Nessun Dorma

I help distribute food to the needy in Centro on Saturdays. Last week when I went to pick up food, I met a gringo in his car outside the pickup point- he was dropping off sandwiches. 'Kurt' and I got to talking. In his former life he had been a singer: musicals, operas, what have you. I said I'd been singing for the public (choirs and cantoring) since I was in first grade, but not professionally, and I really liked songs from opera and musicals. Anyway, we started singing Nessun Dorma from Puccini's opera Turandot, but shortly we stopped, as it was time to head into Centro with the collected food.

So today I'm handing out food, and I hear someone singing the opening line of the aria. I look around, and see Kurt in a car not 10 feet away, stopped at a red light. Can ya believe it? So we launch into it again, and almost got to the end before the light changed. Just a terrific moment.

There's a joke in Cuenca: it's a big city, but a small town: ya always gonna run inna people ya know. Once again it's true. The odds of randomly meeting Kurt on one Saturday, and seeing him again somewhere else the very next Saturday, it's too convenient. And we sounded great together with no preparation.

We both think the best singer to cover Nessun Dorma is Franco Corelli, an Italian tenor from the 1950s-1970s. Given how many people (including the usual suspects) have recorded the song, what are the odds of both of us liking this now-remote tenor's treatment? Life remains a wonder, and here is one of Corelli's performances, chosen for its subtitles. Like many other romantic songs, it reminds me of courting my wife.

https://youtu.be/e8MhdyfQq1A?list=RDe8MhdyfQq1A

Paroles d'Amour

This post links to RAnn's Sunday Snippets

violets grow there the whole year 'round

Song lyrics have hugely informed my view of romance and marriage since before I could even read. For over 50 years I've sung the most influential ones around the house, at work, and in the car. Only in the last year or so have I recognized how being married for 26 years, having kids, grandkids & All That has deepened my understanding of those old lyrics for the better. Because I used to reflect on these songs, but now I participate in them.

I ached for lifelong love-

From France, Julien Clerc:

Comme un jour tu viendras sûrement/ One day you'll surely come

Dans ce salon qui perd son temps/ To this room where time stands still

Ne parlons plus jamais de nos déserts.../ We'll speak no more of just deserts

Et si tu restes je mets le couvert/ And should you nap I'll cover you snug

Maintenant, comme avant/ Now as before

Restons-en au présent pour la vie / Let's stay like this for life

Aujourd'hui, reste ici / From now on- stay with me.

My courtship was just like this-

From my grandparents' hi-fi, South Pacific (where men wear coconut brassieres):

Some enchanted evening

When you find your true love,

When you feel her call you

Across a crowded room,

Then fly to her side,

And make her your own

Or all through your life you

May dream all alone.

And this is still my wife, who turns 64 this week-

Younger than springtime, are you

Softer than starlight, are you,

Warmer than winds of June,

Are the gentle lips you gave me.

Gayer than laughter, are you,

Sweeter than music, are you,

Angel and lover, heaven and earth,

Are you to me.

This is my marriage-

From my dormroom stereo, Yes:

Hold me my love, hold me today, call me round

Travel we say, wander we choose, love tune

Lay upon me, hold me around lasting hours

We love when we play

Look me my love sentences move dancing away

We join we receive

As our song memories long hope in a way

Nous sommes du soleil

Hold me around lasting hours

We love when we play

This is my family-

When I was a cantor, Psalm 128:

Your wife like a fruitful vine in the heart of your house

Your children like shoots of the olive around your table

May the LORD bless you from Zion all the days of your life

May you see you children’s children in a happy Jerusalem

Now we’re in our waning years-

From my parents' hi-fi, the Four Freshmen:

As the days grew old and the nights passed into time

And the weeks and years took wing

Gentle boy, tender girl, their love remained still young

For their hearts were full of spring

Then one day they died and their graves were side by side

On a hill where robins sing

And they say violets grow there the whole year 'round

For their hearts were full of spring

From the radio, Minnie Ripperton, who died much too young:

No one else can make me feel
The colors that you bring
Stay with me while we grow old
And we will live each day in springtime
Cause loving you has made my life so beautiful
And every day my life is filled with loving you

And this my life even until today-

From the Greenville County Library LP collection, Billie Holliday:

Living for you, is easy living.

It's easy to live when you're in love.

And I'm so in love,

There's nothing in life, but you.

I'll never regret the years I'm giving.

They're easy to give when you're in love.

I'm happy to do whatever I do, for you.

For so long through so many songs I imagined lifelong love. Now I live lifelong love in ways I couldn't have imagined. The songs are old; but love grows, and blooms anew.

The Sun Poured In

Thanksgiving Day was cold and clear, and My Fabulous Wife was adding Blondie ingredients to a mixing bowl on the kitchen island. There's a big skylight over the island, which was lit up like all outdoors. I idly watched Janet pour in a bag of little tan goobers. What's that stuff? "Butterscotch." Huh- you put butterscotch in Blondies? "Yep." Huh...and I was seeing the sunlight all over her and the bowl, and trying to recall something about the sun and butterscotch that for a few seconds gave me that Jesus-kill-me-now good feeling.

Later that night I was still trying to make sense of sun and butterscotch. Searched online for "sun butterscotch" and found:

And the sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all my senses.

Oh that's right, it's from Chelsea Morning by Joni Mitchell. I probably first heard it sung by Judy Collins on the radio in 1968, when I was 11, then later on by Joni. Chelsea Morning has always colored my image of Manhattan: bright, busy, full of possibility. And it also influenced my idea of romance.

So I listened to it again; and at 56, it moves me more today than it did when I was young. For as well as the lyrics hinted at the love I imagined as a teenager, they better describe the real love I have now. 'Cause in my life, every morning is a Chelsea morning.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning, and the first thing that I heard
Was a song outside my window, and the traffic wrote the words
It came a-reeling up like Christmas bells, and rapping up like pipes and drums

Oh, won't you stay
We'll put on the day
And we'll wear it 'till the night comes

Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning, and the first thing that I saw
Was the sun through yellow curtains, and a rainbow on the wall
Blue, red, green and gold to welcome you, crimson crystal beads to beckon

Oh, won't you stay
We'll put on the day
There's a sun show every second

Now the curtain opens on a portrait of today
And the streets are paved with passersby
And pigeons fly
And papers lie
Waiting to blow away

Woke up, it was a Chelsea morning, and the first thing that I knew
There was milk and toast and honey and a bowl of oranges, too
And the sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all my senses
Oh, won't you stay
We'll put on the day
And we'll talk in present tenses

When the curtain closes and the rainbow runs away
I will bring you incense owls by night
By candlelight
By jewel-light
If only you will stay
Pretty baby, won't you
Wake up, it's a Chelsea morning

Chelsea Morning lyrics © Joni Mitchell/Crazy Crow Music/Siquomb Music, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Greenville-Ephrathah 4: Local Music

Postlude at the close of Lenten Vespers. Music by the parish organist, Robert Lee. This recording is by the choral ensemble, Concordiae: Singers of Ecclesiastical Music, directed by parish choirmaster Arlen Clarke.

It's not very Lenten, but Vespers is on Sunday.

Evening Prayer

Too Flat a Pyramid

 I think the Beatles are underrated. That's not the subject of this post, but I say it in the interest of full disclosure. I was 6 years old when Please Please Me came out, and even a first-grader knew he'd never heard anything like that before. I got the 45 for my next birthday; but I can date my childhood by Beatle songs better than birthdays.

(I should mention my wife saw the Beatles live at Olympia Stadium in Detroit in 1964. Yes, she is older than me.) 

A few years ago I read Can't Buy Me Love, a Beatles bio that came out in 2007. Of particular interest were the bits on Hamburg, before they had made it big, but were preparing to make it big. Hamburg photos taken of them by Astrid Kircherr are my favorite Beatle images. Some examples:

Kids: George was 17 when they first went to Hamburg. Seventeen.

The book filled in a lot of detail about the Beatles in Hamburg, which had been treated in a 1994 movie called Backbeat. I liked the movie more than Paul and George did.

This summer, on our July Adriatic cruise, one of the shows featured a tribute band called the Backbeat Beatles. After the second song I told Janet they sounded more like the Beatles than the Beatles. They even talked like they were from Liverpool. Anyway, after the show, instead of taking it easy, the band changed clothes and headed up to the piano bar, where Janet and I are if we aren't in the jazz bar. For over an hour they sang songs they hadn't done in the show, with "Paul" on the piano. Just terrific. Then afterward they sat around with us and a few others 'til 2am talking about the Beatles, Liverpool, music, kids, travel, politics. They were all from Liverpool, had been raised on Beatles music; I'm guessing they were all late 30s-early 40s. At least one wife was with them. "Paul" seemed kind of familiar...turned out he played George in Backbeat, and later arranged to use the Backbeat name for the tribute band.

So I asked one of them (let's say it was "John") if they ever play Beatles songs their own way, or do they have to do them straight all the time? John said they perform them like the Beatles: audiences tend to think of Beatles music as kind of preserved, and not to be done except as how the Beatles did it. But when they practice, or do sound checks, they'll do their own thing. I asked if he'd ever listened to any Beatles covers on YouTube: one reason I like YouTube so much is that it shows thousands of people doing their own versions of well-known songs. I already know how the original artists did a song; when I listen to a cover, I want to hear what that individual brings to the music. I elaborated a bit, saying that I expect Beatles music will endure beyond their lifetimes: people two generations removed from the 60s cover their songs on YouTube, and make no pretense of doing the songs like the Beatles did; each person does them his or her way. I like that. It keeps the music from being embalmed. Plus unlike in the Beatles' day, no music industry executive or radio dj with a playlist can decide what music will or won't be available for me to hear. The bureaucratic-managerial pyramid had been bypassed, or at least flattened way down, thus allowing listeners to buy whatever 99-cent songs they like by anyone who made their music available on the net.

But John said he didn't think that flattened pyramid was such a good idea. Oh...why not? Well, he asked, what really great bands can you think of?  I rattled off a dozen. Yes, he said, but name some from the last 15 years or so, since the mp3 format became popular. Ehhh....Smashing Pumpkins maybe...no...I give up! John said right, there aren't any great new bands these days in part because the music industry can't perform the winnowing process as it used to do. New music is being made available faster than anyone can keep up with; and it's virtually impossible for a new talent to get any traction before they're washed over by even newer music. A band like U2 is still a big deal because they were huge before the mp3 era, and aren't likely to ever have any real competition. And John wasn't confident that those old great bands would have had the same success today: partly because the modern listener's attention is too diffuse due to the proliferation of inexpensive downloads, and sites such as YouTube; and the weakness of the music business model in which the promoters risk their paychecks and resources on correctly distinguishing great talent from good talent.

I hadn't thought of that. I'm not persuaded, either. But still, I've always assumed that flattening the pyramid was a good thing, and it hadn't occurred to me that it might not always be true.

P.S.

A couple of Beatles covers I like; your mileage may vary:

Norwegian Wood

Here Comes the Sun

Eclogue for Piano and Strings

This post has been linked to RAnn's Sunday Snippets

 In 1901 Gerald Finzi, a descendant of Italian-Jewish immigrants, was born in England. I thought his last name was 'Finsey' until I saw it written down. He's one of a batch of 20th century English composers that I'm fond of.

His 'Eclogue for Piano and Strings' is something I've returned to repeatedly over the last 20 years or so. It was written between 1925 and 1929; which is to say, after Britain's Pyrrhic victory in the First World War, and before the utter exhaustion of the Second.

I always hope to hear in a piece of music an echo of the time in which it was written. In the case of the Eclogue, I hear a traumatized nation hoping the world might be beautiful again; but also accepting that it might not.
Eclogue for Piano and Strings  (10 minutes)

Griswold vs. Music

I was born in 1957. Grew up amid music which predated Griswold vs. Connecticut (the 1965 Supreme Court case which ok'd contraceptives for married people), Eisenstadt (1972) and Roe (1973). Looking back over the decades, it's remarkable how the Sexual Revolution has affected the imaginations of songwriters and their audiences. And I don't mean rap or death metal, but popular music that can be played in polite company.

As I kid I heard and learned songs such as:

Love & Marriage (1955)

Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like the horse and carriage
Dad was told by mother
You can't have one, you can't have none, you can't have one without the other!

I Have Dreamed (The King & I)

I have dreamed that your arms are lovely,
I have dreamed what a joy you'll be.
I have dreamed every word you whisper.
When you're close,
Close to me.

(That's just how I feel about my wife)

Sweet Lorraine

When it's raining I don't miss the sun
'Cause it's in my sweetie's smile
Just think that I'm the lucky one
Who will lead her down the aisle

(I felt just like that on my wedding day)

and Some Enchanted Evening (South Pacific):

Some enchanted evening
When you find your true love
When you feel her call you across a crowded room
Then fly to her side
And make her your own
Or all through your life you may dream all alone

(Our courtship was just like that; we joke that I launched myself at her like a cruise missile)

I especially took the last line to heart: not only is marriage good, but not getting married has a price. But you say: there's not a word about marriage in this song. And I reply: yes, it goes without saying. And the adult world around me confirmed it. I remember only one marriage-age woman from my early childhood who wasn't married or a nun. And every adult man I knew was married, or a priest. Adulthood in my childhood meant taking an other-directed vow of one kind or another.

I could go on, but here's the point: how I imagined adult life and romance always pointed to marriage, partly because the popular culture which I absorbed did the same. But music started to change when I was a kid. The songs I list here are hardly comprehensive, but simply a few of the ones that made lasting impressions on me, for better or worse.

Griswold was in 1965; in 1967 Angel of the Morning was a huge hit. It seemed odd to a kid...why doesn't she sleep at her own house? What sin is she talking about?

I see no need to take me home, I'm old enough to face the dawn.
Maybe the sun's light will be dim and it won't matter anyhow.
If morning's echo says we've sinned, well, it was what I wanted now.
And if we're the victims of the night, I won't be blinded by light.

Now let's jump ahead two years to a song which from the age of 13 has contributed mightily to my image of marriage, Our House (1969), by Graham Nash:

Our house is a very, very, very fine house
With two cats in the yard
Life used to be so hard
Now everything is easy
'Cause of you

My life is just like the song; but only after I was married in 1988 did I learn that Our House is not about a married couple. By 1969 living together was becoming mainstreamed as an alternate/ prelude to marriage. But Graham Nash, who was born in 1942, made this song about living with Joni Mitchell into such a beguiling little hymn about the joys of monogamy that it looked just like marriage to me...and probably to Nash as well.

Of course 1969 was also the year of Whole Lotta Love. I don't count it because like much of the blues it springs from, its sexual bluntness wasn't in the cultural mainstream, and it didn't affect my ideas about love and sex one way or another.

In 1971, Carly Simon recorded That's the Way I've Always Heard It Should Be which was surprisingly blunt about getting married:

But you say it's time we moved in together
And raised a family of our own, you and me -
Well, that's the way I've always heard it should be:
You want to marry me, we'll marry.

If you check the whole song you'll see that in spite of assorted substantial misgivings, she still accepts marriage as the adult model of love. Pretty remarkable for 1971; but Simon, 12 years my senior, was raised in a more normative culture than I was.

Also in 1971 the Temptations released Just My Imagination, which shows Motown could still think traditionally about men and women:

Soon we'll be married and raise a family.
In a cozy, little home out in the country with two children, maybe three.
I tell you, I can visualize it all.
This couldn't be a dream for too real it all seems.

Then in 1972 there was Summer Breeze,  (recent version) which like Our House even today informs me about the quotidian joys of marriage:

And I come home
from a hard day's work
and you're waiting there
not a care in the world

See the smile a-waitin' in the kitchen
food cookin' and the plates for two
Feel the arms that reach out to hold me
in the evening when the day is through

Is the couple in Summer Breeze married? I don't know. I like to think so: my life is just like this song too.

It wasn't until 1974 that I started to understand mainstream lyrics that not only didn't point toward marriage, but seemed to point away from it, like Joni Mitchell's Help Me (recent cover):

Help me, I think I'm falling in love with you
Are you going to make me go there by myself
That's such a lonely thing to do
Both of us flirting around, flirting and flirting, hurting, too
We love our loving
Not like we love our freedom

and

Didn't it feel good, we were sitting there talking
Or lying there not talking, didn't it feel good?

Then in 1976, Mitchell was more explicit about her inconstancy:

Hejira

I'm traveling in some vehicle
I'm sitting in some cafe
A defector from the petty wars
That shell shock love away....

In our possessive coupling
So much could not be expressed
So now I'm returning to myself
These things that you and I suppressed...

In the church they light the candles
And the wax rolls down like tears
There's the hope and the hopelessness
I've witnessed thirty years.

Hejira is Arabic for flight (as in flee, not fly); here it implies a flight from commitment, not Mecca.

Coyote

There's no comprehending
Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes
And the lips you can get
And still feel so alone...

Now he's got a woman at home
He's got another woman down the hall
He seems to want me anyway
Why'd you have to get so drunk
And lead me on that way...

Coyote's in the coffee shop
He's staring a hole in his scrambled eggs
He picks up my scent on his fingers
While he's watching the waitresses' legs

Song for Sharon

When we were kids in Maidstone, Sharon
I went to every wedding in that little town
To see the tears and the kisses
And the pretty lady in the white lace wedding gown
And walking home on the railroad tracks
Or swinging on the playground swing
Love stimulated my illusions
More than anything...

Sharon you've got a husband
And a family and a farm
I've got the apple of temptation
And a diamond snake around my arm

I was 16 in 1974, and I regarded 31-year-old Joni Mitchell as a thinking adult. But how could a thinking adult have such a wreck of a love life?  Why was love so difficult? Back then I didn't see that what went without saying were Griswold, Eisenstadt, and Roe.

Together these songs became a cautionary tale; I sure didn't want my life to be like that. But my life has turned out wonderfully, as I especially reflected on this Valentine's Day while my glorious wife and I sat in the sun, laughed, and kept tabs on our two grandkids. I imbibed the traditional view of monogamy and marriage through the popular culture that preceded my teen years; and songwriters such as Mitchell warned me that living like "Don Juan's reckless daughter" does not lead to happiness. So I wonder: what about the generations that follow me...my kids for instance?

In 1994 I watched the movie Reality Bites, about GenXers' directionless lives. It was the first time I heard the song Stay, by Lisa Loeb (born in 1968). In the song a couple argues about breaking up, but we learn from the closing lines that the woman who intended to leave will stay:

You said "you caught me cause you want me
And one day you'll let me go"
You try to give away a keeper, or keep me cause you know
You're just too scared to lose.
And you say, "Stay."

What strikes me is that it's clear they're living together (it goes without saying), and it isn't working. The man asks her to stay because he doesn't want to be alone; she knows that is his reason, but stays anyway. And at no point in the song does the woman give any impression that marriage is anywhere on the horizon with this person, or another person, or that there's any choice except to maintain this formless "relationship" or have no relationship at all. And set marriage aside for second: what about love, or romance?  She's only choosing among different levels of dissatisfaction. To which I say, well, yeah: if marriage is simply not an option, then love will be problematic. It sounds like the songwriter (or at least the character in the song) lacks any image of marriage as a model for any present or future way to live; which is far, far away from the worldview I grew up with. She clearly wants love and happiness, but at age 26 seems unaware of how to pursue it. And the song shows how the historical/ anthropological model for sex and romance (marriage) has been just about erased from a popular culture that's marinated in a contraceptive/abortive worldview for more than 40 years.

Of course the erosion of cultural/ moral substance isn't limited to love, sex, and marriage. Even fundamental, existential notions of what life is for are also slipping away. In 1996 Smashing Pumpkins released the album  Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which contains the song 1979 (recent version) which is nominally a treatment of teenage ennui. But the songwriter, Billy Corgan (born 1967) was 28 at the time, and makes observations more adult than adolescent. I don't think this degree of anomie was lyrically expressible in say, 1979:

We don't even care to shake these zipper blues
And we don't know
Just where our bones will rest
To dust I guess
Forgotten and absorbed to the earth below

Double cross the vacant and the bored
They're not sure just what we have in store

We don't even care as restless as we are
We feel the pull in the land of a thousand guilts
And poured cement, lamented and assured
To the lights and the towns below.

Man, that's bleak. And yet when I sing along to 1979, I hear a yearning for meaning, and feel optimistic. If these younger generations can recognize when life is empty or pointless, then maybe they can obtain a life that's substantial and full, if they know how. Yet they struggle against so much that I never had to: it would never occur to me that maybe one or more of my siblings had been aborted, for example.

My imagination has never been my enemy; is theirs?

In closing let's look way past Griswold; could no one have predicted the consequences of easy contraception?

"....the use of contraceptives has made sexual intercourse independent of parenthood, and the marriage of the future will be confined to those who seek parenthood for its own sake rather than as the natural fulfilment of sexual love.

But under these circumstances who will trouble to marry?

Marriage will lose all attractions for the young and the pleasure-loving and the poor and the ambitious.......It is impossible to imagine a system more contrary to the first principles of social well-being."

Christopher Dawson, 1933

The Modern Century

No, not the 20th; and no, not the 21st. I mean the 19th century, the 1800s.

I never tire of reflecting on the speed with which the West develops ideas; that is, not so much the ideas themselves, but how the West grabs an idea and runs with it. For example, in 30 years, the West went from this:

to this:

And in 25 more years to this:

A virtual eyeblink.  And while 20th century aerospace is fascinating, these examples are shown only to introduce a more beguiling process in the 19th: the development of music.

You don't need to listen to these all the way through, just enough to get a sense of what geniuses imagined music could be at different points in the 1800s. They are all piano pieces, partly to focus on the music rather than the instruments; but also so you can hear the newer ideas being played with the same 88 keys by the successive composers. In other words the development isn't technical (like airplanes), but imaginative.

First up is the 2nd movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata from 1801.

Followed by Frederic Chopin's Berceuse (lullaby) from 1844.

And from 1888, Arabesque #1 by Claude Debussy.

Can you hear these men standing on the shoulders of their predecessors, each making music that the prior generation could not have imagined? That's the sound of the West at work.

I never get over the fact that the Arabesque is a 19th century composition. Its sensibility seems better matched to my life than to Teddy Roosevelt's. It's still a mystery to me how Debussy could conceive of such music, and a bit surprising that it didn't kill him; like seeing the face of God, which I expect all artists glimpse from time to to time.

This post is linked to Sunday Snippets.

Praying Twice

This article is also posted at http://amazingcatechists.com/

A constant Catholic theme in 6th Grade Wednesday Sunday School ™ is the relationship between Body & Soul, which naturally has everything to do with singing in church....right?

Occasionally I sing a bit in class (not more than a minute or so): Regina Coeli at Easter, Latin responses as part of our Mass classes, a bit of Supper's Ready, short stuff like that. I'm no great shakes as a singer, but it doesn't matter. I tell the kids if I'm not afraid to sing alone in class that they shouldn't be afraid to sing in church as part of the congregation. Singing is important; Catholics should sing.

"But I don't like to sing!"

"Everybody likes to sing; you're probably just self-conscious. Don't be. Once you get used to singing out loud you'll like it. I used to be afraid too, but nobody really hears your individual voice in church. Do y'all know St. Augustine? No? St. Augustine lived about 1,500 years ago. His momma, St. Monica, prayed for 15 years that he would take God seriously. Eventually he did, and became a Doctor of the Church. A doctor? Not a like a medical doctor, a teacher. 'Doctor' is Latin for 'teacher.' Well why do we call a doctor a doctor then?  Ask me after class. So, St. Augustine was a great teacher. He taught that singing at Mass was important. One thing he gets credit for is the saying, "He who sings, prays twice."

What's that mean..."He who sings, prays twice?" No guesses? OK, let's back up a little: why should anybody sing at all at Mass? Still no guesses...?

When we're at Mass on earth what's going on in heaven? They're at Mass too! That's right, at Mass heaven and earth are connected. Here's a bit about the Heavenly Liturgy from that last book in the Bible which is called...? Revelations!  Yes. Revelations says, "four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and...they sung a new song."  So: why do we sing at Mass? Because they're singing in heaven? Yes. When you're at Mass and afraid to sing out loud, remember you're singing along with everyone in heaven, not just the people around you.

Back to St. Augustine: "He who sings, prays twice." What's he mean? That if we sing with people in heaven we're singing twice? Good guess, that's not quite what I'm looking for.

What makes a hymn different from a song? Hymns are for church. Yes...but what if instead of singing a song, we all just read it? That'd be weird. Yes. Tell me, if you read something out loud and it rhymes, what is it? Oh...a poem? Yes. But if you read a hymn, what might that be? Well, a poem too? Mmm, sort of... usually in hymns we're talking to someone, who? God? Yes. When you talk to God, what's that called? Praying!  Yes! So a hymn is basically a prayer that you...sing!  Yes. So if you sing a hymn, then...you're praying? Yes. But why would that be praying twice?

Tell me please, we are made of...a body and soul!  Yes, together they make a person. If I pray quietly, which of those parts are praying? The soul. Yes; the whole person isn't praying, just the...soul. Yes. How could I get my body to pray too? Umm...pray out loud? Yeah...a little. Talking doesn't really involve my body all that much. It's pretty close to doing nothing. How about if you sing? Are any of you in the children's choir? I am. How do you feel after you sing for a whole Sunday Solemn Mass? I'm tired. But you're just singing, not playing a sport. Why are you tired? It's kind of hard to sing alot, I just get tired of breathing and stuff. Yes. And is your soul tired? No, my head and my lungs I guess get tired.  Yes, it takes real effort to sing out loud. What does the work of singing, your soul? No, my body. Yes. And tell me again, what's a hymn? A prayer you sing. Yes. And when you quietly say a prayer, what part of you does it? My soul. And if you sing the prayer, what parts of you do that? Both parts! Which are....bodynsoul! Yes. So what does it mean: "He who sings, prays twice?" It means when you sing both parts are praying! Yes. So when you're at Mass don't pray with just your soul; pray twice by using your...? body, yes by using your body to...sing! Yes."

Love Creates

A standard theme in Wednesday Sunday School is that love creates. Begin with God. God is Love; hence, God creates. God is all Love, thus God creates all. As Dante observed, "L'amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle/  Love that moves the sun and the other stars."  Acting as God's agents, husbands and wives love. Their love creates children. All people love; they create all sorts of stuff. Humans are so love-infused they create all the time, can't stop themselves. And sometimes God's creativity is most winsomely revealed in the most offhand things people do.

I'm thinking especially of the things people do on YouTube in venues where they're half-ignored.

To introduce a single example, I assume you're familiar with two small pieces of music (even if you don't know their names):

Gymnopedie #1 by Erik Satie  (short version)

and Take Five by Dave Brubeck

Once you're reacquainted with these two, listen to this beguiling bit.   It's all the more appealing for being performed amidst the clink, clatter & conversation of a banquet hall dinner. Ofttimes the smallest, most unremarked stuff can be shot through with God's grace.

Even if no-one is really listening I imagine He is happy.     

Ολυμπία

As is usual every two years, my wife and I hooked up the rabbit ears last Friday night so we could watch the Olympics....especially the part of the Opening Ceremony when all the athletes process into the stadium (much of the Opening Ceremonies bores me, or annoys me....digressing already, I see). I'm always struck by the confidence of youth that's on display during that parade of optimism. All the smiles, laughter, cutting up, taking pictures, the energy, the self-wonder, the physical expression of being the best in world (or at least in the company of the best in the world). I notice this Titanic confidence most of all in the athletes who have won before, and are back for more medals: confidence piled on confidence, masters of all they survey at such a young age. I see them competing, being interviewed: Usain Bolt, Phelps, Shaun White, Ohno. They reign supreme, exude an air of omnipotence. They're the best, and they know it, can't hide it, and don't try: the Conquerors. It's not in the nature of youth to soft-pedal, and I appreciate not having to endure bleats of false modesty.

Anyway, for the last couple of Olympics, this youthful barrage of virtuosity kept reminding me of something, or someone. I dimly recalled a definitive display of the boundless confidence of youth: watch me, I'm the greatest; I'm incredible, nobody else can do this as well; I'm in awe of myself, aren't you; I don't mean to brag, but I am the best in the world, it's just a fact; I love being the best and you can love it, too.

What was that definitive, physical expression of Omnipotent Youth? Some sports event? Something military? Political? A movie scene? No, no...all examples of barking up the wrong trees. And it wasn't Mr. Olympia, Arnold Schwarzenegger, either (why would you think that?); it was Van Cliburn playing the piano. Van who?

When I was a kid in the 1900s, Van Cliburn was a big, big deal. Wikipedia says:

"The first International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1958 was an event designed to demonstrate Soviet cultural superiority during the Cold War, on the heels of their technological victory with the Sputnik launch in October 1957. Cliburn's performance at the competition finale of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 earned him a standing ovation lasting eight minutes. When it was time to announce a winner, the judges were obliged to ask permission of the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to give first prize to an American. "Is he the best?" Khrushchev asked. "Then give him the prize!" Cliburn returned home to a ticker-tape parade in New York City, the only time the honor has been accorded a classical musician. His cover story in Time proclaimed him "The Texan Who Conquered Russia."

America was crazy for Cliburn. My parents & grandparents, who played classical music around the house, made him a dinnertable topic. He was on TV. He was on the hi-fi. He was practically a kid.  He beat the Russians at their own game. He exposed me to Tchaiko and Rachmaninoff at an impressionable age. And he was gloriously full of his own potential. Just watch this world class performance:
 
YouTube - (Cliburn)Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No.1 Mvt III
 
Could any Olympian revel in his victories more than this giant-killer?

Einstein & Mozart & Wagner & Me

No, not that Wagner. But yes, that Mozart.

I was reading this article earlier today Music and the Rise and Decline of Western Civilization and got a kick out of this (edited) excerpt:

"Einstein was not as fond of Beethoven as he was of Bach, Mozart and Schubert. According to Walter Isaacson, “What Einstein appreciated in Mozart and Bach was the clear architectural structure that made their music seem ‘deterministic’ and, like his own favorite scientific theories, plucked from the universe rather than composed. ‘Beethoven created his music,’ Einstein once said, but ‘Mozart’s music is so pure it seems to have been ever-present in the universe... I feel uncomfortable listening to Beethoven. I think he is too personal, almost naked. ...[Einstein] was critical about other composers in ways that reflect some of his scientific sentiments: ......Wagner had a ‘lack of architectural structure I see as decadence’; and Strauss was ‘gifted but without inner truth."

I've only posted twice about music: here Liebestod about Wagner; and here Beim Schlafengehen about Strauss. So I perked up at Einstein fussing about both of them in particular. The article's pretty clear about why Einstein favors Mozart over Wagner; and it made me think about why I'm the opposite of Einstein.

I agree with Einstein that Bach, Mozart, et al do a great job of using music to discover and express the beauty and rationality of the universe. I appreciate that sound frequencies which are proportional to one another in a geometric/mathematical sense are also beautiful to the ear when played together, or in sequence. Why should that be true, except that God deliberately created the universe to be rational, systematized, intelligible, and also beautiful? That man can find reason in beauty is ever fascinating. (Google "Pythagoras chord" for more on this.)

But I don't ever get the feeling that Bach & Mozart are going beyond the system (not to imply that they could). Yes, the universe is a window on the Mind of God; to perceive the Divine Clockwork through the creation of beautiful music is a wonder indeed. But we humans are more than just part of the universe, we're part of God as well, who 'naturally' transcends, and is in no way limited by, his creation. In other words, in a small way now, and in a big way later, we'll share with God the transcending of the universe. That's the point of our current existence: to transcend it (with a lot of help).

That's what I sense in Wagner & Strauss. Through their predecessors they know the beauty inherent in the system, the rationale, the rules of the universe, the Music of the Spheres. Then they wonder: what is the nature of beauty that is not bound by these rules, these rhythms, this system? What is the music that transcends all that? What music is God composing that isn't limited by the conditions of human existence? Can we, as bits of the transcendent God, compose some as well? Create beyond Creation? We exceed our own understanding....can you hear that?

The universe and its rules are finite....human imagination & creativity are not.

And I suppose that Einstein, focused on understanding the Universe, wasn't too keen on music that tries to go beyond it.

Liebestod

This is a post about Wagner.

No, not that Wagner, this Wagner:

I like opera (enough to spend time and money on it). I usually listen to the pretty stuff, the accessible stuff: Verdi, Puccini, Bizet's Carmen, Cav & Pag, that lot.

I like classical music (enough to spend time and money on it). I usually listen to the likes of Debussy, Rachmaninov, Tchaiko, R. Strauss, sacred music, 20th century Brits.

I don't spend much time or money on Wagner. I agree with Mark Twain that Wagner's music is better than it sounds: as Twain said, having attended Parsifal, "The first act of the three occupied two hours, and I enjoyed that in spite of the singing." And afterward: "Seven hours at $5 a ticket is almost too much for the money."

And yet after decades of marinating in, reflecting on, being transported, enlightened, educated & ennobled by classical music in general, and opera in particular, I return again and again to eight minutes of Richard Wagner, the final aria of Tristan und Isolde: Der Liebestod. I'm old enough now (or stupid enough) to propose that this eight-minute song is the greatest work of art ever created by a human being. Higher than not just every other piece of music, but all architecture; all literature; all drama; all painting & sculpture. The best. The one.

Please note: I'm not saying Liebestod is the greatest thing man has ever done; it's the greatest work of art.

I tell you now, I will drop dead if anyone would draw this conclusion having listened to Liebestod once. A more likely reaction would be one had endured it, outlasted it, survived it. The music wanders, shapeshifts, restless, weird....unmusical? The voice & orchestra meander around one another. The lyrics, detached. Yet taken as a whole it's also intriguing, beguiling, mysterious, alluring, immense, pointing to something unclear. If music were seen and not heard, St. Paul would say, "For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood."

Through repeated listenings spread out over decades, Liebestod has become less dim; clearer, but not fully so. As Paul says, full understanding will come.

To give the reader some background, Tristan und Isolde is a tragedy not unlike Romeo & Juliet. In the final Liebestod scene, Isolde mourns over the body of the beloved Tristan, then dies from sorrow. Yeah, yeah, been there, seen that. But Liebestod (love-death) is about much more than Isolde's grief on so many levels at the same time, bears a range of ideas and emotions through mutually-supporting elements of the music, the voice, the plot, the lyrics. The appeal is very, very intellectual; but also powerfully emotional at a primal level. Liebestod grabs onto some ancient, pre-language, pre-culture, time out of mind part of humanity we can't fully understand, the dirt that God breathed life into; and stirs it. From desolate despair to eternal serenity in eight minutes.

And the scale. It veers from the Isolde's miniscule focus on Tristan's eyelids (are they opening? is he alive?) to a vast, horizonless expression of joy, a release from life's grinding, sorrow-wracked struggle, to transcendence. All the passions of love, life, God, death & eternity explode, detonate at a galactic scale, then fade, leaving a gentle residue of God's infinite love. No kidding. I'm still moved to tears, looking at a computer screen.

But don't take my word for it, listen again to the curmudgeon Mark Twain:

This opera of "Tristan and Isolde" last night broke the hearts of all witnesses who were of the faith, and I know of some who have heard of many who could not sleep after it, but cried the night away. I feel strongly out of place here. Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.

But by no means do I ever overlook or minify the fact that this is one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. I have never seen anything like this before. I have never seen anything so great and fine and real as this devotion.

I know what he means. There's no substitute for repeated exposure to the work.

And I'll quote 1Corinthians again, because Liebestod always reminds me of Paul at his most eloquent:

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away......So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Rather than link to one of the online videos of the actual opera, I offer this performance, depicted on the album cover at the beginning of the post:

YouTube - Karajan - Ultimo Concerto - Wagner Liebestod

It features the conductor Herbert von Karajan in what I understand is his last performance. He chose to spend the final eight minutes of a 60-year career in music conducting Liebestod (von Karajan died about a year later). The heroically beautiful Jessye Norman sings Isolde's death, and von Karajan expresses the winding-down of his own life through Isolde's: eight minutes, two minutes, two seconds....done. I believe this is the greatest artistic moment in human history. All the elements combine: singer, conductor, orchestra, composer, audience, building, culture, to show what human beings can achieve. How Man still cooperates with God to create beauty that must exceed our own limitations, even at the close of a century that endured the Godless scourges of Communism, Nazism, and worse. This is the wonder of the West. The centuries of accumulated knowledge; lifetimes of rigorous training; the sacrifice of time & money; the systematizing of music; the exactitude of the instrument makers; the preposterous invention of a symphony orchestra; building a concert hall; all this tremendously expensive resource-devouring effort, all this, this fabulous waste just to crack open an eight-minute window into the Mind of God. But it is worth it.

But don't watch it yet! Wagner takes getting used to....sometimes a lot of getting used to. You may decide to first watch this more accessible piece:

Here is the Prelude to Das Rheingold. In the opera it expresses the flowing water of the Rhine river. In the video it accompanies the exquisite, wordless opening scene of The New World, directed by the auteur Terence Malick (I will not digress about Malick), possibly to a greater effect than in the opera:

YouTube - The New World - Vorspiel

A last note: I haven't said much about Liebestod's lyrics. They absolutely contribute to the complete experience, but at least to start, there's no way to deal with either the German or the English while also trying to take in the rest of the work. The words are at the bottom of this page:

Richard Wagner - Libretti - Tristan und Isolde

BTW, feel free to post your own choice for the #1 work of art if you have one. It doesn't have to be music.

Beim Schlafengehen

The whole process of getting old is ever fascinating, and the older I get, the more I'm interested in the perspectives of those who are older still, especially those who know themselves to be on the cusp of death. About 25 years ago, by chance I checked out a CD by soprano Kiri Te Kanawa: Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss. Composed in the last year of his life, they are about death. The mood, which was striking then to a young man, and grows more meaningful each year, is one of peace, pleasant tiredness, acceptance of mortality.

Among the four, I return the most to Beim Schlafengehen (At the Going to Sleep, my translation); a poem by Hermann Hesse, set to music by Strauss.

The words are effective even without music, and in English:

Now the Day wearies me;
all my longing Desires should
sweetly succumb to the starry Night
like a tired Child. Hands, let go of all Work;
Brow, forget all Thoughts.
Now all my Senses
would sink themselves in Slumber.
And my unregarded Spirit
would rise on spread Wings
in Night's magic realm
to live deep and thousandfold.

At age 51, I'm not the least bit tired of living, or better put, tired from living. But such work as this helps me imagine being that tired. It shows that one may reach such a point in life, and that although death is something I would avoid now, I may feel different much later, when death might seem to be more of a transition and less of an ending.