This blog may be a little unusual, in that it has its own theme tune. The tune itself will be revealed in good time, alongside its connections with European bloodshed, gin, and a pure, clean, amusing virgin.
Let’s have some fun first.The story starts forty years ago, in a rambling Georgian vicarage set in a green valley on the banks of a tributary stream of the Tamar just to the north of Plymouth.
It is night, and the vicarage sleeps beneath the winter constellations. But the thick walls conveniently shelter the goings-on in one bedroom from another. The young son is wide-awake and agog at a literal war of words; his guardian angels know nothing of the clash of armies in his bedroom. The Cold War is in full spate.
The young son - the larval form of your correspondent - has discovered shortwave radio. In the pre-computer, pre-Internet age, this was seething with nations speaking unto nation, each with powerful transmitters telling the world of their version of the truth.
It was a jungle of shouts and murmurs, exotic noises and urgent signals. And music: concerts, ethnic, John Peel and Chinese orchestras.
One kind of music stands out as peculiar to the genius of the airwaves - the interval signal. To help listeners tuning in among the chaos, often with old or unreliable sets, it was the tradition for broadcasters to repeat short musical phrases in the minutes leading up to the start of programming. There were hundreds of these, from Poland’s Chopin to Israel’s urgent trumpets, and most of them have now been silenced, although you can raise them through seances in places like the Interval Signals Online archive
Some stuck fast in my musical memory. One in particular was Radio Netherland’s chiming call, ten bars in 2/4 time, little ascending minor key phrases with a pleasing resolution. (You can hear it captured from shortwave by Greg Shoom in the late 70s, 43 seconds into this recording from the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive) The young lad was much taken with it, and left recordings of it playing in hidden places at school as a sort of treasure hunt. Geek.
Forty years on: this Christmas. A flat in lively, downtown Edinburgh. The festive stresses are being kept at bay by whatever means necessary: in this case, London gin and John Dowland. Experimentally, the (still spectacled, still geeky) son of the manse has asked Spotify to shuffle through what Dowland it has, while his partner quietly hunts down obscure 6th century Middle Eastern religions online. For fun.
A new track politely plucks in from cyberspace, and in a nanosecond we’re back in the vicarage. It’s exactly the same tune - no, not exactly, but almost note for note. There’s a grab for the playlist - John Dowland, yes, and “What If A Day”. But why on earth would the Dutch use an Elizabethan English tune for a nationalistic beacon? It’s very pretty, to be sure, and perhaps more than that, but Dowland wasn’t Dutch. Was he? To the googles!
At first, each new fact just whipped up more mystery. The Radio Netherlands tune, it turned out, was called Merck toch hoe sterck (“Look, how strong”). and came from 1626 during the Eighty Years War between the Dutch and the Spanish. It has lyrics, too, which call on the doughty fighters of the Nederlands to hold out against the Spaniards who were doling out the biffing with no niggardly hand. (There’s a short Radio Netherlands talk about all this, three minutes into the same recording mentioned above.)
The Dowland, on the other hand, probably wasn’t Dowland at all but Thomas Campion, from roughly 1600. It is the setting for a poem that dwells on the randomness of fate and the evanescence of earthly pleasures. Wistful and tinged with mortality, it’s a very long way from a European slaughter song.
But how do you get here from there? How did Campion - or was it really Dowland? - get conscripted into the Cold War?
There are advantages in shacking up with a fully-armed historian. She dug away and came up with a monograph from Modern Philology, vol 4 no 3, Jan 1907 on the song and its history.
According to this century-old research, the tune starts life in a Scottish Metric Psalter in the mid-late 1500s, but at that point was just a couple of stanzas long. Campion vastly expanded and solidified it around 1600, and it then set off on hundreds of years as an evergreen, ever-mutating favourite across Europe. The main vector of infection was thespian; the song was made part of various plays and then dispersed throughout the Continent by travelling English troupes.
By the time it transmogrified into Merck toch hoe sterck, just a quarter-century after Campion had launched it, the tune was noted as an Italian dance melody described as a "Comedianten Dans” with the name (according to Google’s Dutch-English elves, who may be having a giraffe) "Pure clean amusing virgin" - all trace of its origins gone.
There is much unanswered. How many tunes made this sort of journey? How long did they stay at the top of the pops? If it was Campion who effectively wrote it (I’m not convinced by the psalter connection), why does everyone still think it’s Dowland?
The search goes on. But as a tune that links my obsessions with shortwave radio, early music and Europe, it’s a fitting choice as this blog’s theme.
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