April 07, 2008
Bob Dylan rocks!
I just read that Bob Dylan was awarded an honorary Pulitzer Prize.
How cool is that?!?!?
Posted by Tim and Jo at 08:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
March 31, 2008
Newest member of the family
Thanks to mom and dad, and a healthy tax refund...
And there was much rejoicing!
Posted by Tim and Jo at 02:28 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
December 11, 2007
Alfred Burt carols and Bethlehem Down
Tim: I’ve been listening to the Alfred Burt carols recently. Every time I come back to them I discover new things in them: an archaic turn of phrase (“I met a stranger yest’-er’en”), a diminished chord in an unexpected place, a perfect marriage of text and melody, etc. In the lyrics there are some profound theological truths, like the foreshadowing of Christ's suffering and death in the Kings' gifts (from "Jesu Parvule"):
'Tis Thy joy to see
Kings on bended knee,
off'ring gifts to Thee,
sweet Son of Mary.
But Thou may'st not know
what these gifts fore-show
of thy future woe,
blest Babe of Mary.
It is really interesting to hear Christmas carols written with jazz-influenced chord progressions. Most carols are strictly diatonic and easy to digest musically. The chromaticism in the Burt carols matches well the wonder of Christ's birth and mystery of the gospel portrayed in the lyrics.
Another obscure carol I love is called "Bethlehem Down" by Bruce Blunt & Peter Warlock.
“When He is King we will give him the King's gifts,
Myrrh for its sweetness, and gold for a crown,
Beautiful robes,” said the young girl to Joseph,
Fair with her first-born on Bethlehem Down.
Bethlehem Down is full of the starlight
Winds for the spices, and stars for the gold,
Mary for sleep, and for lullaby music
Songs of a shepherd by Bethlehem fold.
When He is King they will clothe him in grave-sheets,
Myrrh for embalming, and wood for a crown,
He that lies now in the white arms of Mary,
Sleeping so lightly on Bethlehem Down.
Here He has peace and a short while for dreaming,
Close huddled oxen to keep him from cold,
Mary for love, and for lullaby music
Songs of a shepherd by Bethlehem fold.
The contrasts in the first and third verses are amazing, encompassing Christ's roles as King and as suffering servant, obedient unto death:
Beautiful robes / grave-sheets
gold for a crown / wood for a crown (i.e. crown of thorns)
Myrrh - sweetness / embalming
Posted by Tim and Jo at 09:20 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
June 20, 2007
National Sacred Harp Singing Convention: The Culture
This past weekend, we drove to Birmingham, AL to stay with our friend Jess and attend the National Sacred Harp Singing Convention.
On Saturday morning, we arrived at the convention bright and early, but the singing had already started. We made our way to the treble section (soprano/descant—the tenors take the melody) and began to sing hymn after hymn. There were several hundred people in the church, most singing, a few listening. The sound was astonishing!
The feeling of singing at the top of my lungs for hours was incredible, too. After an hour, I started to get an oxygen high. I was hoping the babies would wake up for the singing, but they slept soundly. Until it came to the memorial part of the afternoon, where someone gives a lesson and lists the names of all of the singers who had died during the past year. They both went crazy at that point! It was the first time I had felt them both distinctly move at once, and I was trying so hard not to laugh during a solemn moment. It appears that not only are they rambunctious, they also are a bit mischievous as well. On a more serious note, it kind of made me think of the contrast between death and life, feeling these new lives inside of me as people remembered past friends.
Some of the other cultural traditions of the singing were fun, too. Of course, there’s always a “dinner on the ground” (potluck) during these kind of affairs, and it was down-home, deep south food.
Joanna (excitedly): Tim, this is real soul food!
Tim (calmly): I know that.
Joanna: Yeah, but when was the last time you ate black-eyed peas. Wait, when was the last time you’ve even seen black-eyed peas??
I found a great description of the “dinner on the ground” tradition:
And then it’s time for Dinner on the Ground! My observation is that shape note singing is mostly a matter of something coming out a singer’s mouth (song and conversation) or something going in (food). It’s a wonderful system. The term “dinner on the ground” originally meant a picnic, a potluck meal supplied by all who could, for all who were there to eat. And because folks might have traveled a long distance to a church with pretty primitive facilities, everybody spread out blankets and ate ”on the ground”. Today, we stand around or sit on folding chairs (and sometimes even eat at tables in church basements), but Dinner on the Ground is a treasured part of the tradition.(found at http://www.pilgrimproduction.org/sacredharp/maquoketa/tradition.html)
The mantle of leadership for the conference (chairman) was being passed on after fifteen years of service by Buell Cobb. I had read his book The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music and from the style of his writing (it was pervaded by a kindness and sympathy that isn't always found in academic writing), I wasn’t surprised to see that he was a warm man whom everyone seemed to love.
More on the music later!
Posted by Tim and Jo at 06:15 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 02, 2006
Bernstein
Oh, I've neglected this blog woefully lately! I have some fun pics of our little vacation, and the "Josquin Club" reunion I'll put up later.
Tim and I have been watching bits of Leonard Bernstein's lectures "The Unanswered Question," named after Charles Ives's work of the same title.
Incredible. He weaves together musical examples and performances with an encyclopaedic knowledge of music and literature, beautifully articulating how music illuminates the ideas of its time-period, especially the nearly-apocalyptic milieu of the twentieth-century. He makes me remember why I wanted to become a musicologist.
After his philosophical discussion of Mahler and the conducting of the finale from Mahler's Ninth, I was struck by the parallels between Mahler's music and Dostoevsky's novels. Agony, death, love, and occasional luminous outpourings, all inextricably tied together in a complex narrative, shattering and satisfying at the same time.
Posted by Tim and Jo at 06:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 28, 2006
Networking for Dummies
Wow! Diber just sent me a terrific link to an article addressing the ins and outs of how to network as a grad student. As I read it, I realized it was much more than that: it seems more like a survival manual for grad students as they metamorphosize into professional scholars. I wish I had this years ago!
Networking on the Network:
A Guide to Professional Skills for PhD Students
Posted by Tim and Jo at 07:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Wagner remakes
Last week in our "Wagner Ring Cycle" class, a music critic from our local paper came in as a guest lecturer. He spent much of his time describing and showing us clips from really awful Wagner productions, including:
-A chubby Siegfried who when he pulls off his outer garments, reveals a too tight T-shirt with "Siegfried" spray-painted across the front.
-The giants as mafioso characters with briefcases.
-Instead of an eye-patch, Wotan has a pair of sunglasses, with one of the lenses knocked out.
-The Walkyries as tough police broads, all in black with the clear shields used when controlling mobs.
-Scenes which take place in a trailer park
So, a couple of us came up with our own ideas for Wagner remakes...
"The Andy Griffith Ring Cycle"
*Starring*
Andy Griffith as Wotan
Barney Fife as Mime
Opie as Siegfried
Aunt Bea...perhaps Erda the Earth Mother? A nagging Fricka?
The city of Mayberry as Vallhalla
"The Dental Hygiene Ring Cycle"
We haven't worked out the parts for this as fully yet, but we know that Wotan is The Dentist who carries around a giant toothbrush, and Siegfried is a tube of Crest. Fafner the Dragon could symbolize the bad breath that will befall you if you don't brush and floss regularly.
Posted by Tim and Jo at 09:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 20, 2006
All Hail the Orchestrion
Prelude to this entry:
"In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock ..."
This is a quote spoken by Orson Welles' character Harry Lime from an excellent old movie we watched recently - The Third Man.
Today Joanna and I did a tour of the Henry Frick mansion (Clayton House). Frick ("The King of Coke") was an entrepreneur in the late 19th century/early 20th century who made his fortune running coal mines and selling the coal to Andrew Carnegie to fuel the latter's steel mills. Frick (who became a millionaire by age 30), liked to spend his money on nice things; nice things such as Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, a 1914 Model T Ford, a 1914 Rolls Royce, a fabulously ornate mansion, and (my favorite) a Swiss-made Welte Orchestrion. Some people have little wind-up music boxes that sit quaintly upon their dressers. Imagine having an 11 feet high, 8 feet wide (and LOUD) "music box" dominating your parlor room! Mr. Frick would amuse his guests by saying "would you like to hear my own private orchestra?" He then would rev up the orchestrion and the guests would have themselves a chuckle.
The orchestrion grew out of the musical box which grew out of the Swiss peoples' expertise at clockmaking. They are a combination of a music box and a player piano and are a precursor to the jukebox. The monstous contraption in the Frick mansion is a wonder to behold, and hear! It generates music that brings together so many "worlds" of sound. Circus music, carousel music, marching band music, German beer hall oom-pah music, French accordian music, Polish polka music and Jewish klezmer music. The music seeps into the subconscious, welling up images of little Austrian kids riding on carousels, organ grinders standing outside French cafes churning out popular tunes, and people going to the World's Fair in Chicago or New York to see these magical new machines. Contrary to what Mr. Welles said, the Swiss are famous for much more that just the cuckoo clock!
Posted by Tim and Jo at 09:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 17, 2006
Bob Dylan ramblings #1
Joanna: Soooo....a little on my new found obsession with Bob Dylan. I just discovered him about two years ago, thanks to Tim. It's hard to believe that I never came in serious contact with his music before then, since I've always liked folk-song/singer-songwriter kinds of music, Simon & Garfunkel, Peter, Paul & Mary, etc.
There's the perennial Dylan dilemma: how can he sing so "badly" at times, and yet communicate so powerfully? Last year, I played his "Blowin' in the Wind" for the music appreciation class I TA for: his version of it, and a video clip of Peter, Paul and Mary singing it at the 1963 Civil Rights Rally in Washington, D.C. This opened up incredible discussions, of the symbolism of the song as read through the events of its time, and of the timbre of the song itself. Year after year, I'm amazed at the articulate insights that my students have about music, even without any kind of musical training. Basically, though some students thought that the harmonies of P, P & M brought a new dimension to the song, they thought that their version was too polished. They felt that the rawness of Dylan's voice gave an immediacy, poignancy, and passion to the song that was lacking in the other version. Basically, that his "bad" singing was what gave the song its power.
In the Silver Eye exhibit we went to yesterday, John Cohen had a quote saying that Dylan's is somewhere in between a folk ballad and Symbolist poetry.
My favorite Dylan song at the moment is Chimes of Freedom Flashing
The images are brilliant, especially his mixture of sound and visual images—Chimes ring all the time in songs, but how many times do you see chimes flash? I want to describe it more (lightning, thunder, storm, suffering), but I know I can’t say it as well as he does. Here, instead of Symbolist poetry, the poetry reminds me of a drawn out, complex metaphysical conceit.
My take is that he's an orator who uses every tool--melody, harmony, instruments, even at times flat, raw, scratchy, scraping notes--to shape his poetry. Especially in his "folk" style. I have a theory about his electric stuff that I'm still working out--at times, I think he deliberately sings wretchedly in some of those songs as a shield to protect himself from the hordes of people adulating him.
Continue reading "Bob Dylan ramblings #1"
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