The beautiful song I’ll sing for my dear Marj on her ascent to heaven

My partner Marjorie Morrison died in November 2023, aged 59, after a five-year battle with bowel cancer. Marj and I had known each other since the late 1980s when she and her husband were our neighbours in Wandsworth. At the time, she used to complain to her friends about the racket made by the opera singer couple next door. We bonded in the face of the even worse racket created by two sisters who regularly turned their adjacent living room into an after-hours Wandsworth nightclub. Following our respective divorces, in 2013 Marj and I moved in together.

A svelte Glaswegian, directly descended from Robert Burns, with beautiful, sapphire eyes and pitch-black hair, it was Marj’s acerbic wit that drew me most. Once we became a couple, I was often its target: “Throw it out. It’s a health hazard.” “No! I’m attached to it. It’s seen me through separation and divorce.” “It’s an oven, not a psychiatrist!” On another occasion she informed me: “Middle-aged men shouldn’t wear coloured T-shirts. You look like a huge baby.”

Marj with Mark in her garden in Putney, south-west London in April 2019[Missing Credit]

The T-shirt in question accompanied the release of my traditional Pugliese group Amaraterra’s first commercial album, Malvasia. In the early days of our relationship, Marj used to attend many of our gigs, only admitting years later that she didn’t enjoy the music. In her youth she had been a raver, downing MDMA and dancing on podiums in Ibiza nightclubs. On occasional summer evenings, she and her family would recreate that environment in her Putney kitchen, Felix’s Don’t You Want Me and Inner City’s Good Life blasting from the speaker.

A svelte Glaswegian, directly descended from Robert Burns, with beautiful, sapphire eyes and pitch-black hair, it was Marj’s acerbic wit that drew me most

There was another side to Marj and her family that came as a pleasant surprise, one that was both musical and Jewish. Following her parents’ divorce, Marj’s father had remarried and taken on three stepchildren. One had married Stephen Friend, son of the eminent violinist Rodney Friend. Rodney had been concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, with a distinguished recording career behind him. Rodney’s daughter, Lisa, is a front-rank flautist. Family gatherings involved the sort of schmoozing and warm physical greetings associated more with north-west London than Glasgow’s Pollokshields, and discussions about the great Jewish violinists of the past.

In Marj’s last five years, happy moments became increasingly rare, if more intensely joyful for that. No music could have alleviated the crucifying agony she had to endure in her final 12 months, after being misdiagnosed by her doctor, who identified pain in her shoulder as a function of stress. And so a tumour was allowed to develop, untreated, in her spine for six months, until it was eventually diagnosed by a private back specialist. No pain drug, however strong, was sufficient to relieve her agony. It was particularly bad in the morning when her animal howls and screams sometimes reduced me and her son Felix, in the adjacent bedroom, to tears. We were impotent to help her. All of us were undergoing trauma of an order I had never imagined. But in my work as a singer, both with Amaraterra and in classical vocal recitals, I found moments of solace and escape, most of all when performing for an audience. In February 2023, I gave a recital of Russian, Polish and Yiddish musical responses to totalitarianism of the Left and Right at Jewish Book Week, aware, as I did so, that despite the horrors in my personal life, on stage at Kings Place I was free of stress and suffering, unassailable in my musical bubble for those 80 minutes.

Marj picture in London in August 2016[Missing Credit]

Eventually tumours entered her lungs. Marj’s oncologist assembled her close family and told us that she did not have long to live. Days later, while listening to songs by the Russian composer Mussorgsky, one particularly stood out to me for its pathos and beauty. I looked it up. Intriguingly, it was called Softly the spirit rose to heaven. When I read the lyrics, I was astonished. It could have been written with Marj in mind, describing the ascent of a female spirit to heaven. At one point the stars ask her why she is so sad and she answers:

I have not forgotten the earth. 

Many I left there in suffering and sorrow. 

Here I only face bliss and heed joy.

Marj on a swing in Cerne Abbas, Dorste in September 2021[Missing Credit]

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I broke down and cried, but it was as if I had been meant to find the song. Or perhaps it had found me, descending into my head from a celestial place. I decided to learn and record it for Marj’s funeral (I could not have sung it live, though I did perform it at a concert shortly after.) Then, two days after her death, I gave a performance with Amaraterra of a Griko song, changing the words from Andra mou pai (My man is gone) to Yineka mou pai (My woman is gone). I could only get through it by thinking about the immigration theme the song is actually concerned with, but sang it with greater intensity than ever before.

It is, perhaps, the lot of artists to experience emotions with an especially acute sensitivity. Without being able to do so, our art would not be as successful or engaging. But through the act of music-making we can also achieve healing. My concert After Winter: A Song for Marj is my musical tribute to my partner. It includes a version of Mist on the Mountains, the song she had heard played by a piper at the late Queen’s funeral and wanted for her own, accompanying a poem I have written for her.

We will also perform Jewish music, through which I feel able to express my own spirituality most successfully. In addition to Yiddish song, accompanied by the wonderful klezmer violinist Anna Lowenstein, I will sing a setting of the beautiful, early medieval Hebrew prayer Ezkera Elohim, which, remarkably, was written in the Pugliese town Oria where I once had a home, linking the Jewish and southern Italian musical traditions that are the dominant themes of this concert.

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https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/after-winter-a-song-for-marj/