Deity is in this Place! Numen Inest!

 I'm listening to more of The Juilliard String Quartet's 15 CD set The Early Columbia Recordings 1949-56.

Darius Milhaud: Cantate de L'Enfant et de la Mère; The Household Muse

This was one of the first albums from the Juilliard String Quartet recorded by Columbia; it was released in June of 1950. It contains two works by Darius Milhaud with a special authenticity: the Cantate de L'Enfant et de la Mère is narrated by Madeleine Milhaud, Darius's wife, and conducted by the composer. The Household Muse for solo piano was played by Milhaud himself.

I'm trying to put myself in the position of someone listening to this LP at his or her grammophone back in 1950. This was contemporary music in the sense that Milhaud was still alive; the Cantata was written in 1938, while the piano work was only five years old. And it might have sounded "modern" to some ears, though Milhaud's most challenging modernist phase was well in the past by then. I wonder if it would have seemed fresh and new in 1950, or merely old-fashioned and a bit sentimental. I love this music so much, but it's hardly leading edge. The performers sell this in just the right way: sentimental, but not mawkish, homespun but with the numinous power of the household gods of ancient Rome:

"A religion of usages and sentiment rather than of facts and belief, and attached to very definite things and places—the oak of immemorial age, the rock on the heath fashioned by weather as if by some dim human art, the shadowy grove of ilex, passing into which one exclaimed involuntarily, in consecrated phrase, Deity is in this Place! Numen Inest!—it was in natural harmony with the temper of a quiet people amid the spectacle of rural life, like that simpler faith between man and man, which Tibullus expressly connects with the period when, with an inexpensive worship, the old wooden gods had been still pressed for room in their homely little shrines."

- Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean

I guess I have something of the same feeling myself when it comes to this music. The Deity is in the LP itself, somehow. The record album is a "homely little shrine", even more a fetish object today than it was 70 years ago. That's why I'm not listening to this Juilliard String Quartet set streamed on Spotify, but on these CDs stamped with the sacred marks of the Long-Playing Record of 1950.

Speaking of sacred marks, the beautiful album cover design isn't credited, but I'm fairly confident that it's by Darrill Connelly. He did the covers for the three Bartok albums that were released immediately after this record.