Category: Listenable stuff

A bit random, but it’s something I’ve just been listening to and I thought I’d share it.  This lovely aria is from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice. 

Orpheus is a poet and musician whose music is so beautiful that even stones are enchanted by it.  When his beloved Eurydice is killed by snakes, he travels to the underworld to try and win her back.  Even the hearts of the rulers of the underworld are softened by his sweet music, and they agree she can return to life on the one condition that he  doesn’t look at her, even once, until they have emerged again into the world of the living.

In this aria, after various travails, Orpheus finds himself in the Elysian fields.  ‘How pure the sky,’ he sings, ‘how bright the sun…’  But none of this can make him happy until he has Eurydice back again.  At the very end of the aria, the chorus announces the arrival of Eurydice.  Heart-stopping moment!  To be in her presence again, when he thought he’d lost her forever and yet be forbidden to look at her, or even to explain to her why he must constantly turn away his face.

It fascinates me the way old stories from different places tend to echo one other.  No doubt this is sometimes because a story from one culture is heard and taken up by people from another, like the story of St Josaphat.  But I’m sure it also happens because certain stories reflect deep structures in the human mind which are universal, and perhaps even hardwired into our brains.

I think of the biblical story of Lot’s Wife, who would be turned to a pillar of salt if she looked back at the city of Sodom.   But a much stronger resonance is with the Norse story of Balder, who like Orpheus was capable of stirring the hearts even of animals and stones.

In the Balder story it is Balder himself who dies and his mother who sends a messenger down into the underworld to beg for his return.  As in the Greek story, the ruler of the underworld grants the request on one condition (albeit a different one), and as in the Greek story (though not in the opera!), the condition is almost met but not quite, and the beloved one is lost forever.

When I was a kid at school in the 70s a lot of the music we listened to was blues-based stuff and prog rock.  I don’t listen to much of that now -the music from then that stands the test of time for me is from quite different genres- but here is a little prog rock classic that still works for me: the extended piece by Genesis called Supper’s Ready.  I specially love the section that breaks out at about 15:30 in a burst of sheer exultant energy, with imagery straight from the Book of Revelations:

With the guards of Magog, swarming around
The Pied Piper takes his children underground
Dragon’s coming out of the sea
Shimmering silver head of wisdom looking at me
He brings down the fire from the skies
You can tell he’s doing well by the look in human eyes
Better not compromise, it won’t be easy

666 is no longer alone
He’s getting out the marrow in your backbone
And the seven trumpets blowing sweet rock and roll
Gonna blow right down inside your soul
Pythagoras with the looking glass reflects the full moon
In blood, he’s writing the lyrics of a brand-new tune

Why is it that the destruction of everything we know can be such an exhilarating idea?  Is too fanciful of me to say that being human is only one thin layer of what we are, and that (as the Jeff folk put it in Eden) before anything else, we are simply the world looking out at itself?  From that perspective, after all, nothing can ever be finally destroyed, only thrown in the fire to be cast anew.

A Canadian student group apologises for including he Lou Reed song Walk on the Wild Side in a playlist, on the basis that the lyrics of the song are transphobic and therefore ‘problematic’.   Transphobia seems a pretty weird charge to lay against this particular song -a song which actually celebrates a transexual character in its opening verse- but let’s leave that aside.  What I find actually creepiest about this story is the use of the word ‘problematic’.

To be clear about this, I don’t mind people strongly objecting to what other people say.  ‘I find X’s views utterly obnoxious’, is fine.  So is ‘X’s views are racist” (and indeed so is ‘ X’s views are transphobic’, whether or not it happens to be a reasonable charge in this particular case).   But ‘X’s views are problematic’, which in a way sounds more polite, less confrontational, I find quite nauseating.

I’m trying to figure out why.   I think in part it’s the very politeness that I object to, the tight, anal, priggish, self-control that is implied. But I think perhaps also it’s the implication that there exists a single correct account of the world, which the speaker possesses and others do not.

My son was playing old David Bowie tracks recently and one of them was ‘Oh You Pretty Things,’ from Hunky Dory, an album which I adored and must have listened to thousands of times in my teens.  ‘Pretty Things’ is a paeon to a new generation shouldering aside a stale old one:

Look at your children
See their faces in golden rays
Don’t kid yourself they belong to you
They’re the start of a coming race…

You gotta make way for the homo superior

It was a common theme in the late 60s and 70s.  See Joni Mitchell’s lovely ‘Woodstock,’ for instance, or Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Volunteers’ (‘…One generation got old/One generation got soul…’)   But as I listened to it, it struck me with a mixture of sadness and wry amusement that the generation Bowie was thinking of were the Baby Boomers, the very people, now at the threshold of old age, who many in a new generation are blaming for the current dire state of the world.

I’ve always loved the way that stories themselves have stories, changing and evolving over time, so I liked the the idea reported here that some of the traditional fairytales we all know may go back many thousands of years.  The research which the article refers to uses similar techniques to those used by biologists and linguists to trace stories back to common ancestors, and concluded, for instance, that ‘the story known as ‘the Smith and the Devil was estimated to date back 6,000 years to the bronze age’.  (A smith sells his soul to the devil, but then outsmarts him: I’d say that the song ‘The Devil went down to Georgia‘ is an example, albeit with a fiddler instead of a smith.)

But I reckon some stories must go back a lot further than that.   There’s a Native American story from the Northwest coast of North America about a magical, shape-shifting Raven who stole fire, as well as the sun and stars, for humankind, who until then had lived in cold and darkness.   This is surely strikingly similar to the story of Prometheus in Greek myth, who also stole fire for humankind*.

But how far back would you have to go back to find a cultural common ancestor of Greece and pre-Columbian America?

*Prometheus stole fire from the Gods, while Raven stole from an eagle.   But it was eagles that were sent to punish Prometheus.  There is also a Norse story, in which Loki, a subversive shape shifter like Raven, steals from the giant Thiassi and escapes in bird form.  The giant pursues him in the form of an enormous eagle, and dies when fire sets light to his feathers. (Raven is scorched too: his feathers used to be pure white, but are turned black by the fire he stole.)

I was 15 when Hunky Dory came out, and it completely enchanted me.   Lush, lavish, at times almost operatic, it was wonderfully different from the earthy bluesy music people around me were listening to at the time, and I couldn’t  get enough of it.

So taken with David Bowie was I, in fact, that I actually risked expulsion from school to see him.  Discovering that  he would be playing at Oxford Town Hall one Saturday night, as part of his Ziggy Stardust tour, I bunked off from the boarding school I was at in Dorset, and hitchhiked 70-odd miles to Oxford.  I was an odd, solitary kid at that time and had run off from school on a previous occasion to wander for four days round the Dorset countryside by myself, oddly indifferent to the worry I was causing.  It had been made pretty clear to me that, if I went missing like that again, the school would ask me to leave.

Bowie still wasn’t famous enough then to fill a town hall, and I just bought a ticket at the door.  I sat in one of those brown metal chairs with canvas seats that you get, or used to get, in village halls, with empty seats all around me.  It was a fairly ragged performance as I remember (perhaps simply because I missed the lushness and artifice of Hunky Dory) but it was certainly a spectacle.  Bowie was in full Ziggy Stardust regalia, kneeling to perform musical fellatio on the guitar strings of his beautiful blonde guitarist, Mick Ronson.   (I wonder if his biggest achievement might turn out to be that he opened up the possibility that gay sexuality could be stylish and cool?  But I think the pull for me was the way that he made loneliness and outsiderhood seem cool also.)

Although Oxford was actually my home town, I didn’t think my parents would appreciate the fact that I was playing hookey from school, so after the concert I spent the night on the streets.   When it got too cold in the early hours of the morning, I huddled up in a cubicle in a public toilet.  (A trick I’d learnt from the previous escapade was to sleep in the Ladies. The Gents had urinals that suddenly flushed every few minutes, jerking me out of whatever level of sleep I’d managed to reach.)

When dawn broke, I hitched back down to Dorset.   I guess this was about 4 or 5 in the morning.  I remember the first driver to pick me up was so tired that he nodded off and drove right over a roundabout rather than going round it. Luckily there was no other traffic on the road.

Back at school I’d got someone to ruffle up my dormitory bed to make it look like I’d slept in it, and no one had noticed my absence.  This was probably a good thing, because my happiest time at that school was my final year, and I made some friends then who’ve remained friends to this day.

Though who knows?   Perhaps if I’d been expelled, I would have been forced to have the showdown with my parents that I really should have had, but which boarding school – and perhaps this is one of the purposes of this peculiar English institution – had helped me and them to sidestep.  In which case Bowie really would have changed my life.  As it was, a previous Bowie album, The Man who Sold the World, darker and more druggy, was to become the soundtrack to my memories of a time when, in place of open rebellion, I and my new friends retreated into our own subterranean world.

Here’s a Bowie song (actually a cover by him of a song by Iggy Pop), from a much later period, which is associated in my mind with that feeling of freedom and breaking away that comes with a sudden impulsive journey.

I consume music in a spasmodic kind of way.  I might go for months without deliberately listening to any music at all, and then will latch onto some song or fragment that fits my mood and play it to death.  Right now it’s this, “The Wichita Lineman”, not as most famously recorded by Glen Campbell but by the man who wrote the song, Jimmy Webb.

I’ve had to do some driving these last couple of days and have been listening to it over and over in my car on the album “Ten Easy Pieces”.  It’s a little fragment of a song – I gather that Webb hadn’t even finished writing it when Campbell first recorded it – and in one way it’s almost about nothing at all, just a tiny snatch of the random thoughts of the lineman as he wanders the roads by himself and climbs up the phone lines: about his job (“if it snows that stretch down south will never take the strain”), and how he could do with a vacation, and how he rather desperately loves someone.

What’s so clever is how the music fits so perfectly with the words. At the beginning and end, and in between the verses, it comes back to this morse code-like motif, like the signals going back and forth along the lines.  It’s as if, up there on his pole, silhoutted against the sky,  he stands apart from our busy human attempts to communicate, to keep in touch, to stave off aloneness.

There’s immense loneliness in the song, it seems to me, but it’s achingly beautiful too.  I see in Wikipedia that someone or other described it as “the first existential pop song”.  I’m not sure about that.  It’s predated, for instance, by Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ on the dock of the bay”  (another of my favourites, which surely could also claim that title), but it’s a truly great song.