Music – Page 26 – Jarrett House North

“Well, God is in his heaven, and we all want what’s his…”

Somehow in the past fifteen years I’ve been blogging (!), I missed writing about “Blind Willie McTell.” Ever. This despite the fact that the song made the playlist of one of the first mixtapes I ever made back in 1991. And I don’t know that I ever connected the dots on the song’s meaning, in all that time, beyond the vague sense of prophetic dread conveyed by the slowly more intense vocal and piano performance.

It’s twenty-five years since I put that mix tape together, and I’ve spent the last few years feeling as though “this land is condemned.” If the response to the Obama presidency has taught me anything, it’s that slavery was the original sin of this land, and that its repercussions still play out today. So on the heels of writing about the Underground Railroad in my town, about misattribution of black collegiate spirituals by white a cappella performers, about the bureaucracy of slavery, of carefree use of the symbols of the Confederacy a hundred (or 150) years after the end of the Civil War, and of minstrelsy, listening closely to the song again bears dividends.

And I am left feeling that amid revival tents, amid the attempts to dress up the past betrayed by cheap hooch, and despite the otherwise redemptive charge of the blues, we are left with this: an arrow in the doorpost, the ghosts of slavery ships, and the promise of our life in these United States undercut by power, greed, and the inevitable corruption and decay of our descendants.

Friday Random 5: far afield edition

Returning for another edition of the newly resurrected Friday Random 5, here’s what’s on my personal music channel this morning:

Disorder – Joy Division (Unknown Pleasures). Great start to an undercaffeinated Friday morning. There’s something about the starkness of this early Joy Division song: the extremely dry studio production, the guitar all fifths and fourths, the great Peter Hook bass line moving frenetically around the guitar in sixths, and the way the song completely comes apart with Ian Curtis’s frantic “I got the spirit.” I could listen to this song all day. And have.
Grandma Brackbill Dec. 1978 w/Ralph Homsher (track 4). This is an odd one, but a cool one. It’s an interview with my great-grandmother Esta Leaman Brackbill when she was 91 years old, conducted by my great-uncle Ralph, that our family recently digitized. Not a lot of revelations, but a fun retelling of the story of the man who got drunk and tried to burn down Uncle Frank Leaman’s barn and was caught on the porch of my great-grandmother’s house while she and the other children were inside and their parents were off somewhere. Good stuff.
I Will Be There – Van Morrison (Saint Dominic’s Preview). I went deep down the rabbit hole on Van Morrison a few years ago (ten? geez) on discovering Astral Weeks, and picked up this album and a few others. Of course, nothing else is like Astral Weeks, but Van doing traditional blues is fantastic, even with the tossed off line “Gonna grab my suitcase, and my toothbrush, and my overcoat, and my underwear”!
Pieces of Sky – Beth Orton (Comfort of Strangers). Beth Orton’s Central Reservation was on constant repeat for me for about a year, and the followup Daybreaker accompanied more than a few road trips, but her subsequent albums haven’t worked as well for me. This song might be an example of why: the production (courtesy Jim O’Rourke) has just the right amount of emotional restraint but she disappears into it, and the song feels unfinished—it ends too soon.
Messe basse (Fauré): Sanctus – Choir of St. John’s College, Cambridge, George Guest conductor (Fauré: Requiem, Cantique de Jean Racine; Duruflé: Requiem, Quatre Motets). A brief movement for choir and organ from a lesser known Fauré work. He jointly composed a full mass setting with his pupil André Messager providing the Kyrie and the O Salutaris; the Fauré movements (Gloria, Sanctus, Agnus Dei) were subsequently published stand-alone as the Messe basse. It’s a brief but effective setting of the Sanctus for treble and alto voices with organ; I want to go back and listen to the rest.

Winter Song

Speaking of eight years in, I missed a day of posting yesterday due to the Veracode sales kickoff, so I’m going to do a two-fer today to make up.

With the past weekend’s killer storm in DC and Charlottesville (as well as most of the rest of the mid-Atlantic), I couldn’t help but thinking about ice gnomes. One of the great fun songs of my Virginia Glee Club days was singing “The Winter Song,” an odd little tune that… well, look at the lyrics:

Ho, a song by the fire;
Pass the pipes, pass the bowl.
Ho, a song by the fire
With a skoal, with a skoal.
Ho, a song by the fire;
Pass the pipes with a skoal,

For the wolf-wind is wailing at the doorways,
And the snow drifts deep along the road,
And the ice gnomes are marching from their Norways,
And the great white cold walks abroad.

But, here by the fire, we defy frost and storm;
Ha, ha we are warm, and we have our heart’s desire.
For here, we’re good fellows, and the beechwood and the bellows;
And the cup is at the lip in the pledge of fellowship.

I had always wondered about the tune, so did a little research. Turns out “The Winter Song” is a collegiate song, but it originally comes from Dartmouth, not Virginia. The poetry collection Dartmouth Lyrics prints the poem “Hanover Winter Song” by Richard Hovey, who in 1898 convinced his college friend Frederic Field Bullard to write the music.

The tune lived on in Dartmouth fraternity singing, until that tradition died away, and in Dartmouth singing groups such as the Aires. But it took John Liepold to bring it to the University of Virginia, where it’s become a favorite of the Glee Club.

The return of the Friday Random 10 … er, 5

It’s been over five years since I did a Friday Random 10 post. When I was last blogging daily, these posts started out as a group blogging challenge, a fun way to talk music and other stuff. After a while they became mechanical and they stopped along with my other blogging. Now that I’m three full weeks into my resolution to blog every weekday, I thought it might be time to resurrect the format, but with some changes. Namely, I’m not just going to post a list of tunes, I’m also going to write a little bit about each one, and so I’m shortening it from a Random 10 to a Random 5.

Otherwise the rules are the same: turn on your music player, hit shuffle, and list the first 5 tunes that come up… no cheating. I hereby swear to blog about it even if it’s embarrassing.

So here we go:

What Is Your Secret – Nada Surf (The Weight is a Gift). A favorite band ten years ago, I need to go back and revisit some of their later albums which didn’t stick as much with me. But The Weight is a Gift and its predecessor, Let Go, are in my top 100 albums list, and even a lesser song like this is still a great listen for the harmonization.
Song That Made Us What We Are Today (Demo) – Red Hot Chili Peppers (Mother’s Milk). I’m not the biggest Chili Peppers fan in the world but I do love their earlier, edgier stuff, and this instrumental track is all bristly funk.
Oh Carolina – Virginia Glee Club (Songs of Virginia). I’ve written about this track before and it’s still funny. What I didn’t write about is the musical form. A lot of these football songs were written for the spectators to sing at a football game and never had harmonizations, so when the Glee Club went to record this one they had to come up with a new arrangement for it. It’s a fun combination of traditional harmonization and multi-octave voicing that I hope we do as an alumni song someday.
Like the 309 – Johnny Cash (American V – A Hundred Highways). In the aftermath of David Bowie’s death, it’s interesting to revisit Cash’s. Where Bowie’s was, in retrospect, a premeditated surprise managed for maximum artistic impact, Johnny Cash’s had all the inevitability of Revelations—the public awareness of his health problems, the death of June, the elegiac tone of the last few albums. In that context, his first posthumous release is both moving and comforting, with the bluesy shuffle of “Like the 309” a good representation of the tone.
Above Chiangmai – Brian Eno (Ambient 2 – The Plateaux of Mirror). I went back to find the other albums in Eno’s Ambient series the other week, and was glad I did. This one is mostly composer Harold Budd on piano responding to “tones” introduced by Eno, who otherwise contributes mostly sound textures to the recording. The track “Above Chiangmai” is a soundscape in itself, sounding as though the piano is heard through the bones of the skull rather than the ears, and is hypnotic in its simple melodic improvisation. A little Satie, a little Cage, and all Eno.

Disillusionment™, the official emotion of the 40s

Peter Gabriel: Peter and Sting Tour 2016. I am not the most rabid fan, any more, of either Peter Gabriel or Sting, the first decade of the 21st century helping to temper my enthusiasm for their projects. (See my 2006 review of Sting’s “Songs from the Labyrinth” and my note in 2010 on the “Scratch” project for examples of tempered enthusiasm.) But the fifteen year old boy in me wants to see these shows, very badly.

Given where I am in my life almost thirty years after getting exposed to both artists, I think I owe it to myself, and them, to forgive them for aging, for losing the intensity and edge they had in their respective youths, and to see what they’ve found in its place. After all, God knows I’ve lost some intensity and edge too.

Ride the Chariot and Yale: a study in misattribution

I took my daughter to her first a cappella concert yesterday, to see the Yale Redhot and Blue (as well as the women’s group from our town’s high school, the Lexington High Euphoria. As expected from a group of Redhot and Blue’s reputation, their set was excellently performed and jazz heavy (“Fly Me to the Moon” and Cole Porter’s “Redhot and Blue” were solid, “Angel Eyes” was spectacular and a welcome surprise). But they closed with an “old Yale song.” Which turned out to be, essentially, the William Henry Smith arrangement of “Ride the Chariot,” which I sang in the Virginia Glee Club in the early 1990s. More precisely, the Smith arrangement was used unmodified by the group, while the soloist improvised his own line around Smith’s melody.

I asked a member of the group about the Yale attribution after the show, and he said, “It’s an arrangement that’s done a lot at Yale. Each group has their own version of it and that’s ours.” A quick Google confirms the performance practice; the Whiffenpoofs do the same thing to the arrangement, as does the Society of Orpheus and Bacchus. Even the Yale Alumni Chorus gets in on the act, though they sing the SATB arrangement as written.

The attribution is a lot more dubious. The Whiffenpoofs’ repertoire page does not credit William Henry Smith for the arrangement at all, listing it as “trad. Yale”; other groups simply say “traditional.” Given that the arrangement is not only clearly Smith’s but that it was likely in copyright at the time it was adopted by the Yale groups (it was copyrighted in 1939, and if renewed by the publisher does not pass into the public domain until 2034), the Yale groups owe Smith a credit at the very least.

There’s also a matter of appropriation. While little is known about William Henry Smith (1908–1944), we do know that he was a professor at historically black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, known for graduating civil rights leader James Farmer, and that he directed the Wiley College choir, touring with them in the years before his sudden death. To claim authorship of a work published and copyrighted by a prominent black musician is unfortunate if done through ignorance, unforgiveable if done deliberately.

It’s unbecoming for the Yale vocal groups, even in ignorance, to claim “trad. Yale” authorship for Smith’s arrangement of “Ride the Chariot.” The various groups should correct this historical error and give Smith the credit he’s due.

Missed opportunity

The New Yorker: David Bowie and the Return of the Music Video. Good article that stops short of what it could have done, which is to point to the role that YouTube videos for ★ and “Lazarus” played in building anticipation for Bowie’s final album.

Or, put another way, just watch these. After watching the video for the lead single, “Blackstar,” how could you not want more? And the video for “Lazarus” became, posthumously, the key piece in Bowie’s in-plain-sight revelation of his fatal illness.

★

I came to David Bowie, as to all good things, late. My memories of his music in childhood were fragmentary: “Dancing In The Street” was a top 40 hit, and “Let’s Dance” impinged on my consciousness. Later, WNOR and WAFX played that of his material that had been admitted to the classic rock canon: “Suffragette City,” “Space Oddity,” “Changes,” “Rebel Rebel.” I had no idea what lay behind those works.

I came to the better parts of Bowie obliquely, which is appropriate. In the fall of my last year at UVA, Philip Glass’s “‘Low’ Symphony,” based on Bowie’s first album with Brian Eno, came out on CD. It went into my odd heavy rotation. I didn’t check out the album it came from until later, after their collaboration “Outside” had twisted my head, obsessed my thoughts, and ultimately left me cold.

Eventually I found “Low,” but the first listen befuddled me. Then “‘Heroes,'” which was an entirely different story – the title song is probably the only one of his works I can sing from beginning to end. Slowly I was catching up.

I made it through “Ziggy,” “Lodgers,” then “Station to Station.” At which point I began to appreciate what all the fuss was about. The level of the funk he was pulling off in that record!

By contrast the first listen to “The Next Day” underwhelmed me. I’m going to go back and listen to it again, but at the time my dominant impression was “He’s been sick.” The once mighty voice was thin, though still powerfully emotive. And I won’t claim prescience, but it did remind me of the way that Chris Whitley’s voice was eroded in his last recording, or Yauch’s. I probably didn’t think the C word aloud.

But I managed to leave that impression behind. Because the lead single from his now-final album, ★, lifted off the top of my head in a way that his work hadn’t for a while. The skittering drum work of Mark Guiliana anchored a performance by the rest of his band that was at once exhilarating and familiar after the modern jazz I had been consuming for years. And the aesthetic of the video… well, I finally understood Bowie as a complete artist. And I will probably have nightmares with buttons for eyes for a long time.

I devoured the album when it came out last Friday, pausing only over “I Can’t Give Everything Away.” It sounds like a valediction, I thought.

Then this morning, and the place in my mind that was consumed by Bowie’s vital comeback realigned in an instant. It wasn’t a comeback. It was a parting gift. Bowie’s performance in “Lazarus” was completely convincing because he knew what it was to be in a hospital bed.

So now he’s gone, and I’m left to marvel at the wild oracular talent, the body of work that it left, and how far ahead he was and how far I had to go to catch up with him.

Sarah was ninety years old

In the course of listening to all the music in my iTunes library at least twice (a multi-year project!), this morning I came across Arvo Pärt’s 1991 album Miserere. It’s a touchpoint for me—it was the first album of his music I ever bought, probably the first Hilliard Ensemble album I ever got, and one of the first albums of modern classical music I ever bought. (I think the first modern classical album I bought was the Kronos Quartet’s Black Angels.)

As I listened to it, I remember being simultaneously profoundly moved and confused by the third track, “Sarah was ninety years old,” scored for three voices, percussion, and organ. The piece begins in contemplative solo percussion, which gradually picks up intensity until the first vocal entrance, then repeats, until finally the long stretches are ended by the entrance of an organ and a soprano solo that spirals up into ecstasy (as Sarah conceives and bears a son at the age of 90).

Something that had puzzled me from my first listen was just exactly how it was that the percussion didn’t drive me nuts. The percussion consists of four-beat patterns of high and low tones, continuing initially for over five minutes before voices enter. How does it pull the listener in?

I think I figured it out listening to it this morning. Turns out, it’s math. The percussion part runs through permutations of three low tones and one high tone, with varying repetitions. So the first section goes:

L L L H (4x)
L L H L (4x)
L H L L (4x)
H L L L (4x)

And then it repeats, but now each permutation is only repeated three times. Then two. Then one repetition of each permutation, at high urgency and with a fierce percussive attack.

Then: the voices arrive.

And we realize that we have been counting the repetitions and that our breath has been quickening in anticipation of what happens when the pattern ends.

The work is literally minimalistic, but it’s also highly meditative. I don’t think anyone online has specifically written about how Pärt creates this effect, so I figured I’d share.

Enjoy!

New mix: My timing that flawed

Midsummer, so time for another mix. At some point I’ll break this meta-thing I have where the mix starts out party and ends up somber, but this will not be the mix to break the pattern.

A few track notes in line below.

Blind Man Can See It – James Brown (In the Jungle Groove). This is a classic James Brown groove with nothing much else going on, but it’s on here for the first 30 second snippet of Brown talking with the drummer. Dag-a-dag-a-dag-a…
Jungle Grove – Buckshot LeFonque (Music Evolution). I had written off Buckshot LeFonque as a kind of lazy exercise after the first album. I finally got around to checking out the second (and last) platter Branford’s gang waxed, and I’m glad I did. This track features some seriously hot playing as the group plays some live jungle.
Blue Line Swinger – Yo La Tengo (Prisoners Of Love). Yeah, I know, there are probably a bunch of live cuts of this that are better, but this is the one I first learned to love.
Lotus Flower – Radiohead (The King of Limbs). Get your Thom Yorke dance on.
Song Of The Stars – Dead Can Dance (Spirit Chaser). Get your mid-90s cultural appropriation dance on.
The Great Curve – Talking Heads (Remain In Light). I think this is the only track on this album that hadn’t previously made it onto a mix tape.
Optimistic – Radiohead (Kid A). To think that I once considered this the happy song on this album.
Idioteque – Virginia Sil’hooettes (Best of BOCA: The First 20 Years). I know, I know. But honestly I was blown away by what these Hoos could do in the studio.
Ascension Day – Talk Talk (Laughing Stock). I’m still not sure what this song is about, but I do know that I haven’t been able to stop playing this album since I finally picked it up a few years ago.
Total Trash – Sonic Youth (Daydream Nation). Is it bad that reading Kim’s autobiography made me want to listen to Sonic Youth songs that weren’t sung by Kim?
You Get What You Deserve – Big Star (#1 Record – Radio City). Ditto the comment on track 6.
Nicotine & Gravy – Beck (Midnite Vultures). Okay, here we go. I enjoyed this album ironically when it came out, now I just enjoy it. “I’ll feed you fruit that don’t exist/I’ll leave graffiti where you’ve never been kissed/I’ll do your laundry, massage your soul/Then turn you over to the highway patrol.”
Beykat – Youssou N’Dour (Joko From Village To Town). I could listen to Youssou sing anything, even a track that would be at home on a Europop radio station.
Rose Parade – Elliott Smith (Either/Or). Haven’t been able to let go of this one.
Prïtourïtze Planinata – Bulgarian State Television Female Choir (Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares). Another album I came to late, and can’t stop listening to.
Love Will Tear Us Apart – June Tabor & Oysterband (Ragged Kingdom). Surprising how well this works.
Nothing But Heart – Low (C’mon). Fighting through.
Cherry Chapstick (Acoustic Version) – Yo La Tengo (Today Is the Day! – EP). Have loved this tune for a long time in its original form. The acoustic is wistful and summer afternoonish.
Into Dust – Mazzy Star (So Tonight That I Might See). Another track that echoes around my head when it’s quiet.
Fading Away – The Church (Gold Afternoon Fix). This may not have been the album that The Church wanted to make—stories of their fights with the producer and their despair at LA and their label are plenty—but it’s still an album that I know almost every track on.
Bye Bye Beauté (Coralie Clement) – Nada Surf (if I had a hi-fi). Not the first time I’ve bought an album based on a cover. I originally wasn’t taken by too many songs on this cover album but this one kept at me, thank goodness.
A Mother’s Last Word To Her Daughter – Washington Phillips (The Half Ain’t Never Been Told, Vol. 1). Very little dulcimer work in the gospel music I’ve heard. This is a fascinating track to sign off this mix as we go and see the King.

Bascom Lamar Lunsford: the Berea recordings

Bascom Lamar Lunsford, courtesy Asheville and Buncombe County on Flickr

Thanks to Tyler, I’m spending the morning listening to archival folk music recordings and grinning from ear to ear.

I’ve written about cousin Bascom Lamar Lunsford before. In the years since the CD reissue of the Anthology of American Folk Music, which features several of his songs, quite a few folk artists have approached his tunes anew, with varying levels of success (check out Frank Fairfield’s version of “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground“). But nothing’s like the real thing.

So I was thrilled to get a link from Tyler on Facebook pointing me to the digital archives at Berea College with a collection of forty-two Bascom Lamar Lunsford archival recordings, plus a few large group songs and a newsreel, available for free listening and download. The quality of the recordings, made for Columbia University in 1935 and archived by Berea, isn’t great — there’s reel-to-reel noise on most of them, and the otherwise revelatory performance of “Mole in the Ground” is marred by uneven recording or playback, leading the pitch to wander all over. But hey–free Bascom Lamar Lunsford! Go listen!

More reading: a Bascom Lamar Lunsford/University of Virginia/Virginia Glee Club connection.

Listen: “Swannanoa Tunnel” by Bascom Lamar Lunsford from the Berea archive

An appreciation of John Oliver

Boston Globe: Tanglewood chorus director Oliver to step down.

I auditioned for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus almost ten years ago. In that audition, I showed my lack of symphony and opera experience by singing a work by Landini — a good audition piece for an early music ensemble, woefully out of place for a symphony chorus. But John Oliver took a risk on what he heard and invited me to join the chorus. And he let me continue to participate through travel, at least one blown reaudition, and the appearance in the chorus of many other more qualified singers.

In the process, he has taught me a great deal as a singer, including:

Sing with the whole body as an instrument. Be aware of the resonant space in your head, the position of your body, the depth of your breath.
Language matters deeply. Articulating precisely conveys not just words but meaning.
Memorization allows you to inhabit the music deeply and fully — and sometimes builds electricity in the performance via sheer terror.
Connect with the conductor and the audience.
Be committed completely. Don’t settle for less, in yourself or others.
There isn’t one “correct” interpretation of a musical work. Be open to what others bring to it.

There is much to be said for John’s tenure as founder and director of the TFC, and I’ll write it someday. For today, I’ll just note my gratitude for this acerbic, demanding, opinionated… and secretly generous man, and for what he taught me as a singer.

New mix: In ragtown like I always was

It’s another new year, another mix. As always, this is no more or less than what happened to be kicking around my iTunes for a long period of time, so I make no claim for it hanging together. Except I’m kinda happy about the string of tracks from #2 through #13 and parts of the last stretch.

Some track specific notes:

“Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag”: Yes, yes he does. You can’t have this track, with James Brown yelling out “This is a hit!”, in a playlist and not have it leading off.

“Rotating Head (raga version)”: A tabla-heavy remix of a song most familiar from the “Ferris Bueller” soundtrack, this picks up the groove from Track #1 and takes it into…

“Seen and Not Seen”: Groove city. Check the way the handclaps, bass, and guitar work together. Much like the way the next groove builds…

“Autumn Sweater”: Here the groove is all drums and bass, especially bass. Love what James McNew does with the bassline during the break here.

“Electricity”: A break from the groove for a guitar based rocker. I had forgotten this album until Shuffle brought it back to me. A great track.

“Masanga”: An obscurity, this popped up on a compilation of sub-Saharan guitar that I found on Bandcamp over a year ago. I love the purely guitar driven groove. Seriously propulsive and fun.

“I Love This Life”: Also propulsive and fun, but almost all synths, I slept on this track from The Blue Nile for a long time. I’m not sure what “ragtown” meant to Paul Buchanan, but when I listen to this track I feel like I understand.

“The Statue Got Me High”: A non-sequitur but a fun one, and a great singalong.

“Mod Lang”: Gee, there’s a “groove” theme going on on this mix, which is unusual for me. I love how Chilton takes a handful of lyrics that are almost nonsense and weaves them into urgency.

“Courage”: A PG rarity that was released alongside the 25th anniversary reissue of So a few years back. Too lyrically heavy and overtly structured a song to fit comfortably on that album, I don’t know if it works well here either but I couldn’t cut it.

“Rain”: Groove, man. Complete with the backward bit at the end.

“JC”: Shift of tone to a minor key with a fair amount of distortion.

“After the Flood”: This track is the still heart of this mix. I stumbled across Talk Talk by accident, more or less, thought they had been on my list of bands to find for a long time thanks to the late lamented Lists of Bests. This is an incredible track, building from almost inaudibility up through some killer organ work into a long burn of a distortion guitar solo. I have listened to this one for days at a time.

“Try Not to Breathe”: Taking a breath, this is a song I didn’t think so much of until I was recovering from surgery a year ago. Then it made a lot of sense.

“No Love Lost”: The rare Joy Division song I like more as an instrumental, but there’s still something compelling in Ian Curtis’s delivery here.

“Lick the Palm of the Burning Handshake”: Boy, Nika can really do apocalyptic, can’t she? Even if we don’t totally understand what she’s singing about.

“Svatba”: The transition from Nika’s wordless outro to “Lick the Palm” into the Bulgarian voices here was a happy shuffle accident.

“Accordion”: Another happy accident, another supremely bizarre rap from MF Doom.

“Super Mario”: Well, as long as we’re doing bizarre, I figure an a cappella version of an 8 bit videogame theme qualifies.

“Gallows Pole”: If there’s a theme wending through the back half of this, it might be covers vs. authenticity. The ballad, which started out as “The Maid Freed from the Gallows” in the Child ballads before being recorded as “The Gallis Pole” by Lead Belly, is colored by Plant’s rock god delivery until it’s hard to tell at the end who is swinging from the gallows pole, and whether the pole is literal or metaphoric. A neat trick.

“Tall Trees in Georgia”: Again, covers and authenticity. When Eva Cassidy was alive, she was lauded as a vocalist but not so much as an authentic jazz talent (I remember one review saying “She even covers Buffy Ste Marie!”). It’s a moving performance nonetheless.

“They Won’t Let Me Run”: A beautiful groove for an ugly story.

“Holocene”: Was totally obsessed with this song for about 18 months.

“Let It Down”: Tension release necessary after the last few tracks.

“Rill Rill”: Speaking of authenticity, how about copping “Can You Get to That?” for this song about teenage girl angst? Well, yeah, and it works, so the hell with authenticity.

“(Won’t We Have a Time) When We Get Over Yonder”: Another Bandcamp find, this one is a different kind of groove entirely, almost an incantation until one of the Jordan River Singers slips over completely into a Spirit induced holler. And that leads to…

“The Times They Are A Changin’”: I was disappointed with the rest of this album only because it doesn’t live up to its title the way this lead off track does. “Times” is truly one of Dylan’s most gospel-like songs to begin with, and this version pulls out all the revival stops. A fantastic cover.

Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag, Parts 1, 2 & 3 – James Brown (Star Time)
Rotating Head (raga version) – English Beat (Lives of the Saints 5)
Seen And Not Seen – Talking Heads (Remain In Light)
Autumn Sweater – Yo La Tengo (I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One)
Electricity – Spiritualized (Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space)
Masanga (Congo) – Jean Bosco Mwenda (Hata Unacheza: Sub-Saharan Acoustic Guitar & String Music, ca. 1960s)
I Love This Life – The Blue Nile (I Would Never – EP)
The Statue Got Me High – They Might Be Giants (Apollo 18)
Mod Lang – Big Star (#1 Record – Radio City)
Courage (Radio Edit) – Peter Gabriel (Courage)
Rain – The Beatles (Past Masters, Vols. 1 & 2)
JC – Sonic Youth (Dirty)
After The Flood – Talk Talk (Laughing Stock)
Try Not To Breathe – R.E.M. (Automatic for the People)
No Love Lost – Joy Division (Substance 1977-1980)
Lick the Palm of the Burning Handshake – Zola Jesus (Conatus)
Svatba – Bulgarian State Television Female Choir (Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares)
Accordion – Madvillain (Madvillainy)
Super Mario – BYU Vocal Point (Best of BOCA: The First 20 Years)
Gallows Pole – Led Zeppelin (Led Zeppelin III (Remastered))
Tall Trees In Georgia – Eva Cassidy (Live At Blues Alley)
They Won’t Let Me Run – John Vanderslice (Cellar Door)
Holocene – Bon Iver (Bon Iver)
Let It Down (Bonus Track) – George Harrison (All Things Must Pass (Bonus Track Version) [Remastered])
Rill Rill – Sleigh Bells (Treats)
(Won’t We Have a Time) When We Get Over Yonder – Rev. W.M. Anderson & the Jordan River Singers (When the Moon Goes Down in the Valley of Time: African-American Gospel, 1939-51)
The Times They Are A Changin’ – The Brothers and Sisters (Dylan’s Gospel)

The Brahms Requiem at 41

Symphony Hall, orchestra rehearsal for the Brahms Requiem.

(By which I mean, of course, my age, not the age of the work.)

I last wrote about Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem in 2009, at the end of a run in which we performed the work in Symphony Hall, issued an official recording, and reprised it at Tanglewood. It was a different time: James Levine was at the relative height of his powers and I was singing more regularly with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus.

We reprised the work a few years later under Christoph von Dohnányi, in a totally different performance. By that time I wasn’t blogging as regularly so I don’t have any notes from that run. I remember a few things, though: his tempi were brisk, his interpretation totally unsentimental, and his demands on the chorus’s diction were fierce.

This run, which concluded a week ago, was to have been conducted by the great Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, with whom I was fortunate to sing a few times. But he passed away this summer, and the task of filling his shoes went to Bramwell Tovey. The chorus had sung with him before, but I had not, and had heard about his affability but not much about his musicianship. He turns out to be, at least with the Requiem, a conductor concerned not so much with putting an individual stamp on the work than with seeking how the text determines the flow of the piece. To that end he, like Dohnányi, asked the highest level of diction and pitch precision from the chorus. Our chorus conductor, Bill Cutter, helped with that, pitilessly letting us know when we could be doing better.

For this performance, my third time through the work, I had a pretty good idea of what some of the major challenges would be for me. I wrote about some of them in the post from Tanglewood:

I found what may be the real culprit of the sixth movement, for me at least. It’s not just the overall arc of the piece, but specifically the tenor part immediately preceding the fugue, where all choral voices respond… And the text is sung at absolutely full volume over some of the thickest orchestration in the work, and in the high part of the tenor range.

This is the rub, at least for me. The need to support the voice is strong, but at that volume and emotional fervor it’s very easy to tip over from supporting to tightening, and then the battle is lost and the voice closes progressively until it is difficult to get any sound out at all. Once that happens the following fugue is unsingable.

Well, friends, I’m here to tell you that I had the right problem area, but the solution was both easier and harder than I thought.

The hard part was in placing my voice properly. I have never had more than a few hours of formal voice instruction since I got my full instrument, and so it takes me a while to learn things that I suppose most voice majors know inherently. (The hazards of being a sciences major and not taking advantage of the meager vocal instruction offerings at my undergrad, among other things.) Sometime over the past few years, though, I managed to learn about two important concepts in voice placement: singing toward and through the mask, and keeping the ceiling of the vocal chamber high. What follows is an embarrassing amateur’s assessment of how this works; I welcome correction.

The “mask,” or the frontal bones of the face, is where a good portion of the resonant overtones of the voice develop, due in no small part to vibrations through the sinus cavities (yes, they’re good for something besides infections). But the voice must be directed through this part rather than being allowed to linger in the back of the vocal chamber for the resonance to take effect. Once it does, the difference is startling: a brightness and sharpness to the sound that cuts through surrounding noise for far less vocal effort. The challenges are in keeping the sinuses clear (no small task thanks to the common cold) and managing the position of the facial muscles that support singing so that the placement happens properly.

The full vocal chamber, otherwise known as the front of the face, the cavity of the mouth, and the back of the throat, is important in developing the fullness of the sound. Again, my amateur guess is that this has something to do with developing the right resonant frequencies. It turns out that for me, one of the most important parts of this process, in addition to the mask, is keeping the soft palate, which forms the ceiling of the vocal chamber, high and out of the way. If it comes down, producing sound on pitch is much harder, the sound is muddied, and if you’re singing through the mask and not taking advantage of the full chamber you get a sharp thin sound rather than a penetrating fuller sound.

This leads me to the other thing that was much easier in solving the problem. One of the things that makes keeping the soft palate in the proper place extremely hard is not being prepared for the next vowel sound that is being produced. If you are unsure about whether an e or an ah is coming next, the palate doesn’t know where to go, and producing any sort of sound at all becomes a challenge of brute force.

In this context, my prior problem about my voice “tightening” had a simple diagnosis: I was not comfortable with the text. By that point in movement six my memory was generally unreliable so I couldn’t anchor the Den es wird die Pasaune schallen. I finally figured out what was going on in one of our rehearsals when we started on the second repetition, Der Tod is verschlungen in den Sieg, sung on virtually the same tune, and I had no difficulty in keeping the voice from tightening. Why? I knew the words better! I didn’t have to force the sound, and that meant I could keep the palate high and the muscles in the proper place! All I had to do to make this a general solution was focus on ensuring that I had the right words!

So for this run I managed, most of the time, to keep the apparatus such that I was producing the right sort of sound throughout, and it made all the difference in the world. I even sang in my church choir the following morning; usually after a Brahms Requiem run I’m a ragged baritone for at least a week.

Lessons learned?

Stay conscious of the mask and the ceiling of the chamber.
Learn the damned text. First, if possible.

This should be fun as we head into the Rachmaninoff that we’ll sing next. It’s been a long time since I’ve had to learn that much Russian.

New mix: been so lonesome, just ’bout flew away

Percolating this one for a while, as usual. Genesis has been the end of a long hard winter, some outstanding old gospel 78s that washed up on Bandcamp, and a few songs (“Headspins,” “Genius of Love”) that seized my playlist and wouldn’t let go.

In Your Eyes (Special Mix) – Peter Gabriel
I Won’t Be Long – Beck (I Won’t Be Long)
City With No Children – Arcade Fire (The Suburbs)
Man – Neko Case (The Worse Things Get, the Harder I Fight, the Harder I Fight, the More I Love You (Deluxe Edition))
Headspins – Splashh (Comfort)
Little By Little – Radiohead (The King of Limbs)
Weightless – Brian Eno (Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks)
Root Down – Beastie Boys (Ill Communication)
White Girl – Soul Coughing (Irresistible Bliss)
Can You Get to That – Funkadelic (Maggot Brain)
Borrowed Time – Alexander O’Neal (Purple Snow: Forecasting the Minneapolis Sound)
Bittersweet Me – R.E.M. (New Adventures In Hi-Fi)
Genius Of Love – Tom Tom Club (Tom Tom Club)
Patience – The Men (Campfire Songs)
What Are They Doing in Heaven Today? – Dixie Hummingbirds (When the Moon Goes Down in the Valley of Time: African-American Gospel, 1939-51)
Stones In My Passway – Robert Johnson (The Complete Recordings)
Royals – Lorde (The Love Club EP)
Deeper Into Movies – Yo La Tengo (I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One)
Too Much of Nothing (take 2) – Bob Dylan (A Tree With Roots)
That Was My Veil – June Tabor & Oysterband (Ragged Kingdom)
Wash. – Bon Iver (Bon Iver)
Avalanche (Slow) – Zola Jesus, JG Thirlwell & Mivos Quartet (Versions)
Green, Green Rocky Road – Dave Van Ronk (Inside Llewyn Davis: Original Soundtrack Recording)
Water Wheel – Steve Gunn (Time Off)
Ceremony – New Order (International: The Best of New Order)
One Day – Angelic Gospel Singers with the Dixie Humming Birds (When the Moon Goes Down in the Valley of Time: African-American Gospel, 1939-51)
Winter’s Come And Gone – Gillian Welch (Hell Among The Yearlings)