The Main Street Quartet reminds us of love when spring comes again.
In this vein, South Florida’s Signature Quartet asks what they will do without their lovers nearby.
Category Archives: Music
Friday Singing: Saints and Summer Quartets
I know I just shared some music with you, but it occurred to me today that summertime is for happy music. This year has been tough, so I’ll see if I can find some good barbershop quartets to post for the next several Fridays. Here are two.
Passaggio
Passaggio, originally written for piano by Ludovico Einaudi
Voces8: “Be not angry, O Lord”
Ne irascaris Domine satis,
et ne ultra memineris iniquitatis nostrae.
Ecce respice populus tuus omnes nos.
Civitas sancti tui facta est deserta.
Sion deserta facta est,
Jerusalem desolata est.
Be not so terribly angry, O Lord,
and remember not iniquity forever.
Behold, please look, we are all your people.
Your holy cities have become a wilderness;
Zion has become a wilderness,
Jerusalem a desolation. ( Isaiah 64:9-10 ESV)
Imagine No Bad Songs
Inspired by the mayor of New York City, who said the song “Imagine” was an inspirational song about treating each other better, writer Matthew Walther suggests that the unifying banner under which we can all gather could be disdain for this song.
Start with the word salad of Marxism, anarchism, and existentialism. Nowhere is there even the faintest hint of how any of the hypotheticals we are being asked to consider might be realized. Instead Lennon does the political equivalent of telling us that the real magic was inside us all along.
This terrible song offers “a vision of a reality in which ‘lol nothing matters’ is elevated to a first-order principle.”
I’ve always hated “Imagine.” It’s as silly a song as “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime.” It’s abyssmal. I can barely listen to Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and “Bewitched, bothered and bewildered” has to be about singing under the influence–does anyone like that one?
Let’s unite in our disdain for overly popular songs. What’s your pick? (via Prufrock)
‘The Mansions of the Lord’
I guess I post this one every year for Memorial Day. Honor to the dead. We were not worthy of them.
A dishonest ad
In the time of quarantine: My private peeve today: A public service ad on IMDb.
I’ve been streaming TV on Amazon Prime, which also gives me limited free access to the IMDb channel. Only you have to put up with ads. I can live with ads.
But there’s one public service ad they’ve been running that annoys me. I don’t know if it’s been running anywhere else.
It’s an ad for some kind of educational organization. It features various colorful vignettes of little kids having a wonderful time learning in school.
My tolerance for cute kids is limited, but I can handle that. It’s the music that annoys me.
What they play over the ad is Pete Seeger’s classic folk/protest song, “What Did You Learn in School Today?”
The overall effect of the ad is to say that public schools are magical places, where the kids learn good, wholesome things.
Which is pretty much the opposite of what the song is about. The song goes back to the 1960s. Pete Seeger, the composer, was the godfather of the American folk music movement, which was really huge in the early ‘60s. I was a big fan. I wasn’t, however, aware back then of the basic purposes and motivations of the movement. Most (if not all) of its leaders (especially Seeger) were communists and fellow travelers.
The lyrics of the full song portray a dialogue between a parent and a little boy who has come home from school. Asked what he learned in school today, the boy tells about how he learned that “Washington never told a lie.” And how war is glorious and relatively safe, and “someday I might get my chance.”
In other words, according to the original song, the public school is a brainwashing center that indoctrinates children into unthinking loyalty to the capitalist system, and prepares them to be cannon fodder in useless, imperialistic wars.
The ad I’ve been seeing on IMDB is dishonest on two levels. First of all, it pretends that the song is not satirical, but sincere.
Secondly, now that the Left has taken over the educational system, it attempts to use a protest song as propaganda for perpetuating a new establishment.
Requiem for the Living
Before we all got sent to the bench for several games, before we started murmuring about whether we’d get to play again this season, the choir in my church had been preparing to join other choirs for a late April performance of Dan Forrest’s marvelous Requiem for the Living. Now as ever, mankind must to recognize his need for good, restorative rest.
I have loved John Rutter’s Requiem for many years. I bought the CD in college, when I was buying music like that, and maybe I heard it on the radio prior that, I don’t remember. It’s enchanting. Forrest’s piece will be second favorite now. I hope you enjoy this recording.
The composer writes that his piece tells “a narrative just as much for the living, and their own struggle with pain and sorrow, as for the dead.”
The opening movement sets the traditional Introit and Kyrie texts- pleas for rest and mercy- using ever-increasing elaborations on a simple three-note descending motive. The second movement, instead of the traditional Dies Irae, sets Scriptural texts that speak of the turmoil and sorrow which face humanity, while yet invoking musical and textual allusions to the Dies Irae. This movement juxtaposes aggressive rhythmic gestures with long, floating melodic lines, including quotes of the Kyrie from the first movement. The Agnus Dei is performed next (a departure from the usual liturgical order) as a plea for deliverance and peace; the Sanctus, following it, becomes a response to this redemption.
The Sanctus offers three different glimpses of the “heavens and earth, full of Thy glory”, all of which develop the same musical motive: an ethereal opening section inspired by images of space from the Hubble Space Telescope, a stirring middle section inspired by images of our own planet as viewed from the International Space Station, and a closing section which brings the listener down to Earth, where cities teem with the energy of humanity.
The Lux Aeterna which then closes the work portrays light, peace, and rest- for both the deceased and the living.
from the program notes shared on danforrest.com
The words are latin. Here’s the translation pulled from this recordings page.
Continue reading Requiem for the LivingThe Lark Ascending
Perhaps Britian’s most popular work of classical music, The Lark Ascending draws a listener to a quiet, comfortable seat. You can listen to it through the link.
Ralph Vaughan Williams composed The Lark Ascending in 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War One. With hindsight, the work has assumed a deeper significance in the UK’s national consciousness. A haunting ‘pastoral romance’ for solo violin and orchestra, it has become a symbol of the calm before the storm, perhaps of the summer countryside in the last days of peace before thousands of young men were sent away to their deaths (though suggestions that the piece was written while Vaughan Williams watched troops setting out for France are probably apocryphal).
‘O Sacred Head, Now Wounded’
The Ao Naga are a tribal group in northeastern India. They were converted to Christianity in the late 1870s. This is the Ao Naga Choir with the Passion hymn, “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded.”
“O Sacred Head” is a very old Latin hymn traditionally attributed to St. Bernard of Clairvaux. However (I’m disappointed to learn) it’s now generally attributed to a 13th Century poet named Arnulf of Leuven (whose name suggests Norman ancestry).
Arrangement by J. S. Bach.
I love this hymn. For Lutherans (and, of course, for many others) Christocentricity is the chief test of theology. If Jesus isn’t the Center, then it’s wrong.
Through all history, people have sought the secret of the universe. Christians declare that the secret is not an equation, not a formula, not a hidden talisman or precious stone or treasure, but a Person. When you get to the end of all questions, when you draw back the final curtain of the universe, you find Personality.
And of course, we always knew this was right. All our great stories declared that the King must save his people; the Father must save his child; the Prince must save the princess. The answer is Someone.
A blessed Good Friday and Easter to you.