… aka Thine Be / Is the Glory (Risen Conquering Son). But, either way, joyous and triumphant. (Also with a tune that’s an industrial-strength earworm. I warned you.)
The background is that in these plague times, when people cannot physically be with one another, they’re mobilizing existing non-local communities — in my case, the big ones are linguists, queerfolk, and shapenote singers — and creating new ones on-line, and sharing enthusiasms within these communities. Especially music, of every conceivable kind, and food, which can’t literally be shared on-line, though we can share the details of what we’re eating and cooking, how it’s prepared, how it looks and tastes, memories of meals past and imagined and (especially) what they mean to us, and so on. In both cases, we celebrate an amalgam of appetites, of intellectual and sheer physical pleasure.
(Linguists are famously food-music people, and Jim McCawley is our saint.)
But the specific matter at hand is a tune by Handel that came to us later as a cello and piano piece by Beethoven and also as a Christian hymn for Easter. And for me, the recollection of hearing the Beethoven, for the first time, with Ann Daingerfield (Zwicky), in a moment of great pleasure, in Urbana IL in 1968, when our lives were about to shift unimaginably.
