A bit of musical wishful thinking, I suppose…via the mid-13th century.
Something for Thursday
We have Muzak at work, constantly piping music into The Store. I usually don’t pay a great deal of attention to it, though I do rather like our current “classic rock/hits of the 70s and 80s” mix that we have going on. I never thought that I’d hear “Come On Eileen”, the official pop anthem of overalls-wearers like myself, on a daily basis, but there it is.
Yesterday, though, I had to stop and listen, because it was a song I hadn’t heard in many years. I’m still stunned that this song turned up on our Muzak mix. It’s never, to my knowledge, been a hit. It comes from one of the goofiest musical movies ever made: Xanadu, which was supposed to be a big star vehicle for Olivia Newton John. Somehow, when they made this movie–about a roller-disco dance club called Xanadu–they managed to entice Gene Kelly to appear in it. I remember reading later that Kelly was disillusioned by the production and the filmmakers’ lack of knowledge of what went into making musicals; I suspect that Kelly, who was in his late 60s at the time, was hoping for a throwback to his beloved genre. Alas.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever watched Xanadu all the way through, but I suspect that nowadays it would inhabit the same kind of space as flicks like Battle Beyond the Stars: movies that aren’t really good, but are better than their reputations for being bad. I know that Xanadu has become a kind of cult classic, and that the soundtrack (which included ELO, one of my favorite bands and a major source of listening in recent years) produced some well-known songs that were huge hits on the European charts. But even so, I don’t recall the title song ever getting much by way of airplay at all…and yet, there it was, playing away in a retail grocery store in 2022. What a world.
Here’s the movie’s last number. The actual Olivia Newton John song starts about 3:30 in this video, but those first three minutes are worth watching just for the sheer goofiness of it all. Enjoy!
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Something for Thursday
Here’s some wintry music, as we here in The 716 are gearing up for the first big lake-effect snow event of this season (and what might be the biggest one we’ve had since Snowvember in 2014): “Journey to Blofeld’s Hideaway”, from John Barry’s score to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. This is the music that accompanies James Bond’s trek into the Alps via helicopter as he, disguised as Sir Hilary Bray (a prominent genealogist), goes to the lair of the secretive Count de Bleuchamp, whom he believes to actually be his archenemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld. The sequence itself is one of many gorgeous sequences in the film, alternating stunning vistas of Alpine winter with darker, more suspenseful music that accentuates that Bond is very much not sight-seeing.
We may not have the mountains, but we’re sure about to have the snow!
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Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
A long and busy day with no time for thinking about posting means, as always, that when I get home I throw up a quick post with an overture by Franz von Suppe.
This time I’ll change it up a little, though: no orchestra this time! Just a pianist, playing the Poet and Peasant Overture.
Interesting!
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Something for Thursday
Producer Jules Bass died the other day. If the name isn’t immediately familiar, it’s because people are probably more familiar with his name in the context of his partnership with Arthur Rankin, Jr, known as Rankin-Bass. Those two produced some of the classics of animation in the mid-to-late 20th century, including Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. For me, the best thing they did was their animated adaptation of The Hobbit, in 1977. I remember watching it on teevee, and then a year or two later going to a screening of it with my sister at our local library. (This, I believe, was when we lived in Hillsboro, OR.)
I’ve watched a lot of Rankin-Bass stuff over the years, but that adaptation of The Hobbit ranks with Star Wars in its influence on my tastes after I saw it. I suspect that my love of epic fantasy starts right there, with that film; a few years later I would read the actual book and notice all the material left out: Beorn, the whole matter of the Arkenstone, and the foreboding stuff regarding Gandalf and his concern about “the Necromancer” (who would later turn out to be Sauron, a.k.a., Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Film). But that animated film really does The Hobbit justice in a lot of ways: it gets the tone and feel right, capturing Bilbo Baggins’s reluctance to go with these thirteen dwarves and one wizard on “an adventure”: Hobbits just don’t do that sort of thing! And yet, on some level, Bilbo actually not only wants to go on the adventure, he’s excited by it, and before long the various travails have Bilbo turning out to be the most resourceful person in the entire party.
It’s interesting to me, looking back, to note the very short length of time–just a few years long–in which I was exposed to so much of what would guide me in all the days since. In just a handful of years came Star Wars, Tolkien via the animated The Hobbit, Superman: the Movie, and at the end of that run, in 1981 or so, I read John Bellairs’s The House with a Clock In Its Walls. In the middle of that was Moonraker, and my introduction to James Bond. And through all that, my sister was a burgeoning musician, so I heard a lot of classical music in that period…and John Denver was a huge star…and on and on and on. An entire life of tastes and obsessions, kindled within three, four, five years or so. Jules Bass was a big part of that.
In his memory, here is the title song from The Hobbit, “The Greatest Adventure”. It’s really quite a fine song, in that late-70s folkish kind of way; it’s somehow both wistful and optimistic at the same time.
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Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
I did not realize, until late in the day yesterday, that it was the 150th anniversary of the birth of British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. I’m going to have do some feature work on him in the coming months, I think. I’ve loved Vaughan Williams ever since I first encountered him via his “English Folk Song Suite”, a perennial favorite for concert band, while I was in high school. Vaughan Williams’s work has always fascinated me, representing a different kind of nationalistic post-Romanticism, not exactly modernist in its approach, but definitely a rejection of (or maybe a reaction to? Correction of?) the dominance in Europe of the German symphonic traditions.
Vaughan Williams looked inward for his influences, both to English folk song (a common approach of many English composers of his day) and to early English music, specifically that of the Tudor era. His Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis is probably his most famous such work. Vaughan Williams also had other fascinations, too: the poems of Walt Whitman seem to have spoken to him, as he set several of them in prominent works and in some of his art songs.
One such poem by Whitman, “Darest Thou Now O Soul”, has a pretty clear subject, as it appeared in a section of Leaves of Grass called “Whispers of Heavenly Death”. Here is the text:
DAREST thou now O soul,Walk out with me toward the unknown region,Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?
No map there, nor guide,Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips, nor eyes, are in that land.I know it not O soul,Nor dost thou, all is a blank before us,All waits undream’d of in that region, that inaccessible land.Till when the ties loosen,All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bounding us.Then we burst forth, we float,In Time and Space O soul, prepared for them,Equal, equipt at last, (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil O
soul.
Vaughan Williams would set this poem in to a deeply moving, beautiful and compelling work for chorus and orchestra, which he called “Toward the Unknown Region”. Shades of Shakespeare’s “undiscovered country”. This is as good an entry point in Vaughan Williams and his uniquely English twentieth-century sound world that I know.
More Vaughan Williams to come, I think. I won’t pledge a weekly exploration, but…we’ll come back to RVW a bit over the next few months, I think.
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Something for Thursday
I’m sentimental, if you know what I meanI love the country but I can’t stand the sceneAnd I’m neither left or rightI’m just staying home tonightGetting lost in that hopeless little screen….
“Democracy” is my favorite Leonard Cohen song, and in a way it’s almost exactly the opposite of “Hallelujah”: the latter is covered by just about everybody, and the former is…well, I don’t know if it’s been covered by anybody else. If so, I don’t want to know about it. I honestly can’t imagine this song sung by anybody else. For me, “Democracy” is perfectly suited to Cohen’s own growl. His performance of this song is…well, let me get back to that. Because it’s a Cohen song, which means we also need to talk about these wonderfully complex and emotional lyrics.
Cohen started writing “Democracy” after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and there’s some impressive lore about the song’s genesis. Cohen apparently wrote at least fifty verses for the song, crossing out this and x-ing out that, in a messy process that finally resulted in the more-than-seven-minute song that arrived on his 1992 album The Future. In an interview later, Cohen said this:
This was when the Berlin Wall came down and everyone was saying democracy is coming to the east. And I was like that gloomy fellow who always turns up at a party to ruin the orgy or something. And I said, “I don’t think it’s going to happen that way. I don’t think this is such a good idea. I think a lot of suffering will be the consequence of this wall coming down.” But then I asked myself, “Where is democracy really coming?” And it was the U.S.A….So while everyone was rejoicing, I thought it wasn’t going to be like that, euphoric, the honeymoon. So it was these world events that occasioned the song. And also the love of America. Because I think the irony of America is transcendent in the song. It’s not an ironic song. It’s a song of deep intimacy and affirmation of the experiment of democracy in this country. That this is really where the experiment is unfolding. This is really where the races confront one another, where the classes, where the genders, where even the sexual orientations confront one another. This is the real laboratory of democracy. (via)
“Democracy” seems to point out a particularly American pathology: our tendency to assume that we’ve got it all figured out and that the rest of the world is trying (and much of the time, failing, sometimes hilariously failing) to catch up to us. Cohen seems to be pointing out that this isn’t the case, and this song–thirty years with us this year–now seems to be partly a prescient warning about the fact that there’s no guarantee when it comes to democracy. Because, by definition, if democracy is coming, then it’s not actually here yet.
Which may have been Cohen’s point all along. In the very first verse he sings this:
From the war against disorderFrom the sirens night and dayFrom the fires of the homelessFrom the ashes of the gayDemocracy is coming to the USA
It’s awfully hard to call our society a “democracy” when all these populations are hardly free, after all.
Cohen’s lyrics also sum up many of the contradictions that lie at the heart of this society of ours. Democracy is coming both “on a visionary flood of alcohol” and “from the staggering account of the Sermon on the Mount”; it’s coming…well, here’s an entire verse:
It’s coming to America firstThe cradle of the best and of the worstIt’s here they got the rangeAnd the machinery for changeAnd it’s here they got the spiritual thirstIt’s here the family’s brokenAnd it’s here the lonely sayThat the heart has got to openIn a fundamental wayDemocracy is coming to the USA
We’ve got the best and the worst; we’ve got the “machinery for change” and the “spiritual thirst”, but we’re also where “the family’s broken”. Cohen’s lyrics make clear that America is a giant mess of a place, and yet…democracy is coming.
Lest the lyrics of “Democracy” seem overly chiding–“I love the country but I cannot stand the scene”–there’s an undercurrent of optimism beneath it all. After all, it’s not “Democracy might be coming”, it’s “Democracy is coming.” And it’s not just coming in the large, societal way, but it will also be an intimate thing shared at the closest level:
It’s coming from the women and the menOh baby, we’ll be making love againWe’ll be going down so deepThe river’s going to weepAnd the mountain’s going to shout, “Amen!”
That verse, right there? That wonderful sexualization of the idea of democracy? That’s why I can’t fathom anybody else singing this song. Cohen’s growling baritone takes on just the perfect mix of erotic joy there; you can see him smiling just enough, and maybe giving a wink of his eye. He’s partly singing to an audience and whispering to a lover in a darkened bedroom.
And for all of that, the song seems also to partly look back to Walt Whitman, with the constant refrain of “Sail on, you mighty ship of state!”
“Democracy” is one of those songs that rewards the more one hears it. While I was preparing this post I listened to it more times than I could count, and now I’m going to listen to it again. And so are you.
Here’s “Democracy” by Leonard Cohen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_P4IEr-yd8