I read the news today

An OTP (One-Time Passcode) I was sent this morning (partial of course, and I'm not saying what for – you never know what Nigerian princes are lurking out there) started 158... and it took me back to the top deck of a 158 bus in late May 1967. I know it was a 158 (although I could  catch either a 158 or a 114 for the first leg of my journey home from school at the time) because a friend was there ...

<parenthesis>

I've mentioned John before, here back in the days when this blog paid more attention to its byline ["a snapper up of unconsidered trifles"] and recounted chance observations)

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...and he lived in Ruislip (which wasn't on the 114 route).

John was reading from the sleeve of an album...

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Now there's an interesting word – yet another example of a metaphor continuing to refer to an old technology long after the technology has moved on (mentioned  in this blog, too often to mention, like hanging-up a phone or [trivially] giving someone a ring, when most mobiles don't ring anyway). 

Latin album  means "white [thing, in this case]", and collectors of various things (stamps, press-cuttings, photos...) used to keep them in a book with blank pages. Meanwhile, back at the gramophone, the old 78 rpm records used to last  only about 3 minutes.  (The length of early popular songs in the recorded music era reflects this...

<autobiographical_note>

And novelty recordings like Danny Kaye's story of The Little Fiddle had to be turned over halfway through. At least, that's what we did until the elder of my two brothers broke it, and had to mend it by sticking thick card to one side. Thereafter, we had to make do with just the second half of the story.

</autobiographical_note>

 )...Any longer, and you had to have a number of discs;  for a symphony, say,  there would be a dozen or more). These were sold in ledger-like volumes, containing separate sleeves. This was an "album" as the sleeves were blank. I've always wondered whether the designer of the Beatles White Album knew this. (But maybe it's a well-known item of pop trivia: "let your fingers do the walking" [to use another metaphorical anachronism] if you're interested enough to check.)

</tangent>

... which included full lyrics on it. To quote Wikipedia: 

The album's lyrics were printed in full on the back cover, the first time this had been done on a rock LP.

This was important, some say, because it was a "concept" album (though what the alleged concept was isn't clear to me. OK, so there was a band. And then....? [as they say in that telling French question Et alors?]). What's that got to do with the other songs?

Still, it was exciting, and John read the lyrics aloud on that 158 (top deck, of course).

One last observation re "the news today": RIP Dave Prowse. His two chief roles were Darth Vader and The Green Cross man; but I  first remember him as the figurehead of the Bullworker^TM advertising.

<autobiographical_note>

My two brothers and I clubbed together to buy one at the Ideal Home exhibition "special" price of 32s 6d. The older one, who had a job in the Selfridges crockery department (which indirectly caused the Little Fiddle Affair, as he was demonstrating how you could drop a plate without breaking it), paid £1/0/0. The two younger brothers, reflecting our relative amounts of pocket money, contributed 10s. and 2s. 6d.

 

</autobiographical_note>

That's all for this week. I'm missing the cricket.

b

 

Soul of discretion

Some years  ago I wrote (here):

Songs in my forthcoming concert have made me think about gender. My first ..issue, thinking point.....? comes in Fauré's Cantique de Jean Racine (written  'when Fauré was still at school', as programme notes tend to say, although he was a fairly mature 19-year-old at the time). The basses sing Dissipe le sommeil [... ⇦ NB] languissante qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois. 

I've sung this piece many times [see here for a rantette], but only recently I started to think about gender. There was no feminine noun that the object pronoun la could refer to. If the thing that was the object of conduit was sommeil then the  languissante shouldn't have its feminine ending, and the la conduit should be l'a conduit – so that it's not an admission of weakness but a confession of past sins.

This seemed to me to be a great discovery – all those editors had got it wrong; I started sharpening my mental pencil, in preparation for a letter to the publishers of European Sacred Music. After all, the editor was John Rutter,  and I had a history of textual nit-picking with him:

But look back at that NB a couple of paragraphs back. Before writing my planned letter I checked the score, and realized my potentially embarrassing mistake: the basses don't sing all the words. The upper parts sing the whole sentence:

Dissipe le sommeil d'une âme languissante 

Qui la conduit à l'oubli de tes lois!

Oh well....

This was a bit defeatist (Defeatist? Moi?); there could still be a musicological point worth making. There are, as I wrote before looking at the score, two possible interpretations of the sounds:  

1. qui la conduit is an admission of (present) human weakness
   Here, la conduit means "[it] leads"  [the soul is being led by human frailty]
2. qui l'a conduit is a confession of (past) misdeeds (l'oubli de tes lois)
   Here, l'a conduit means "[it] has led" [sleep – human fecklessness – has led to l'oubli de tes lois]

   <autobiographical_note>
   I can almost hear Fr Gregory saying 'I hadn't time'. 

   <inline_PPS>
   The context was a soul in Purgatory aspiring to get into Heaven, speaking to the celestial bouncer in justification of their sins of omission.
   <inline_PPS> 

   </autobiographical_note>

There is a pun here, based on the two meanings of conduit and Fauré knew that. It's not inconceivable that he wanted the basses to sound Sam-the-Eagle-like. After all, the phrase is  marked by a very prominent bass entry. Perhaps the 19-year-old was having a sly dig at his schoolmaster father, who sent him away  from the family home in the South of France twice: he lived at home for only 14 five of his first 19 years –  with a foster mother until he was four, and then after only  five happy years...

<parenthesis>
(of the chapel near his home he wrote:

I grew up, a rather quiet well-behaved child, in an area of great beauty. ... But the only thing I remember really clearly is the harmonium in that little chapel. Every time I could get away I ran there – and I regaled myself. ... I played atrociously ... no method at all, quite without technique, but I do remember that I was happy; and if that is what it means to have a vocation, then it is a very pleasant thing.

quoted in Wikipedia

)
</parenthesis>

... he was sent to Paris to study at the Ėcole Niedermeyer.

L'Envoi

Meanwhile, a pedant's life doesn't get any easier: in My soul doth magnify the problem I wrote (of a concert that include the Magnificat)

...The words of the Magnificat reminded me of a confusion that keeps cropping up in the life of a choral singer. In the text that that link points to you'll see in the third line of the Latin exultavit, translated in the English as "hath rejoiced". But later on the word exaltavit appears, translated in the English as "hath exalted".

Italianate pronunciation of Latin now gets involved. Listen to this YouTube clip; the relevant word starts occurring from about 30 seconds in, and is repeated as often as Vivaldi chooses. When this vowel (not unlike the English /ʌ/ phoneme – the one that occurs in, for example, "exulted", although it is closer to [ɑ]) is heard by a strictly Anglophone ear, confusion arises..

And this a/u problem hasn't gone away. In the ENO's recent rendition of Mozart's Requiem one of the alternations between in aeternum and requiem eternam was a fleeting blemish (at 51'14") on a very welcome live concert. I'm sure I'd be happier if I didn't notice this sort of thing, but there we go. The choir of ENO usually sing in English, so maybe I should cut them some slack; shame though.

b

PS My choir was rehearsing (via Zoom) last night, and it reminded me of a previous concert, of which I had written:

...My favourite moment during rehearsals involved a private joke – private, that is, to people who have a bit of Latin. 

We were singing an arrangement of In Dulci Jubilo that involved only half the choir singing the second verse and the other half joining in at the words Trahe me post te. As often happens when more people sing, there was a tendency to slow down. Our conductor said 'I feel as if I'm having to drag‡ you along after me.' This was my moment of private hilarity [little things...], as the words mean 'Drag me after you' (think of tractor on the one [Latin] hand and draught [animals] on the other [English].) 

More here

Update: 2020.11.2311:45 – Added <inline_PPS /> and fixed dodgy maths re Fauré's time spent  at home.

Joys Seven

In a Zoom rehearsal last night we were introduced to a new setting by our MD of the carol Joys Seven.

In less pestilential times, before singing a more traditional (or less fiendishly difficult, perhaps) version of this carol I wrote:

We will be singing several pieces new to the choir, among them Joys Seven – which is, in jazz terms, a paraphrase of The Lincolnshire poacher.

<digression>
That's something they don't seem  to do in  Primary Schools any more  – communal singing of  what were known as "Folk Songs" before the Revival of  the late '50s–early '60s. I remember at St Gregory's RC Primary School singing with gusto

When me and my companions Were setting of a snare
'Twas then we spied a
    gamekeeper
For him we did not care
For we can wrestle and fight,
    me boys,
And jump o'er anywhere...

A one-time colleague of mine, who already played the piano and the violin, during her teacher-training was required to learn the guitar so that she could maintain eye-contact with her pupils. As a consequence of this sort of thinking, today's schoolchildren can sing Kumbaya but not Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill.
</digression>

The interjection "me boys" in that extract are significant in a mistake I am always tempted to make in Joys Seven, because the two-word interjection at the equivalent place is "good man" – and I find it hard to avoid the less devout version.

Words, though; they won't learn themselves.

And, in a update to the same post I added this oft-picked nit:

And while we're on the subject of the words to Joys Seven, the sixth verse (which needs a rhyme for six) evokes in me another conditioned reflex from my old  St Gregory's days, provoked by the words "To see her own son Jesus Christ upon the crucifix".

A cross is a cross; an image of someone on one (there have been thousands of people tortured to death that way, if not  millions, but Christ is usually the one depicted) is a crucifix. I thought I'd better confirm this bit of pedantry, and it seems that dictionaries tend to agree:

Cambridge

Macmillan

Cobuild

Still, they needed a rhyme for six, and there aren't too many. Besides, the Collins English Dictonary is more forgiving:

On re-reading this I didn't see at first what justified my word "forgiving"; but there is a reading of this (which would be clarified by a comma after the second word) that makes the last phrase apply exclusively to "image of a cross". (And I wouldn't put such low standards of punctuation past the editors. :-) )

But time's wingėd chariot is doing its usual thing; Phoebus's jolly old cart...

b