The journey home
Herbert Sumsion 1899 - 1995
By Hattie Butterworth
I will always remember January 2018 for the healing it brought to my life. Healing was revealed to me first as an experience to remember and hold on to. It wasn’t any instant fix for my experience, but some reassurance and knowledge that my life was greater than the poverty of my current situation.
Depression and complex anxiety was a cloud that landed over my life early that January of 2018. I felt it creep in and by the end of the month it had taken control over all elements of my life. Second year as an undergraduate at the Royal College of Music, all musical commitments felt unfulfillable. I was fighting to function on even a low level, feeling little hope for my future. In this space I took myself on a weekend to my hometown of Hereford.
Though not always an easy excursion, Hereford holds joy, as well as memories of lingering between lessons and busses home. Concerts at the Shire Hall and dark evenings in the cold winter months waiting. I will always associate my hometown with waiting. My parents left for Scotland the previous year and I felt a need to return. Maybe I was hoping I’d cure some of my anguish, escaping from London to the place I associate with happy memories.
Sunday evening I went to choral evensong at the cathedral. Stepping into the wide nave with its faint smells of wood and incense, I feel safer than I’ve felt for a long time. Across from the choir I sit and watch as I find myself in the knowledge of a true love, peace and hope within my corrupted life. The magnificat I am witnessing is a communion like few I have ever witnessed, a mirror of the complexity of emotion within my illness, but simultaneously it removes it and leaves me in a state of peace.
To be given peace within a service could be considered inevitable. Within a time of intense depression or anxiety the hope of peace or knowledge of its existence is unattainable. Through a short magnificat I had felt it again with a newness of life which was a power to keep me together and moving onwards for months of depression that followed. I needed to know more about who had written music so restorative as to gift me the grace of peace.
The work revealed itself as the Magnificat in G by Herbert Sumsion was written in 1942 whilst Sumsion was organist at Gloucester Cathedral. Herbert Sumsion’s music had awakened something within me that urged me to keep going. The pain was just as intense, depression just as real, but I knew peace was possible within my life somewhere. This was a peace separate to my own musicality or experience of creating music as a cellist. I understood the notes only as short pathways to something different and a way to escape. It was a gift of deep understanding and comfort that words weren’t able to offer.
Healing was slow but further moments revealed themselves as I pieced together a quilt of precious memories to cling to. Healing happens incrementally in stages of how ‘pitch’ the darkness feels. Small moments of relief become miracles and reasons to listen. Sound with eternal embrace. Voices of liberation. Freedom in colour. ‘Music’ is a word that can’t describe each experience of deep sound connection.
Maybe music isn’t the healer, but the deep reminder of possibility.