calm

Modernism Monday: “April Rain,” Harvey Reid

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I’m feeling homesick for New England today, and whenever I’m homesick, I usually turn to one guy: Harvey Reid.  Harvey Reid is an American folk artist and incredibly talented musician.  I grew up on his album “Of Wind and Water” and play it whenever I want to remember what home feels like.  This beautiful track especially conjures up memories of where I’m from.  Once on the train home to visit my family, I made a list of the things that define what that means:

  • Iron rail track nails
  • Hot weeds
  • Frozen mud
  • Sail cloth
  • Tiny fish bones
  • Sweet corn
  • Rambling stone walls
  • Chickadees
  • Pavement undulating with tree roots
  • Low tide seaweed
  • Splinters
  • Bare white churches
  • Bare white birch trees

I’m also from cold April rain.

Throwback Thursday: “String Quintet in C, D. 956: II. Adagio,” Franz Schubert

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Ever get that feeling that the universe is up to something?  Like there is something going on and you don’t know what, but something is definitely up?  That’s how this week has felt to me and I’ve needed music constantly.  Anyone who knows me will tell you I never go anywhere without my headphones.  I literally never leave the house without those happy little wires running from my ears to my iPhone.  This week, the second movement of Schubert’s extraordinary string quintet has been on heavy rotation.

This piece is a prime example of why I just adore classical music.  It seeks out and absorbs your emotions like rice absorbs the water around salt crystals.  As rice expands in water, so too does music like this grow as it finds and absorb your thoughts and feelings, and in the end, you can see its real shape.  It helps you look inwards and check in with yourself – “oh, so that’s what’s going on.”  When you hear this piece, how do you feel?  What do you think about?  Where does your mind go?  Pay attention to whatever comes back to you; you may or may not be surprised.  For me, this piece magnifies both happiness and sadness, which is why I have been listening to it so much this week.  It calms me down the way sharing a burden with a worldly friend can be calming.  I have to be very careful listening to this piece, among others, when I’m in a certain kind of mood – otherwise it becomes too sodden and it takes on that mood’s shape permanently.

Your results may vary, of course.  But I hope it enhances and magnifies good things when you hear it.

Sacred Sunday: “Ave Maria,” Josquin Des Prez

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I know, I know, I get it – “Great, another Renaissance polyphony piece, awesome, haven’t heard that in a while.”  Whatever.  Wrap your ears around this beauty and them come complaining.

Beyond the basics details of when and where he lived, not much is known about Des Prez (c1450 – 1521).  He was a Franco-Flemish composer who has about 370 compositions to his name, plus – allegedly – some graffiti on a wall in the Sistine Chapel.  I for one am dying to learn more about the man who wrote this triptych of a motet.  First, the canon of voices at the beginning; second, the unification of voices at 2:28; and third, the heart-breaking simplicity of the end – oh mother of God, remember me – at 4:00.  Three is a significant number in the Christian religion – the trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – and I wonder whether that was the purpose behind splitting the piece into three segments.  Whatever the purpose, thank heavens he wrote it at all.

Worldly Wednesday: “Taro,” Alt-J

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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

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.

One of Taro’s most famous photographs. A woman in Barcelona, Spain, training for the Republican militia, 1936.

—

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

Modernism Monday: “Coyote,” Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma

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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.

Sacred Sunday: “Miserere Nostri,” Thomas Tallis

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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.

Salubrious Saturday: “Old Friend,” Alexander

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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.

—

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

Throwback Thursday: “Abendlied,” Josef Rheinberger

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Humans are social animals.  We wither on the vine without interaction or companionship.  And yet, what wounds us more deeply than these same things, without which life is awful?  It’s a terrible truism, but a truism nonetheless, and one that I’ve been turning in my mind these past few days, for a variety of reasons.  It puts me in mind of a wonderful passage from C.S. Lewis:

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

What nourishes will always wound; humans are imperfect.  What we need we will always ultimately lose; humans are mortal.  It is a far lovelier truism that the nourishment outlasts the wound, and that our mortality does not drain the memories and impressions we gave to others.  Let us bide with each other, then, while we are here.  Let us be vulnerable.

—

“Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend werden, und der Tag hat sich geneiget.
Bide with us, for evening shadows darken, and the day will soon be over.”

In memory of Nancy Harris Smith.

Salubrious Saturday: “Unexplainable Stories,” Cloud Cult

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Cloud Cult is a fantastic band from Minnesota (doncha know).  This song has a pretty different vibe than some of their other work – this one is much more down-tempo and a little more synthesizer-y.  But I still love the message of the song (“Activate your force fields and just keep going”), and the long brass intro is absolutely gorgeous.  This is a good, calm song for a quiet Saturday after a long, long week.  I hope you enjoy.

Sacred Sunday: “Officum Defunctorum & Missa Pro Defunctis,” Cristobal de Morales

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Some Tune-Up fans might think it a bit of a cop-out to post an entire body of work instead of a song – since this blog is devoted to providing you with the “song of the day” – but I just was incapable of pulling this piece apart.  It needs to be heard in its entirety; it’s just that gorgeous.  Those of you who are up on your Latin will know that these two bodies of work are funereal – “Officum Defunctorum” means the office of the dead (a cycle of prayers), and “Missa Pro Defunctis” is the mass for the dead.  Without knowing the titles and therefore purposes of these pieces, I wouldn’t have guessed they had anything to do with funerals, and that is one of the reasons I love them.  The harmonies are the other reason.  They are simple, accessible, and exquisite.

Cristobal de Morales is rightly considered one of the giants of the Spanish Renaissance, and really one of the great composers of the Renaissance in general.  He was born in Seville, Spain, around 1500 and died in 1553.  I cannot possibly overstate the importance of buying the Jordi Savall recording, if you’re inclined to get a copy of this for yourself.  It is superlative.