sings for two services each Sunday and present concerts with orchestra throughout the year. The choir has actively commissioned many new sacred choral works over the past fifteen years. They have commissioned anthems from Bob Chilcott, Ola Gjeilo, Mack Wilberg, Paul Leddington Wright, Hal Hopson and from Emmy Award-winning composers Gary Fry and Anthony DiLorenzo. The Sanctuary Choir has also commissioned several major works for choir and orchestra, including John Rutter’s most recent piece: “The Gift of Life – Six Canticles of Creation.” The Sanctuary Choir sang the premiere performance with Mr. Rutter at Preston Hollow in April. The choir joined with the Bach Choir of Oxford to co-commission Bob Chilcott’s ‘Requiem’. Their director, Terry Price, will retire at the end of July following 46 years of directing church choirs.
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Forthcoming Events
The Moot - Tuesday 30th June, 7pm - Worcester College Gardens The next meeting of The Moot will be on Tuesday 30th June. We are hoping to enjoy a beautiful summer's evening in Worcester College gardens, so we will be meeting at the slightly earlier time of 7pm. Our speaker is the Rev'd Dr Jonathan Arnold, Senior Research Fellow and Chaplain at Worcester College. He has recently published a book entitled 'Sacred Music in Secular Society' and he will be leading us in a discussion on the links between theology and music. |
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Forthcoming Concerts Oxford Sinfonia, Saturday 27th June, 8pm Mozart, Stravinsky, Schubert Tickets: £15/£12 from Oxford Playhouse or on the door.
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| We are looking for people to help with moving the altar on weekend mornings for approximately 1 hour. We would provide payment of £20. Please send an email to the office, at universitychurch@ox.ac.uk |
| | Poetry corner
William Carlos Williams, "The Dance"
In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess
1944
24th June is the feast day of St John the Baptist. This day, in 1372, saw an odd, unsettling event: an outbreak of dancing mania in the German village of Aachen. Up to a thousand citizens were affected; they danced crazily, uncontrollably, until their legs gave way and they collapsed from exhaustion. It is suggested that this was an example of public hysteria, or possibly the effects of ergotism affecting local crops of rye.
Interestingly, Pieter Brueghel the Elder witnessed one such a dancing mania in Flanders in 1564; studies he made from life were later used by his son, Brueghel the Younger, to inform his painting The Kermesse. ‘Kermesse’ is a Dutch term derived from ‘kirk’ (church) and ‘mass’, a celebratory feast held traditionally in the Low Countries.
And now, to the poem. William Carlos Williams, one of the Imagist poets of the early twentieth century, captures the wild, celebratory Breughel dance scene in his 1944 poem, “The Dance”. Mimesis is important in this poem, as well as its ambiguity: the fiddles, as well as the dancers, tip “their bellies (round as the thick- / sided glasses…)” The dancer equals musical instrument as much as beery tankard.
The dancers whizz away, dispensing impatiently with punctuation, jigging madly over line-breaks; but it is nonetheless a precise poem – the dancers “go round, they go round and / around”. That is, they are both themselves rounded, and going around each other, mindful of the others’ peculiar orbits. Perhaps we can see the poem performing the same politeness to Brueghel’s image.
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