Tag: music

Where’s Mama? Where’s Mama?

There she is!  Oh, um, sorry, I mean, please come see me in two other places today.

Such a day!  I have a piece up at Faith and Family Live–an interview with Kathy Rivet, who has been teaching Creighton Model NFP for over 30 years. Kathy has also been my instructor for about eight years, so I can personally attest to the fact that she is a woman of supernatural patience and fortitude.  Come check out what she has to sayabout the changes she’s seen in the world of NFP.

And today The Anchoress is going to Rome, and I’m not jealous at all, do you hear me?  She has very generously invited me, Danielle Bean, and Sally Thomas to write guest posts while she’s gone.  So come on over and see the video of Dolly Parton that I found!

How should I do this?  Should I post the same thing here and there?  Or should I just leave a note here to remind you to see me there?  What should I do?  Where did I put my coffee?  What’s that smell?  You thought it was okay to just step over this mess and keep on walking? And with a track record like this, you think I’m going to get you a dog???

Sorry, I forgot who I was talking to again.  Nooo, I wouldn’t rather be in Rome….

How to tell if you’re listening to okra

I do not like okra.  It’s pretty much the worst vegetable you can imagine,  kind of like the Newt Gingrich of the produce world:  hairy and fibrous on the outside, seedy and slimy on the inside.   It just makes you wonder, why is it even here?  What is the point of this food, other than to make you glad when it finally goes out of season?

 

And yet there it is in the supermarket.  Every week I pass it by with a shudder; but I know someone must buy it, because they keep putting more out.

Life is so short, I would hate to miss out on some valuable experience.  On the other hand, I’m a lazy, lazy woman.  So when I want to meet life head on, when I feel the urge to stretch out a wondering hand and pluck the fruit of some new experience that our amazing world has to offer, it usually takes the form of — say, eating fruit.  Or listening to a new kind of music.  You know, something I can do sitting down.

A recent (not terribly fruitful) conversation in the comment box of Inside Catholic has brought up a few interesting points.  I put up a video of a song by The Black Keys, who are a pretty good rock band.  Okay, so they’re not Mozart.  They’re not even the Rolling Stones.  They just sound pretty good to me.  So once the huffing and puffing subsided (did you realize that, despite claiming to be Catholic, I listen to things which are not Gregorian Chant?), someone who didn’t like the music asked why I do like it.  A fair question.  She didn’t hear what I heard, and was curious.

I simply don’t have the mental energy at the moment to explain why rock music sounds good to me.  But since I do have a policy of at least trying to listen carefully to something new,  I thought I’d ask you all:  how do you listen to music?  Specifically, if someone tells you, “Hey, this stuff is great!” and you don’t hear it right away?

Here is what I listen for:

Does the singer or musician sound like he means it?  He doesn’t have to be wrenching his guts out and laying them at your feet like Otis Redding does, but is he really present in the performance, or is he  just letting the music trot him around?

Was there some self-control in the crafting of song?  Writing is easy; it’s editing that kills you.  That’s what (among other things) was so great about the Beatles:  they always knew when to stop.  Say what you have to say, make it good, and then go away.  I’m looking at you, Led Zeppelin.

Does anything come to mind when I hear this song?  If it sounds like something to me, then it looks like something, too, mentally.  It’s not usually a literal illustration of what the song is about (and obviously that couldn’t be the case if there are no lyrics) — it’s just some colorful or textural image, which worthless music is not capable of producing.

I also like to think about what instrumental works would be saying if they had words, and I’ve noticed that musicians are generally saying the same thing over and over, no matter what different kinds of work they produce throughout their career.   For instance, I think that most of Brahms’ instrumental work is saying, “Death is sweet, but life is sweeter” (or sometimes I think it’s the other way around).

I guess the funny thing about listening attentively is that you have to tune out most of what you normally hear.  You have to forget that, “okay, this is an electric guitar, that guy sounds nasal, I bet this is from the early 90′s, or from the late Baroque period; this is the song that goes with that Sprite commercial, this is the song that that jerk in 8th grade study hall used to sing all the time,” etc.  You have to, as it were, listen on the slant, and try and hear through to where the song lives – -what kind of house it’s built for itself.  In this way, you will not only discover why some famous musicians are famous, but you will wonder why some other famous people are even allowed on the stage.

And sometimes it just sounds good to you, and you can’t say why.  You know what?  I like Roxette.  I know there’s nothing there; I just like them.

But The Black Eyed Peas? I know they’re famous, but man, they’re just okra.

Okay, so what are your standards?  How do you decide if what you’re hearing is worth your time?

(okra photo source)

(Gingrich photo source)

Espressivo

(photo source)

Glenn Gould is the second person I ever heard who plays Bach properly.  The first one is my father, who is not a very good pianist.

My father has the ear of a great musician.  He takes orchestral scores to bed as a little night reading.  Haydn eludes me, but his music brings my father to tears.  Once, when he was striving to explain sonata form, I coolly answered that I’d rather let the music just wash over me, instead of wrecking the mood by overthinking it.  By the look he gave me, I think he heard me say something like,  “I prefer to let small children be mutilated by elephants, rather than harsh my buzz.”

The radio always played classical music as I was growing up, and the awkward, melancholy voice of Peter Fox Smith was the sound of Saturday afternoon at our house.  We didn’t learn table manners or social skills, but we knew how to behave at a concert, and sneered mercilessly at the dolts who clapped between movements.

We drove 45 minutes in a snowstorm to hear Sally Pinkas play (stopping only when we skidded and rear-ended another driver, who turned out to be the local choir director), and once hauled the old red minivan four hours to watch The Marriage of Figaro at the Met.  We pulled over to the shoulder at the outskirts of the city, hung sheets on the car windows, and changed into our fanciest dresses (and were appalled to see other opera lovers show up in jeans).

But the best music lesson I had was at night, when the sounds of my father’s upright piano floated up through the floorboards of our bedroom.  He often played Bach at night.  He would play the same fugues and partitas over and over again, and he never got any better at them — his fingers just wouldn’t perform what his mind was hearing.  So what I heard as I fell asleep was a halting, passionate, pleadingly tender rendition of these gorgeous melodies — all largo, grave, and always con espressivo — never in the prestissimo that Bach directed.

I remember first learning that some people are emotionally repelled by the music of Bach, and hear nothing but a dazzlingly intricate array of sound, mathematical, impersonal, elegant and impenetrible.  I was dumbfounded.  My father, with his meager technical skills, laid Bach out bare.  Again and again, struggling to pefect an unusual chord, he would string it out, one note at a time, five or six or seven times in a row.  Occasionally, to our glee, he would call out, “Yahhhhh . . . ” in the note he was trying to find – as if his lost fingers would hearken to him and realize which piano key they were aching for.

So to me, Bach sounds like struggle,  longing, and tireless devotion.  That is still how I hear Bach, even when some hotshot virtuoso zips over the keyboard in the time key that Bach called for.   When I discovered that Glenn Gould is known for slowing Bach down, for drawing out the tempo and turning those breakneck intricacies into vulnerable or exultant songs of the human heart, then it sounded like the real Bach to me.  In fact, Bach sounds like Music to me — like the heart, the tendons, the  inner workings of music.  My other cherished composers – Brahms, Schubert, Mahler – wouldn’t have anything to say if Bach hadn’t said it first, somehow cocooned in a code of speed and density.

I am grateful to Glenn Gould for revealing the heartbreaking beauty of Bach, and I’m grateful to my father for revealing his unburnished talent to his family.  From him came music.  A clever teacher can produce clever students; but, in music as in all other things, only love begets love.