Matthew's Journal

The BBC has recently broadcast Reginald D. Hunter's Songs of the South [first episode available on iplayer for another 15 days, the rest a little longer]. It was a chance find - I was idly browsing iplayer the other week when feeling a bit low, and nearly passed it by. But I'd found Reginald D. Hunter funny on HIGNFY, so thought I'd give it a go. I'm glad I did.

Reginald came to the UK from Georgia in 1997, and says that by the time he left, he hated the South. Still, much of what we think of as American music comes from the South, so he felt it was time to go back. So it's a bit of him re-evaluating his relationship with his home, a bit of looking at the South's past and perhaps its future, and quite a lot about the origins of American popular music.

I don't know much about American music - with a growing range of exceptions, I've never really been into pop, and while I did study it in school, that gives you a very strange way of thinking about music. To pick an example, I could once have described the chord progression in a 12-bar blues; but in the same way you wouldn't start a discussion of Bach Chorales by talking about how parallel fifths were bad, I feel that music qua subject at school taught me nothing of the context of American music.

So as Reginald travelled through Tennessee and Kentucky, Alabama and Georgia, and finally Mississippi and Louisiana, visiting key cities from which a range of music (from bluegrass to hip-hop, zydeco to soul, and many others) emerged, and talking with artists young and old, I felt that I began to get an idea of some of what these styles of music are about.

One theme that ran through all of this, of course, was race. Time and time again, racial issues were discussed - the presenter's discomfort in some of the white-dominated parts of the South, slave songs, blackface minstrels, segregation and the civil rights movement, and so on. Reginald's view was, I think, that you cannot talk about Southern music without talking about race, that you cannot understand much of that music without understanding the racial tensions of the time, but also that only by understanding the past and coming to terms with it could America move forwards.

Lest that make it sound terribly heavy, it wasn't all thus. Reginald went to a lot of good parties while making this series! He clearly enjoys meeting a lot of the artists, and there is plenty of laughter. There's also a fair bit of tourism - moonshine joints, theme parks(!), music festivals. He remarks dryly at one point that the American way is to take a great cultural movement, tear it down, turn it into a tourist industry, and sell it back to you. "Local girl done good" means, usually, that she made a lot of money.

I learned a lot watching this series, but a couple of notable surprises were genres of music I'd never encounted, including zydeco (from the Creole people of Louisiana) and some of the darker strains like the murder ballad. I've been to Knoxville a number of times for work, and I never knew it used to be known for the high murder rate! "The Knoxville Girl" is pretty creepy.

One of the things I love about music is how a particular piece can remind you so strongly of particular memories; they can be silly or profound, but sometimes a particular work can immediately bring something to mind that I'd thought long forgotten. This series threw a couple of those at me, so I found myself listening to songs from a particular era - Nightswimming and One of Us were played endlessly on a trip youth-hostelling with friends just before a Mammal Society field trip. Listening to them, I could remember the pool table where we used to hang out (and play a lot of terrible pool), and some of the nonsense we got up to...

If I was going to be critical, I'd say that 3 hours wasn't really quite enough time to cover all the material, which meant that you hardly got any footage of some interviews, and there were places where it felt like Reginald wanted to go into things in more detail but there just wasn't time. Still, I thought this was very good television. Hurrah for iplayer :)

There's a playlist of many of the songs here, though you need an account on a streaming music site to make much use of it.

Last year, on 23 December, I posted on facebook: "[emperor] thinks that John Cage's 4'33" should be the internet campaign for Christmas number one next year :-)". Clearly I wasn't the only person to think this, and some people even got their act together, and are trying to make it happen. Follow the think from here to amazon, and buy the single for 49p :-)[0]

I've liked Cage's 4'33" for quite some time now, having first encountered it at the GSM where my musicianship class one year was taken by someone who was very keen on 20th century music. When I had a radio show on CUR1350, it was the one thing the programme controller forbade me from playing - silence and radio make uncomfortable bedfellows. I'm a bit sad that it only ever seems to appear as a bit of a joke, as is the author of this little article on the background to the work. Cage's work reminds me that no-where is quiet these days, even concert halls, and it's a chance to pause and be reflective.

OTOH, if people who think it's a joke get it to Number 1, I won't be complaining at all. In fact, I'll be a very happy man :-)

[0] The Christmas Number 1 this year will be the track that's number 1 this Sunday, so based on purchases made this week

Is there a standard warm-up / set of warm-ups for singers? I mean more for a group than for an individual.

I know how I like to warm up, but I think I'm rather odd. When I've directed choirs in the past, I've just sort of made something up (scales, some easy music with lots of good vowel sounds, that sort of thing), but presumably someone has thought about this in a more systematic way?

Another music post, I'm afraid. William Byrd wrote three Mass settings, at a time when it was dangerous for him to have done so in latin - the latin Mass was a Papist thing, and there is speculation that it was only Queen Elizabeth's involvement that stopped his recusant Roman Catholocism ruining him. The three Mass settings were written for small recusant choirs to sing. I'm going to write a little about the 5-part setting, as that was the setting atreic and I chose for our wedding service, so it has special significance for me.

It's a concise setting, but unlike his continental contemporaries (such as Palestrina), there is nearly constant counterpoint, which gives the Mass a sense of forward movement, and, I think, adds to its intensity. Byrd is careful to not let the intricate lines confuse the words, however; this is most definitely music for liturgy, not the concert hall. He plays close attention to the sense of the liturgy, too. In the Credo, there is a great surge at "et resurrexit", and similarly the Hosannas of the Sanctus echo the joy in Heaven they describe. There is real subtlety in his use of light and shade in modality, too, particularly in the Agnus Dei - just listen to the first "Agnus dei, qui tollit peccata mundi", and contrast it with the following "miserere nobis", and you'll see what I mean

The recording I have here is on a disk containing Byrd's three Mass settings, and the motet Ave verum corpus, performed by The Tallis Scholars. It's pretty-much spot on.

I've never really blogged about music much, even though it's something that I get a lot of pleasure from. I suspect this may be partly a fear of boring people, or appearing nerdy (though I really should have got over the latter by now), and partly that until recently I had a radio show in which I could enthuse about early music. I'm really missing it, although maybe no-one else is ;)

Anyway, this evening I've been listening to Lassus' Missa pro defunctis, performed by the Hilliard Ensemble (it's on a disk with his Prophetiae Sibyllarum, which are a somewhat different work!), and it's lovely. I have a fair selection of settings of this, and Lassus' is perfectly formed, and restrained without being bland. That's not to say I don't like the fireworks of Mozart's setting, but by the time you get to Verdi or Puccini, I think they forgot it's meant to be a liturgical work! Lassus' work has a timeless and contemplative feel to it, and certainly rewards careful listening to pick up more of the structure.

I have an audition for a senior clerkship at Pembroke on tuesday (I think), and I don't really have much in the way of suitable music (all the stuff I have is obviously for a baritone). Can anyone suggest something (probably sacred) for someone who's actually a bass rather than a baritone? Ideally, I'd like to buy it from a music shop tommorow ;-s