Music

Blegging time, though I’m giving too. I’ve got to give a talk about Mozart to my German class tomorrow (learning lots of new words like Pokeninfektion!) and I’d like to play them some musical clips. It ups the entertainment value and it gives me time to think about what I’m going to say next. So I’m open to suggestions for representative short extracts. Currently I have in mind the opening to the C-major string quartet (K465), the Adagio from the C-minor piano sonata, the overture to Figaro, der Hölle Rache from Zauberflöte and maybe the Dies Irae from the Requiem. But that’s all off the top of my head. Oh, and I said I’m giving. Well I’ve been trawling the net for German-language 250th anniversary podcasts and the most entertaining I’ve found is this 30-minute interview with biographer Dorothea Leonhart on Südwestrundfunk. Enjoy.

Oh dear oh dear. The last person who ought to be educating the world on the Internationale is Jane Galt who gives a rather literal translation of the French words over at Asymmetrical Information . The first time I sang the Internationale was on Mayday 1978 in Paris when I joined the UNEF contingent on the traditional march. The last time I heard it was when a colleague’s mobile phone rang. She told me, embarrassed, that she’d spent hours programming the tune in and that it had then gone off during a meeting with top university administrators, none of whom would have recognized it but for a BBC documentary about the end of the Soviet Union on the box the night before.

One important thing to get across to an Anglophone audience is that the British and American words are different (what do Australians and Canadians sing, btw?). Wikipedia has a reasonably accurate version of the British words but starts:

bq. Arise, ye workers from your slumber,
Arise, ye prisoners of want.

The version I learnt had “starvelings” for “workers”, “criminals” for “prisoners” (though I remember that being controversial) and, later in the verse, “conditions” for “tradition”.

Having picked up the the anthem by listening to my comrades, I also misunderstood the next two lines for my first year or so of singing it in English. These are are:

bq. For reason in revolt now thunders,
and at last ends the age of cant!

Yes, you’ve guessed it … I imagined this was a reference to the supersession of Kantianism by the Hegelian dialectic. “… at last ends the age of Kant!” Makes sense, doesn’t it?

A few days back Dsquared and I were involved in a comment thread over at Stumbling and Mumbling about Merle Haggard’s politics. That post had been prompted by Chris Willman’s Rednecks and Bluenecks , and that’s also the subject of a Jesse Walker review in Reason Online which is worth a read. I’ve been meaning to get hold of Willman’s book and this is a further spur to me doing so.

Birgit Nilsson , the Swedish soprano famous, among other things, for her Brünnhilde in Solti’s pathbreaking Decca Ring cycle and her Isolde on Boehm’s Tristan, is dead at the age of 87. Her recordings speak for themselves, but there are also plenty of nice anectotes in the obits. From the New York Times :

bq. After a disagreement with the Australian soprano Joan Sutherland, Ms. Nilsson was asked if she thought Ms. Sutherland’s famous bouffant hairdo was real. She answered: “I don’t know. I haven’t pulled it yet.” After the tenor Franco Corelli was said to have bitten her neck in an onstage quarrel over held notes, Ms. Nilsson canceled performances complaining that she had rabies.

The NYT obit has some MP3s (including one of the Liebestod from Tristan). See also the Times and the Washington Post .

Bob Dylan, 1963 :

bq. In a many dark hour
I’ve been thinkin’ about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can’t think for you
You’ll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.

The Vatican 2006 :

bq. JUDAS ISCARIOT, the disciple who betrayed Jesus with a kiss, is to be given a makeover by Vatican scholars. The proposed “rehabilitation” of the man who was paid 30 pieces of silver to identify Jesus to Roman soldiers in the Garden of Gethsemane, comes on the ground that he was not deliberately evil, but was just “fulfilling his part in God’s plan”.

Here’s a pointer to a piece of music that’s generating a lot a chatter here in the UK but which isn’t commercially available yet. I’ve listened a couple of times and I’m not entirely sure what I think (except that it is unusual enough to be worth a blog post). The song in question is Wyckham Porteous’s cover of the Beatles’ Please Please Me: very slowed down, semi-spoken, country-style arrangement (steel guitar). Bob Harris has been playing it on BBC Radio 2, as have Mark Lamarr and Jonathan Ross. It is currently available via the Listen Again feature of Bob Harris's Friday Show , but you need to use the +5 and +15 features of the BBC Radio Player to scroll through to about 1h 17 or so (you can use the music played list on Harris’s website to help you find the right place). Porteous’s own website is here .

Go read about Warner Brothers’ attempt to shut down a non-commercial mashup of Greenday’s “American Idiot” album. Then go listen to it while you still can. All I can say is that there are a lot of very talented people with a lot of time on their hands – amazing stuff.

The BBC is obsessed with the anniversary of Lennon’s death. For my own part I have four memories — the shock of Radio 4 (the Today Programme) announcing the death in the morning; the amazing sense of loss at school, mitigated only by the bizarre spectacle of Lennon-look-alike Nick P crying his eyes out all day long; somebody on Question Time saying that everyone would remember where they were when they heard about Lennon’s death, and finally, watching Not the Nine O Clock News that week (Thursday?) and wondering all the way through the show how they would respond to his death — and being first touched, and then shocked, by the way they did it (am I the only person who remembers this?)

Anyway, I’m deliberately posting this the day after the anniversary in order to alert you to 2 wonderful shows full of cover versions:

Mike Harding’s show, with numerous folkies covering songs from Rubber Soul (released 40 years ago this week? Amazing)

and

Lennon Live with numerous non-folkies covering Lennon songs, with varying degrees of success (My favourite: Teddy Thompson, whom I’d never heard before, and is eerie)

Other Lennon-related radio shows include a portrait narrated by Mark Ratcliffe and a play based on Ray Connolly’s reflections on his death.

Oh, and you can hear Libby Purves reminisce about him, too, but its a bit odd.

More than once I have posted about klezmer concerts after they have happened. This time I am giving you enough time to plan accordingly.

On Christmas Eve, the 92nd St Y in NYC is hosting The Klez Dispensers and King Django’s Roots & Culture Band. I have mentioned the Klez Dispensers here before. They are great and the type of music they play at these concerts is really fun. In fact, I am told that there will be plenty of room for dancing so dress accordingly. Tickets are $13.50 (including service charge) and can be purchased on the Y’s concert site. Feel free to let me know if you are going, perhaps we can have a little CT meetup.

I’m back in the UK after a trip to the US which included a week spent at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Thanks to Harry and everyone else who made it such a memorable and enjoyable visit, and to those Crooked Timber readers who made suggestions about what to eat. (The frozen custard was excellent, but I passed on the cheese curds.) One piece of good luck I had there was the following. Having eaten dinner and enjoyed interesting conversation with some of Harry’s students, I was wandering down State Street last Thursday when I saw a poster advertising a Mary Gauthier gig. When? I wondered. Tonight! I produced my $15 dollars admission and made my entrance. It was a terrific performance by Mary and her German guitarist Thomm Jutz, leavened by some great monologues including one about “Brits who listen to Radio 2.” Afterwards, I was able to identify myself as such whilst getting my copy of Mercy Now autographed, a memorable evening.

I’m in Madison Wisconsin for the week and enjoying my first experience of the US away from the east coast. As visitors are, I keep being struck by the micro-details of life and how they differ from the UK. Harry and I just had lunch in a student cafeteria. Having finished our sandwiches we got up to get some coffee from a machine and simply left our coats and bags by our table whilst we did so, even though they were not always in sight. The cafeteria was also organized with the tills at one end and the seating back in the same space as the self-service access to food. Everyone stands in line and pays before taking their seats. All of this is radically different from the UK where (a) one learns from an early age to hang on to all one’s property because otherwise it will be stolen and (b) where given an opportunity to take food from the university, sit down and eat it and not pay, many (even most) students would do so.

(On the downside, the built environment has far too much concrete, especially on roadways and pavements (flagstones would make such a difference) and people eat dinner barbarically early — 6pm!!).

(On the very downside, I tuned into Country Music TV in my hotel room and found no overlap whatsoever with the stuff that gets played by Bob Harris : Emmylou, Steve Earle, Gillian Welch — forget it — it is all wall-to-wall pap by people wearing cowboy hats. Appalling.)

It’s a bit silly to link to things b0ingb0ing has already linked to, but I saw this awesome Guinness ad and —had you going there, didn’t I? No, actually, here’s a link to The Fifth Dimension performing what may be my favorite of their songs, the transcendently weird “Paper Cup.” It’s about how cool it is to become homeless, or something (lyrics. OMG I can get a polyphonic Fifth Dimension ringtone!). The outfits, the painfully amateurish dancing, the backdrop; it’s beautiful. As discussed in the comments at Bedazzled, the Fifth Dimension was a band for white people who were afraid of real black musicians. Totally safe for you to listen to some of that crazy Negro music the kids are into these days! Just look at these guys; they’re not about to break the white man off something lovely, at all! They’re more about to float up into the sky in a beautiful balloon, wearing matching yellow Wild-West outfits with foot-long fringe, and warbling incoherently about the glory hole in my mind! By any groovy means necessary!

Now, I hope I’m not going to hear any rock snob grumbling about liking the Fifth Dimension. I have gone into the realm of rock snobbery beyond good and evil, where I like the America song “Sister Golden Hair”, and Rush songs and the Shirley Bassey cover of “Spinning Wheel”. Sometimes, just for a laff, I listen to the music that plays in the background in Rocky IV during the cross-cut work-out scene, where Dolph Lundgen is all on a treadmill with commie scientists monitoring him, and Rocky is out on the Siberian tundra chopping wood and growing a beard and digging the Byelamor canal with his teeth, and ironically understanding the great Russian soul way better than the actual Russian people–because that’s what America is all about. Yeah, that song. I mean, it sucks, obviously, but in a cool way.

Now, why don’t I have anything to say about the rioting in France? Well, I sort of don’t understand what the hell is going on. I’m reluctant to embrace the Victor Steyn Hinderaker death-throes of Eurabia thing, since it looks more like your run-of-the-mill broke people rioting, combined with massive state incompetence. The cheerful schadenfreude on this issue from the right is unseemly. “Remember when they mocked our social system because something terrible happened to us? Now something terrible is happening to France! I bet they wish they could go cry on the shoulder of their old friend — Saddam Hussein!” I am surprised to learn that les flics are crippled by their mushy multicultural love all all things Islam; the blogosphere really can turn you on to new ideas. Obviously, though, the French government has screwed this up royally; it’s ludicrous that it would go on this long, and that it would take Chirac more than a week to even deign to notice the situation. Some forceful police action is obviously needed; it’s not right for citizens to be cowering in their homes while every car in France is set on fire right outside. (And, damn, those things are more flammable than I ever thought. Suddenly all those 80’s TV scenes where a car going 12 mph noses into a fence and blazes up like a Pinto inferno seem realistic.) Finally, and I mean this in the nicest way, and I don’t want people to die, but doesn’t this seem like some kind of pussy rioting, frankly? It’s been going on for almost two weeks and only one or two people have died? If American people had been rioting that long the death toll would be in the three digits, for sure. Don’t mess with American pride.

UPDATE: it isn’t very helpful or accurate to call this rioting “run-of-the-mill” when it’s so obviously serious and strange in a possibly epochal way. So, retract that. What I meant to say is that from what I have seen, ordinary underclass alienation, reaction to percieved racism, massive unempolyment among bored young men, cack-handed government responses, etc. seem to be playing the largest role, vs. the “let’s reduce impotent France to dhimmi status and take over the world with the evil powers of Islam” fantasizing one sees at many right blogs.

Dammit, why do all these rock snob thumbsuckers have to hate on the chicks? Maybe if you just assume that all the rock snobs in the world are guys, you won’t find any rock snob chicks? Maybe we’ve got, like, lives and stuff and don’t just sit around at home changing our minds about the relative merits of alphabetization by artist vs. genre vs. date of purchase? Because we already decided? Strict alphabetical order!! (I know, I can hear my friend Daniel complaining about all the stuff that gets lost. Serendipity!) Jesus, now you’re going to tell me you just discovered Can’s Ege Bamyasi. But, you know…maybe most rock snobs are guys. And most bloggers are guys? I hope it doesn’t turn out chicks suck. That wouldn’t be very punk rock at all.

Today’s Guardian editorial concerns the recent legal case involving Hyperion Records . Hyperion are best know for their wonderful series of Schubert song recordings — Ian Bostridge’s Die schöne Müllerin being a case in point. Their survival is now threatened because the editor of the works of a rather obscure French composer was successful in an action claiming musical copyright in the work . I offer no opinion on the legal merits of the case, though it is claimed that this effectively lowers the threshold on what counts as an original work. Hyperion will probably face small damages, but they must now meet their own and the plaintiff’s enormous legal costs. They are appealing for donations .