Day 21: April 7 - Can You Hear Me Now?
As we all struggle with Microsoft Zoom, some music about communication, good and bad, near and far, and ancient and modern . Check your internet connection and mute your microphones while you chew please, it’s QuaranTunes.
Perfume Genius - Otherside
A lot is communicated by prayer and by absence. Mike Hadreas, who writes and performs as Perfume Genius, found hymns to be powerful communicators of comfort, but was denied them and told he would suffer because of his sexualtiy. I’ll let him say it:
Hymns have always sounded like sung spells to me. I never felt included in the magic of the God songs I heard growing up — I knew I was going to hell before anyone ever told me that I was. People found comfort in this all-knowing source, but I felt frightened and found out. I developed some weird and very dramatic complexes. It took me a long time to not think of the universe as a judgmental debit-credit system. I haven’t completely shaken it, but I no longer think that I am overdrawn with God. Grace is not something you earn, its always there. I find this idea a lot more fun. I guess this song is a collection of little prayers that are helpful to me.
What Hadreas made here, these reflections of ‘little prayers, is sonically and emotionally powerful. The big-bang level explosion of ecstasy that answer these sparse, fragile prayers speak to music’s power to communicate healing and of how one personally learns to communicate self-love and affirmation. A stunning experience.
Clarissa Bitar - Ah Ya Hilu
LA-born Palestinian Clarissa Bitar carries on a tradition. The oud often accompanies narrative songs and transmits a shared Palestinian heritage, culture, and history to a diaspora dislocated by colonialism. As a culture which is very centered on their land, but which has no access to it, communicating these stories is vital to keeping the Palestinian Identity felt in each new generation. She has a very powerful album, Bellydancing on Wounds, with Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd, which is a modern take on a tradition of songs that mix struggle and love and nostalgia for the land. It is immensely powerful. I chose Ah Ya Hilu, a Syrian folk song which laments an abandoned love, instead because it is a standard of Arabic music, a song learned by generations of oudists and singers.
Gadjo Dilo - To Minore Tis Avgis (A Minor Morning Tune)
Greek Gypsy Jazz ensemble Gadjo Dilo is multitalented, beyond being great musicians, their repertoire spans Greek, French, and English jazz traditions. To Minore Tis Avgis (A Minor Morning Tune) is a Greek tune about singing a sad morning song beneath the window of your lover who’s giving you the cold shoulder, a very one-sided communication and absolutely legally qualifies as stalking.
Wake up my baby and listen to
a sweet A minor morning tune
tonight it was written for you alone
by some poor crying soul's tearful sad croon
Come to your window and open it
throw me just one angelic look
then I can fade happy my baby
close to your porch's steps, into some nook
Gadjo Dilo clearly love Django Reinhardt and the virtuosic bloodlines of the Gypsy Jazz family tree because this tune is full of delicious guitar playing.
Sarah Jorosz - Simple Twist of Fate
Austin, Texas-born singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz brings a very soulful, sparse, country tinge to this classic Bob Dylan tune about a man who missed out on his love because couldn’t express himself fully:
People tell me it's a sin
To know and feel too much within
I still believe she was my twin
But I lost the ring
The original is such a singular classic, it’s hard to imagine a take that doesn’t make me yearn for the original like this man yearns for the woman walking along the arcade. Yet, Jarosz manages that with just her blue croons and Nathaniel Smith on cello. A gem.
Ludwig van Beethoven - Piano Sonata no. 30 in E Major, Op. 109: III. Gesangvoll
Beethoven is not one of my favorites. I don’t find myself going to him when Im stuck, I’m pretty happy not knowing the wide swath of his repertoire, I’m content with not thinking about him. I am grateful, though, that this piece made its way into my life. A set of variations on a very simple theme, this work builds through to one of the greatest moments in music (the trill variation, just wait for it). On the way there, it is light, it is playful, it is subtle, it is a delight. There is an old tall tale that Beethoven, who was deaf at this point, could no longer hear the piano, but used to rely on the vibrations from the floor to hear the music. So the trills variation is, supposedly, Beethoven vainly trying to hear his own music. A man who couldn’t hear himself speak. (This is specious and certainly false. Beethoven was both endowed with an incredible inner ear and working in a time where there were rules and conventions for how to write consonant music which he could fall back if he needed, but likely did not need to because he, again, had such an ear.) I used this theme and the variation structure as the source for a (very long) string quartet. Played here by Jonathan Biss, because Philly love.
Alvin Lucier - I Am Sitting In A Room
Alvin Lucier is sitting in a room. Different from the one you are in now. Alvin is recording the sound of his speaking voice and he is going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of his speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. He regards this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities his speech might have.
When the same sound is played into a space, recorded, and played back, it creates a loop in which the sound is subsumed by the sound of the space. Each subsequent recording includes more room sound than the last, until finally, it is just the room. A stunning and clever and mesmerising piece. Because, after all, aren’t we all just sitting in a room. Different than the one you are in now. Trying to get Zoom to work dammit.