Dr. Metablog

Starlight, Dewdrops, etc.

The Stephen Foster songbook was a staple of my childhood.  My mother, sitting at the old Hardman baby grand,sang "Camptown Ladies," and "O Susanna" and "Old Black Joe."  But times change and Foster was pushed to the sidelines years ago. Too racist, too sentimental, too 'soft'. 

Now we're enjoying a Stephen Collins Foster Revival and Festival in our very own home.  It began with the discovery of the "American Dreamer" cd that Thomas Hampson recorded in 1992.  Hampson, opera lovers will know, is the world champion of living baritones, and in this cd, he does Foster proud -- to the inventive accompaniments of Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, No question but that Foster was a truly superb melodist --with a long string of songs that would have gone double-platinum, if there had been such a thing, in pre-Civil War America.  

Hampson sings the Foster songs as if they're Schubert lieder, but there's another recent cd, "Beautiful Dreamer" -- a "tribute album" in which Suzy Bogguss, John Prine, Allison Krauss, Mavis Staples and a bunch of excellent lesser-known (to me) but wonderful musicians lay into these tunes with enthusiasm and verve. Who would have guessed the "Beautiful Dreamer" was country before country was cool? Pure country.

Foster was a better melodist than poet. Often his lines are awkward and time-bound and mawkish, but occasionally he hits the nail on the head.  I like "beautiful dreamer, queen of my song";  I think that "slumber my darling the birds are at rest" is fine, but a succeeding line in the same song --"thy pillow shall sacred be" -- is bad beyond ordinary bad;  "weep no more, my lady" is positively Shakespearean and "all the world is sad and dreary/ every where I roam" is well-rooted in the medieval contemptus mundi  tradition;  "long may the daisies dance the field, frolicking far and near" is far too pseudo-Wordsworthian for my palate.  Foster's best lyric, in my view, is "Hard Times Come Again No More" --  "'Tis the song, the sigh of the weary/ Hard times, hard times, come again no more/ Many days you have lingered, around my cabin door/ Oh! hard times, come again no more."  It's inspired, heartfelt, and eternally pertinent -- and also, wedded to an excellent melody.  "Hard Times" was not known to me in the days of my youth -- more's the pity.  

Old guy, maybe a bluesman, bottle of hooch in a brown paper bag, sits on a bench in the middle of the night, downtown, playing air-sax, nodding. Young fellow comes by, cheerful, asks him, "Crosstown buses run this way?"  Blues guy looks up, pauses for a second, and then drawls, "Doo--dah, doo-dah."     

Modern Radio

For the new downtown apartment, we've purchased a Sonos ZonePlayer. What does this oddly-named machine do?  It simply allows me to capture the signal of radio statios all over the world (through the internet connection), pipe them through the amplifier, and broadcast them on our old but functional speakers.

Quite a step up in standard of living, especially since over-the-air reception in our mountain town is severely compromised by the bumpy terrain

With this new device, I can listen to classical music stations in all the capitols of Europe -- all over the planet, in fact.  I can choose from among 5 or 6 crystal-clear stations dedicated entirely to opera, as well as a few that specialize in the baroque period, or in chamber music, or piano. There are also five Beatles stations, one of them from Moscow!  Several "big band" stations.  An all Grateful Dead specialist beaming directly to me from Connecticut.  An all Bruce, all the time.

I love the "Paris Chanson" station, twenty-four hours a day of Edith Piaf and friends, from Tokyo.

But so far my favorite is the all doo-wop station out of Winter Haven, Florida, which, on demand, has the power to return me to my teen-age years. Just now I heard the Jacks' plaintive, "Why Don't You Write Me," a song which functioned, earlier in my life, as a personal anthem of self-flagellation.  And just at this moment, a glorious version (and one that I didn''t know) of the much-recorded "The Glory of Love."  Aural bliss!  

What's missing?  A good American roots (1920s and 1930s) station.   A station specializing in 1940s and 1950s black gospel -- definitely not "contemporary gospel" -- which, according to AH, the world's expert, is called contemporary because it is both a "con" and "temporary."  An all Gilbert and Sullivan station -- but perhaps that would be a gift too precious to imagine?

But if  there can be eight all-Elvis stations, shouldn't there be at least one that is all-Haydn, all the time?

And yet I've only begun to search.  Who knows what other pleasures are out there in modern radioland?

Life Lessons from F. P Schubert

Our local chamber players, the Takacs, performed the Schubert Quintet (D.956). It's a glorious work -- one of the finest in the entire chamber repertoire -- and was brilliantly performed.  It's a turbulent, nervous, tense piece of music. With the last notes, the entire audience rose simultaneously to cheer.  There were fist-pumpings, whistles, "bravos," "yesses," and other spontaneous shouts of pleasure from the octogenarian listeners.  It was a rock and roll moment at Grusin Hall. 

I cheered too, but not so much for the Takacs as for Schubert.  It's so often the case that the interpreters are rewarded while the creator is neglected.  Here's Schubert, dead of poverty and syphilis and mercury poisoning at age 31, never having made a nickel out of his many compositions.  In desperate straits, with only two months to live, Schubert sent his new quintet to the Leipzig publisher H. A. Probst. Probst rejected it, asking instead for something "easily understandable."  The world "does not yet sufficiently and generally understand the peculiar, often ingenious, but perhaps now and then somewhat curious precedures of your mind's creations."  The quintet was first performed in 1850, twenty-two years after Schubert breathed his last.

Is there a moral?  Yes, I think there is.  If you're in the composing or painting or novel-writing business, do it your own way -- not the easy way.  If you lose, you lose.  So what?  If you win, you win big.

More on Sam Cooke

Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come" condenses centuries of tangled racial strife into a brief lyric.  The song begins in rural, impoverished, perhaps southern, America:  "I was born by the river, in a little tent."  Then, with a glance at the old man river who just keeps rolling, it alludes to African-Americans as on-the-lam outsiders: "Just like the river, I've been running ever since."  The third stanza, now shifted to an urban location, refers specifically to the insult of segregation (shortly before writing the song, Cooke had been barred from a Shreveport hotel):  "I go to the movies and I go downtown;/ Somebody keep telling me, don't hang around."  The second stanza is surprisingly confessional for a man who had started his career in gospel and had sung lead for the Soul Stirrers;  it's about loss of faith.  "I don't know what's up there, beyond the sky."  Nevertheless, despite all the reasons for losing heart, including the lack of support from brothers of different political factions, Sam retains an uncompromised optimism:  he will "carry on, yes I will."  The song is a miniature allegory of a triumph over separation and persecution.  It celebrates endurance, perseverance, fortitude in the face of long odds. No wonder that Barack Obama adapted Cooke's affirmative "Yes I will" into "Yes we can."

Sam Cooke himself didn't get to the promised land;  he was shot, under "mysterious circumstances" in December of 1964.  "A Change is Gonna Come" was released posthumously.

It's Been a Long Time Coming

I'm enchanted that our new president chose to cite -- or "sample" as they say in the world of pop music -- one of my favorite, and one of the most important of the songs of the 1960s.  Here's the borrowed sentiment, delivered in Chicago on November 4, just after Obama cleared the electoral hurdle:  "It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America."  The big O's citation is to the refrain of Sam Cooke's great anthem,  "A Change is Gonna Come":  "It's been a long time coming/ But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will." 

Those who know their Sam Cooke will appreciate Obama's sentence. To the Cooke-innocent, the "change" is a new administration and new policies.  To the Cooke-knowledgeable, the "change" to which Obama refers is a tectonic shift in American racial politics.   

So I'm reproducing Sam Cooke's lyric right here.  If you're one of my coevals, you probably know the song by heart.  If you don't know it, you should.  If you're curious, you can see and hear Sam and Otis Redding and a host of others sing the song on You Tube.  Here's the lyric.  It's one great, inspiring song. 

"I was born by the river in a little tent

And just like the river I've been running ever since.

It's been a long time coming.

But I know a change is gonna come.

It's been too hard living, and I'm afraid to die.

I don't know what's up there, beyond the sky.

(refrain)

I go to the movie and I go downtown

Somebody keep telling me, don't hang around.

(refrain)

I go to my brother, I say help me please,

But he winds up knocking me down on my bended knees.

(refrain)

There's been times that I thought I couldn't last long,

But now I think I'm able to carry on.

It's been a long time coming,

But I know a change is gonna come, o yes it will."

Talk about the ability to say a lot in a little.  O yeah!

Takacs Geezers

At Grusin Music Hall last night to hear the Takacs play Beethoven and Schumann, always a delight, and also a quartet by Bartok, which is, I'm sorry to say, even after many exposures is still screechingly hard on my tender ears (except for the very amusing pizzicato 4th movement).  Perhaps some day I'll "get" Bartok, but it's been forty years of hard listening and frankly, I'm not there yet.  I'm still hopelessly stranded in melody, harmony, and rhythm. 

Meanwhile the chamber music crowd get older and older.  Anyone with the least amount of pigment in his/her hair is young;  in fact, anyone without a wheel-chair, a walker, an oxygen bottle, or a "minder" is young.  Grusin is the place I take my septuagenarian self in order to feel youthful and vigorous.  I admit that it's a strategy that doesn't have much of a future, but I'm not thinking long term.   

I think Ed and the Takacses should accommodate to their elderly audience.  For example, when it comes time for the violin to play solo parts in the highest register, the notes are barely audible.  It can't just be me having this problem because half of the geezers in the auditorium have sprouted hearing aids.  I think that Ed should make an effort to play the high notes a lot louder.  Or possibly, plug in that near-Strad that he wields so well.  I'm sure that there's a electronic program designed to amplify the top of the register. 

On the other hand, If the Takacs wants to attract a younger audience, there are some changes they might make.  For one thing, it's time to give up on the all-black tuxes.  Why must they all dress like Johnny Cash?  Sequins would be good, or anything glittery.  And those shiny black shoes in an age when footwear has become plastic and colorful?  What's with that?  And how about a little chest hair (or in the case of Gerri the violist, a little bosom)? Bring that Broncos/Buffs/Coors crowd to Grusin!! A new generation of Brahmsophiles.  And why must they just sit there like lumps when they could move around the stage a bit.  An occasional dance step.  Slap that cello, swing those violins from side to side. 

Lots of room for exciting innovations in the world of the classical string quartet.

Lebanon, Puccini

I'm just back from Lebanon (that would be Lebanon, New Hampshire) where I heard a performance of Puccini's Madame Butterfly.  If you pay no mind to the ridiculous racist orientalist anti-American story, it's a pretty good opera.  The orchestra, though small, was excellent and the singers top-notch.  The music is a little on the overwrought side, and the garish emotional display makes Dostoevsky seem in comparison like drawing-room comedy.  It's a sad, dated story.  While Emma Bovary found the solution to her problem in arsenic, Anna Karenina in the locomotive and Edna Pontellier in the water, Cio-cio-san elects the knife -- more evidence, if more is needed, for women's paucity of choices in the grand old days.  But great melodies, no question.  The opera crowd was, as usual, a little on the geriatric side -- and as a consequence I felt quite youthful bounding up to the balcony.  At breakfast the next day, a friend admitted to being moved by Cio-cio-san's suffering.  "Did you cry," I asked.  His reply:  "I'm not saying."

Duke, Duke, Duke

Ain't it shocking that Gene Chandler's excellent song is now almost half a century old?  Seems like just yesterday.

This be the verse in its full splendor.   

Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

As I walk through this world
Nothing can stop the Duke of Earl
And you, you are my girl
And no one can hurt you, oh no
Yes, I'm gonna love you
Come on let me hold you darlin'
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

And when I hold you
You will be my Duchess, Duchess of Earl
We'll walk through my dukedom
And the paradise we will share.

Yes, oh, I
I'm gonna love you
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl
Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl

I'm gonna love you
Nothing can stop me now
'Cause I'm the Duke of Earl.

1)  "Duke of Earl" is classic, though late, doo-wop.  It's lineally descended from songs in which a supporting male quartet sang meaningless syllables:  doo wop, wop, wop.  In this revisiting of the genre, nonsense doo doo doo de wop has been superseded by words that carry meaning of a sort: duke duke duke of earl.  Return we now to the pages of history:  in their turn, doo wop quartets were themselves secular offspring of gospel quartets, where a reverent foursome would sing do lord do lord, do lordy lord (an good example:  the unnamed quartet supporting Georgia Peach in "Do Lord Send Me").

2)  It's a fascinating process:  Gene Chandler's replacement of doo doo with duke duke is in fact a return to the roots, except that the previous and inherent religious content has undergone secularization.  "Lord" has become "Duke," while the heaven of gospel has become the "dukedom" of doo-wop.

3.  It's easy to deride the naive aristocratic title "Duke of Earl"; but would the song preserve its meaning if it were "Duke of Buckingham?"  "Earl" may sound silly, but because it's a generic title rather than a specific one it carries allegorical significance. "Duke of Earl" is no one and therefore everyone. 

4.  It's entirely likely that the word "earl" was chosen because of it echoes "lord": liquids "r" and 'l" and unemphatic vowel. 

5.  The first line of the lyric --"As I walk through this world"-- introduces a secularized religious motif (an inheritance from the song's gospel forbears).  Some readers will recall the opening sentence of the most famous of all religious allegories, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1672):  "As I walked through the wilderness of this world."  Gene Chandler, walking through this world, is reborn just as Christian was reborn in the classic allegory.  Not religiously, but in a worldly way.  He is not saved;  he is duked.

6.  What is the significance of aggressive "nothing can stop me now?"  What obstacles stopped the Duke of Earl in the past, before his duking?  The triumphalist language is highly developed but the obstacles remain vague and unarticulated.  Audiences find their own meaning in the lacuna, but indiginities historically suffered by the black underclass lurk only slightly below the surface of the lyric.

7.  The transformation from a previous but unknown and unarticulated existence to an aristocratic, unstoppable Duke of Earl takes place offstage, nor is any explanation offered for the metamorphosis.  It's entirely magical.

8.  Because it's magic, it's pure fantasy.  Pastoral fantasy in fact, which, curiously, is simultaneously primitive ("paradise") and sophisticated ("dukedom").

9. But it's a shared paradise: the duke along with his duchess.  The retreat to domesticity is almost Victorian:  "ah love, let us be true/ To one another...."  This particular Duke does not know that "Two paradises were in one/ To live in paradise alone."

10.  The Duke retreats to domesticity and and yet he seems to stake out ("nothing can stop me now") new territory to conquer, in which regard the spacious lyric seems to embody contradictory or even incoherent vectors of thought.  However, the enthusiasm of the singing obliterates the ambiguity of the lyric;  in sum, the song is remarkably optimistic -- which is just one reason for its continued popularity. 

No Words, No Words? Hush.

A few nights ago, I attended a performance by our local treasure, the ever-glorious Takacs Quartet.  Without asking my leave, they chose to play works by Aarvo Part and Philip Glass.  I suppose that there must be virtues to "minimalist" music, but a single motif played over and over again in the same tempo, with the same unvarying dynamics, and in the same non-key -- what's the point?  Music without melody, harmony, or rhythm is like a novel without a plot or like a severely abstract painting. Sorry folks, I'm antediluvian. A relic.  I want a story and I want it dressed in rhyme and meter.  It's exhilaration that I crave, not forty-five long minutes of total ripvanwinkleization.      

I was already in a sulky mood at the intermission when Mr. and Mrs. Talkative behind me, after gushing over the minimalists, directed their intellects toward Shakespeare. Mrs T. announced, "You don't need to read a Shakespeare play before seeing it.  Just read a plot summary so that you know what's happening."  Mr. T. agreed:  "Absolutely.  Going to the theater is all about the costumes and the set and the business. As long as you have a general idea of the story, you don't need to understand the words."   

No need to understand Shakespeare's words?  Go to the theater and ignore the words of the finest poet in human history?  What are the Talkatives thinking?  The costumes are the work of the costumer;  the business is the work of the director and the stage designer.  The only part of the performance that is Shakespeare's is the language. 

One of the teachers of my youth, the late and much lamented Alfred Harbage  -- the finest Shakespeare scholar of his generation -- used to say that he didn't care what the actors did on stage as long as he could hear the words.   I'm not nearly so tolerant.  I don't want Rosiland and Orlando to send email messages to each other -- I want them to articulate.  I don't want Cinna and Metullus Cimber to be dressed as blackshirt fascist thugs.  And I certainly don't want Snug and Bottom to ride to the Duke's Oak on motorcycles.  Such antics are stupid and distracting.

The performance for which I'd pay a premium price is one at the Theatre, or at the old Globe, or at the Blackfriars during the years when Shakespeare was teaching the parts to Burbage and Hemmings and Kemp.  Dollars to doughnuts he insisted that the actors pronounce the words distinctly.   

After the grating intermission, the Talkatives ran out of insights and my indignation began to wane.  Eventually Ed, Andras, Karoly and Gerry returned to the stage and played one of Haydn's great Opus 76 quartets.  It was transcendent -- melodic, intelligent and intelligible, warm, robust and sensuous.  It was music.   

The P. S. 217 "Assembly"

During the 1940s and early 1950s, when I was a pupil at P. S. 217, the school auditorium was given over to formal weekly "assemblies."  Boys were required to wear white shirts and green ties (girls had a specified outfit as well, but in those days I was so unconscious of a) girls and b) their costumes that I'm darned if I can remember what was worn by the young ladies).  Before entering the auditorium, classes lined up in "size places."  P. S. 217 was particularly strong on "size places"  -- a point of particular humiliation for me, because I was, as WS says about R of G, "so long a-growing, and so leisurely" that I was by far the smallest child in every class from first grade to eighth.  After we found our assigned seats (boys in one row, girls in the next), our principal Miss Bildersee, a formidable and incredibly ancient woman with hugely distended nostrils in which an agile boy could go spelunking, would perform the mandatory reading from the Bible.  Blessings on her fond old heart, Miss Bildersee regularly choose melodious passages from the book of Psalms.  I was particularly struck by the eloquence of "Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful," with its abrupt counterbalancing antistrophe: "the ungodly are not so, but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away."  After the Bible reading and some announcements, there was usually a performance of some sort.  Choral readings, the oddest of art forms, were far too frequent. I remember that I was once a member of a sextet of quavering sopranos who memorized and recited the patriotic World War I poem "In Flanders Fields."  What in the world was a second-grader supposed to make of "We are the Dead. Short days ago/ We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,/ Loved and were loved, and now we lie/ In Flanders fields./ Take up our quarrel with the foe:/ To you from failing hands we throw/ The torch; be yours to hold it high./ If ye break faith with us who die/ We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/ In Flanders fields."   (Such poppycock was received as true literary greatness.  It would have been beyond utopian imagination that our teachers would have known or introduced us to the distinguished WWI poetry of Wilfred Owen or Isaac Rosenberg or Siegfried Sassoon or Edward Thomas.)  Then our music specialist Mrs. Georgia Keiselbach would sit down at the piano and teach us songs, some of them also left over from the first World War:  "Keep the home-fires burning,/ While your hearts are yearning,/ Though your lads are far away/ They dream of home;/ There's a silver lining/ Through the dark cloud shining,/ Turn the dark cloud inside out,/ Till the boys come home."  And also: "Give me some men who are stout-hearted men/ Who will fight for the right they adore... Shoulder to shoulder, and bolder and bolder."  And: "Tramp, tramp, tramp along the highway/ Tramp, tramp, tramp, the road is free...  We're planters and Canucks/ Virginians and Kentucks/ Captain Dick's own Infantry/ Captain Dick's own Infantry," which I now know to have come from Victor Herbert's Naughty Marietta (1910) and which provoked a great deal of surreptitious tittering because it had the word "dick" in it.  In those unenlightened days we sang very many overtly religious songs: "White Christmas" and "Silent Night" and "Easter Parade."  I much admired the tune of "The First Noel" but I had no idea what was meant by "born is the king of Israel" -- the only Israel I knew of was a recently-founded democracy.  I loved the Thanksgiving hymn "We gather together to ask the Lord's blessing;/ He chastens and hastens His will to make known;/ The wicked oppressing now cease from distressing,/ Sing praises to His name; He forgets not his own" and many more stanzas, none of which I could parse or understand (still can't, in fact!).  Another Thanksgiving song:  "Over the river and through the woods/ To grandmother's house we go/ The horse knows the way/ To carry the sleigh...," which I found to be curiously disorienting because my particular grandmother lived in a tiny third-floor walkup on noisy and sweaty Coney Island Avenue.  We sang the immensely mysterious Lord's Prayer (in the Schubert setting, I later discovered).  Why did we so?  Were the heathens and Jews among us expected to convert on the spot?  I much preferred the patriotic songs, although even they too were permeated with inexplicable theology.  We were fervent patriots.  Not one, but two full stanzas of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic":  "In the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea,/ With a glory in His bosom, that transfigures you and me/  As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,/ For God is marching on."  And two stanzas also of "The Star-Spangled Banner": "Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand/ Between their loved home and the war's desolation!/  Blessed with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land/  Praise the Power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation./ Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,/ And this be our motto: 'In God is our trust.'"  I preferred the rousing "O Columbia! the gem of the ocean,/ The home of the brave and the free,/ The shrine of each patriot's devotion,/ A world offers homage to thee" and "God Bless America" as well as the jingoist exceptionalism and cluttered syntax of "Our father's God, to thee/ Author of liberty/ To thee we sing./  Long may our land be bright/ With freedom's holy light;/ Protect us by thy might/ Great God our King." 

Here's a song we were distinctly not taught and did not sing: "This land is your land, this land is my land/ From California, to the New York Island./  From the redwood forest, to the Gulf Stream waters/ This land was made for you and me."  We especially did not sing:  "In the squares of the city  -- in the shadow of the steeple/  Near the relief office -- I see my people/  And some are grumblin' and some are wonderin' /  If this land's still made for you and me."

December 17.  I now remember that we sang musical settings to two familiar poems.  The first, Emma Lazarus's inscription on the Statue of Liberty:  "Give me your tired, your poor/ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free/ The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."  Hey, that's my grandparents you're calling "wretched refuse."  The second, Joyce Kilmer's horrid "Trees":  "I think that I shall never see/  A poem lovely as a tree...  A tree who's hungry mouth is pressed/ Against the earth's sweet-flowing breast" etc.  This song was only palatable because it allowed us to say the word "breast" out loud. 

(Thanks to Steve and to Barry, graduates of P. S. 217, for jogging my memory;  thanks also to David [P. S. 102].

Graduates of P. S. 217 who happen to stumble onto this site: feel free to add comments or to forward this post to classmates with whom you might be in touch.)