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Death's a lonely old
time, ain't it Johannes?
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With one or two exceptions (Simon and Garfunkel, Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra) these names are simply names to me. I am aware of them, nothing more. There is no implicit criticism here. I simply travel on a different train, an outdated steam chuffer that trundles along rural routes and spends aeons untended at stations, deserted by staff. Speed is immaterial. I only visit graveyards. To a man (and I fear they all are men) my "milestones" are tombstones.
Living conductors, orchestras, singers and instrumentalists re-animate the works of these long-dead ghosts. Newspaper critics praise or denigrate such "performances" then all is still. My patch represents only a tiny percentage of what constitutes music these days. Even The Guardian, my newspaper, which tries to be even-handed about culture, devotes only a few column inches to this branch of archaeology, and then – ironically - only when the work is "new". By implication, soon to be forgotten.
A bit like being limited to novels written before, say, 1900. Great names, great works but lacking Joyce, Greene, Waugh and Proust.
Minorities like mine may seek comfort in snobbery: “This stuff has survived; it must be good.” – I’ve done it myself. Also much modern popular music is electronically tweaked; for a baritone such sounds are beyond my debutant skills.
Minorities may also pretend to be elite but it really isn’t worth the effort. One friend said classical singers’ voices sounded “artificial”. I sort of agreed.
I enjoy singing; it seems to “complete” me. But this is surely an intimate sensation, probably incommunicable.
Is smoke finally emerging from the chuffer’s chimney? Time for more tombstones.
I like thinking about music and the role it has played over the centuries. Lives utterly enriched by the sounds dreamed up by someone. My parents always loved music, and we had many albums of Broadway musicals that they listened to often. I came of age in a time marked by political unrest and music. The singer-song-writers of the 60s, for me, bridged the gap between poetry and music. What music do you listen to? What songs tug at your heart? When I listen to music, I want to be moved... to dance, to tears, to insights into the human spirit.
ReplyDeleterobin andrea: Most people's lives have been influenced by music in some way. Even my father who was stone-deaf picked up songs long after their popularity had faded and sang them tunelessly to himself; the most notable example being Lili Marlene. This song was a favourite of the German Army fighting the Brits in the Western Desert during WW2. The British Army adopted it, translated it and "sang it back" to the Germans. Long after the war had ended my father "discovered" it and could be heard: murmuring "Underneath the lamplight, by the barricade...", more or less as a monotone.
ReplyDeleteMy own experience has several well identified periods: My mother sang Anglican hymns round the house. I was just the right age (super-absorbent memory in my early teens) to take on both tunes and verses, all of which have stayed with me since. Briefly I sang as treble in the church choir but was too lazy to get up for Matins. When I started work on the newspaper in 1951 the commercial radio station, Radio Luxembourg was popular and I can still recall several of the terrible pop-songs (hideously, How Much is That Doggie in the Window?) RL transmitted.
Mercifully RL's influence was cut short by two musically well-educated friends whose tastes in classical music impinged on me for over a decade and changed my tastes for good. I was married duing this period and VR, my wife, was another "classical" influence. When I moved to the US for six years (1965 - 72) classical LPs were far cheaper than in the UK and this too cemented my interest. For several decades I'd have said my interest centred on orchestral and instrumental music.
Just over four years ago, aged eighty and quite inexplicably, I abruptly decided to take individual singing lessons. Was I too old? I asked V, the soprano who became my teacher. Age didn't matter, she replied, desire did. From then on singing has become central to my life, even to some extent displacing literature. I sing some operatic arias (Mozart: The Magic Flute) but inevitably my repertoire has expanded into Schubert, who wrote some 600 songs in his pitifully short life. You may, for instance, have heard of his "Who is Sylvia?" (words by Shakespeare) and the song cycle "Die Schöne Müllerin". Other composers in my repertory include Dowland, Schumann, Wolff, Handel, Purcell, Britten, Quilter
All classical I fear. But there are exceptions. On my own initiative I have added Cole Porter's "Every Time We Say Goodbye I Die a Little" and the Roberta Flack version of "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." There are only two types of song - good and bad. No genre has a monopoly on the good.
I haven't given up writing entirely. Keen to record the details while they were still well-remembered I wrote a short book, "Opening Bars" which covered the first eighteen months of taking singing lessons.
As I've put together this inordinately long re-comment songs have floated into and out of my consciousness and I've snatched at a bar or two here and there. "Now, now that the sun hath veiled his light..." (Ev'ning Hymn by Purcell), "Am Brunnen vor dem Tore..." Die Lindenbaum by Schubert). You might say I'm transfixed.