Posted in Film Music on Oct 30th, 2009 No Comments »
Some months ago I went across the river to Peckham, to where my grandmother was born. At the age of three she was taken by her father to Salford where she remained the rest of her life - till she died in 1984 aged 87. I was searching for her grandfather’s grave, my great-great grandfather’s. I was unlucky. The cemetery had recently systematically cleared out the graves abandoned from before 1920. I did, though, find a reference there in the records - as Alfred, died age 64 in August 1914.
Charlie Chaplin was eight years older than my grandmother. He was born in Peckham. His early life there, the poverty and distress, was terrifying. I’m glad my grandmother escaped it - into something relatively more comfortable, though I’m not sure we’d think of it so now. Her life, a Lancashire miner’s wife, was hard enough.
There’s a sculpture of Charlie there now. It’s not up to much, but it marks a remembrance.
This is Charlie’s composition ‘Limelight’ - into which he, by his genius, was able to escape to live, and my grandmother and great- great grandfather weren’t.
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Posted in Classical on Oct 27th, 2009 No Comments »
Music for the season, by Cecile Chaminade. She was a French composer, mainly of piano music, who spent the first half of her life in the nineteenth century and the second in the twentieth. She would never be called one of the so-called ’serious’ composers. Her music is too unpretentious for that. It is intimate, nostalgic, dreamy and quite disarming. She’s usually judged as a composer of ’salon’ music, of charming trifles. Well, maybe she isn’t Beethoven, Chopin or Liszt. There are no grand gestures, no angst or pain. But in its unassuming, simple and modest way, this is perfect. I love the way she weaves around the charming tune the bustling of the wind and the leaves.
It is played by Eric Parkin.
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Posted in Folk Music, Rock on Oct 25th, 2009 No Comments »
1971 - my third year trying to teach skinheads in East London - and drowning. This is Leon Russell, from the same year, complete with false start. The song, a blues, is by Bob Dylan. The lyrics are typical Dylan whimsy - and don’t mean very much. It is given substance by Russell’s self command and chainsaw vocal. He lags fractionally behind the beat, in that way characteristic of blues and jazz. It’s not something consciously learnt, but absorbed, as by a child, from the sounds of the world around him.
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Posted in Folk Music, Choral on Oct 10th, 2009 No Comments »
Another evocative choral sound - and a quite extraordinary one. A Russian folk song, sung by a tenor (anonymous) in an almost impossible high falsetto across a ground of deep basses. It’s like a distant animal cry, a wailing carried on the wind across the endless Russian steppes. There are moments when the voices of the other tenors straining into falsetto too move up towards his, and surround him like a flock of starlings. Utterly strange and haunting.
It is sung by the Don Cossack Choir conducted by Serge Jaroff, recorded almost fifty years ago.
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In 1991 the BBC put out a series of TV programmes, ‘Bringing It All Back Home’, about the influence of Irish music on American folk and country music and the cross fertilisation of American music back to Ireland. Naturally, given the history, a lot of the songs were about emigration, and the experience of loss and longing, on the part both of the emigrants and the ones they are leaving behind. Here is a heartbreaking example, from the same series.
This song ‘Sonny’ is about the other side of this - of the one who didn’t leave. It tells of the fear of the mother that her son will, like those of so many other mothers, leave her alone. And when at last it is he who is left alone, it’s as if his life had had its meaning taken from him. It is sung here in a famous recording from 1991 by Emmy Lou Harris, Mary Black and Dolores Keane. The wailing uillean pipes, Ireland’s equivalent of country music’s steel guitar, seem to speak achingly of Sonny yearning for something he could never have and which he has no words for.
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Posted in Folk Music on Oct 1st, 2009 No Comments »
For some unaccountable reason, travelling into London today on the Tube, the memory flickered across my mind of 7/7, four years ago, when I was on the Edgware Road train blown up by home-grown Muslim terrorists. My memories are of darkness, confusion and silence - and, out of the silence, the strange animal sounds of human distress. I didn’t know what was happening. I emerged dirty and bewildered, stumbling across confused and bloodied passengers, to make may way out into the daylight. It was only some hours later I fully understood what had happened. Here is a fuller account of my experience that day.
Anyway it gives me an excuse to play this heartfelt song, written and sung by Eddi Reader. She is waiting for news of friends who, like me, were caught up in it.
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