This has already been a tough week for me and a lot of people I know, so I thought I would share a piece that has helped me recenter myself when things get a bit much. Davies wrote this for a play, “The Yellowcake Review,” which was a work of protest against a possible plan to build a uranium mine in Stromness, in the Orkney Islands of Scotland.
Stromness
“I will not walk backward in life.”
– J.R.R. Tolkein
Gorecki was a modern Polish composer who is probably best known for his Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. This piece is my favorite of his. It is a very simple arrangement of a Polish folk song about undying love.
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Broad waters on the Vistula,
Now I’ll tell you my thoughts.
As it was yesterday, so it is today:
I must be with you through the ages.
This is such a sucker-punch of a song. You don’t even need to understand the words (which are below, never fear, faithful readers) to know it’s about something fairly wretched involving a train. This song portrays the life of black African migrant workers working in South African mineral mines. Some melancholy songs are more mellow than sad. Not this one, not by a long shot. This is sad, resigned, longing, resentful, and angry, all at the same time. By the time harmony spreads out at 2:31, you’ve already committed yourself to listening to the whole thing, maybe even again a second time, even though it’s a tough haul.
Masekela wrote this song in 1974, about halfway through the lifespan of the apartheid regime in South Africa.
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There is a train that comes from Namibia and Malawi
there is a train that comes from Zambia and Zimbabwe,
There is a train that comes from Angola and Mozambique,
From Lesotho, from Botswana, from Zwaziland,
From all the hinterland of Southern and Central Africa.
This train carries young and old, African men
Who are conscripted to come and work on contract
In the golden mineral mines of Johannesburg
And its surrounding metropolis, sixteen hours or more a day
For almost no pay.
Deep, deep, deep down in the belly of the earth
When they are digging and drilling that shiny mighty evasive stone,
Or when they dish that mish mesh mush food
into their iron plates with the iron shovel.
Or when they sit in their stinking, funky, filthy,
Flea-ridden barracks and hostels.
They think about the loved ones they may never see again. Because they might have already been forcibly removed
From where they last left them
Or wantonly murdered in the dead of night
By roving and marauding gangs of no particular origin,
We are told. They think about their lands, their herds
That were taken away from them
With a gun, bomb, teargas and the cannon.
And when they hear that Choo-Choo train
They always curse, curse the coal train,
The coal train that brought them to Johannesburg.
Felix Mendelssohn, you magnificent bastard. (I read your book! …Wait. (“Patton?” Anyone? Ok I’ll stop.)) Mendelssohn wrote this in 1830. Let’s see what else was happening around that time, shall we?
And Mendelssohn wrote this gorgeous symphony, inspired by a trip he took to Scotland.
Mendelssohn was German and one of the early Romantic composers. He definitely crams a lot of feeling into nine minutes. I love the swelling major to minor at 4:28. Gives me tingles every time. Although I do deeply resent that he wrote this piece when he was 21. Show-off.
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:
I’m also from cold April rain.
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.
I have listened to this Elgar cello concerto hundreds of times. I bought a cheapo bargain basement recording during one of the many trips my parents and I took to visit colleges. Years later, I bought this Venetian Snares album. It took me another year to put the two together: the beginning of “Szamar Madar” is so demented, I always skipped over it. One morning, while on the train to work, I listened to the entire thing and finally got to main meat of the piece and thought, “…wait…I know that line… …Holy $%&! that’s Elgar?!?” I was practically effervescent, I was so excited.
To save you the hassle, here’s a cheat sheet. The cello line arrives in earnest around 1:47; before that there’s only snippets. At 2:14: fasten your seatbelt. Venetian Snares takes a beautiful and somber Elgar cello concerto, adds cocaine, and puts it in a blender. My favorite part is at 2:54 when it smoothes out on top while the drums go bananas beneath. And after all that, it just sort of slowly fades away, like a bruise, and you’re left wondering what just happened. You have to love a band who hears Elgar and says, “yeah, that’s pretty…but what if we sampled the main cello lick, sped it up, and added a breakbeat beneath it?” I just can’t get enough.
Original Elgar, played by Yo-Yo Ma:
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.
This sounds like Thompson Twins, Lou Reed, and U2 got together and wrote a song. In fact when I first heard it I thought it was a lost New Wave track. Wrongedy-wrong-wrong. Panama is a new band from Australia. The driving rhythm and steady bass guitar makes it sound totally U2 with a dash of New Order and Depeche Mode, while the fairly consistent volume level reminds me of Lou Reed’s “Street Hassle.” This is good song for a long night-time drive, or a cold and snowy Monday.
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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The Daily Tune-Up 