Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (or just Palestrina. Like Madonna is just “Madonna.” …Okay maybe not.) is one of the top four Renaissance composers, in my opinion. His music just aches with feeling. Born in 1525 in Palermo, Italy, Palestrina the Prolific gave the world 105 masses, 68 offertories, at least 140 madrigals, more than 300 motets, 72 hymns, 35 magnificats, 11 litanies, and four sets of lamentations before he died in 1594. This simple anthem, “Sicut Cervus,” is my personal favorite Palestrina composition out of everything he wrote. He manages to pack such longing into simple harmonies and phrasing. Listen to when the basses come back in at 2:06 to follow the tenors on “Ita,” the second half of the lyrics. It literally and figuratively deepens the sentiment expressed and creates the supported space for the sopranos to come in with the long “Anima” at 2:08. It’s a tough piece for me to sing because it always makes me choke up if I think about it too much. This piece really is my soul’s tuning fork.
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Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea ad te, Deus.
As the deer longs for running water, so longs my soul for you, O God.
I. Cannot. Stop. Playing. This. Song. This is a remix of O.V. Wright’s Song “I Don’t Know Why,” which, as you’ll see is much slower. By speeding it up and adding a new drum track, Poldoore skews the track way more towards funk – and hip-hip – and away from soul. I love the very 60’s era chord progression and lead guitar riffs (vaguely Buffalo Springfield-esque), the tempo, the rhythm track layered on top, the horns, the way it builds – everything. It’s flawless. Check out more of his stuff on his Soundcloud website. Groove on, Tune-Up fans.
First of all, it’s important for my erudite international readership to know that one of my very best friends refers to Haydn as “H-Man.” This did play a small role in convincing me to post this piece today. Not an enormous role, mind you, but still. A small one. I’ve also been feeling relatively braced with life in general these days, and in these moments of rare contentment, I turn to this masterpiece by Brahms. It runs the gamut of emotions and starts out proud but not arrogant, and calm but not sedate. It is also important to recognize that Claudio Abbado is at the baton in this, my favorite recording.
Brahms, a native of Hamburg, Germany, lived from 1833 to 1897 and is one of the most important composers of the “classical” period. He composed during an interesting period during music history, when Western classical music was evolving away from the structure of Bach and Mozart towards the freer harmonic modernism championed by Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. Brahms always sounds like he has a foot in both camps. His melodies and embellishments are as flowery and delightful as any of the true Romantic composers, but he doesn’t go on for six and a half hours. One of my favorite life quotes is actually from Brahms: “It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table.” I think he left only the very best notes in this piece. By the end of it, you feel like you’ve run a marathon, graduated from medical school, completed astronaut training, and cleaned your kitchen. You know – done something really major.
There are certain things in the world I don’t understand: whether Velveeta is a food or spackling material, why millipedes have to exist, why I always seem to end the day with $20 less in my wallet than I began with but have nothing to show for the loss, and so on.
I also don’t understand Western complacency towards global inequality. Every person that is born, anywhere in the world, might be the person that cures cancer, AIDS, writes a new theory of international relations, transforms the United Nations, figures out how to slow or reverse global warming – any one of us humans might solve any of these terrifying, global problems. That we limit the population of people who have adequate eucation, not to mention food and water and roads and clothes and voting rights and safe passage and electricity, to even attempt to solve any of these problems shoots us all in the foot. Maybe my cold meds are getting to me, but every now and again it hits me that the biggest resource we waste is each other. This is what this song by the British band Alt-J makes me think of.
Alt-J wrote the song about Robert Capa, the Hungarian photojournalist and war photographer, and Gerta Pohorylle, otherwise known as Gerta Taro, who was his companion and professional partner. Taro was one of the first female photojournalists to work on the front lines of war, and died during a road accident while covering the Battle of Brunete during the Spanish Civil War. Capa died during the first Indochina War after he left his Jeep and stepped on a landmine.
One of Capa’s most famous photographs – “Death of a Loyalist Soldier,” 1936.
One of Taro’s most famous photographs. A woman in Barcelona, Spain, training for the Republican militia, 1936.
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Indochina, Capa jumps Jeep, two feet creep up the road
To photo, to record meat lumps and war
They advance as does his chance, very yellow white flash
A violent wrench grips mass, rips light, tears limbs like rags
Burst so high finally Capa lands
Mine is a watery pit painless with immense distance
From medic from colleague, friend, enemy, foe
Him five yards from his leg, from you, Taro
Do not spray into eyes, I have sprayed you into my eyes
3:10 pm, Capa pends death, quivers, last rattles, last chokes
All colors and cares glaze to gray, shriveled and stricken to dots
Left hand grasps what the body grasps not, le photographe est mort
Three, point, one, four, one, five, alive no longer my amour, faded for home May of ’54
Doors open like arms my love, painless with a great closeness
To Capa, to Capa, Capa dark after nothing, re-united with his leg
And with you, Taro
Do not spray into eyes, I have sprayed you into my eyes
Hey Taro
The weather is warming up, the days are getting longer, the breeze smells like new growth instead of mud and road salt – ah, je me languis d’être à Paris! (Not like that’s anything new, of course. Hi there, Sidney Bechet!) Here is a delightful gypsy jazz track from Stephane Wrembel used in the movie “Midnight in Paris.” Wrembel is a modern French jazz guitarist for whom Django Reinhardt has clearly been a strong influence.
I have a cold. I can’t believe this. I never get sick, and I’m starting the week with a cold. Obnoxious to the max. For some reason, this album always makes me feel better when I’m sick and is just generally great for all times, so I recommend buying the entire thing pronto. Can you imagine a cooler duo than Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma? Exactly. You can’t. It’s not possible. Now excuse me while I blow my nose for the 700th time.
Thomas Tallis, you magnificent bastard. This piece is actually a canon, called a “six in two.” This means it uses six voices to produce a double canon. This means that the top two voices are playing off each other while the bottom voices are doing their own thing. You can track in the score how the second soprano follows the first soprano’s lead. It’s one of my favorite Tallis pieces – which is saying something, since I carry a serious torch for the guy. I love how it slowly builds to the two-minute mark, plus the interplay of the soprano lines between 2:46 and 2:56. But the most ingenious part of the piece is how it ends on a question, by which I mean the chord doesn’t resolve back to the tonic (or starting chord of the piece); it ends on the fifth. Miserere nostri – Have mercy on us, Lord. It’s a request. That the piece ends without resolution leaves space for that request to be answered. It just brings tears to my eyes every time.
This song feels like an appropriate one with which to conclude Ukraine Week on The Daily Tune-Up. We will return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow, but please keep an eye trained on Ukraine. Equally important: if you are fortunate enough to live in a country where you have freedoms of speech and assembly, exercise that right every day. Vote. Organize. Protest. Speak out. Educate yourself. Be an active citizen. We insult those who don’t have these rights when we take them for granted.
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Mr. Magoo, he took off with Betty,
And I’m on the porch carrying wood.
My heart is confetti.
I’m having a party,
I’m feeling good.
You say you’re comin’ to crush my skull,
To bash in my face, and shatter my frown,
To mingle my blood in with the ground,
All this as the sun was setting down.
Old friend, trying to hunt me down again
Old friend this is your exit, you’re no, no no friend
Who is this man, who’s afraid of death?
Who fears it so that death’s all he brings?
I s’pose he wage war till nothing is left,
With a mouth full of teeth and nothing to sing.
Well he put his hands around my neck,
And I s’pose I let him from natural respect.
As he frothed at the mouth, I twinkled my eye,
And gave him this vision just before I died.
He saw his lines drawn in the sand,
Upon a land of beauty and wind,
And he in the distance dragging a flag pole
Across a desert that never will end.
Old friend, trying to hunt me down again
Old friend this is your exit, you’re no no no friend
BoomBox is a fun band formed by a couple of friend from Kyiv in 2004. When I was in Ukraine a few years ago I saw their posters everywhere I went and I’m glad I took the hint. Their songs are really solid and run the musical gamut from synth-heavy funk to mellow instrumental. This song is one of my favorites by them.
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Ukraine’s Interim Prime Minister, rejected Crimea’s vote to secede from Ukraine and join Russia. Here are some interesting Russian and Ukrainian perspectives on Crimea. And finally, it doesn’t look like the U.S. has much leverage over Russia – or, Putin wants to make the world believe that.
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My memory doesn’t sting anymore, my thoughts don’t strike on my hands
I accompany you to other shores, shores
You are a migratory bird, you look for happiness on the way
You come to say goodbye and leave again, leave again.
Chorus:
The summer rain, the summer rain started early today
The summer rain, the summer rain washes my soul’s wound
It mourns together with me by the blind window.
The summer rain, the summer rain whispers to me softly and simply
That you’ll comme, you’ll come, you’ll come, but it’ll too late
Untimeliness is the eternal drama, where he and she are.
I’ll soon stop dreaming of you at all, but then
I’ll have a new dream about our cold house
You ‘ll understand with time that one doesn’t look for love out of love
But you listen for now and you won’t bring yourself back, you won’t.
The Daily Tune-Up 