June 4th, 2004

You’ve Been Blogged

I received an email from a colleague recently telling me that I had been blogged. Fame at last…

The blogging related to my recent commencement address at Richard Stockton College. I had been elected the President of the Faculty Assembly in the spring, and immediately it had been sprung on me that I would be required to address the students on behalf of the faculty at Commencement. I was more than a little freaked by the idea of doing this. It wasn’t merely the idea of speaking in front of several thousand people twice in one day (if your speech goes down like a lead balloon, you still have to do it again), it was also the fact that I only had a couple of weeks to prepare and had no time available to devote to doing so.

In my passing thoughts on the coming speech, I decided that I should focus on the faculty-student relationship and that I should mention some of my colleagues who have been doing research that benefits the college and the students in so many ways. A starting point also came to me – something I always find crucial for any essay, whether it is a title, a phrase, or an idea – so I knew it would probably go fine. My idea was to focus on the fact that I would feel out of place at this ceremony, feeling certain that I would feel this way because the only other time I had ever been to a ceremony like this (the previous year’s college commencement) I had felt decidedly strange.

This feeling had come to me in that previous ceremony when I heard Edward Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance”, which, as far as I know, is played at every commencement. I remembered this music from my youth, having played it hundreds of time on the cello in the school orchestra, and hearing its words, penned by Arthur C. Benson, sung frequently:

Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free,

How shall we extol thee, who are born of thee?

Wider still, and wider, shall thy bounds be set;

God, who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet!

Of course, when we were young we had generally changed the words around, so that we were singing about soap suds, dope and gory, and so on.

Growing up in a Quaker family, such sentiments as those associated with this song were very much frowned upon. And yet, Elgar and his music were much enjoyed, I seem to recall. This was particularly the case because Elgar happened to live close to the private school I was sent away to in the Malvern Hills. Perhaps to deal with this disjuncture of love and hate of Elgar and all that he stood for, I got it into my head that Elgar himself had hated the words that were attached to his song. I believe that I was informed of such, though I associate the idea also with Ken Russell’s film on Edward Elgar, but I am not sure why (I need to see that film again). But it turns out that Elgar himself worked quite closely with the poet who provided the words for “Land of Hope and Glory”, and so did not disapprove of them. However, it may be that he became so identified with “Land of Hope and Glory”, that his other work tended to be overlooked – and he came to resent this.

But this wasn’t quite the message I wanted to get across in my speech. Wanting to say something about our current political predicament, without beating people over the head with a full-blown anti-war speech, I suggested that an interesting piece of music had been reduced to pompous circumstance and imperialism, and that Elgar would have much preferred the appropriation of his music for the ceremony we were then witnessing – one about completion and renewal (thinking “The Four Quartets” – at our ending we shall find our beginning, commencement, and so forth).

It also seemed to me that the music in “Pomp and Circumstance” and the larger work, “The Enigma Variations”, was full of sadness. Now this maybe just me, resulting from the fact that it takes me back to my childhood, the Malvern Hills, and brings on a hefty dose of nostalgia. But if it is this (and the music is very romantic), it isn’t nostalgia for the empire I never inherited. This begs an interesting question: to what degree are the things that we remember nostalgically also wrapped up in and connected to those things that we struggle hard to avoid remembering in the same way. The “world we have lost”, after all, is very much the same old world that we have now. But I digress.

Well, the speech passed off without any major hitch; though standing at the podium with only four of the five pages of my text, requiring me to tie up all the loose ends from memory, could be described as a major hitch. But I survived.

It turns out, though, that a friend of a member of the faculty, Dr Jill Walker, from the Department of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen, was attending the ceremony, and she wrote an entry about it for her own web blog. This blog provides quite an interesting read in its own right. Many of the comments on it are anti-Bush and opposed to the war, so she responded favorably to my words, especially as she seemed to have been experiencing her own sense of the foreigner’s incomprehension in face of the display. But after the ceremony was over, she did proceed to look up Elgar on the BBC’s website, and noted what she found in her blog entry.

(This can be found at: http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/archives/world/other_countries_ceremonies.html)

What we learn from the blog, if the Auntie Beeb is to be believed (and I tend to do so in contrast to, say, believing in what Anthony Orwell [aka Tony “the half a beeb” Blair] passes along in his big brotherly fashion), is that Elgar was a raging imperialist himself. Indeed, we will get little assistance from mining his biography if we want to use him as the artistic counterpoint to the more materialistic impulses that lead towards empire and war.

As Jill said, “Whatever!” But I am still curious about the origin of my earlier reading of the composer and his work.

© Rob Gregg, 2004