Confounded diphthongs

On Saturday evening, at Reading's Great Hall, listening to Trinity Concert Band, I was reminded of the power of music in stimulating memory (much greater, I'd say, than the overrated Madeleine Effect). Earlier this year I wrote here about my thespian debut:

My own 42nd Street dream centred on the Sergeant-at-Arms in Iolanthe. I was a peer, but I dreamt of  standing in at the last minute for the fellow bass who had that part – not a huge one (I wasn't that ambitious –  he had one song, at the beginning of Act Two [in that YouTube clip the song starts after about 1 min.], as I remember: "the ice-cream slot", as it was archly referred to among the wiseacres of the Cecilian Players [not the chamber ensemble, an amateur operatic society based in SW London in the 1960s and '70s] – the first turn after the interval, when the audience are at their least attentive).  I was going to "Go out there an unknown and come back a st... well, a bit-part player".

And on Saturday, when the band played the opening chords of the Peers' March, I was back in the Questors Theatre, at the back of the audience, ready to process down to the stage. The words of the chorus came back to me:

Bow, Bow ye lower-middle classes

Bow, Bow ye tradesmen, bow ye masses

And with that memory came a memory of the MD ...

<autobiographical_note>
..."Budgie" Byrne, my music teacher (though it wasn't a school production) who, in the days when teachers were allowed to write what they thought in school reports, wrote of me "C+ – has ability but is disinclined to use it musically"...
</autobiographical_note>

...warning us not to enunciate the /ʊ/ of /bɑʊ/ until the last moment (a warning repeated by countless MDs over the next 50 years in other contexts).

One of those MDs warned me about another diphthong (tricky chap, Johnny Diphthong), rehearsing Haydn's Te Deum. This time, it was a diphthong to be avoided; the opening word was not /teɪ/ but /tɛ/:  not having the resources of the International Phonetic Association, she told us to imagine it was spelt teh (at the risk of anachronism I suppose she might have said it rhymed with meh). And that warning too has been repeated by my present MD (as we will be singing the piece, inter alia, at the Great Hall [where I started this post]).

I have mentioned word painting several times before; but one particular instance has caught my attention in the Te Deum. The tritone ....

<autobiographical_note>
(bane of a child violinist's life, especially in the key of Bb if memory serves*, not that I stuck at it for more than a year or two; couldn't stand the noise)
</autobiographical_note>

... is known as diabolus in musica. I don't expect Haydn was ignorant of this. An entry in the Guardian's Notes and Queries section summarises:

...the augmented fourth was the only augmented interval that appeared in the modes used before the emergence of the major and minor scales. Using only the white keys on a piano, the interval of F natural to B natural is the only augmented one (also known as the tri-tone) and was considered so unnatural and discordant in pre-tonal times as to be known as the Devil in Music

There's much more there, of varying  quality and accuracy. Caveat emptor ; I for one don't buy

THIS chord was banned because it was very hard to sing.

The devil's interval

Near the end of the Te Deum, the basses sing  Non confundar – "Let me not be damned" – ending on a B. And there, in the soprano line^P4S , is an F.  F  to B – "the devil's interval". The sopranos' F is a good few octaves above the basses' B, but the devil is hiding there. Sneaky.

Aunty Katy (mentioned many times before) was right: he was always lurking where a good Christian least expected it.

Idle hands, though. I must be getting on.

b

PS: A couple of political clues:

• Regurgitated nasty brioche that he left to make left-winger. (10)
• Not 'ard Brexit – no way; after haggling, very costly. (10)

Update 2016.10.04:14:15 – Added footnote

* Close, but no cigar. I was thinking of the key of F major (which involves a tritone stretch on the A string. (It all comes flooding back: An inch boy, an inch. Don't you know what an INCH looks like? My teacher, a dreadful old woman, was a fan of neither Galileo nor Pythagoras.)

Update 2016.10.16.22:15  – Added snippet of Te Deum score.

Update 2016.12.30.11:45  – Added PPS

PPS: Crossword answers: CORBYNISTA and  EXORBITANT

Update 2017.03.02.16:15  – Added PPPS

PPPS Fixed the link in the footnote, having initially got my Galileos mixed up. I was referring to the father,  lutenist and music theory pioneer – although I can't imagine that the boy didn't assist in his father's investigation of string-lengths.

Update 2017.10.16.15:55  – Added P⁴S footnote

^P4S It's not only the sopranos with that distant F. The bass accompaniment is marching relentlessly towards an F, and gets there in the fourth beat of the bar.

Look Back in Bangor

In the recent broadcast of Look Back in Anger I noticed two things (apart from the performance of wossname of course):

• Use  of the expression "the $64 question"
• Use of the expression "the Big Bang" to refer to a possible nuclear holocaust

The $64 Question

This has been the victim of hyperinflation. It dates back to the American radio show Take It Or Leave It first broadcast in 1949, based on a number of questions with prizes starting at $1 and doubling in each subsequent round. After each successful answer, the contestant was offered the chance to Take It Or Leave it? The big prize was $64. that article goes on:

In 1947, the series switched to NBC, hosted at various times by Baker, Garry Moore (1947–49), Eddie Cantor (1949–50) and Jack Paar (beginning June 11, 1950). On September 10, 1950, the title of Take It or Leave It was changed to The $64 Question. Paar continued as host, followed by Baker (March–December 1951) and Paar (back on December 1951). The series continued on NBC Radio until June 1, 1952

A very similar format was first broadcast in the UK in 1955 with the title Double Your Money, but instead of the rather crude demand "Take It Or Leave It" the catchphrase was a polite question: "Do You Want To Go On?".  If memory serves me correctly, the neat doubling was suspended after £64 though, and the subsequent prizes then dropped to £125 before resuming that stately binary progress on to £1000. (I was going to write £1000.00, but in fact  it was more like £1,000 0s. 0d.)

The Big Bang

Fred Hoyle coined the expression Big Bang on a BBC broadcast in 1949. Look Back in Anger post-dated that by six or seven years but the adoption of the cosmological usage can't have caught on very quickly as Jimmy Porter's reference was obviously to annihilation rather than creation.

<autobiographical_note date_range="1968-9">
Jimmy Porter clearly had no thoughts of stardom. My own were thoughts rather of cometdom. It centred on an amateur production of Iolanthe (which must have taken place during my Lower VIth, as in those days the full frenzy of Thinking About the Future was held back until the Upper VIth (rather than, as in our own enlightened times, at Primary School [Oh Christ, that ever this should be! as Coleridge put it –  they'll be using kids as chimney-sweeps next!]). 

My own 42nd Street dream centred on the Sergeant-at-Arms in Iolanthe. I was a peer, but I dreamt of  standing in at the last minute for the fellow bass who had that part – not a huge one (I wasn't that ambitious –  he had one song, at the beginning of Act Two (in that YouTube clip the song starts after about 1 min.), as I remember: "the ice-cream slot", as it was archly referred to among the wiseacres of the Cecilian Players [not the chamber ensemble, an amateur operatic society based in SW London in the 1960s and '70s] – the first turn after the interval, when the audience are at their least attentive).  I was going to "Go out there an unknown and come back a st... well, a bit-part player".

No amateur production of a G&S operetta is complete without a topical reference. Ours was in the second  verse:

When in that House MPs divide 

If they've a brain and cerebellum too 

They have to leave that brain outside 

And vote as Harold Wilson tells 'em to

(Heur heur, geddit?)

W. S.  Gilbert wrote And vote just as their leaders tell 'em to, but our version spoiled the rhyme for the sake of a not very relevant topical reference. The director and the Musical Director were both teachers at my school, and I thought – as any self-respecting sixth-former would –  they made the mistake because they were just stupid. It would have been much better, I thought at the time, as And vote as Ted and 'arold  tell 'em to. Not only does it preserve the rhyme, but it refers to the sort of  mindless two-party situation that Gilbert was writing about. I was going to sing my version, thus at one fell swoop both shaking the foundations of the amateur operetta world by my brilliant performance and improving the line (which would thereafter be adopted for the rest of the run).

On reflection nearly fifty years later, I've realized – though there's no way I can check – that the writer of this ad lib  did not just have a tin ear (as far as the rhyme was concerned) but was also probably (ironically, in the context) a Tory.* 

</autobiographical_note>

Well – time for a bit of amateur plumbing.

b
* The MPs Edward Heath (Conservative) and Harold Wilson (Labour) exchanged the position of Prime Minister several times. Fans of The Beatles may have noted the backing vocals singing "Mr Wilson" and "Mr Heath' in George Harrison's Taxman.

PS Reportedly imitation pot sherd has features of two genres – (4-4)

Update 2016.05.23.16:00 – Added esprit d'escalier in blue

'As the ancient Romans say...

'...festina lente', to quote Lord Snooty - or whatever his name* was - in Iolanthe. I've been toiling away at the vowel pairs starting with e for my book of lists. It is very slow going. But at least I have -eu- already done as part of the ELTON submission last year - my entry was short-listed and forms the basis of the book I'm working on at the moment. And e is the most common vowel, so I shouldn't expect too much.

Here's what I've got so far (as well as pages and pages of handwritten notes that are about to be exposed to my legendary typing skills - upwards of five words per minute):

Vowel sounds represented by the spelling 'EA'

There are 21 sounds represented by the pair -ea-, but three of these are part of the trigraph -eau- and are dealt with in the -au- section [x-refs tbs].

Of the remaining 18, /i:/ is by far the most common, with nearly twice as many representatives as its nearest rival, and those two together outnumber all the rest by a similar margin.

• /i;/
• /e/
• [16 more TBS]

As well as these sounds, there are words with one syllable ending in e and the next beginning with a. In these cases, the two vowels do not normally interact.  the e just works its magic on the preceding syllable...

And bridging between that G&S song I quoted at the outset and his big aria, Strephon accused, of 'attaining ['partaking'? 'a-taking'?] of his dolce far niente' [to rhyme with 'festina lente'] with Iolanthe, protests:

My Lords, of evidence I have no dearth 
She is - has been - my mother from my birth

That dearth is a representative of the '16 more TBS', which it's time I got back to.

* 'Tolloller', Wikipedia tells me. 'Earl Tolloller', it says, but one has to forgive Americans for not understanding titles.

 Update 15 November 2012 - trivial maths corrections (18-2=16).

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