One of the rare but ugly dangers of rock shows is that occasionally, a nut-job can attack you onstage when you’re not looking. Noel Gallagher just found that out the hard way, poor bugger.
- Rudy Carrera.
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Ah, mashups, you gotta love ‘em.
For those of you who can read Spanish, this is an announcement from Argentine composer Maria del Carmen Aguilar regarding an upcoming festival of religious choir music in Buenos Aires:
Hola: el Estudio Coral de Buenos Aires dirigido por Carlos Lopez Puccio ofrecera un concierto con entrada libre el Domingo 4 de Mayo a las 18 hs en la Iglesia Evangelica Metodista, Rivadavia 4050, Buenos Aires. como despedida antes de su viaje a Alemania.
Programa: In the Beginning, de Aaron Copland, Pater Noster y Ave Maria de Fernando Moruja, Lamentaciones de Jereminas, de Alberto Ginastera, Veni Creator, de Krzysztof Penderecki, Singet dem Herrn de J.S.Bach, Nunc dimitis, de Gustav Holst y Quam pulchri sunt, de Tomas Luis de Victoria.
El coro esta invitado al Festival de Musica Sacra que se realizara en Marktoberdorf, Baviera, del 9 al 13 de Mayo, y del cual participaran 10 grupos que interpretan musica sacra de 5 diferentes religiones. Ver mas detalles en la siguiente direccion:
http://www.modfestivals.org/msi_allgemein_en.php
- Rudy Carrera.
Hello, community!
Malcolm has invited me to post here because I would like to share some news and keep you apprised of its progress.
Some years ago, now over ten years in fact, I survived and escaped a really terrible ordeal. Out of that ordeal I wrote a cycle of 15 poems (how often great art comes of great adversity!) called Rachel Rising (http://www.rachelrising.com). I shared the words with many, even delivered them as a sermon in a church in Seattle at one point.
All through the life of these poems, I have wished that they could be set to music — a chamber work for soprano and a mix of instruments. Because I am a singer myself, that idea has remained close to my heart: how I would love to sing these words!
I approached three composers over the years, all three of whom expressed interest but for various reasons did not get involved in the project.
Until now.
I am delighted to share with you that Rob Deemer (http://www.robdeemer.com) has accepted the rather Herculean task of setting the entire cycle to music in a chamber work. He and I will be giving the work its premiere performances this autumn in eastern Tennessee, upstate New York and Illinois. The Tennessee premiere performance is planned as a benefit, some portion of proceeds of which will be donated to Haven House, a local women’s emergency shelter. We will be offering the performances in New York and Illinois in
conjunction with university music school seminars on the collaborative process, preparing new works for performance, and other subjects relating to the work.
Malcolm has also now suggested that we try to bring a performance of it to Seattle, which idea I will pursue!
The collaborative process will be interesting: the poems are already written, and because I-the-writer am also I-the-singer, the composer and I will be working closely on the setting. Instrumentation will be a little nonstandard and emphasizes the “dark” quality of the work: violin, viola, cello, bass, oboe/English horn, clarinet/bass clarinet, bassoon/contrabassoon and piano.
I’ll be posting updates here on the progress of the work. In the meantime, if you would like more information about the project, the artists or the performances, please feel free to contact me by phone at
865-238-0525 or privately through this group. I look forward to posting more news about the project soon and often!
Best regards,
Rebekkah Hilgraves
NPR put up a story that gave me quite a surprise today. So much so, in fact, that I had to do a double-take. Did I read this correctly? YaHoWa 13?! I used to sell their records in my former life as one of L.A.’s hipper music buyers for Aron’s Records in my misspent youth. I was in charge of (what else?) the weirdo music, which put me in touch with distributors peddling everything from atrociously sub-pub nazi skinhead music to some of the finest and most sublime experimental music imaginable. YaHoWa 13 were neither. Boorish, noisy, with a touch of Krautrock and acid folk, and after completion you feel like your inner brute was about to be released. Their music had a sort of weirdness factor that overtook your better senses, brainwashed you just long enough to buy the damn records and wonder, “What the hell was I thinking?” Over and over again… And again.
Now that I’ve awoken from a drugged out and hazy memory (without taking drugs, mind you!), here are the links to the story:
The Birth of Organic, Polygamous Spiritualism
From Source Restaurant to ‘Cosmic’ Commune
Read the whole thing here.
- Rudy Carrera.
The Guardian, a paper I normally loathe, comes up with a gem in the music department:
A song about the 13th century Albigensian heresy, sung in French by a Belgian nun, reached No 1 in the 1960s. We can learn a lot form that
Joe Queenan
Friday April 4, 2008
guardian.co.ukWhen I was 13 years old, a Belgian nun with the unlikely name of Soeur Sourire released a single called Dominique which became a mammoth international hit. As I was still quite young and impressionable, and as my parents never bothered to explain reality to their children, I viewed Dominique’s success as a sign that Armageddon was nigh. Nothing else could explain why an entire planet would go nuts over a jaunty little number about the personal theological battle waged by a Spanish monk against the 13th century Albigensian heresy, sung in French by a Belgian nun ostensibly named Sister Smile, accompanying herself on the guitar. Nothing.
Sister Smile (nee Jeannine Deckers) proved to be a one-hit wonder, and the threat posed to society by her No 1 single was soon superseded by the success of the child lounge lizard Wayne Newton, who released his own European-flavored hit Danke Schoen the very same year. In the fullness of time, it was explained to me by the village elders that Dominique and Danke Schoen were “novelty numbers”, quirky little one-offs that were not likely to spawn any dire new trend. It was their unexpected quality that added to their appeal; they seemed to come out of nowhere. They fell into the same class as Que Sera, Sera, Non Dimenticar, Vaya con Dios and the surprise Japanese hit, Sukiyaki, which was also reached No 1 in the charts in 1963. These songs, I was assured, were quite harmless and had nothing to do with John F Kennedy’s death. But I never trusted the village elders on this one, because the village elders adored songs like Volare, and Volare seemed to have bubbled up from the deepest bowels of Hell.
Ever since I heard Dominique, I have had an abiding terror of pop songs sung in French. This is hard to explain, as I have spent a year living in Paris and have read all six volumes of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. What’s more, there are many French singers whose work I enjoy: Edith Piaf, Georges Brassens, Yves Montand, Michel Polnareff, Jacques Brel (Belgian), even a few numbers by Johnny Hallyday. But one of the reasons I like these singers is because they never succeeded in making a genuinely big splash in America. Though Piaf and Aznavour and Brel might occasionally wow audiences at Carnegie Hall, none of them entrenched themselves on the pop charts and entered the American consciousness in the way, say, Spandau Ballet did. French music was something that could be admired from afar, like Go or Morris Dancing or socialism, but it was not something Americans wanted making inroads into our civilization. We didn’t mind having French music on the planet. We didn’t want French music on the radio.
Americans are very touchy about this issue. With the exception of homegrown Cajun ditties with names like Le Loup Garou, Americans do not respond well to songs sung in French. This is because Americans view the French as shifty and pretentious, and honestly think that when someone sings all or part of a song in French, they are trying to put something over on us. Typical is Leonard Cohen, a canny Canadian who often recruits vaporous French women with angelic voices to handle the background vocals in his ostentatiously cryptic songs, and it is also true of Paul McCartney, whose Michelle is one of the most culturally discombobulating hits ever.
The lyrics to Michelle, it will be recalled, are: “Michelle, ma belle, sont des mots qui vont tres bien ensemble.” To an extent this is true: the words certainly go together better than, “Kylie, ma vie, tu es vraiment tres jolie, ma Kylie,” or, “Marie-Therese, ma maitresse, est-ce que ca te plait quand je te baise, ma Marie-Therese?” But it does not change the fact that the lyrics are banal and extraneous as they say nothing in French that could not be said equally well in English. This is just another case of Paul trying to be highbrow and snooty, which is what always gets him into trouble.
I am not one of those people who insist that there has never been a great crossover pop song sung in French. I know of at least three: Plastic Bertrand’s rambunctious 1977 hit Ca Plane Pour Moi, Blondie’s 1978 reworking of the 1963 hit Denise with additional French lyrics and Labelle’s 1975 smash hit Lady Marmalade, which contains the immortal query: “Voulez-Vous Coucher Avec Moi - Ce Soir?” Of these tunes, only one is sung by a native francophone, and I don’t hear anyone complaining about it. Some may petulantly insist than the 1969 Serge Gainsbourg- Jane Birkin ballad Je T’Aime … Moi Non Plus is a great pop song, but they are only saying it to be annoying. Je T’Aime is a vital pop cultural artefact: it shows what can happen when people from very different backgrounds and very different cultures get together in a recording studio and release a single in a society where people are already taking too many drugs. But to insist that Je T’Aime is a great pop song is to fall into the classic trap of assuming that just because a song makes no sense in the language of Sartre that it might make more sense in the language of Sting. This is like arguing that Penelope Cruz would be appreciated as a great actress in Hollywood if more Americans spoke Spanish or if she could make herself understood when she speaks English. Neither of these things is happening anytime soon.
Many young people alive today are unaware that a Belgian nun ever had the number one hit on this very planet. This is unfortunate, because those who cannot remember the Belgian hits of the past are condemned to listen to the Swiss hits of the future. Yet, within living memory, shortly after Kennedy’s assassination, and indeed on the very cusp of the British pop music invasion, a song about a heresy that erupted in Southern France in the 13th century rose to the very top of the charts. The song would have us believe that St Dominic was a humble, lovable monk who fought valiantly against the forces of darkness, though in fact Saint Dominic founded the religious order that brought mankind the monstrous Spanish Inquisition. And far from being murderous heretics, the Albigensians were sweet, easy-go-lucky Mediterraneans who simply wanted to be left alone. The Albigensian Crusade, the first time Christians mounted a religious war against other Christians, was nothing but a naked land grab by the French nobility.
The Crusade kicked off with the massacre of the entire population of Beziers, during which a sassy monk, asked by the troops how to distinguish devout Christians from the devil’s own, snapped: “Kill them all; let God sort them out.” It finished up with the massacre at Montsegur, where several hundred Albigensians refused to abjure their faith and were burned alive. None of this is mentioned in the song. One last thing: Sister Sourire’s co-composer also wrote the fiendishly maudlin Yuletide classic, Do You Hear What I Hear? Noel Regney was a Frenchman who joined the Nazi army, then, like many Frenchman with shadowy war records, subsequently claimed to be a member of the Resistance. Dominique reached the top of the US charts on December 7, 1963, the 22nd anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Shortly thereafter, Sister Soeur quit the convent and lost her record contract. Twenty-two years later, she committed suicide. This didn’t surprise me one bit. Even as a kid, I knew this thing was going to end badly.
- Rudy Carrera.
The Washington Post waxes on one of the great elder statesmen of jazz, Dave Brubeck.
- Rudy Carrera.
I feel like a sliver of my youth died with these two. Klaus Dinger was a member of an early formation of Kraftwerk, and would leave the band to form Neu! Chris Moriarty was a member of seminal New York post-Industrial group Controlled Bleeding. These groups helped for a lot of my tastes in music. RIP.
HT: Dana Madore, Paul Lemos.
- Rudy Carrera.
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I cannot say that I have a vast amount of knowledge regarding pop music from Azerbaijan or the Azerbaijani region of Iran. This slice of ethnic pop by Azeri singer Flora Kərimova may open up an interesting avenue of research, though.
HT: Bijan Azadi.
- Rudy Carrera
It boggles the mind that this talented lad from Burkina Faso took 30 years to release an album! Victor’s Myspace page has samples of his work, and links to record labels connected to his work, such as Makasound.
- Rudy Carrera
One doesn’t associate the balmy and beautiful country of Costa Rica with electro-acoustic music, the avant-garde or modern classical composition. This perception may change if young composer Otto Castro has anything to say about it. His music makes references to the compositional styles of Pierre Boulez, Iannis Xenakis and even a bit of Brian Eno. This site will take you directly to Otto’s Myspace profile, where you can hear samples of his work.
- Rudy Carrera
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Accordionist Dave Thomas does a stunningly good interpretation of Yann Tiersen’s La noyée.
No videos on this fine Mexican pianist yet, but his site and bio are certainly worth a look into. If you visit Mexico check his schedule and watch him perform. By all accounts he’s quite a pianist.
- Rudy Carrera
