[Doowop... Doowop... Doowop...]‘The Penguins, The Moonglows, The Orioles And The Five Satins’

Those are the four mid-1950s doo-wop/R&B groups that Paul Simon chose for his Rene and Georgette Magritte... to dance and romance to. Guys (or gals), think twice before you queue up these sample songs and dance them with your favorite gal (or guy)... if you aren't already in love before you start, you will be after this feast of close-dancing music!

• The Penguins: Earth Angel
• The Moonglows: Sincerely
• The Orioles: Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me
• The Five Satins: In the Still of the Night

Paul Simon: Two Songs That Each Span Half A Lifetime

First, ‘Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War’; then "The Obvious Child,".

I always wondered why the Magrittes song and The Obvious Child brought tears to my eyes. Finally today it dawned on me why: each of these songs describes a series of events in a person's life (or two people's lives), and manages to elide half a lifetime in a couple of sentences.

First, the Magrittes:

...

Rene and Georgette Magritte
With their dog after the war
Were strolling down Christopher Street
When they stopped in a men's store
With all of the mannequins dressed in the style
That brought tears to their immigrant eyes
Just like The Penguins, the Moonglows
The Orioles, and The Five Satins
The easy stream of laughter
Flowing through the air
Rene and Georgette Magritte
With their dog apres la guerre

Side by side
They fell asleep
Decades gliding by like Indians
Time is cheap
When they wake up they will find
All their personal belongings
Have intertwined
...

...

Cool: "Decades gliding by like Indians / Time is cheap" ... Time flies like an Indian arrow, I suppose. Next, "The Obvious Child":

...

We had a lot of fun
We had a lot of money
We had a little son and we thought we’d call him Sonny
Sonny gets married and moves away
Sonny has a baby and bills to pay
Sonny gets sunnier
Day by day by day by day

...

Whew! A very small amount of text covers a lot of years. And similarly...

...

Sonny sits by the window and thinks to himself
How it’s strange that some roots are like cages
Sonny’s yearbook from high school
Is down on the shelf
And he idl[y] thumbs through the pages
Some have died
Some have fled from themselves
Or struggled from here to get there
Sonny wanders beyond his interior walls
Runs his hands through his thinning brown hair

...

Again, perhaps a greater part of Sonny's lifetime passes in a mere couple of sentences. Then again, IMNSHO, Simon is one of the truly great lyricists of my generation; your mileage may vary, but if you disagree, you're just wrong... :-)

Please go listen to these songs. Listen to each song whole; as you might expect, the texts work best in context. Then allow yourself to while away an evening listening to more of Simon's music; it will be time well spent, no matter what your age.

Handel: Water Music And Music For The Royal Fireworks — BBC Proms 2012

I have a lot to say about these two works and this performance, but perhaps first you should just take an hour out of your day (a well-spent hour, surely — actually more!) to listen to this performance by Le Concert Spirituel conducted by Monsieur Hervé Niquet. The word for the day, the word for this orchestra, this conductor and (to a much lesser degree) this festive music is "idiosyncratic," and I'm going to let you go to the music before I say anything more:

I'll be back sometime this weekend. There will be a quiz. Here's a sample question for you:

George Frideric (or Frederick) Handel (born Georg Friedrich Händel) was

1. German
2. Italian
3. British
4. All of the above
5. None of the above

(Answer: 4. Look it up. Or Mother Wikipedia will tell you. Born Halle, Duchy of Magdeburg, Holy Roman Empire; studied in Halle, Hamburg and Italy; lived out his life and fulfilled his promise in a surpassing wonderful career in London.)

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UPDATE: forget about the quiz. If people are disinclined to read this blog already, what will they do when confronted with the classroom of their youth? Right. I'd rather keep the two readers I have left.

‘Soft Summer Breeze’ — Eddie Heywood (Piano Solo), Or The Diamonds (Male Vocal Quartet)

Eddie Heywood, 1946

Music from my childhood! This song was #11 on the charts in 1956 when I was 8 years old. My parents, who loved to dance (slow dancing or jitterbug) somehow came by a 45 RPM record of songwriter Eddie Heywood soloing on his own too-cute love song, and I later somehow heard it on a cover by The Diamonds, a male vocal quartet typical of the time. One of my early play-by-ear efforts was an attempt to memorize Heywood's solo in the second chorus... I didn't yet have the technique to play it, but damn, it certainly was fun trying.

Through the miracle of YouTube, this charming bit of early music (heh) can be found online. First, Heywood; second, The Diamonds:

Oh, yeah; I almost forgot: lyrics!

Music For Monday — Bill Evans: Peace Piece

Even without America's endless War on Everything and Everyone, Monday is a shock to the system after a weekend (whether restful or raucous). This piece by one of America's greatest musicians ever, the late Bill Evans, may be just what you need:

(View on YouTube site)

Need more? Listen (offsite) to the works by Erik Satie that were surely Evans's inspiration for the Peace Peace... different meter, different degree of dissonance, but very much in the same spirit: the three Gymnopedie.

Blissed out yet?

François Couperin (le Grand): Soeur Monique

I don't feel like writing today this week; there's just too much violence and tragedy in the world. Here... put all that aside and listen as Couperin, himself the signature harpsichordist of the Court of Louis XIV, sketches a nun (one of his teachers?) ambling through a convent in no terrible hurry, but not without a certain grace in her deliberate motion. Written for publicantion in 1722 as a movement in Ordre 18ème de clavecin in Couperin's Troisième livre de pièces de clavecin; performed here by Nancy Kito (who??) on a harpsichord of unknown origin:



(View on YouTube site. This is a better performance by Pastor de Lasala (who??) on a Flemish two-manual harpsichord appropriate to Couperin, built in 1988 by Carey Beebe, Sydney, Australia. The good Pastor declines to allow his better performance to be viewed from another site, i.e., this one. Hey, it's at his discretion...)

(View a recently created .pdf of the score.)

ACRONYM Ensemble Plays Giovanni Valentini: Canzona A 5 in G Major — UPDATED

Delicious music performed by a strikingly good ensemble formed only in 2012...



Now that you've heard that, see what YouTube has under "ACRONYM ensemble"; then visit ACRONYM's own web site. There are lots of Oberlin-educated folk in this group; that's probably part of why I like their sound... two of my private teachers studied there, and one of them taught there.

Yes, "ACRONYM" is an acronym, one with many expansions. See the group's web site.

---

AFTERTHOUGHT: this piece by Johann Pezel may be more generally representative of the kind of high baroque music that is ACRONYM's stock‑in‑trade:

Ars Longa, Vita Brevis — Antoine Forqueray And His Son; Gustav Leonhardt And His Students

I spent part of the afternoon listening to a CD of the late and truly great harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt (1928‑2012), performing works mostly by Antoine Forqueray (1671‑1745) as arranged and amended after his death by his son Jean‑Baptiste Forqueray (1699‑1782).

Father and son were reportedly both cranky people, and one of the son's arrangements was from his father's viola da gamba composition to the son's transcription for harpsichord (no small step!), with some movements newly composed by the son, all two years after his father's death. Had they lived in a different era, that family was almost dysfunctional enough to have been American!

But the music was stunningly, breathtakingly beautiful. Here is the recording (if I got the link right in spite of YouTube's new "simplified" mechanism for chaining volumes together (so "simple" that you'll likely do just that even when you don't intend to):

Life is short. Music is shorter (with the exception of a few pathological 20th-century works; some of those are still going well into the 21st century). Fathers write music and perform it; sons learn how to play in part from their parents, but again in pathological cases await their parents' departure from this world before tinkering with their parents' music.

Performers relearn the essence of a particular work sometimes literally centuries after the work was created; then they pass their own performance traditions on to their students, who do their own things with the work.

Is the work recognizable as the one the composer created centuries ago? Some performers don't care. Some care so much they obsess over every particular of style and craft. Music is an emphatically human activity, engaging every human foible; when music-making involves multiple generations of a family, well, that's when it gets really challenging.

I guess if I intend to leave any compositions to my child or my student, I'd better, first of all, write some music, and second (and not incidentally), have some kids, or at least some students...

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ASIDE: lately I feel too old and tired to participate in even the passing-on-traditions part of the process (let alone passing on genes or technical advice on playing an instrument). Would one or more of you do all that for me, please? I can't promise your efforts will be appreciated, except by me...

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ANOTHER ASIDE: I've had the privilege of rehearsing and performing with one of Mr. Leonhardt's excellent students, an American now living in Amsterdam (I think) with her cellist husband and their two sons. Like all of Leonhardt's students I have met, she was aware of the community in which they all participated, and, again like all of his students, was crestfallen at his death; it's going to be tough without him. But whatever tradition that family and I were once part of for about a decade in Houston continues, different in every particular in a land utterly familiar to that family and utterly foreign to me, but still a part of a tradition. I worry about humankind a little less every time I think of them.

Obama Takes First Steps Toward Normalizing US‑Cuban Relations

And it's about damned time. (More here.)

Cuba survived its unhealthy dependency on the old Soviet Union. I suppose Americans assumed when the Soviets dropped their support of Cuba that Cuba would collapse in a heap; to the apparent consternation of our Red-baiters, that did not happen. You have only to watch Michael Moore's film SiCKO to see evidence of at least one aspect in which Cuba's citizens enjoy life circumstances superior to those of lower-income Americans, namely, medical care.

But I'm not here to talk about medical care. I want to talk about the performing arts. For better or worse, I'm going to quote myself, from a post on the ancient hand-coded YDD in 2003:

...

Chucho Valdés, 2014

Tonight the youth were supposed to share the stage with Chucho Valdés, a famous jazz pianist (about whom there's more below). ...

...

So... why am I writing about this, on a mostly political blog? Simple: the concert I expected to hear was not the one presented. I went because the eminent Latin jazz pianist Chucho Valdés was scheduled to perform. Why did he not perform? Again, simple: he was stuck in the Havana airport, unable to obtain a U.S. security clearance to fly here to perform. Yes, Valdés is Cuban. He has performed so many times in the U.S. that I can't begin to count them. But apparently George W. Bush & Co. are sure that anyone from Cuba must be a terrorist. Of all Dub's flaws, raw, unmitigated ignorance... proud ignorance, often enough... must be one of his worst.

...

Fast-forward to 2014. Valdés is still alive and apparently still performing at age 73, with a backup band called The Afro-Cuban Messengers. Bush-baby is no longer president. So if Obama can manage to complete negotiations of basic diplomatic ties with Cuba while he is still in office, maybe Valdés can come to the US one last time.

On the other hand, a Rethuglican still hellbent on Commie-bashing (e.g., soft-brained Sarah Palin or madwoman Michele Bachmann) could become POTUS in 2016, and Chucho could once again be stuck in the Havana airport...

Barenboim Plays Beethoven: Sonata Pathetique

Daniel Barenboim, pianist, one of the outstanding interpreters of our time, plays one of Beethoven's signature sonatas, Op. 13, Pathetique. Listen first, then you can decide whether to read my ramblings:

I was probably about 13 years old when I finally confronted this sonata at the other kind of keyboard. Believe me when I say that a 13-year-old is not ready for this work, physiologically or musically, but sometimes I think that a 130-year-old would not be, either. My dear parents suffered politely as I hammered my way through the work ("Hammerklavier" takes on a different meaning when a kid does it). Dad took a second job at night and bought the piano for Mom and for me; Dad himself didn't play or... if we could prevent it... sing.

Barenboim may not be today's version of a Beethoven scholar; he is 72 years old now, and people of his generation had a different idea of how Beethoven should be played than many of today's original-instruments performers. But in the case of Beethoven and Barenboim, I am not one to quibble. When one of the great interpreters of our era applies his skill and inspiration to one of the great creators of art music of all time, we all have to listen with respect and enjoyment.

Beethoven was not afraid of the future; many have remarked that when it comes to piano in particular, the instruments of his day sometimes did not survive his relentlessly aggressive attack. I am willing to concede (as I do not with most composers) that Beethoven required of his instruments things they could not provide. A concert in a sports arena with a speaker stack blaring bright and loud in every remote corner would probably have suited his personal taste. Surely Beethoven would conceive the Pathetique more the way Barenboim renders it than the performances Beethoven heard (when he could hear).

(Some say today is Beethoven's birthday. Maybe so: it is better established that he was baptized on the 17^th.)

Jazzing It: ‘The Way You Look Tonight’

Sometimes we forget that "jazz" was originally more frequently used as a verb than as a noun. I was looking for moderately comprehensive details of the song "The Way You Look Tonight" (music by Jerome Kern, lyrics by Dorothy Fields). Sources seem to agree that the song was first performed on screen by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in the film Swing Time (1936). From that point forward, just about every crooner has performed it, and a lot of them have recorded it or worked it into a film (it even appears in the final episode of Star Trek Deep Space 9).

Searching YouTube yields dozens of versions. Two of them in particular caught my attention as an example of a song played straight vs. the same song "jazzed." In this case the straight version is by Fred and Ginger; the jazzed version is by Billie Holiday, accompanied (says one reader) by a band including Benny Goodman and Lester Young (I own that recording, but it's part of a gigantic set of Holiday's work, and I have not confirmed the accompanists). Please listen to them in that order, and notice the effect of jazzing on one of the most popular songs of the 1930s.

First, Fred and Ginger:



Then Billie Holiday:



Got the idea?

Dietrich Becker: Sonata And Suite In A Major

Sometime between 1980 and 1990, in Houston, before Ars Lyrica, before Ensemble Mercury, there was the old Houston Baroque Ensemble. We never had a web site (a what?) but for our last three years we had a subscription season, and we had a lot of fun.

In those days, gambist Robert Wayne Moss still lived in Texas. Back in his student days at Oberlin Conservatory, Wayne had little money for purchasing printed music, but he could afford staff paper, and he had a reasonably legible music script, so he spent his spare time sifting through the conservatory library for old 17^th/18^th-century manuscripts or published music (literally centuries out of copyright) that he thought he might find opportunities to perform... and copying them out by hand.

Forward a couple of decades. Wayne turned up at an HBE rehearsal with parts for a Sonate-Suite by 17^th-century German composer Dietrich Becker, of Hamburg. In those days as in these, a musician was likely to find a lot of work in a cultural and commercial center like Hamburg (the better-known Georg Philipp Telemann was there for part of his career). Becker was a master of at least two crafts, virtuoso violin-playing and composition, and apparently made his living in the service of the Hamburg city council. From the wiki:

Little is known about Becker's musical education. His first position was as organist at Ahrensberg. In his second position, in the service of the Chapelle Ducale (Ducal Chapel) of the Duke Christian-Ludwig at Celle, he mainly devoted himself to the violin. In 1662 he settled in Hamburg as a violinist in the service of the Conseil de la Ville (City Council) and in 1667 he was named Maître de Chapelle (Chapel Master).

In 1668 Becker dedicated a collection of pieces entitled Musikalischen Frühlingsfrüchte (Musical Spring Fruit) to the mayor and members of the City Council. This collection consisted of chamber sonatas and suites for 3 to 5 voices with basso continuo. In 1674, his Zweystimmigen Sonaten und Suiten (Sonatas and Suites for Two Voices) was published.

(Aside: "Chapel Master" is a dubious translation of "Maître de Chapelle". "Conductor" might be slightly closer; "band leader" is also pretty close. So is "choir director." Google Translate punts and offers "Kapellmeister" as the English translation. Well, yes, but...)

(Another aside: "Zweystimmigen Sonaten und Suiten" does not translate as "for two voices," because titles in those days often counted only melody voices... the basso continuo, comprising one, two, three or even more bass-melody and chordal instruments, was often not counted, and when it was counted, it was counted as just one part, however many instruments performed from that one part on a given day. Go figure. But it wreaks havoc with the given translation.)

Houston Baroque Ensemble was thrilled with one of the Sonate/Suites suited to our instrumentation: melody parts for a violinist and a gambist (player of viola da gamba), both with a lot of facility; it's rather sprightly music!, and the accompanying basso continuo was well within my more modest harpsichord skills. Somewhere in a closet I still have the copied parts, but I scarcely need them to hear the piece in my mind's ear.

I couldn't find the exact work on YouTube, but there's a ton of Dietrich Becker out there, and this Sonate‑Suite in A Major from "Erster Theil zweystimmiger Sonaten and Suiten" is very similar in character. The artists are Parnassi Musici; their web site is a bit incomplete in the English-language version, but they really play superbly. Enjoy!

Not Beyond Outrage After All

The summary at Kos gives the basics of the cause for my outrage:

US Customs Officials Destroy Musician's Instruments (Updated)

by Land of Enchantment

Too fucking stupid for words. Wanton destruction, and for no useful purpose at all.

Not a lengthy story, but absolutely outrageous. I think this deserves some attention:

Boujemaa Razgui, a flute virtuoso who lives in New York and works with many US ensembles, was returning to base over the holiday when Customs officials at Kennedy Airport asked to see his instruments. Bourjemaa carries a variety of flutes of varying ethnicity, each made by himself over years for specific types of ancient and modern performance.
...
At JFK, the officials removed and smashed each and every one of his instruments. No reason was given.

An artist's livelihood. A lifetime of skill and craft wantonly destroyed. Perhaps because he's Arab? (He's Moroccan, having moved to New York via Montreal.) It's not like they couldn't have checked that he was a "real" musician!

...

Additional info available from Arts Journal, Slipped Disc, and again Slipped Disc (with [copyrighted] photos of the flutes).

Mr. Razgui is originally from Morocco, is a Canadian citizen, and has toured the world for a dozen or more years with no problems. Did I mention that to no one's surprise he looks like an Arab?

I have a strange feeling the TSA or ICE agents who did the smashing are not liable to lawsuit. Mr. Razgui is just out a lifetime's painstaking hand-work, with no likelihood of recompense.

Andean Quenas... I own a similar flute,
and many stranger-looking woodwinds

In my youth, when I toured occasionally with The Broken Consort, toting one or sometimes two cases full of truly odd-looking wind instruments, copies of historical originals (imagine what those looked like on X-rays!), I feared such an incident. Nothing ever happened. Sometimes the agent wanted to see the instruments or proof that I owned them in the United States; more typically, they didn't want even that. But that was 1978. And this is now. Welcome to the wonderful world of now!

Pedro Memelsdorf And Mala Punica Perform Johannes Ciconia At 2013 Utrecht Festival

We go from the utterly ridiculous (see previous post) to the truly sublime...

Memelsdorff

An hour ago I was listening to a 1995 recording by recorder player Pedro Memelsdorff (bio, photos) and harpsichordist Andreas Staier of two-part English consorts in the second half of the 17^th century... John Playford, William Lawes, Matthew Locke, etc.

But I wasn't content to stop there. I googled Memelsdorff, and found a veritable gold mine of material on him. He has grown; his art has grown and the scope of his activities has broadened immensely. Memelsdorff, born in Buenos Aires and active in Europe since the 1970s, seems to have been known back in 1995 primarily as a truly excellent recorder player, and no doubt he still is, but since then both his ambitions and his skills have diversified greatly.

Now director of the long-famous Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, he also formed and performs with the group Mala Punica (Lat. "pomegranate"), a group devoted to historically plausible (and artistically stunning) performances of, among other things, works in the ars subtilior ("the more subtle art") style, an intentionally complex and avant‑garde style in parts of France and Spain at the end of the 14^th century. The work they perform in the video below is by Johannes Ciconia (c. 1370‑1412), at the 2013 Festival Oude Muziek ([Utrecht] Festival of Early Music), in the Geertekerk (St. Gertrude of Nivelles Church).

After truly TMI, here is the Ciconia performance. Is it avant‑garde enough for you? It sounds pretty forward-leaning to me!