Author: oconnellmusic101

If it sounds good, it is good. -- Duke Ellington

“Ode to Joy” Re/Mix

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Some resources for your final project.

The text of Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”:

“An die Freude”“Ode to Joy”
Freude, schöner Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!
Deine Zauber binden wieder
Was die Mode streng geteilt*;
Alle Menschen werden Brüder*
Wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt.

Wem der große Wurf gelungen
Eines Freundes Freund zu sein;
Wer ein holdes Weib errungen
Mische seinen Jubel ein!
Ja, wer auch nur eine Seele
Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!
Und wer’s nie gekonnt, der stehle
Weinend sich aus diesem Bund!

Freude trinken alle Wesen
An den Brüsten der Natur;
Alle Guten, alle Bösen
Folgen ihrer Rosenspur.
Küsse gab sie uns und Reben,
Einen Freund, geprüft im Tod;
Wollust ward dem Wurm gegeben
und der Cherub steht vor Gott.

Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen
Durch des Himmels prächt’gen Plan
Laufet, Brüder, eure Bahn,
Freudig, wie ein Held zum siegen.

Seid umschlungen, Millionen!
Diesen Kuß der ganzen Welt!
Brüder, über’m Sternenzelt
Muß ein lieber Vater wohnen.
Ihr stürzt nieder, Millionen?
Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?
Such’ ihn über’m Sternenzelt!
Über Sternen muß er wohnen.		Joy, beautiful spark of Divinity [or: of gods],
Daughter of Elysium,
We enter, drunk with fire,
Heavenly One, thy sanctuary!
Your magic binds again
What custom strictly divided;*
All people become brothers,*
Where your gentle wing abides.

Who has succeeded in the great attempt,
To be a friend’s friend,
Whoever has won a lovely woman,
Add his to the jubilation!
Indeed, who even just has one soul
To call his own in this world!
And who never managed it should slink 
Weeping from this union!

All creatures drink of joy
At nature’s breasts.
All the Just, all the Evil
Follow her trail of roses.
Kisses she gave us and grapevines,
A friend, proven in death.
Salaciousness was given to the worm 
And the cherub stands before God.

Gladly, as His suns fly
through the heavens’ grand plan 
Go on, brothers, your way,
Joyful, like a hero to victory.

Be embraced, Millions!
This kiss to all the world!
Brothers, above the starry canopy
There must dwell a loving Father.
Are you collapsing, millions?
Do you sense the creator, world?
Seek him above the starry canopy!
Above stars must He dwell.

Its most famous setting:

This video shows some of the text and translation, along with the vocal passages to which each textual phrase is set.

The great African-American bass-baritone Paul Robeson (1898-1976) sings it in English translation in the 1930s (it’s worth noting that Robeson was an outspoken supporter of communism and the Soviet Union).

If you look on Youtube, you will find numerous versions of Beethoven’s setting, including many updating it to contemporary genres. Here’s a performance on Coke bottles:

Schubert’s setting of “Ode to Joy,” from 1815 (nine years before Beethoven’s):

The earliest known setting is by the dedicatee of Schiller’s poem, Christian Gottfried Körner, from 1786. You can hear Körner’s complete list on the playlist “An die Freude” on NAXOS.

An 1800 collection of fourteen settings of Schiller’s ode by the important Austrian and German composers of the day. The volume was published by Jacob Böhme of Hamburg, who would become one of the most important music publishers of the nineteenth century. Most of these are as yet unrecorded.

14_compositions_to_schillers_odetojoyDownload

A simplified and transposed version of the first “Anonymous” setting.

Affrilachian Banjo and Pre-Blues Traditions

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West African griot (nomadic musician) with a lute.
Gambian musician Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta with an ankonting.

Dink Roberts (1894-1989).

John Snipes (1899-1983).

Elizabeth Cotten (1893-1987), who was left-handed, adapted both banjo and guitar by simply turning them upside-down.

Odell Thompson (1911-1994), with his cousin, fiddler Joe Thompson (1918-2012).

For more, browse here:

https://affrilachianmusic.weebly.com/stylistic-and-instrumental-origins.html

Black Woodstock and the Opposite of Woodstock

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New York City Mayor John Lindsay, the “blue-eyed soul brother,” arriving at Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) for a July 13, 1969 concert, escorted by Black Panthers.

As the media is flooded with reminiscences about Woodstock, the New York Times remembers “Black Woodstock,” 1969’s rolling Harlem block party.

The video for Lauryn Hill’s “Doo-Wop” alludes to that time and place.

And Dave Chappelle’s Block Party is in some ways an attempt to recreate it.

Do you believe that it’s possible to re-create a moment of unprecedented community engagement like Black Woodstock?

“White” Woodstock, in the meantime, was perhaps the last gasp of optimism of the 1960s counterculture. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy had both been assassinated the previous year. Five hundred thousand U.S. troops were in Vietnam. Nixon was in the White House and had begun secretly bombing Cambodia.

Just a few months later, another massive music festival would try — and fail catastrophically — to carry on the spirit of Woodstock.

At the Altamont Speedway in northern California, the Hell’s Angels were contracted to provide security for $500 worth of beer (more than $3000 worth in today’s money). As the crowd got restless and the Angels got drunk, they began beating concertgoers with pool cues and motorcycle chains, and kicked and stabbed an eighteen-year-old black audience member, Meredith Hunter, to death during the Rolling Stones’ set.

As rock critic Greil Marcus, who was at the festival, succinctly put it:

“A young black man [was] murdered in the midst of a white crowd by white thugs as white men played their version of black music.”

The murder was caught live on camera and included in the documentary Gimme Shelter as the Stones performed “Under My Thumb” (warning: this footage contains the actual murder of Meredith Hunter — watch at your own risk).

As gospel singer Merry Clayton famously sang on the studio version of “Gimme Shelter”: “Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away.”

Clara at 200

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A clever student-created animated bio, “The Wild Life of Clara Schumann.”

Clara’s beautiful Lied “Beim Abschied.”

The poem, by Friederike Serre, translated by Richard Stokes.

On departing

A purple glow shines from afar,
Golden now the bright day sinks,
One by one the silver stars
Awaken in the skies.
And the Queen of the Day
Bows her head and goes to sleep;
One more greeting, now goodbye!
No farewell! No departure!

Shadows cover the broad earth,
Night lies on the meadows.
Pray be still now, poor heart,
That the day has wearied so!
O appear, gently, mildly,
Sweet image in my dreams.
One more greeting, now goodbye!
No farewell! No departure!

Ah, hot tears run down my cheeks;
Now a feeling of bliss,
Now a painful, fearful longing
Is set to break my heart.
Only dreams can restore
That happiness too quickly vanished.
One more greeting, now goodbye!
No farewell! No departure!

When I gaze into the dusk,
And the sun sets,
I think of all the pain
That I have endured.
Ah, perhaps the morrow
Will banish all cares.
So be of good cheer! Goodbye!
No farewell! No departure!

What Romantic themes can you identify in the text and in the music?

Pianist Jonathan Biss attempts to decode the Schumanns’ relationship.

The wonderful scene where Brahms shows up at the Schumanns’ door in the 1947 film Song of Love.

To the Distant Beloved

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Title page of An die ferne Geliebte, with dedication to Prince Lobkowitz.

Read the score here:

an-die-ferne-geliebteDownload

Translations are here.

The cycle performed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore.

Read the texts and see facsimiles of the “Immortal Beloved” letters here.

Canadian composer James K. Wright composed a cycle of three songs based on the letters for voice and piano trio. The piece, Briefe an die unsterbliche Geliebte (Letters to the Immortal Beloved), was premiered in 2012, two hundred years after the date on Beethoven’s letters. Read Wright’s discussion of the background and process of his piece here.

Listen to it here.

Wright argues for the identity of Josephine von Daym as the Immortal Beloved (you will be familiar with her from the BBC Eroica film). What do you think? Other possibilities are listed here.

The 1994 film Immortal Beloved relied on a theory advanced in a 1957 book called Beethoven and His Nephew: A Psychoanalytic Study of their Relationship, by Editha and Richard Sterba.

The film makes Beethoven out to be more of a player than he really was.

Black Country

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This seems to be the summer that country trap reached the mainstream.

Where does country trap come from?

Maybe we should be asking why we think of country music as a white genre in the first place.

A diagram of the main themes of country music.

One of the reasons that we think of country as a white genre is that country music has connotations of Southern rural life, wide open spaces, and farming.

Southern rural life was decimated by the Great Migration, and wide open spaces have not always been safe for black people. What is not widely known is that, before the Great Migration, blacks were also disproportionately represented among American farmers. Not only during slave days, but also up until the early years of the twentieth century, black people were the farmers, at least in the South.

There’s a movement to revive black farming. Here Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm, near Albany, explains her mission.

Penniman is also featured in this documentary by Binghamton-native musician Taína Asili:

Watch a documentary about efforts to reclaim the urban decay of Detroit and repurpose it as farmland:

More on the history of black farming:

And the history of black landowners being dispossessed of their land: “The lost property isn’t just money; it’s also identity.”

Appendix 1: Zydeco is a Louisiana-based subgenre that mixes country, folk, and cajun music.

Appendix 2: Watch the 1960 documentary “Harvest of Shame,” narrated by the famous journalist Edward R. Murrow, about migrant farm workers, both black and white southerners dispossessed of their land:

Back (and Forth) to Africa

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A 1736 map of what would become Liberia a hundred years later.

As Michael Rosenwald observes in the Washington Post, the recent eruption of the disquieting chant “Send her back!” has a long history.

Read the article and all the links.

In 1972, singer-songwriter Randy Newman wrote an ironic song from the perspective of an eighteenth-century slave merchant trying to convince a little boy on the west coast of Africa to “sail away” with him to Charleston, South Carolina — the American center of the transatlantic slave trade.

In America you get food to eat
Won’t have to run through the jungle
And scuff up your feet
You just sing about Jesus and drink wine all day
It’s great to be an American

Ain’t no lion or tiger, ain’t no mamba snake
Just the sweet watermelon and the buckwheat cake
Everybody is as happy as a man can be
Climb aboard, little wog,* sail away with me

*Old-fashioned British racist term for people of African origin.

The song was covered by several prominent black artists, including Ray Charles:

Etta James:

Bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee:

As well as some white artists, like Linda Ronstadt:

Harry Nilsson:

The Punch Brothers — in a nice touch, performing live in Charleston:

Do you think the sense of irony is present in each of these performances?

Do you hear more or less of it in the black or white performances?

What do you think each of these artists intended to convey?

What about this performance? Bobby Darin changes “little wog” to “little one.” How do you think this choice affects the meaning of the song?

It’s interesting, too, that Darin is the only one of the white artists who uses “blackvoice.”

Classically Black, V: Playlist for “Home” by Langston Hughes

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The pieces Roy Williams plays in his mother’s house when he returns from Europe:

The most famous of the Hungarian Dances by Brahms (called “The Gypsy Dances” by Hughes):

Roland Hayes singing “The Crucifixion” (for more on Hayes, including the poem Langston Hughes wrote on the assault on the great tenor in Georgia, see here):

The “Meditation” from the opera Thaïs by Jules Massenet:

It’s worth noting in the context of the Hughes story that, in the 2018 film Green Book, composer and pianist Don Shirley does not play classical music for white audiences, but rather his own jazz-classical hybrid form, a choice that makes white listeners more comfortable with the separation between him and themselves; in a sense, Hughes tells us, it’s the blurring of race and musical genre that leads to Roy’s death. For Don Shirley in the film, it’s only in a black bar that he’s finally allowed to play the music that he loves the most.

For more about the real Don Shirley, the subject of the film, read this.

What do Kira Thurman’s essay and Langston Hughes’s story tell us about the experiences of black classical musicians?

X, UnNaming, and the Cowboy Blues

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This song dropped just as school was ending last semester.

Of course, I loved it. But, because I’m old and grumpy, I started thinking about and analyzing the nom de rap chosen by Montero Lamar Hill.

“Lil” like Lil Wayne, or like so many other rap artists?

“Nas” like . . . Nas?

“X” like DMX?

Or even Malcolm X?

Apparently not.

Again, because I’m old and grumpy, I started grumbling (in my mind, anyway) about how Words (and especially Names) Mean Things.

Here, Malcolm X — the unintended namesake of Lil Nas X — explains the meaning of his adopted last name.

In other words, Malcolm Little chose “X” as a symbol of the unnaming of his ancestors, who were stolen into slavery. If words have meaning, letters do as well, and X, used in this context, is particularly powerful. So powerful, in fact, that even such luminaries as Spike Lee have attempted to profit from that letter of the alphabet.

As Larry Depte, the spokesman for the (short-lived) X-brand Potato Chips, explained in 1992:

“X is a concept.” On each bag of the chips is printed the legend: “X stands for the unknown. The unknown language, religion, ancestors and cultures of the African American. X is a replacement for the last name given to the slaves by the slave master. We dedicate this product to the concept of X.”

“We’re not trying to market anybody’s name or likeness,” Mr. Depte said. “Ninety-five percent of African-Americans don’t know their original names and cultures. Most people don’t know this. X remains unknown, even though it stands for the unknown.”

Indeed, Lee even sought to trademark the letter “X” (read the linked article, “Who Owns X?” for more).

I looked hard for a photo of those potato chips but couldn’t find one. They existed before smart phones. But this will give you some idea of what was going down back in the day.

In the meantime, on a summer road trip, my children and I listened to an audiobook of A Wind in the Door, the second book in the fantasy/scifi YA series by Madeleine L’Engle known as the “Time Quartet” (the first is A Wrinkle in Time). The theme of Naming is prominent in the book: The human protagonists are assisted by an angel, who is also responsible for naming all the stars in the universe. The bad guys in the novel are known as Echthroi, the plural of the Greek echthros, meaning “The Enemy” (Ἐχθρός). The Echthroi’s destructive power comes from unNaming — Xing out their victims, turning them into nothing.

Names have power, in other words.

Azie and Evelyn of Say It Loud delve into the fascinating history of “black-sounding” names.

In “Old Town Road,” Lil Nas X also draws on the symbolism of the black cowboy. It’s a little-known fact that roughly one out of every four cowboys in the late nineteenth century was black. As Irwin Silber notes, “Many an emancipated Negro decided to try his luck in the west.”

The music of the African-American cowboys had a lasting influence on cowboy ballads in general; in fact, “Home on the Range” was collected by John Lomax from a black trail cook.

Read “Cowboy Blues: Early Black Music in the West.”

Don Flemons, one of the founders of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, sings “Home on the Range” and other black cowboy songs on a recording he made in 2018 for the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture.

In John Lomax’s article “Sinful Songs of the Southern Negro,” in your course reading packet, the folklorist mentions collecting some “cowboy songs” from black informants in a South Carolina prison, including “Streets of Laredo”:

And “The Old Chisolm Trail”:

As sung by Don Flemons: