Advent Antiphons - White as Snow

And so Advent begins. This afternoon we sang the wonderful carol 'O Come, O Come Emmanuel' which is in turn based on the traditioanal 'O Antiphons.'

The O Antiphons are Magnificat Antiphons used at Vespers of the last seven days of Advent.
Each antiphon is a name of Christ, one of his attributes mentioned in Scripture. They are:
• December 17: O Sapientia (O Wisdom)
• December 18: O Adonai (O Adonai)
• December 19: O Radix Jesse (O Root of Jesse)
• December 20: O Clavis David (O Key of David)
• December 21: O Oriens (O Dayspring)
• December 22: O Rex Gentium (O King of the nations)
• December 23: O Emmanuel (O Emmanuel)

The importance of the "O Antiphons" is twofold. First, each one is a title for the Messiah. Secondly, each one refers to the prophesy of Isaiah of the coming of the Messiah. It's one of my fave hymns of all time. It took me back also to a song by U2 called 'White as Snow' on their 'No Line on the Horizon' cd. The melody of the song echoes the melody of the hymn we sung today.

A quick google search found an article that I remember reading on The Guardian Music Blog
which I copy below:

When I interviewed Bono in Dublin back in January, as part of my marathon tracking of the new U2 album, No Line On the Horizon, for Sunday's Observer Music Monthly, he described it as "essentially a big fat rock album". The most dramatic exception is a track called White As Snow, the quietest, most intimate, and arguably most arresting song that U2 have ever made.

"There are a couple of songs from the point of view of an active soldier in Afghanistan," Bono told me back in June 2008, at the group's Hanover Quay studio in Dublin, during a break in recording, "and one of them, White As Snow, lasts the length of time it takes him to die".

Of all the character songs on the album, White As Snow is the most moving. Much of this is to do with its sense of quietude – not a mood one normally associates with U2. The song is almost ambient in its musical pulse, suggesting the presence of Daniel Lanois and Brian Eno, and Bono's voice sounds markedly different here, more restrained, more plaintive, the emotion suggested rather than strained for.

The song's melody is based on an old hymn, Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel, that, according to The Handbook to the Lutheran Hymnal, was composed by "an unknown author, circa 1100". (Surprisingly, the original has been faithfully covered by both Sufjan Stevens and Belle & Sebastian and, less surprisingly, by Enya and 2006's BBC Young Chorister of the Year, William Dutton).

The idea of a song based on the dying thoughts of a soldier initially came to Bono after he read William Golding's ambitious novel, Pincher Martin, which is told from the point of view of a British sailor who appears to have survived the torpedoing of his ship. As he approaches death, his thoughts roam back over his life, and the moral choices he made or avoided. (The novel's denouement, though, suggests that the soldier died at the moment his ship went down and that the preceding narrative recounts his soul's struggle to stay in the material world.)

After watching Sam Mendes's film, Jarhead, Bono decided the song should evoke the thoughts of a soldier dying from a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. Intriguingly, you don't really need to know the context for the song to work. It stands alone. Initially, I had assumed it was sung in the voice of a young Middle Eastern man who had been driven into exile, but there you go.

I am not typically taken with songs that require prior knowledge or context to be fully appreciated. I remember interviewing Elvis Costello on the release of his dense and difficult album, Spike, and being baffled even more by his explanations of the songs than the songs themselves. Springsteen, on the other hand – and, in particular, Springsteen the quiet balladeer – is a master of setting and context: "My name is Joe Roberts, I work for the state, I'm a sergeant out in Perrineville, Barracks number 8" . There is something about writing in character – putting yourself in someone else's place and seeing the world though someone else's eyes – that requires a certain craft and economy for that shift in perspective to be credible.

"We were going to start White As Snow with an explosion," recalled Bono. "An early version had this industrial noise that sounded like the aftermath of a bomb." Now, that would have been one way of getting around the problem of context. It may have worked, too, but the song is fine the way it is, unadorned, evocative, suggestive. You don't have to know what it's about to feel its quiet power or sense its sadness. "It's kind of pastoral,"
said Bono. It bodes well for the album that will follow No Line On the Horizon, which has, he says, "the idea of pilgrimage at its centre", and is made up of the "quieter, more meditative songs" that did not make it on to this one. "Intimacy is the new punk rock," Bono added, laughing. But is it the new stadium rock?

The 'O Antiphons' as special because, '...[i]n English as it is spoken in our communities, the vocative O is never used in the same way we see it here. Thankfully, liturgical language preserves a kind of impatient address for us with the O, opening our mouths and our eyes at the same time as we talk to a person. When we sing and pray, the O is followed often by the petition for someone to come and join us: O come, let us sing unto the Lord. O come, O come, Emmanuel. O come, all ye faithful. The O — and these Os — arranges our mouths and hopes around specific persons and special ends. We had not noticed before this year that in addition to bringing together Hebrew prophecies about the coming of the Christ Child, the antiphons include a substantial pre-Christmas wish-list. When we pray them, we ask — not always disguising our impatience very well — for instruction in the way of prudence; for redemption with an outstretched arm; for deliverance; for the release of prisoners out of the prison house; for enlightenment and for salvation. There is not a bicycle or toy train set in sight, nor a giftcard, nor clothing, nor even an iPod....' (that snippet is taken from here)

But perhaps they do sum up the hopes of a dying soldier or the longings of a war-torn and suffering world...



Where I came from there were no hills at all
The land was flat, the highway straight and wide
My brother and I would drive for hours
Like we had years instead of days
Our faces as pale as the dirty snow

Once I knew there was a love divine
Then came a time I thought it knew me not
Who can forgive forgiveness where forgiveness is not
Only the lamb as white as snow

And the water, it was icy
As it washed over me
And the moon shone above me

Now this dry ground, it bears no fruit at all
Only poppies laugh under the crescent moon
The road refuses strangers
The land, the seeds we sow
Where might we find the lamb as white as snow

As boys we would go hunting in the woods
To sleep the night shooting out the stars
Now the wolves are every passing stranger
Every face we cannot know
If only a heart could be as white as snow
If only a heart could be as white as snow

~~~~

For more on this, see my post last year on the O Antiphons here