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The chronicles of Ruin, continued. Call me Ishmael said....intelligence is knowing what to do when you don't know what to do. Anonymous said... When I don't know what to do,I come here. 10 September 2009 22:59
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17 comments:
Wonderful, goes right to the soul, if we have one.
The multi-chambered heart of the Blues, the psalms of King David, the chanted masses and the polyphony of the counter-reformation; worthy is the lamb that was slain, oh it's hard to tell, it's hard to tell, when all your love's in vain.
Ishmael,
I thought you had retired; very pleased to see that it is not so. Yours is the first blog I look for; every best wish,
Harperfield
Thank you, mr harperfield.
Not wanting to get all Gary Glitter but there is a thing about the notes this piece can obtain and young boys. I've got this stoopid thing about the little fellas dominating cathedrals to the point where a good church choir in a decent plot can knock people out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lC7V8hG198
Meh, maybe, but the kids can hit the notes - it turns it ethereal, spiritual, magical perhaps. I'm more impressed by their desire to build magnificent cathedrals where the only function was choir than by the choir itself. I sang total shite songs in my school choir and we toured a bit but chuntering out notes at 10 year old ain't too much to ask - gets you out of rugby ffs.
I guess my point is, why fuck with awesomeness. Everybody knows this is a cub scout song - fuck off! It's either bad karaoke or bad satire to remake something a bit shit on purpose - Star Wars prequels, Godfather 3, New Labour, I dunno - but still, sometimes composition and the right instrument for the job make things good.
If ever you get to Bath and Wells cathedral, mr dtp, check, first, the Bishop's palace in the grounds - of which, incidentally, they have been trying to deprive the old chap and then the front of the cathedral. There is, up high, a row of, I think, about forty niches, each housing a life-sized statue of a saint which, in mediaeval times, was painted in full Technicolour and behind which, invisible, stood a choir which would sing to approaching worshippers and pilgrims, making your point about the connection between voice and space, the singing for the congregants and the chanting of bought masses for the souls of the rich. The spaces of the cathedrals and basilicas and what have you enabled composers like Allegri to stipulate - as in this piece - that there be two choirs, each separated by some distance. I am no expert, not in this or in anything else, so don't take my word for any of this but Youtube is rich in Harry Christophers and the Sixteen performing early music in divine settings, you should take a walk on the wild side.
As for the soprana versus the boys' treble voices, all I can say is that I saw the Vienna Boys Choir in Brimingham Symphiony Hall and they gave me the heebie-jeebies; this woman, here, is very probably am insufferable pain in the arse but her voice and her singing are from Heaven.
Defo as per Bath 'n' Wells - the guys built them for a reason.Probly thru feudal economics and cock waving but music creates us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8AOAap6_k4
I think it might come through us but we create it, shape it, unless one is Mozart, that is. Even such a blessed musician as Mike Heron sang, Music, is so much less, than what you are....even the birds, when they sing, it's not everything....to them.
The mediaeval mind and purpose, mr dtp, I can't get anywhere near it. Roll on the printing press, is what I would've said, and the Renaissance and the Reformation and the Enlightenment. And the Internet.
It was the start of the Freemasons, cathedral building, the start of organised labour. I wonder if your Tory associates kniw that.
I'm with Mr dtp: these pieces were written for male boy voices; the chilling sound they create cannot be bettered by a woman. BTW, nice tits at 30 secs.
I've got a Maria Callas thing but there's a girl at work who's got a Doctorate in music (didn't know they did that) and used to do orchestra shit and teach Wagner but the inevitable mental breakdown later and she tells me Callas is shite! What can you say to that?
I reckon there are emotionally intelligent songs and the wrong category of people singing them just sounds stoopid. It's the racism argument - i'm racist because i wanna learn about opera, reggae and New Orleans blues but having not been there it's easier to ask a guy that has. Racism's always seen as negative but ffs, if i played pikey Dubliners all the time i'd have no mates.
There was a dinner lady from Rotherham at the Marsden Jazz Festival and I fell over so fast it was like my parachute didn't work. Certain singers can totally nail songs that you thought were a bit shit. Human voice man, instrument in itself and the bastards always have their instrument with them. Van Morrison knocked me down too - you remember these things.
You will know more than I, mr mike, about choral music, so I shouldn't argue but never mind, it is, now, in these days, just a matter of taste, I guess; women's participation is now permissible where once it was forbidden and I believe that artistically that is a good thing nit a bad thing. I think that an ever-modernising church is an absurd and cowardly contradiction but adult women singing parts for which they are so eminently suited falls outside any understandable wish for artistic or spiritual conservatism.
Sometimes Harris gets up on his hind legs and starts jumping about the place, barking; he hasn't been taught this, it's just something he does; it might be that he wants a walk on his Lou Reed or that he wants a game of fives, in the hall - I bounce a tennis ball off the floor, onto a door and he tries to snatch it from the air - whatever it is it's not something I encourage, a dog walking upright, bad for his back, I shouldn't wonder and I can't help but feel that those boy sopranos squeaking about Oh for the wings, for the wings of a dove are equally.... not unnatural but unsettling, unquiet. I know that they - or castrati - are often the instruments for which these pieces were written and in the composers' views did not require any emotional intelligence or interpretive ability, hitting the notes was enough; just makes me a bit uneasy, seeing kids singing about death and guilt and redemption, a kind of a western madrass education. Also, I have heard a few former boy choristers, now supposedly great musicians in their own right and I wouldn't piss on them and their works.
I like Maria Callas, mr dtp, no doubt others, more expert, think differently, she was a bit of a fuck-up, wasn't she, all the more reason to like her.
Van Morrison is vastly, preposterously over-rated, a product of the album-sales generating music industry back then. There is a handful of very superior songs, Madam George, And it Stoned Me, The Healing has Begun, Take It Where you Find It, my own favourite is These Are The Days, all of them have a spiritual dimension lacking in his more boisterous, repetitive and derivative work-outs, he is no soul singer, if you want that try Jackie Wilson, Ray Charles and Otis Redding; he is a terrible, shouty, truculent, little man, Morrison. I had all his albums once upon a time, just gave them all away in the blink of an eye one day and have never missed them. What he does is that thing that Billy Connolly does - laughs so hard at his own jokes as he is telling and retelling them that you think Fuck me, this must be really funny, even he's laughing. Van Morrison, with his awful, pseudo gospel, too-late-to-stop-now repetition upon repetition is saying to us, Christ, I sang those three wee words so well I am gonna sing them to you again. And again. And again. I'm a right genius, so I am.
I never met him in Belfast but I knew another singer, back then, Sam Mahood, of Sam Mahood and The Soul Foundation; Sammy, dead now'd sing the arse off Morrison, as indeed would so many, less pushy, less VanMorrison VanMorrison VanMorrison. I hate him. You shouldn't come around here, mr dtp, singing up at people like that.
Castrati's a bit strong. All this PBC stuff has left us bereft of what kids are good for. Usually fuck all but if you can get 'em singing it's the most hopeful sound on earth.
You defo wouldn't leave kids with Van Morrison - kinda volunteering.
I can never resist Avalon of the Heart.
Opera is a curious phenomenomenon; when it fails it is unbearable, but when it works there is nothing like it. I am not fond of the way Maria Callas sings, but for one of my friends she unlocks part of his soul every time. My dear mr narcolept can't hear notes of any sort, so you can imagine how baffled he is by plainsong and polyphony, but he snarls along to Ace of Spades and Bat Out Of Hell on long drives.
The Miserere is one of the works I can imagine God stopping what he is doing to listen to, and then granting its prayer.
God stopping what he was doing to listen to.....
And there you were, saying you couldn't write things down.
Forty million plus copies of Bat out of Hell sold and quite right too. I saw the producer, Nils Lofgren, saying that he did Paradise by the Dashboard Light because, he chortled, he thought this guy Bruce Springsteen was becoming a bit much. In his car. By the river. With his baby.
I see Springsteen as the American version of Billy Bragg, only jumping around a bit more.
Talking of castrati, here's an actual recording, over 100 years old, of the last one, Alessandro Moreschi in Ave Maria.
Apparently mediocre in the extreme, it still gives an inkling of the range and sheer power of the voice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ptGRnX02-8
Johnny.
Yes, mr johnniy, I heard it years ago, made my skin crawl, my flesh creep, my nerves jangle nearly as much as if I was watching, Skinner and Badiel. Makes me shudder, now, just thinking about it.
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