Music – Page 40

Musical Interlude: Chin Up

August 5, 2010 by John 6 Comments

The week’s been one of needing (re)encouragement — always a popular subject with writers, who can never get (or imagine they can’t get) enough of it — and of finding new reasons why maybe we don’t need as much encouragement as we thought. Coincidentally, in the last 24 hours I’ve tripped across a couple of songs that seem to fit the mood.

The first is by Mary Gauthier, from her recent album The Foundling. The album was recorded in Toronto, produced by Michael Timmins of the Cowboy Junkies (with characteristically smoky backing vocals by sister and bandmate Margo Timmins). Gautier says of the songs on the album:

[They] tell the story of a kid abandoned at birth who spent a year in an orphanage and was adopted, who ran way from the adopted home and ended up in show business, who searched for birth parents late in life and found one and was rejected, and who came through the other side of all of this still believing in love.

Here’s “Sideshow,” the opening track (lyrics below).

Lyrics:

Sideshow
(Mary Gauthier)

People stare and then they walk away
But there’s always a few who’ll stay
From the state I watch ’em close their eyes
Like a little kid trying to hide
Like they’re somewhere ain’t supposed to be
Watching something they ain’t supposed to see
Giving in to the undertow
In the dark at the sideshow

I’m the singer at the sideshow
It’s a place that orphans go
Far away from the bright lights
Hard to find on a dark night
Another truly troubled troubadour
Writing songs to even up the score
A tune for every single body flow
And I sing ’em at the sideshow

Who likes to think about their pain
Most people would avoid the rain
A sunny song will help you make it through
But constant whistling is hard to do
Too many songs about happiness
Leave me sad, lonely, and depressed
A million miles from the radio
You can find me at the side show

I make my living at the sideshow
It’s a place that orphans go
Far away from the bright lights
Hard to find on a dark night
Another truly troubled troubadour
Writing songs to even up the score
A tune for every single body blow
And I sing ’em at the side show

I make a living at the sideshow
It’s a place that the wounded go
Far away from the Bright lights
Hard to find on a dark night
You can find us
Another truly troubled troubadour
At the sideshow
Writing songs to even up the score
Yea, me
A tune for every single body blow
And the buffalo
And I sing ’em at the sideshow
You can find us
Back in the corner where the sad songs flow
At the sideshow

I’ve actually had the second song on my playlist for a few years; it’s just been a while since I last heard it. It comes from Eric Bibb, as recorded on the multi-artist album Mali to Memphis which traces the route of the blues across an ocean and from one continent to another.

Here’s “Don’t Ever Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down” (lyrics below).

Lyrics:

Don’t Ever Let Nobody Drag Your Spirit Down
(Eric Bibb)

You might slip
You might slide
You might tumble and fall by the road side
Don’t you ever let nobody
Drag your spirit down
Remember you’re walkin’ up to heaven
Don’t let nobody turn you round

Walk with the rich
Walk with the poor
Learn from everybody that’s what life is for
Don’t you ever let nobody
Drag your spirit down
Remember you’re walkin’ up to heaven
Don’t let nobody turn you round

Some say yes
Some say no
Some wait and see which way the wind blow
Don’t you ever let nobody
Drag your spirit down
Well we’re walkin’ up to heaven
Don’t let nobody turn you round

Well I might say things
Sound strange to you
And I might preach the gospel I believe it’s true
I won’t let nobody
Drag my spirit down
Yes I’m walkin’ up to heaven
Won’t let nobody turn me round

You might slip
You might slide
You might tumble and fall by the road side
Don’t you ever let nobody
Drag your spirit down
Remember you’re walkin’ up to heaven
Don’t let nobody turn you round

Hits and Misses

August 2, 2010 by John 13 Comments

Complicated here, during the last week. Not bad, just… complicated. Thought I’d sort of summarize a couple of points of potential interest, but first, a question for regular visitors:

Have you had problems accessing RAMH recently? One of your number has reported getting repeated “the connection was reset by the server” errors. It’s prevented her from even seeing the site, apparently. (I got the information via a Facebook message.) I haven’t been able to reproduce it from any of various locations, using various browsers and operating systems. But I wanted to check before proceeding to see if anything like that has cropped up for the rest of you. (Of course — ha! — if it has, then you won’t be able to read this post.)

Okay, now onto “real” matters…

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You Spoke from Midnight

July 30, 2010 by John 3 Comments

From whiskey river:

Moonrise

And who has seen the moon, who has not seen
Her rise from out the chamber of the deep,
Flushed and grand and naked, as from the chamber
Of finished bridegroom, seen her rise and throw
Confession of delight upon the wave,
Littering the waves with her own superscription
Of bliss, till all her lambent beauty shakes towards us
Spread out and known at last, and we are sure
That beauty is a thing beyond the grave,
That perfect, bright experience never falls
To nothingness, and time will dim the moon
Sooner than our full consummation here
In this odd life will tarnish or pass away.

(D. H. Lawrence [source])

…and, from whiskey river‘s archives (the commonplace book):

Our existence is finite. The self that we have created through so many years of effort and suffering will die. And sustained though we may be by the idea, the hope, the certainty that some portion of us will eternally endure, we also must acknowledge that this “I” who breathes and loves and works and knows itself will be forever and ever and ever… obliterated.

So, whether or not we live with images of continuity — of immortality — we also will have to live with a sense of transience, aware that no matter how passionately we love whatever we love, we don’t have the power to make either it, or us, stay.

(Judith Viorst, Necessary Losses [source])

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Behind the Scrim of the World

July 23, 2010 by John 6 Comments

[See the note at the end of this post for info about the above song.]

From whiskey river:

Falling

Long before daybreak
none of the birds yet awake
rain comes down with the sound
of a huge wind rushing
through the valley trees
it comes down around us
all at the same time
and beyond it there is nothing
it falls without hearing itself
without knowing
there is anyone here
without seeing where it is
or where it is going
like a moment of great
happiness of our own
that we cannot remember
coasting with the lights off

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

It is this admirable, this immortal, instinctive sense of beauty that leads us to look upon the spectacle of this world as a glimpse, a correspondence with heaven. Our unquenchable thirst for all that lies beyond, and that life reveals, is the liveliest proof of our immortality. It is both by poetry and through poetry, by music and through music, that the soul dimly descries the splendors beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to our eyes, those tears are not a proof of overabundant joy: they bear witness rather to an impatient melancholy, a clamant demand by our nerves, our nature, exiled in imperfection, which would fain enter into immediate possession, while still on this earth, of a revealed paradise.

(Charles Baudelaire [source; the above is the version at whiskey river, a somewhat different translation])

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The Breathing of Summer Mountains, the Hissing of Summer Lawns

July 16, 2010 by John 8 Comments

From whiskey river:

It was almost dark on an early summer eve, and the forest was never more enchanting than now, at dusk. At dusk the mountain begins to withdraw its force back into itself and become quiescent. If you too can become quiescent, so still that you can’t think of your name, you can feel this as a palpable fact. Just become so still that your mind won’t be bothered to remember the mundane, and then you’ll feel it like you feel the shifting of the winds. Then you’ll know when the mountain changes from exhaling to inhaling. That’s not so important in itself, but the mind that is quiet enough to notice is. The mind that is not always caught up in detail is your only treasure. Stop chasing details and become still to feel it. The mind that sees details clearly but is not caught by them is like a vast borderless mirror. That mind does not oppose itself.

(G. Bluestone [source])

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What’s in a Song: Simple Gifts (2)

July 10, 2010 by John 18 Comments

[Above: portion of letter from Aaron Copland to Harold Spivacke, Chief of the Music Division at the Library of Congress. Original in the Library of Congress’s Aaron Copland Collection.]

[“Appalachian Spring (7th Movement)” (about 13:30 long)]

[…or, if you’d prefer, the whole thing (about 35:57)]

Note: If you’re interested in the early history of “Simple Gifts,” rather than its resurrection in the 20th century, you might want to begin with Part 1 of this two-part series, posted a few days earlier.

In late 1942, choreographer/dancer Martha Graham first approached composer Aaron Copland. She hoped he could score a new ballet for her troupe. She had a grant from the Library of Congress’s Coolidge foundation to fund the work, but at that point she didn’t know the details of the project — certainly not the title. She hoped to premiere it in the auditorium of the Library in Washington, DC, within a year.

As you can see from the portion of the letter reproduced at the top of this post, as of the following spring Copland had heard no more from her about the new ballet and moved on to other projects. But by June, 1943, he’d received Graham’s first notes; by July, he’d managed to compose the first third of the ballet. The premiere date was now set for October 30, at the Library of Congress as Graham had hoped. (One constraint: the orchestra would be limited to 13 musicians, because of the small size of the orchestra pit there.)

What Copland knew about the ballet at this point was the general story it would tell. It would be about a young farming couple in the hills of Pennsylvania, early in the 19th century. Graham hoped it might capture of the same spirit as Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town (1938). Of course, with the US and the world in the grip of war — and because the life of a pioneer farming couple would not have been easy — it could not be too sweet and sentimental. Importantly, it still had no title. (Copland settled on Ballet for Martha as his working title.)

But it did have a main theme, one which Copland had found almost by accident.

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Best Not to Wait

July 9, 2010 by John 13 Comments

[Image above, “Don’t Wait for Tomorrow” (original oil on board, 92cm x 122cm),
by Nadeem Chughtai]

From whiskey river:

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.

(Joan Didion; quoted widely, allegedly from a 1975 commencement address)

…and:

The time allotted to you is so short that if you lose one second you have already lost your whole life, for it is no longer, it is always just as long as the time you lose. So if you have started out on a walk, continue it whatever happens; you can only gain, you run no risk, in the end you may fall over a precipice perhaps, but had you turned back after the first steps and run downstairs you would have fallen at once – and not perhaps, but for certain. So if you find nothing in the corridors open the doors, and if you find nothing behind these doors there are more floors, and if you find nothing up there, don’t worry, just leap up another flight of stairs. As long as you don’t stop climbing, the stairs won’t end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards.

(Franz Kafka, quoted at Memory Green from a work called The Advocates)

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What’s in a Song: Simple Gifts (1)

July 7, 2010 by John 14 Comments

The great tangled rope of popular music (American and otherwise) includes so many disparate strands that to speak of it as a single “thing” invites ridicule: show tunes and jazz, bluegrass and ragtime, country, folk, rock, metal, rap, and hip-hop… And then what about “easy listening”? and popular classical music, like Gershwin’s and Copland’s? New Age? Heck, what about Christmas music?

So in declaring (as I did) that this What’s in a Song series would explore “American popular songs with long histories,” well, I might as well have announced upfront that anything listenable was fair game.

Under the circumstances, inevitably, I’d find myself bumping into the category known loosely as “sacred music” — at least, those bits of it which have percolated out into pop culture. Off the top of my head, only two songs in this category appealed to me as subjects. The first, “Amazing Grace” — okay, that’s been tackled by an impressive roster of pop artists. But I have one problem with celebrating “Amazing Grace,” beautiful though it is: few performers seem able to resist milking its very “sacredness.” What emerges from the throats of such performers isn’t a song about grace, even about the special grace of music: it’s a song about the singer.

But almost by definition, the other song has resisted manipulation at the hands of the lugubriously self-righteous. That song is the subject of this two-part post.

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Exquisite

July 4, 2010 by John 3 Comments

You may already know of Natalie Merchant’s recent Leave Your Sleep project. Here’s how she describes it, at the start of the little booklet which comes with the CD (and I think as a bonus with the downloadable edition):

This collection of songs… documents our word-of-mouth tradition in the poems, stories, and songs that I found to delight and teach [my daughter]. I pulled these obscure and eccentric poems off their flat, yellowed pages and brought them to life for her. I willed into being this parade of witches and fearless girls, blind men and elephants, giants and sailors and gypsies, floating churches, dancing bears, circus ponies, a Chinese princess and a janitor’s boy, and so many others. I tried to show her that speech could be the most delightful toy in her possession and that her mother tongue is rich with musical rhythms and rhymes. I gave her parables with lessons in human nature and bits of nonsense to challenge the natural order of things and sharpen her wit.These poems speak of so many things: longing and sadness, joy and beauty, hope and disillusionment. Grave or absurd, these are the things that make a childhood, that time when we wake up to the great wonders and small terrors of this beautiful-horrible world of ours.

What Merchant did, in short, was set over 20 seemingly simple childhood poems to music informed by adulthood. The results, I think, utterly justify a six-year wait.

I am particularly enthralled with her take on “The Land of Nod.” Here are the lyrics, especially if you’re unfamiliar with Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem:

From breakfast on all through the day
At home among my friends I stay;
But every night I go abroad
Afar into the land of Nod.
All by myself I have to go,
With none to tell me what to do —
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams.
The strangest things are there for me,
Both things to eat and things to see,
And many frightening sights abroad
Till morning in the land of Nod.
Try as I like to find the way,
I never can get back by day,
Nor can remember plain and clear
The curious music that I hear.

Merchant, again:

[Stevenson’s wife] Fanny nursed the celebrated man of letters as he finished his classic volume of poetry, A Child’s Garden of Verses, while confined to bed in a darkened rented room in the south of France. His body shrunk to only 109 pounds (seven stone eleven and a half), he wrote through fever and night sweats with his right arm strapped to his body after a particularly horrible lung hemorrhage. While he coughed and struggled for breath, he invoked his childhood and composed a treasured collection of poems with those memories. “The Land of Nod” is one of the most beautiful of these verses. Both dreams and childhood are elusive and fleeting; Stevenson understood how impossible it is to return to either once we have awakened or grown up.

The arrangement — the orchestration — which Natalie Merchant chose to accompany her light, gentle voice is particularly affecting. It tugs at the heart, in the same way that Annie Lennox’s “Into the West” did at the end of Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King. That song benefited from the weight of the entire grand trilogy of films that preceded it. Merchant’s “The Land of Nod” does all the heavy lifting on its own.

(Interesting, too, the contrast between Annie Lennox’s and Natalie Merchant’s vocal treatments: As it often does, Lennox’s voice feels almost like a barely controlled warhorse; Merchant’s, more that of a mother thinking of what she herself has left behind — as well as what her children will, in years to come.)

Here’s “The Land of Nod,” from Natalie Merchant’s Leave Your Sleep:

[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 4:04 long.]

[audio:thelandofnod_nataliemerchant.mp3|titles=’The Land of Nod’|artists=Natalie Merchant]

If the above audio player isn’t working for you — some browsers prevent the use of Flash — try this one instead:

Road-Seen

July 3, 2010 by John 8 Comments

From whiskey river:

Cutting Loose

for James Dickey

Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.

Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell you where it is and you
can slide your way past trouble.

Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path — but that’s when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on earth, again and again.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

The Next Time
(excerpt)

Perfection is out of the question for people like us,
so why plug away at the same old self when the landscape

has opened its arms and given us marvelous shrines
to flock towards? The great motels to the west are waiting,

in somebody’s yard a pristine dog is hoping that we’ll drive by,
and on the rubber surface of a lake people bobbing up
and down

will wave. The highway comes right to the door, so let’s
take off before the world out there burns up. Life should
be more

than the body’s weight working itself from room to room.
A turn through the forest will do us good, so will a spin

among the farms. Just think of the chickens strutting,
the cows swinging their udders, and flicking their tails at flies.

And one can imagine prisms of summer light breaking against
the silent, haze-filled sleep of the farmer and his wife.

(Mark Strand [source])

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