What goes around...

In the early weeks of the present little local difficulty ("Nice and damp treatment [and catching] (8)") I wrote here

[Ed: In September 1985] I had my audition for Wokingham Choral Society with their new MD Paul Daniel. I persuaded him to take me on, despite my limitations when it came to reading music (and at the time I didn't even have a keyboard of any kind at home to help with note-bashing) on the strength of my having "recently" sung Beethoven's Mass in C (WCS's concert piece that term) with MagSoc's choir. That recently was something of an exaggeration, but it sounded more persuasive than the more accurate 'about 12 years ago when I was looking for an unauditioned choir having been kicked out of the chapel choir').

<peccadillo>
After three years with that choir (three years that coincided with Paul Daniel's tenure, before he went on to greater things) I left WCS, to return in the early noughties, under Aidan Oliver. On the strength of being a returning member I escaped without audition. (This may have had something to with the maestro's attitude to red tape.)
</peccadillo>

The post the other morning brought the music for next term's offering ...

<parenthesis>
(if that's the mot juste – as there is no offeree, "so shaken as we are, so wan with care" as wossname put it). We'll be having virtual rehearsals. So individual choir members will hear themselves, but there won't be an audience. 
</parenthesis> 

And the main piece for our Zoom rehearsals was the same mass. So my introduction to SATB choral singing...

<autobiographical_note>
There had been "the sixth form choir", but that was just a (transparent?) ruse to flesh out our UCCA forms ("UCCA" being the fore-runner of UCAS) in the Lower VIth. Our repertoire extended to "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" set for two parts, in Latin  (it was a Catholic school after all) For years this was a party piece for me and my brother.

Before that there had been a primary school choir (back before the philistines rewrote the curriculum), and a Gang Show (from which I can still see the Banda'd ...

<parenthesis>
A Banda was a sort of pre-Xerox duplicating system (Wikipedia calls it a spirit duplicator), involving smudges and a strong whiff of meths. It's a wonder to me that there was not a rash of Banda-sniffing among school children (perhaps there was though; we had a very sheltered childhood)
</parenthesis>

... copies, complete with a baffling typo at the end of "Steamboat Bill". The widow's words addressed to her children should have been "bless each honey lamb"; but our copies said "bless each honey bole" a mistake that my memory can't shake whenever I think of the tune. (We had no idea what a "bole" was at the time, but much of the socio-historic environment was foreign to us anyway: What was a steamboat?, what did "Crêpe on every steamboat" signify? What was a "honey lamb" and did it differ in any meaningful way from a "honey bole"?

</autobiographical_note>

... was Beethoven's Mass in C. And I can't wait to hear what our MD makes of the first movement's less than decisive tempo marking. But what do I know? Far from indecisive it might just be extremely persnickety (and if I was feeling stronger I'd've stuck to my guns when the Autocorrect monster told me to break that last word up with an S). 

"Andante, but moving on a bit, in fact fairly vivace, come to think of it almost Allegretto. But don't overdo it."

The other piece is Brahms' Schicksalslied – a piece that's new to me. But one critic is quoted ...

<dodgy_reference>
Wikipedia gives only a secondary source, so I'm not naming either the quoter or the quotee. More'n my job's worth.
</dodgy_reference>

...as saying "Had Brahms never written anything but this one work, it would alone have sufficed to rank him with the best masters." 

That's all for now.

b

A silly poor ass

In Saturday's Times David Aaronovitch reviewed Alain de Botton's The News: A User's Manual He took a rather dim view of it. He put Alain de Botton in the Fotherington-Thomas school (that's my paraphrase, not a quote – but it seems to me quite an apt reference to Molesworth's school-mate, whose character may be gleaned from Molesworth's match report:

Acktually fotherington-tomas is worse than me he is goalie and spend his time skipping about he sa Hullo clouds hullo sky hullo sun etc when huge centre forward bearing down on him and SHOT whistles past his nos

Other Molesworth quotes here.

)

In his closing paragraph, Aaronovitch discussed  the evolution and changing meanings of the word silly. He traced it to the Old English gesælig. I imagine that, sitting smugly behind his paywall (and regular readers will already know how I feel about them) Mr Aaronovitch has access to the OED. But I have to make do with Etymonline:

 The word's considerable sense development moved from "happy" to "blessed" to "pious," to "innocent" (c.1200), to "harmless," to "pitiable" (late 13c.), "weak" (c.1300), to "feeble in mind, lacking in reason, foolish" (1570s). Further tendency toward "stunned, dazed as by a blow" (1886) in knocked silly, etc. Silly season in journalism slang is from 1861 (August and September, when newspapers compensate for a lack of hard news by filling up with trivial stories). 

The review, in its romp through the twists and turns of silly's meanings, says '...in the era of Shakespeare the word "silly" already meant roughly what it does today.' Really? Shakespeare is a sort of etymological vacuum cleaner. People often use him as a marker buoy in the sea of meanings. But just because he used the word in one sense (possibly a rarely used sense that his writing would help concretize), we can't assume it had  that sense generally at the time. I am pretty sure (no time for research at the moment) that he also used it in the 'lacking in reason' sense that Etymonline conveniently dates to the 1570s.

It is this 1570s sense,  that will be familiar to readers with a choral background, as it's used this way in Tomorrow Shall Be Me Dancing Day a carol set by various composers (but my money's on Garland's setting).

In a manger laid and wrapped, I was,
So very poor, this was my chance†,
Betwixt an ox and a silly poor ass...

Of this traditional carol ('probably based on a secular song' [and the Devil has all the best secular songs, or Carmina Burana as they might be called, but that's a digression we'll give only a passing wave to]) my old out-of-print [or OP as we used to say in my Grant and Cutler days,  mentioned here] Oxford Book of Carols says 'the text seems to go back earlier than the seventeenth century'. 'Earlier than the seventeenth century' would include the end of the sixteenth, which fits Etymonline's '1570s'. In Shakespeare's time, silly could mean 'lacking in reason'.

But what caught my eye in Etymonline was the German Selig,  which recalled another stalwart of the choral repertoire – the Deutsches Requiem:

Selig sind die Toten, 
die in dem Herren sterben

The sense here is more like 'blessed' (not the 'blessed with a photographic memory....' sort of 'blessed', but the two syllable blesséd: 'Blessed are the dead/faithful who...' is the way English versions of Revelation 14:13 puts it.

So silly's many meanings have included both blessed and foolish in a sort of polysemy – to [ab]use the linguists' word (I added the ab- because the academic word is typically used to refer to many meanings at the same time) – that will not be unfamiliar to lovers of words. See this for many other examples.

But my coach is about to turn into a pumpkin. (For coach read Adobe Acrobat 30-day Trial Version and for pumpkin read expires next Wednesday.)


b

Update 2014.02.22.12:00 – Added PS
† PS This is, of course, not the Boys' Own Paper sort of 'This was my chance', which might be followed by 'While his back was turned I quickly shook off my bonds and...'. It is an archaic way of saying (to use another archaic word that has become fossilized in a frase hecha) 'such was my lot'.


Update 2017.06.17.21:15 – Removed old footer.