Soothing the savage beast

...a misquote of course. What Congreve [not Shakespeare, the usual suspected source of most iambic pentameter] actually wrote in The Mourning Bride was

Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast, 

To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak.

<digression title="factoid du jour">
The Latin for oak, robur, gave English the word robust. (Further info). Strictly, it was no English wordsmith that came up with a word based on robur. as Latin already had the adjective robustus, but the link is still worth knowing about (and I only recently had the "Of course it means that – DOH" moment).
</digression"> 

A recent Classic FM page reported (if report is not too strong  word in this case –  there was a disappointing dearth of hard facts about the paper in question):

New research from the British Academy of Sound Therapy (BAST) has shown there is a common dosage for music and revealed how long an individual needs to listen to it for a therapeutic effect to be experienced.

Clicking on that inviting link in the first line leads not to an authoritative source but to another – equally unauthoritative  – Classic FM page (which at least gives some detail):

To carry out the trial, students divided 157 adult participants into two groups. The first received ultrasound-guided injections of a benzodiazepine known as midazolam, while those in the second group were given noise-cancelling headphones delivering ‘music medicine’.

For three minutes – the length of time it takes for midazolam to reach optimum effectiveness – patients in the second group listened to a musical recording specially designed to lower their heart rate, blood pressure and levels of the stress hormone cortisol. 

To ensure accuracy of results, researchers used an approved anxiety scale with patients before and after treatment, scoring them from 1-4 on six simple statements, while doctors also rated them on a 10-point scale
.
.
.
And it certainly had the desired effect, with the abstract of the study describing music medicine as a ‘non-pharmacologic intervention that is virtually harm-free, relatively inexpensive and has been shown to significantly decrease preoperative anxiety’ 

Source

There may be some way of getting out of this labyrinth of self-reference, but I don't have the time to find it. If you have, have at it. But it reminds me of a reference I made here to 

...the madrigal All Creatures Now, written during the reign of Good Queen Bess ('See where she comes, see where she comes with flow'ry garlands crownéd...'). I have sung this madrigal before, and [not] given this phrase a second thought: 'Music the time beguileth'.  It doesn't seem to belong semantically (or musically) with either what comes before or after it. So previously I have dismissed this line as just an Elizabethan filler that doesn't mean very much.

But having so recently written That's 'wile', as in 'beguile'... [HD – in that same post] I realized that Bennet (the composer) was referring to the way music has a beguiling effect on the listener's awareness of the passage of time; it wiles time away.

 (And if you'd like an H in that wiles, read that post: I've highlighted in red my reasons for going H-less; but you do whichever you prefer.)

The BAST article used this infographic, which I found quite interesting (although I think the RDA message (the Recommended Daily Amount) is rather lost. It would have been more persuasive (about the music versus drugs issue) if they had used the term RDA:

 Music as Medicine infographic, from The British Academy of Sound Therapy. 

That's all for now. I must get on my HazMat gear before this evening's TCB concert.

b

Update 2020.03.17.16.45 – Added PS

PS
I wronged the Classic FM report. Because the first two links in it pointed to more fairly vapid editorial I assumed that the whole site would be like that. But there is a link to the original paper if you persist.

<apologia>
But I'm afraid that the more web masters' budgets are splurged on the generation of "content", the more editorialisers churn out verbiage by the yard, garnering the vain clicks of us seekers of wisdom and truth. Classic FM weren't (egregiously) guilty in this case though –  I was just a bit quick to write them off.
</apologia>

I Was Glad

On 25 July 2000 Air France Flight 4590  crashed in Paris. At the time both my children were there (not at Charles de Gaulle airport, silly...) on a joint tour of two local choirs (possibly three, but I only had a paternal interest in two of them:  Berkshire Youth Choir "BYC" and  Berkshire Girls' Choir ["BGC"]). BGC, the younger choir, came home earlier.  But when BYC came back BGC joined them for a homecoming concert in Winchester Cathedral.

Winchester Cathedral
concert
17 years ago

BYC was in its heyday at the time. (Gillian Dibden, their MD at  the time, wrote about them in Airs and Places [a locally-funded compendium of short pieces about music in Berkshire], but the piece is rather dated, and I can't find a quote that wouldn't involve yards of footnotes about local admin.) When they won the Sainsbury's Choir of the Year in 2002, Howard Goodall, judging, was to call them "the Manchester United of junior choirs". A very young (sixteen?) Sophie Bevan sang a solo and filled the cathedral with her assured, confident, and eerily mature voice. Her sister Mary was also in the choir. The joint choirs sang Parry's I Was Glad at the end, in a rendition that I've never heard bettered.

Exactly eighseventeen years to the day later, on 29 July 20187, my own choir – Wokingham Choral Society – will be singing in the same cathedral; that is, a self-selecting but goodly and well-balanced minority.  That self-selecting is significant. The ability to find time for an extra-curricular event like this bespeaks both commitment and enthusiasm; and, sadly, money.

In June 2017 Voices Now produced a survey of choral singing in the UK. Here's a taste:

The census estimates (conservatively) that over 2 million people sing regularly across the UK. This is similar to the number of Britons who go swimming on a weekly basis, and 300,000¹⁰ more than those playing amateur football each week^.11 However these two sports receive considerable public funding, in part because of the widely recognised benefits of regular¹² sports practice for mental and physical well-being and their role in local communities.

​

  10  2.52M swimming once a week (source: Active People Survey 10)

​

11 1.84M playing football once a week (source: Active People Survey 10)

12  Football - £30 million per year (source: Full Fact.org).
    Swimming -  £10 million(source: Sport England)

Aha – but sport has physical and psychological benefits. Doesn't that explain the difference in government support? The Voices Now survey again:

Professor Graham Welch, Chair of Music Education at the Institute of Education, University of London, found that the health benefits of singing are both physical and psychological. “Singing has physical benefits because it is anaerobic activity that increases oxygenation in the blood stream and exercises major muscle groups in the upperbody, even when sitting. Singing has psychological benefits because of its normally positive effect in reducing stress levels.

Psychological benefits are also evident because of the increased sense of community, belonging and shared endeavour. 

​6 Heart Research UK, Singing  is Good for You, 2017

And Professor Welch is far from alone. The report cites experts from a range of disciplines.

Meanwhile, an MIPRO article has reported on the horrific effect of the EBacc on music in schools.

I can't help  feeling that the UK has some seriously mistaken priorities, particularly with regard to music.  The rot has been spreading for years. As early as 1999, in Airs and Places, I wrote:

Sometimes I think choral singing is a dying tradition. When I joined the Reading Haydn Choir I was, in my late thirties, one of the younger members. Even now, ten years later, I am far from being one of the older members. But I hope I'm wrong.... Perhaps our children will bring new blood to the  many  ageing choirs out there....

But if our children are starved of music in school, what hope is there?

So come and hear what may be the last of a dying breed :-)

b

PS And here‘s another clue:

• After manipulation, fenland visitor becomes flamboyantly adept in performance (9)

Update: 2017.07.27.23:05 – Correction pointed out by No 1 Son. My discalculia.

Update: 2017.07.28.12:25 – Added photo of 17-yr-old programme

Update: 2017.08.30.12:15 – A few typo fixes and a PPS.
PPS – The answer: VIRTUOSIC. (Perhaps just "fenland" for CU was a bit unfair, but I'm parti pris :-) )

Johannes-Passion, Take N

("Take N", because I've had the good fortune to sing it several times.)

As I have said before, more than once, when talking about music:

(This is an open goal for musicologists – my theoretical knowledge of music is minimal. Please comment if this needs another update.)

When I first discussed Bach's St John Passion here I recalled many hours standing listening to the Passion story during mass;  it was standing room only in churches around Easter  (in the One True Chorch, that is):

... on Palm Sunday and on Good Friday ([ed. there were] dramatized readings on that day, to the extent of having separate voices for the Evangelist, Jesus, Pilate, Peter et al., but without Bach's extraordinary music).

Later in the same post I mentioned this pelagic pun:

from Rick Marschall's biography, p. 99 

[I imagine the English word 'beck' – now for the most part reserved for dialects and crossword puzzles–is related.]

Beethoven's pun ...

<confession>

I am reminded of a venial sin of mine, which I feel the need to confess. At a quiz held by my choir a few years ago, this pun was background to a question about the meaning of Bach. At the time, I didn't know; but I guessed that there might be some link between the consonants in the two languages (German and English). I scrawled my guess: book. My reputation as someone who sometimes knows stuff about language may have influenced the marker on the neighbouring table  – assuming that I'd got it right because it was the sort of thing I get right,

The situation was quite competitive, and I accepted the ill-gotten point. (Stupid really. We didn't win – divine retribution, no doubt.)

</confession>

...came to mind as I listened to the recit before Peter's Ach, mein Sinn, with its excruciating chromatic keening – a mixture of grief, fear, and self-pity. Not long afterwards the dramatic writing is no less oceanic when the veil of the Temple is rent 'from top to bottom' [cascade of  little black notes] and 'the earth did quake' [another three bars of frenetic black notes], until an uneasy peace is restored when 'many bodies of saints arose'
.
(Ed: My memory here was at fault. Ach mein Sinn isn't sung by Peter; it's a reflection sung by an unnamed tenor after Peter's denial.)

Anyway, the St John Passion is uppermost in my mind at the moment, because of my choir's forthcoming concert (oo-er, on Sunday week):

  

Don't miss it.

b 

Update 2017.03.28.16.55 – Added PS

PS

In my subject line, both here and on the occasion of my Cambridge rendition , I said Johannes-Passion. This isn't because of snobbery (though elitism does come into it – so bite me, as I believe they say in some parts of the world). It's because the German is part of the music.

There are, in the piece, two choruses with more-or-less identical settings. But what is matched is not just the notes. In one the mocking words are

Sei gegrüßet, lieber Jüden König!

In the other, the corresponding words are

Schreibe nicht der Jüden König!

The last two words are (trivially, of course) a perfect match, but consider the vowel sounds in the first three syllables: two are identical (Sei/schrei-, ge-/-be) and the third is similar: nicht has a front vowel and grüßet has a vowel that, though not strictly a front vowel, is fronted (the lips are forward); the same applies to König. All the stressed vowels are either front, or fronted,  or in the case of the first diphthong the tongue position is moving forwards (from [a] to [ɪ])

The first version, which I sang (in  English) with a previous choir about 30 years ago, had "Write thou not..." for Schreibe nicht... The first syllable is a close match; not so the others. My present edition has both German and English and goes for a strangled and outlandish version: "Write Him not as our king of the Jews"; how glad I am that we're not singing that... :-)

There's more to be said, but tempus is fugendum (or whatever). My point is that the original language adds to the drama of the original, forcing facial antics in the singers to indicate mockery/anger/hatred... as appropriate. And the sounds are part of the musical picture.

Update 2017.03.30.14.35 – Tiny correction to PS, in bold.

Update 2019.12.22.12.05 – Added PPS

PPS
The last paragraph of this Guardian piece I've just seen reminded me of the point I made in my PS:

As part of a multilingual family, Konkolewska said she finds that subtle differences in meaning for the same word in different languages are important – and useful. “My favourite English word is ‘flabbergasted’ – I love this feeling, but I can only feel it in English because it doesn’t exist in Polish,” she said. 

“My Lithuanian partner says that when he’s moderately angry, he can be ‘angry’ in English, but when he’s really angry, he’s ‘piktas’ in Lithuanian because, in his opinion, the accent and pronunciation of the Lithuanian word carries much more anger than saying it in English.”

Some languages are a better fit for some emotions, and many composers – knowingly or not – exploit this (and translations can only try to make up the deficit).

Out of the mouths of babes and ducklings

Some time ago, here,  I wrote this:

<soapbox>
To learn to speak a foreign language, we must regress to our infancy and learn to make speech noises the way a baby does. Even infancy is a bit late*; there is evidence that growing familiarity with speech sound starts in the womb. Here is just one such study).

* To quote from a recent article:

"The dramatic finding of this study is that not only are human neonates capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their fetal life, within the last trimester of gestation," said Kathleen Wermke of the University of Würzburg in Germany.

</soapbox>

I've just come across a much more recent source via this NY Times article .  The immediately relevant issue (language-acquisition in the womb) is summed up here:

In the latest study, published in January in Royal Society Open Science, Jiyoun Choi, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands... and her colleagues looked at Dutch-speaking adults, some of whom had been adopted from Korea, but none of whom spoke Korean. The researchers found that people born in Korea and adopted as babies or toddlers by Dutch families were able to learn to make Korean sounds significantly better than the Dutch-speaking controls who had been born into Dutch families.

It was especially interesting that this effect held not only for those who had been adopted after the age of 17 months, when they would have been saying some words, but also for those adopted at under 6 months. In other words, the language heard before birth and in the first months of life had affected both sound perception and sound production, even though the change of language environment happened before the children started making those sounds themselves.

This is impressive, though I'm not sure the NY Times‘s last sentence (in that excerpt) is entirely justified: "under 6  months" is not the same as "before birth"; and how could they possibly test anything to do with sound production...? (That's a rather immature question: I need to read the original paper – although the title

Early development of abstract language knowledge...

doesn't inspire confidence. The continuation does though:

...: evidence from perception–production transfer of birth-language memory

... is more  promising though.)

<autobiographical_note>
During last Saturday's Purcell concert – which, sadly, many of you missed – I was struck by two pre-echoes of our next (perhaps the little MD knows something about it, as  veterans of the original Bill and Ben series might think

<digression type="cultural background">
Bill and Ben were flower-pot-men (don't ask – it was a children's TV programme in the days when [in the UK] the BBC's Watch with Mother was more-or-less the only source of children's TV) . They caused various sorts of mild mayhem; and the narrator often finished with the words "... and I think the Little House knows something about it").
</digression>

         Where was I...? Oh yes, pre-echoes:

• The trumpets in the canzona in the overture to Come ye sons of art play a phrase remarkably similar to this tune from a very different context (J. S. Bach's St John Passion):
  

• The words "Haste, haste to town" in Dido and Aeneas, which are similar in both sense and melody to this passage::
  

</autobiographical_note>

Enough. Onward and upward: next on the agenda (perhaps that should be canenda –  from Latin cano [="I sing"]) needs work:

PS Quite incidentally (not a COincidence, it just happened), I wonder if Evan Davies in last week's The Bottom Line knew what he was doing when he produced this glorious mixed metaphor:

Is the white van your bète noire?

b


Update: 2017.03.06.18.40 – Added PPS

PPS And here‘s a clue:

• Switch prison guard‘s allegiance and increase metaphorical pressure. (4, 3, 5)

Update: 2017.03.20.16.10 – Added PPPS

PPS: On the subject of my last point, I wonder how a white-van man might become an eminence grise. Oh, and that clue: TURN THE SCREW.

Incidentally, for the benefit of anyone expecting sense from my subject lines, ... no, it's gone. There was a reason though.

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.

Andrew Marvell and Bert Jansch

Marvell wrote:

Now therefore, while the youthful hueSits on thy skin like morning dew,And while thy willing soul transpiresAt every pore with instant fires,Now let us sport us while we may...

More here 

Or, as Bert Jansch put it [with more brevity if  less decorum]:

Love be bold,

We're not so old,

Don't you be afraid to lie

By me, my love,

Your father will not know.

More: here 

This sort of correspondence strikes me quite often. In a summer concert (probably called Music for a summer's evening  – they usually are [see here]) given by a choir I used to sing with we were singing, inter alia [or should that be aRia? {bou-boum-tsh  – Ithangyou}],  Verdi's Va Pensiero and Borodin's Polovtsian dances [victim of many a metathesis, but I digress]. They seemed quite dissimilar, until you look at the lyrics – particularly the metaphors in them:

Verdi's setting is:

(the melody known to the listeners of Classic FM as The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves)

The words are translated ('after a fashion' as my brother once said in response to a sales assistant's 'Are you being served?') in this Wikipedia article:

Fly, thought, on wings of gold;

go settle upon the slopes and the hills,

where, soft and mild, the sweet airs

of our native land smell fragrant!

Borodin's setting is:

(the melody known to the listeners of Classic FM as Stranger in Paradise)

– translated as

Fly away on wings of wind

To native lands, our native song,

To there, where we sang you freely,

Where we were so carefree with you.

There, under the hot sky,

'Fly', 'wings', 'native land'  – it's all there in both of them., because the people singing, in both pieces, are expatriated slaves. Moreover, the Wikipedia translation does the correspondence no favours: Borodin's sky is 'hot', but Verdi's 'sweet airs' are 'mild' – a flamboyantly inappropriate translation of tepidi (which you'll see towards the end of the second line).

In our coming concert it took me a while to make this sort of link between seemingly disparate pieces. But I've finally got it; it's not  matching words, but matching structures, between Palestrina's setting of Psalm 42 (Sicut cervus) and Elgar's setting of Longfellow's 'As torrents in summer'. The first word gives it away ('Sicut...' vs 'As...'). They are both extended metaphors.

In the Palestrina† (sung here beautifully by the Cambridge Singers) the deer (cervus) occupies the first third; and although the 'That's the way...' (Ita...) bit starts at 1'15", God doesn't get a mention until quite near the end (2'23", the whole piece taking only 3'16"). The text is:

Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderat anima mea ad te, Deus.

<philological_note comment="insufficient data">
In  my youth I would have hazarded a guess [okay, I do now too, though with less confidence] that the writer of that translation into Latin had links with the Iberian peninsula. I've not met this use of desiderare ad elsewhere. It is reminiscent to me of the Castilian desear a.
</philological_note>

The Elgar/Longfellow is more evenly divided – into two verses. The first verse is about torrents in summer (duh), and the second verse starts with 'So hearts that are fainting' – in a Mills & Boon novella tears would suddenly well up, reinforcing the generally wet theme – and God enters the picture only in the closing bars.

Is that the time...

b

PS:
Many of my posts kick off from something I've heard on the radio. This time, the radio has followed the blog. After writing about Bert Jansch – who was big in the '60s and early '70s and active until his death in 2011 – I caught on Radio 3 a recording I have, insulated in vinyl. (That's my word of the day; on In Our Time just now I heard the phrase 'insulated Christians'‡ and  it's inspired me to find innovative uses of the word. My vinyl records are an island of unplayability [well, not unplayable, but just not easily playable given the technology I have]).

PPS (later the same day, after rehearsal): added this footnote:
^† Oops, no – this piece has been axed. Shame.

Update 2015.06.05.10:25 – Added this footnote:
^‡ By this she didn't mean 'uninfluenced by non-believers' – which depends on a more common application of the insulation idea (cut off  – in an intellectual sense). This is a usage (perhaps a common one among religious historians, but one that's new to me) that refers to physical isolation.

Update 2021.10.18.15:30 – Deleted old footer.

Quando coeli movendi sunt et terra

Those words are from the text of the Requiem mass... 'when the heavens and the earth are moving'. 

The recent terrible events in Nepal reminded me of three things.

The first  was 'The Great Peruvian Earthquake' of 31 May 1970. Again there was a complete   breakdown in communications. As it happened there was something  else going on not too far away, kicking off on that very day: the Mexico World Cup. The father of a member of the group I sang and played with was Peruvian, and was trying in vain to get news of his family. It struck me as ironic that at a time when hundreds of journalists with millions of pounds worth of hi-techery (which we had been told about in awestruck tones for weeks beforehand by Jimmy Hill  and his fellow pundits – the instantaneous action-replay  was a new invention at the time

<weasel_words>
...well maybe not brand new. Perhaps like many technological sporting innovations it was known of but thought too expensive – until an excuse for conspicuous consumption arose (something REALLY IMPORTANT like the FIFA World Cup.)
</weasel_words>

, and was going to revolutionize football commentary) were so nearby (well, on the same page of the map at least), the plight of the Peruvians was so dire.

I being in my Peter  Starstedt  phase (Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?  had spent 4 weeks at no. 1 a few months previously) I wrote a song – another of Paul Simon's 'songs that voices never shared':

<digression> 

In homage to Starstedt's whimsical Zeitgeist-y references ('You sip your Napoleon brandy, and never get your lips wet'...) I had odd portentous sallies like 'What have you done, Jules Rimet?' The most heavily ironic touch  was a setting  of the football chant

Ee Aye Addio We won the Cup

in a minor  key. Pretty poignant, I think you'll agree.  

</digression>

The second was a reflexion on musical settings relating to earthquakes, which I wrote nearly a year ago here, and which I felt merited another airing:

The going rate for the (musical) difference between heaven and earth seems to be about an octave. (This is an open goal for musicologists – my theoretical knowledge of music is minimal. Please comment if this needs another update.) Verdi, as I said, drops an octave from coeli to terra (after a bar containing higher notes). [Update: the main piece had referred to Verdi‘s Requiem, which, at the time, I had recently sung.]

Fauré, an enfant terrible who was nick-named Robespierre during his Directorship of the Paris Conservatoire because of his reforming zeal, toys with expectations in his setting of Libera me [part of his Requiem].

Quando coeli movendi sunt
Quando coeli movendi sunt
Et terra ...

The words are describing the Day of Judgment. Quando coeli movendi sunt – 'not too scary; a clap or two of thunder. But hang on ...et terra. Not just thunder, that felt to me like an earthquake – I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this.' 

But the drop isn't quite an octave. This minor seventh coincides approximately with the 'that felt to me like an earthquake' in my imaginary commentary. What coincides with the words 'I've got a REALLY BAD feeling about this' is the octave drop at '...Dum veneris' {='when you [will††] come'}. Taking the music along with the text you get an even more intensely growing feeling of impending doom. 

††This is not to suggest that the original writer had any choice about using the future (if he [almost certainly a he] used a finite verb, that is). Latin, like many languages, just does this; ESOL students in fact, find it very difficult to buy in to the English way (and even when they've 'bought in', a pretty reliable bear-trap remains – a potential error that few manage to avoid!) I only insert the 'will' as a way of underlining the fact that the Latin makes it very clear that THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN. A common way of dealing with this in English is the addition of an expression like '... And it's a question of WHEN rather than IF'.

The third was to wonder if there was any remote etymological link between 'terra-' and 'terror' – and it seems there's not.  It's just a coincidence that earthquakes (Sp. terremotos

<digression>
I use terremoto rather than tierra lest anyone think 'But of course  tierr- is not the same as terr-.'  A Spanish speaker wouldn't feel this, being used to the e/ie variation under conditions of stress in some sorts of /e/. This accounts for many irregular Spanish verbs, such as tener – with stressed tiene [='he/she/it has'] but unstressed tenemos ['we have'] (well, not totally unstressed of course, but unstressed in the relevant syllable). (Italian doesn't do this: terracotta but also terra.)

</digression>

) are both terrible and terrifying.

The Proto-Indo-European root for tierra is given in Etymonline‘s entry for 'terrain':

...from terra "earth, land," literally "dry land" (as opposed to "sea"); from PIE root *ters- "to dry" 

Meanwhile, under 'terror', the source is different:

...from terrere "fill with fear, frighten," from PIE root *tres- "to tremble" (see terrible).

         See more here (if you're that way inclined).

And the possibility of a metathetical link between *ters- and *tres- doesn‘t seem to me worth fretting about; that would be a supposed phonological development in a language that exists  only in  the minds of a few linguists.

OK – Real Life calls.

b

Update: 2015.04.28.11:20 – Added notes in red.
Update: 2015.04.30.09:20 – Added PS.

PS At the end of last year I referred to a growing following, then reaching an average of 35 daily visits. Well 35 schmirty-five. This has been a record month (an average of over 55 visits per day), and the latest version of the graph I gave then reflects this:

Update: 2015.05.01.22:55 – Added illustration  from the Libera Me.
Update: 2016.01.23.11:30 – Embellished reminiscence in purple.

A born-again nincompoop

<rant>
My choir's latest venture is – among other things – Howard Goodall's Eternal Light. So of late I've been browsing on YouTube for recordings. And, posted as a Comment after one, was this:

I can't say I'm sure exactly what having a problem with something involves. but here are a few issues that occur to me:

1. 'theological issue' (l.1)
   This is self-important twaddle
2. 'Goodall writing' (l.1) 
   erm, he didn't. There are disputes about who did  but Goodall is out of the frame – he wasn't even born when it first appeared in print (1938).
3. 'It ends with...' (l.1)
   The words in question come much earlier too,{Oops  – I misremembered.}
4. 'statement' (l.2)
   It's not, it's an imperative, although I have to admit that it is followed by a statement.
5. 'I understand' (l.2)
   If he'd closed the quote, I'd have had a chance of understanding too.
6. '...the nuance' (l.3)
   The mind boggles. He has misunderstood so much that the nature of this nuance is a matter of some interest.
7. 'portray' (l.3)
   This should win some sort of prize for oddness of collocation. How, I wonder, does one portray a nuance? Perhaps he's confused nuance with nuage, so that when writing that it 'fails miserably' he's suggesting that Goodall is no good at drawing clouds...
8. 'Jesus' (l.3)
   What? Who said anything about him? I think maybe he's confused it with that source of so much error, Holy Scripture. For the record, Jesus didn't have a grave. He had a tomb, (Sceptics would point out that it's easier to 'rise from the dead' if you're entombed rather than interred.)
9. 'PLEASE' (l.4)
   Lord deliver us from posturing like this! To whom is it addressed, for Heaven's sake? Does he have some psychotic fantasy of being forced by Someone to act against his will, so that he has to beg '...allow me to sing?' No doubt he hears voices too, poor chap. 
10. 'Most discerning christians [sic]...'  (l.5)
    While not being one myself, I know quite a few discerning Christians, none of whom would 'have a problem' with that (though they might wish that I hadn't put the boot in quite so hard – they'll forgive me though; that's what they do, after all!)
11. 'SHOULD' (l.5)
    In the words of Oliver Cromwell
    I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
    

But amid this detailed stuff  I'm in danger of missing the general point: this is a work of ART. If Goodall had written the text, he'd have been perfectly free to write anything that produced the musical effect he wanted. And while we're on the subject of oft-misinterpreted authoritative texts, didn't the Founding Fathers have something to say about this sort of freedom?

b

</rant>

Update 2014.10.02.22:45  –  retraction in the colour of shame.

Update 2014.10.09.12.45  –  added this PS
PS
Well, that was better out than in. But to remove the aftertaste of bile, here's a bit of levity –  a letter I've just sent to Faber Music (publishers of the piece). I imagine it won't get past the triage exercised by the unpaid intern who no doubt monitors the information@fabermusic.com mailbox.

My choir is singing this piece next month, and I'd like to report a typo that you could perhaps correct if there's a reprint.

In bar 3 of Factum est silentium the text has 'et vidi septem illos angelos' and the number is repeated correctly elsewhere. After the fourth angel has blown his trumpet, the mortals wonder what terrible things will happen at the sounds of the trumpets of the remaining 'trium illorum angelorum'. There's little doubt that the number is septem.

But in bar 6 it has 'Et septum angeli' as though St Jerome had a benign form of Tourette's Syndrome: 'And partition angels...'!

All the recorded versions I have heard repeat this error, and I regret that my own choir will follow suit: a rogue  u in a quaver at this speed isn't worth spending precious rehearsal time on. But I'd like somebody to get it right sometime. ['I have to believe...']†

b 

PS And in case anyone says 'This isn't Classical Latin. What does he know?', the answer is 'Quite a lot'. I studied Vulgar Latin (precisely the Right Sort of Latin, as the text comes from the Vulgate) at Cambridge (at the time, coincidentally, that Tom Faber was a Fellow of my college).

† This will certainly go over the head (between the legs?) of the intern. It's a reference to the text of the movement that follows Factum est silentium.

Update 2017.06.07.15:00  –  Removed old footer .

The Times it is a-changing

Some time in early Spring 1966 The Times dropped a bombshell. Since the year dot (and in the case of The Times this is a pretty remote dot – 1785, says Wikipedia): in place of the classified ads that had previously appeared on the front page (Wikipedia says 'the front page featured' them FFS. But the point is that the front page was featureless) they were going to print news. What a thing for a newspaper!

<autobiographical_note date_range=1965-6>

This was about the time my big brother came home with a nylon-stringed guitar that had a broken back, repaired with a three-inch screw where the fretboard met the body. Above the octave, the strings were a good half-inch away from the frets.This meant that before a string met the fretboard it stretched; so the higher up the fretboard you played, the sharper the note became – not so much the Well-tempered klavier – the Ill-tempered vihuela perhaps.

  <excuse>
Took a bit of a liberty with the instrument there, but the consonance (all three vowels) was too good to miss. 
<excuse>

In the spare time that pubescent boys had in those pre-National-Curriculum days, I started to pick out tunes. Mick had borrowed a 'teach-yourself' LP (on the Argo label) which tied a particular style of accompaniment to one song: 'hammering on' – 'Trouble in Mind'; arpeggios – 'Black Girl'; 'clawhammer'  – 'There Were Three Bothers'; calypso – 'Dip and Fall Back' ...and so on.

When the news of The Times' concession to sensationalism hit, Bob Dylan was still in his protest phase. 'The times they are a-changin'' was in the Zeitgeist. And the title of this post 'came up' from the depths of my mind (and you might have detected, in that 'came up', my current interest in subvenire). But I hadn't got far enough in my guitar 'studies' (I could do a pretty impressive accompaniment to  'Trouble in Mind', but nothing else) to think of making that first line into a song. I squirrelled it away, and here it is at last.

 </autobiographical_note>

Well,  John Walter who founded The Times on the 1 January 1785 as The Daily Universal Register, will be spinning in the family vaults (which his mortal remains have occupied since November 1812). This Saturday The Times had neither classified ads nor news on its front page, but a photograph taken on the occasion of a celebrity wedding. OMG or what? Murdoch hadn't forked out for the actual wedding photos, but the grubby intent was still there.

This calls to mind a scene from my as yet unpublished (as yet undone, except for a 30-odd page sample that I hawked around a few publishers in the late '70s) translation of Eça de Queiroz's Cartas da Inglaterra (a sort of Victorian Letters from America, but written by a London-based Portuguese diplomat and man of letters [no pun intended, and none taken I hope]). It was a breakfast scene, with a daughter doing her filial duty and saving Papa's eyes by reading from The Times over breakfast. But some filthy bounder, an infamous scoundrel of the first water (whatever that is), had breached 'The Thunderer''s Victorian firewall and somehow amended the proofs, substituting obscenities. When his daughter read the results of this cruel deception, Papa nearly choked on his kedgeree.  (I meant to quote this properly, but the translation, and indeed the text, is In a Box in the loft. Allegedly. Fingers crossed.)

My reaction on Saturday morning was similar. Well, all right, The Times did make a concession to the news of an insignificant little war somewhere East of Suez. But don't worry, there'll be no 'boots on the ground', only 'suits in the board-room'.

Or perhaps they could use pogo-sticks; no dusty boots then.

b
Update 2014.09.30.14:20 – Added this clue (not  relevant to anything in this post)

Evacuation without a breach of faith. (9)

Update 2014.10.01.14:30 – Esprit d'escalier, in blue.
Update 2014.10.01.14:20 – Encore plus, in maroon.
Update 2015.09.10.09:25 – Added PS
OK, time's up: DEFECTION

Update 2017.06.27.16 – Removed old footer

Respighi and the Doppler Effect

This morning on Radio 3 I caught a snatch of Respighi's Pines of Rome, specifically the fourth movement, Pini della Via Appia, which according to the presenter depicts Roman legionaries marching to (or from?) Rome. From the sound of it, my feeling is that they were probably marching back to Rome after one of their less successful campaigns; the 'marching' ostinato sounds to me rather disgruntled. (And, if the word's new to you, think of the English cognate obstinate  – it's a stubbornly repetitive bass line [well, usually bass; there may be exceptions – in matters musical I'm a dilettante {delighting in it}, rather than a cognoscento {knowing about it}]).

Which leads me, more or  less seamlessly, on to Italian words in music – not a boring list (that's what Wikipedia's for), just a few that have piqued my interest.

<digression theme="pique">
I wonder if pique has anything to do with pizzicato...? That'll have to remain FFS as they say in the OSI world: 'For Further Study', though it would,  if true,  exemplify the tendency of Italian loans and derivations dealing with the arts, while Spanish loans and derivations tend to deal with the more immediate and physical; picante is the Spanish word I'm thinking of, obviously connected with pique.

On the other hand, Ital... no, no time for even-handedness now.
</digression>

Italian words and music go together, though 'Italian' is a concept that post-dates a lot of music we listen to.

<autobiographical_note date_range="1999-2002" theme="Italian">
A good few years ago, I sang (not with my present choir) Howard Blake's Song of St Francis. The setting was mid-late 20th century, but the text was by St Francis of Assisi, written in whatever Italic dialect he spoke – Umbrian of the 13th century, probably.  But saying it was written in that dialect is an oversimplification. Vulgar Latin had various different substrates – whatever medium of spoken communication underlay it – throughout Romania (in the historical sense of 'that part of the world that was directly influenced by the Romans'). St Francis may have thought (if he thought about it at all) he was writing Latin. Strongly influenced as his life was by Latin texts, it is probably a rather Latinate form of his dialect.

Anyway, speculation like that is something I left behind 40-odd years ago. The point is that during rehearsals people asked now and then about the text – sometimes 'in the original', sometimes 'in the Italian' sometimes 'in the Latin'. And after a while, knowing that I knew a bit about languages, they asked me  'What is it, Bob?' But my answer left a lot to be desired. It wasn't 'Latin'; it wasn't (just) Umbrian; it certainly wasn't Italian – a language that wouldn't be codified for several centuries.

Shortly afterwards, the same choir sang from Verdi's Nabucco. OK, by now it can be called 'Italian'. But that doesn't mean it's the sort of Italian you'll find in Parliamo Italiano. 

The word for 'where' has a chequered history in the Romance Languages. Simply put (which is all I'm up to) it is derived from UBI [='where'] or UNDE [='where from'], with or without an initial DE. So French où comes from UBI, Italian dove comes from DE + UBI and Spanish is 'etymologically pleonastic' when it asks  'Where are you from?'; '¿De dónde eres?' starts with  DE DE UNDE, meaning 'from[from[from where]]]'. To flesh out the Iberian picture, confirming the preference for derivation from UNDE, Portuguese has onde and Catalan has on.

In his text for Va pensiero, Verdi (or his librettist if he had one ...?) does not use dove, in

Ove olezzano tepide e molli 

L'aure dolci del suolo natal

(something like that – it's a while since I sang it... Yes, here it is:

) the ove shows that at one stage some Italic dialects followed the French path, without an initial d. And what in modern Italian would be aire is aure (reminiscent, to me, of the two possible forms in Portuguese of the word derived from CAUSA(M): Fr. chose, Italian and Spanish cosa, but Portuguese [modern Continental Portuguese, that is] either coisa or cousa  – to be filed under Interesting but irrelevant I suspect). And as for olezzare, my Italian dictionary (admittedly not the most scholarly of tomes) does not recognize it at all.

<retraction>
It's fine. Lousy dictionary.
</retraction>

</autobiographical_note>

Oops. Tempus has fugitted, in the immortal words of my old maths master. I'll get on to those musical terms in an update.

b

PS

But I can't leave you guessing about Doppler. I thought, when I first heard that Respighi piece – in a realization a bit like Bob Peck's in Jurassic Park, when he thinks he's hunting a velociraptor but there are actually two, hunting him, and his last words are 'Clever girl' – that the ostinato bass mimicked the Doppler Effect by falling in pitch at the high point of the crescendo, to mark the arrival in the foreground of the marching soldiers. But I checked on YouTube, and I was wrong. Pity.

Update 2014.09.11.09:20  – Added red bits.

Update 2014.09.14.21:45  – Added this update, [a few more thoughts about musical terminology.]

It was my mentor Joe Cremona (mentioned in several of my other posts – see the word  cloud on the right)  who pointed out that Italian native speakers pronounce mezzo with the voiced affricate /ʣ/ and prezzo with the unvoiced affricate /ʦ/ without – for the most part – knowing the reason: that the one with voicing is derived from MEDIU(M) and the one without voicing from PRETIU(M). Yet I've never heard a mezzo-soprano called (in English) a /meʣəʊ/. Of course I'm not saying the English pronunciation 'should' have the /ʣ/;  it's just interesting that it doesn't.

<inline_PS>
Just thought: I wonder if it‘s because in the word soprano (apart from the sonorants) all the consonants are unvoiced, which favours the voiceless pronunnciation of mezzo. The same, incidentally, to mezzo-forte and mezzo-piano.
</inline_PS>

Another double letter in musical terminology forms one of a pair of similar-looking little notes, distinguished only by a "/" through one of them: the appoggiatura and the acciacatura. In the second of these, the "i" softens the "c", so that the word has five syllables: [a'ʧakatura]. Again, the only pronunciation I have heard (admittedly rarely) is [aki.aka'tura]; and again I'm not suggesting that anyone 'should' do anything.

The appoggiatura 'leans on' or 'presses on' the note it precedes; (Mozart was a great fan). Meanwhile, the acciacatura is a sort of sneeze squashed in before the note it precedes. And music theoreticians about to raise an eyebrow at that sneeze metaphor will be interested – though possibly not convinced – by my mnemonic for remembering which is which: acciacatura/atchoo.

<digression>
And, incidentally, no less an authority than Gyles Brandreth claimed on the radio a few weeks ago that 'atishoo' is derived from à tes souhaits, which takes the biscuit, I suspect, in the too-good-to-be-true department. I must look into it, but it smacks to me of folk etymology.
</digression>

I imagine the Italian appoggiare is cognate with the French appuyer. But the Spanish ignores the double p and has just apoyar. Another musical double letter, attacca(r), has lost the second double letter in the French attaquer. But Spanish dispenses with both: atacar.

<digression theme ="Spanish and double consonants">
In fact, Spanish and  double stops don't mix. Which leads some people to say Spanish has no double consonants. Au contraire. 'But the dog...' leads to the most obvious counter-example: pero el perro...  

I am on shakier ground when I point to ll and even shakier with ñ. What Spanish seems to have done is this: take double consonants and give them independence as new autonomous letters. Children's alphabet blocks in Spain have both l and ll. And students using Spanish dictionaries are often confounded by the  fact that llama doesn't fall after liar and before lobo; ll is a whole 'nother letter.

The ñ really is a new letter (in that it's a different shape from nn). But that is where it came from – the manuscript convention that saves ink, space, and effort by writing nn as ñ. A lady in Portuguese is donna; in Spanish it's doña.
</digression>

But where was I? (Late for my 8 o'clock, that's where.)

Update 2014.09.25.12:15 – Updated footer

Update 2015.05.12.14:15 – Added musical illustration

Update 2017.05.04.17:55 – Added inline PS, in blue.