#st.matthew passion

[rolflovesclassicalmusic]

Concert review, ★★★★, Florian Helgath, Zürcher Sing-Akademie, Orchestra La Scintilla Zürich, Jan Petryka, Milan Siljanov, Hannah Morrison, Anke Vondung, Konstantin Wolff @ KKL Lucerne, 2021-03-28 — Bach: St.Matthew Passion BWV 244 (recording performance for online streaming)

Blog post #571

[anastpaul]

Saint of the Day – 21 September – The Feast of St Matthew, Apostle and Evangelist, Martyr (born Levi) – Patronages – • accountants; bookkeepers• bankers• customs officers• financial officers; money managers• guards; security forces; security guards• stock brokers• tax collectors• diocese of Trier, Germany• archdiocese of Washington, DC• 5 cities.   Attributes – • angel holding a pen or inkwell• bag of coins• halberd• inkwell• king• lance • man holding money• money bag or box, purse• spear• sword• winged man• young man.

Saint Matthew, the first-century tax collector turned apostle who chronicled the life and ministry of Christ in his Gospel, is celebrated by the Church today, September 21. Although relatively little is known about the life of St Matthew, the account he wrote of Christ’s ministry – his Gospel was written in Aramaic, the language that our Lord Himself spoke and was written to convince the Jews that their anticipated Messiah had come in the person of Jesus.

The Gospel accounts of Mark and Luke, like Matthew’s own, describe the encounter between Jesus and Matthew under the surprising circumstances of Matthew’s tax-collecting duties.   Jewish publicans, who collected taxes on behalf of the Roman rulers of first-century Judea, were objects of scorn and even hatred among their own communities, since they worked on behalf of the occupying power and often earned their living by collecting more than the state’s due.

Jesus most likely first encountered Matthew near the house of Peter, in Capernaum near the Sea of Galilee.   The meeting of the two was dramatic, as Matthew’s third-person account in his Gospel captured:  “As Jesus passed on,” the ninth chapter recounts, “he saw a man named Matthew sitting at the customs post. He said to him, ‘Follow me’. And he got up and followed him.”

Matthew’s calling into Jesus’ inner circle was a dramatic gesture of the Messiah’s universal message and mission, causing some religious authorities of the Jewish community to wonder:  “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus’ significant response indicated a central purpose of his ministry:  “I did not come to call the just but sinners.”

A witness to Christ’s resurrection after death, as well as his ascension into heaven and the events of Pentecost, Matthew also recorded Jesus’ instruction for the apostles to “go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”

Like 11 of the 12 apostles, St. Matthew is traditionally thought to have died as a martyr while preaching the Gospel.   The Roman Martyrology describes his death as occurring in a territory near present-day Egypt.

Both the saint himself and his Gospel narrative, have inspired important works of religious art, ranging from the ornate illuminated pages of the Book of Kells in the ninth century, to the St Matthew Passion of J.S. Bach.   Three famous paintings of Caravaggio, depicting St. Matthew’s calling, inspiration and martyrdom, hang within the Contarelli Chapel in Rome’s Church of St Louis of the French.

Reflecting on St.Matthew’s calling, from the pursuit of dishonest financial gain to the heights of holiness and divine inspiration, Pope Benedict said in 2006 that “in the figure of Matthew, the Gospels present to us a true and proper paradox:  those who seem to be the farthest from holiness can even become a model of the acceptance of God’s mercy and offer a glimpse of its marvelous effects in their own lives.”

via AnaStpaul – Breathing Catholic)

[durinskhuzdul]

i can't draw and i can't make gif sets that are original or just remotely decent - i write fics but i am too shy to share them. the only good thing i can't do is writing essays and research. every time someone is making a fantastic and breathtaking fanart about something or someone i feel proud of them and happy for their talent and the happiness they put in what they love - but at the same time i'm still here with my essay on the etymology on who-knows-whose name and another essay in which i talk about the shade of color of their eyes and i make parallels with art techniques and pigments in nature and I DONT KNOW I AM WEIRD

for example sometimes i want to make something (a drawing, a video, i don't know) to show my support to matthew daddario and it doesn't matter if he doesn't see that I DO THIS TO FEEL USEFUL IN SOME WAY but i found myself translating st.matthew passion of Bach and it doesn't really MAKE SENSE BECAUSE IT'S ABOUT SAINT MATTHEW THEY ONLY SHARE A NAME - and my essay on the latin use of the name matheus and i translate latin poems and i'm like - yeaaaaah how about no

why am i like this

[musicazca]

Best Sellers in Vocal Non-Opera #1: ST.MATTHEW PASSION ~ Johann Sebastian Bach https://t.co/uUk1aXZx2H… https://t.co/CsTCfjhzGv

Best Sellers in Vocal Non-Opera #1: ST.MATTHEW PASSION ~ Johann Sebastian Bach https://t.co/uUk1aXZx2H #VocalNonOpera pic.twitter.com/FoR22VMpN8

— MusicAzCA.bot (@MusicAzCA) October 8, 2017

via Twitter https://twitter.com/MusicAzCA October 07, 2017 at 07:00PM

[lets-ethno-blog]

On a sunny Saturday Morning with a group of ethnomusicologists to be, this is because we are still students with a passion for ethnomusicology. We went to visit a town called Keiskamma Hoek in a small village that is known as St.Matthews. We went to a Xhosa community and more specifically to a man who calls himself a prophet and a traditional healer which is known as the leader of the community. As soon as we approached the community, we were accompanied by a group of old Xhosa women singing traditional Xhosa songs. Their music hits home. Thisi is because I also come from the Xhosa culture as well. And when they were singing, the songs reminded me of the moment I had to experience when I had to go through the Xhosa rites of passage i.e circumcision. Most of the songs that they were singing are songs that mostly women sing for young men when they are coming from the initiation school also known as eSuthwini. However, one of the songs that they sang is also generally sang by men most of the time. It is called Somagwaza, it basically means ‘I will stab you with a spear’. It is about the origins of circumcision in the Xhosa culture and how it became part of the Xhosa pantheon. There is a myth or parable in the Xhosa culture of how circumcision came about. It says that there was a boy which later was named Somagwaza, because of the fact that he introduced circumcision to his culture. They say the boy was walking through a forest one day with his dog and he went deep inside the forest. When he arrived in the deep forest, he took out a knife, which would be a spear according to the context of the song and he cut his foreskin off. However, it got so intense that he could not walk back home. So his dog tried helping him by pulling him out but it could not until the dog left him and ran back to the village. When the dog arrived in the village, it barked so hard at the elders and moved a few step back. It kept on doing that until the village elders realised that it was showing or telling them something. So they followed the dog until they arrived to the helpless boy lying on the floor. When they checked what was wrong with the boy, they realised that there was a difference in the boy’s genital parts, a difference they never saw before that distinguished him from all the other men in the village. Therefore, he was called Somagwaza/Stabber of the spear because he introduced the rites of passage for young men in the Xhosa culture to manhood. And he also did it on himself with his own bare hands. However nowadays, young men go through the rite of passage initiation through the hands of others because it is considered that no one can circumcise themselves but the originator of circumcision Somagwaza. In addition, there was another song that was sang that I deeply resonated with. It is called ‘ngelinyi langa uzomdinga uMama’ meaning ‘you will need your mother someday’. And most of the other songs I was familiar with as well, this is because some of them were sang by Rhodes University students during the fees must fall protests. As we were accompanied by these beautiful and emotional songs, we got the opportunity to meet community leader, traditional healer and prophet of the community of St.Matthews, Siyabonga Ngonzi. He is a very tall and kind men that comes from the Xhosa clan called ‘Ngconde’, which is the name everyone in the village called him by. As soon as we enter we greeted him and everyone introduced themselves one by one. And after that, he made the statement; “In the Xhosa culture we have to first eat and drink before we do anything, however, before we even do that we first need to pray”. And eating meaning eating a lot of food because I even lost count how many times I have eaten during my stay there. We went inside the hut which looked like a gathering place for traditional rituals to be performed but also looked like a gathering place for the church services. There we had a Christian prayer called ‘eFefe’ which basically means ‘grace’. From that point I realised that the community contested the notion that African traditional religion and Christianity could not go well. They actually merged them together in their theory and practice into one. Even through the interview, the community leader Siyabonga explained how it goes together. He calls himself a traditional healer and a prophet, which is tradition and religion merged together. He became a traditional healer not by choice but because he was chosen by the ancestors to lead and heal the community of St.Matthews. And in the Xhosa culture there is a belief that ancestors are the intermediates and messengers of God. And through his calling he received or was already embodying a gift of getting messages from the ancestors in the form of sound and sight. The message can be an individual message to a specific person or can be about a family or the community as a whole. He just had to accept his calling. In his own words he said; “accepting a calling is not a choice, if you do not accept your calling, your life becomes miserable because you are denying or delaying the work of the ancestors and God. So this is the reason why he accepted his calling, because he had no choice. Therefore, through the ancestors calling, he received the gift of healing traditionally and also prophesying in the Christian sense, and also he mentioned that before the calling he loved church so much. So that is how the elements of tradition and the Christian religion go together or are one. After we finished eating, we told that we were going to a nearby community that has a traditional celebration happening, which is called ‘umgidi’ in the culture, it is the return of Xhosa initiates from the bush. It is basically a celebration of the success of having to go through the Xhosa rites of passage. This is because not everyone returns home, there are few that die in the bush due intense pain or not being strong enough to persevere over it, sometimes the case might that the person who did the initiation might have not been that experienced. So according to the culture, it is a matter of persevering, being strong and finding the right person that is experienced with the Xhosa rites of passage. That person is called ‘ingcibi’ and it has always been a man. Nonetheless, we arrived in this community which is about 3 km from the prophet’s community. Since communities there are situated in mountains, I remember going up the steep slope and I could hear the singing voices from afar. As we arrived we were welcomed and greeted with many beautiful songs sung by these beautiful people wearing colourful Xhosa traditional clothing. As we went inside the yard taking pictures, recording the songs and singing along with the people, similar songs the previous women sang at the prophet’s household. We had to go through the same rules we went by when we arrived at the prophet’s premises, we had to eat and drink. However, during this time there was no time to pray because everyone was in a joyful spirit of singing and that was a celebration. The amount of meat I ate and the stiff shot of viceroy brandy I got from one of the elders conducting the initiate, put me in a mode of wanting to participate more on the celebration. However, we had to leave after that because we had to reach the other side of town where we had our accommodation place situated. Nonetheless, the songs from the prophet’s community were the same as the songs that were sung at the imgidi celebration, Rhythmic, melodic, harmonious, cyclical, interlocking and was always accompanied by a call and response. From the celebration, we went back to the prophet’s house. And when we arrived there, to our surprise we were welcomed by a group of Xhosa Diviners which arrived when we left. All of them were woman. Subsequently, we had to eat again, and of course we also had to pray before that as well. However, they prayed in the form of calling their ancestors names and clan genealogy accompanied by ‘Camagu’ which is a form Amen in the Xhosa tradition ancestral pantheon. Nonetheless, to my shock, I was surprised to see the Xhosa diviners making a Christian prayer as well. This is where my research interest was in the field. How they mixed traditional and Christian elements in their way of doing things. They put us into trance with their enchanting voices and rhythmic dance moves by stomping the dry floor polished with cow dung. And the songs that they sang were a bit different in content and context than the ones the elderly women were singing. This is because most of their songs were not coming from the creative people of the community but were revealed by the ancestors through the prophet/traditional healer in the form of visions and sounds in dreams and in waking life. These songs are sung for specific requests or when the prophet is doing a healing ritual or prophesying. In the evening of that day I was feeling healed and energised as well, even though I could not wait to get to the place we stayed in because I was tired. Nonetheless, even though I myself come from the culture, it was an amazing experience with new things to learn. It made me realise we can belong in the same culture but the way we do things and our understanding of them can be different, which means we have the same tradition but different customs.  

[rattisbooks]

Golden Seeta (Kanchana Seeta, 1977)

3-12 Feb 2017, Close-Up Cinema, London

Mythical Poetry : The Cinema of Govindan Aravindan 

Aravindan's film Golden Seeta (Kanchana Seeta, 1977) based on C N Sreekantan's play and the Indian epic Ramayana is perhaps his most enchanting film. The sparsity of dialogues, the essence of Seeta nurtured through the moods of nature with evocative musical notes that complement the visuals - a cinematic treatise on the harmony and discord of man and nature, reminding us of the juxtaposition of Vartanov's poetic images with Vivaldi's compositions in Artavazd Pelechian's 'Seasons of the year' (1975), the tribals enacting the mythical figures all married to Shaji N. Karun's inspired cinematography produce a unique poetic experience that concludes with Rama's suggestive suicide as he walks into River Saraya under the setting sun, a suggestive communion with Seeta. Aravindan's casting of rustic tribals as mythical figures, the Rama Chenchus from AP, inspired by sculptures have a strong physical presence, their faces exude a certain pre-industrial innocence like the Palestine children whom Pier Paolo Pasolini met while scouting location for The Gospel according to St.Matthew (1964) or the villagers who enact the Passion of Christ in Manoel de Oliveira's Acto da Primavera (1963). The opening film of our retrospective Mythical Poetry : The Cinema of Govindan Aravindan screening at the Close-Up Cinema, London.

[musicazca]

Best Sellers in Vocal Non-Opera #2: ST.MATTHEW PASSION ~ Johann Sebastian Bach https://t.co/eXwxahhRc1 https://t.co/EwnuPfUTY8

Best Sellers in Vocal Non-Opera #2: ST.MATTHEW PASSION ~ Johann Sebastian Bach https://t.co/eXwxahhRc1 pic.twitter.com/EwnuPfUTY8

— MusicAzCA.bot (@MusicAzCA) August 9, 2017

via Twitter https://twitter.com/MusicAzCA August 09, 2017 at 12:59AM