À propos my Daoist ritual spinoff of Strictly, the brilliant (ethnographer!) Stacey Dooley‘s recent waltz reminds me what a brilliant song is Moon river:
Pace Andy Williams, the classic sung version is that of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961):
Johnny Mercer’s lyrics, “a love song to wanderlust” (cf. Roaming the clouds), are complemented by Henry Mancini’s melody. I just love the leap of a major 7th:
I’m crossing you in style some day / There’s such a lot of world to see,
always effective—as in the finale of Mahler 9 (introduced by quintuplets!) and, um, Raindrops keep falling on your head! Indeed, there’s another brilliant touch: following “We’re after the same rainbow’s end“, when that sequence returns with
Waiting round the bend, My huckleberry friend,
for the first phrase the melody omits the low tonic, making us nostalgic for the missing major-7th leap (waiting, indeed), until it returns for the second phrase.
So Moon river (nearly cut from the film, PAH!) makes a perfect expression of Holly’s persona—and indeed that of Stacey Dooley, with her documentaries from around the world.
The dominant interpretation currently seems to be that Hepburn’s screen characters make her some kind of feminist role model. But “it’s complicated”—certainly in this film, which largely replaces the edgy feel of Truman Capote’s novella (1958, set in 1943) with a “sugar and spice confection”; indeed, Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe for the part! I tend to side with more critical reviews, such as this, this, and this. After I cited some dodgy sexist terms to describe talented female performers, gamine and ingénue are among those for which there are both male and female equivalents, but the latter are far more commonly used, and flawed. Oh, and how ahout “elfin waif”…
For Hepburn’s actual life, Darcey Bussell (another fragrant icon) made a fine documentary Looking for Audrey(2014), including her childhood in Nazi-occupied Holland.
* * *
Capote describes Holly as an American geisha—rural child bride Lulamae, reinventing herself in New York. Film adaptations can be effective, but in this case the novella portrays her with more nuance and depth. So—not least because I’m so averse to Hepburn’s “elfin waif” shtick—I find Capote’s silent invisible original far more moving, and Holly herself far more poignant and (as she would say) sympathique.
Inevitably, at the end of the film the narrator and Holly fall in love and stay together, whereas in the novella their relationship remains platonic, and Holly disappears.
Lending significance to Moon river, the name-slot for Holly’s mail-box reads:
Miss Holiday Golightly, travelling
She reflects on how she demurred from a break in the movies offered by a Hollywood agent:
But he’s got a point, I should feel guilty. Not because they would have given me the part or because I would have been good: they wouldn’t and I wouldn’t. If I do feel guilty, I guess it’s because I let him go on dreaming when I wasn’t dreaming a bit. I was just vamping for time to make a few self-improvements: I knew damn well I’d never be a movie star. It’s too hard; and if you’re intelligent, it’s too embarrassing. My complexes aren’t inferior enough: being a movie star and having a big fat ego are supposed to go hand-in-hand; actually, it’s essential not to have any ego at all. I don’t mean I mind being rich and famous. That’s very much on my schedule, and some day I’ll try to get around to it; but if it happens, I’d like to have my ego tagging along. I want to still be me when I wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany’s.
And Holly does indeed sing and play guitar:
Don’t wanna sleep, don’t wanna die, just wanna go a’travellin’ through the pastures of the sky
With a Brazilian suitor in tow, she takes to Linguaphone:
Oh screw it, cookie—hand me my guitar and I’ll sing you a fado in the most perfect Portuguese.
In the novella, I note with proprietoral pride that Holly’s fellow-geisha Mag Wildwood (intriguingly, Capote gave her the full name of Miss Margaret Thatcher Fitzhue Wildwood)—as if being a redhead over six feet tall isn’t enough—is a stammerer (Marilyn Monroe might have resented the competition):
Even the stutter, certainly genuine but still a bit laid on, had been turned to advantage. It was the master stroke, that stutter: for it contrived to make her banalities sound somehow original, and secondly, despite her tallness, her assurance, it served to inspire in male listeners a protective feeling.
* * *
For Moon river on the ethereal theremin, click here.
Amy Winehouse (see my tribute here) may seem an unlikely exponent of the song, but she was grounded in ballads, as we can hear in her “late” sessions with Tony Bennett. Here she is, subverting the waltz, making the song sugar-free—maybe it doesn’t quite work, but even at the age of 16 she was always exploring, discovering new personal connections:
Click here for a discussion of the song in the BBC Radio 4 Soul music series.
From my playlist of songs, it’s clear that, with some noble exceptions, I find female voices more moving than male ones—and I’m right!!!
As journalism, and journalists, currently face renewed threats around the world, a homage to Gareth Jones (1905–35) is timely. [1] This post serves mainly to direct readers to the comprehensive website about his life.
I’ve already mentioned him among the foreign journalists who tried to draw the world’s attention to the 1933 famine in Ukraine. On the site you can read his reports, including his rebuttal of Walter Duranty’s apologia for the Soviet regime.
Indeed, he features in Bukovsky’s film The living (from 24.33), which you can see in my post on the famine. His story is told in the 2012 Storyville documentary Hitler, Stalin and Mr Jones, and now in the new feature film Mr Jones directed by Agnieszka Holland, with James Norton in the title role.
Besides documenting the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, once Jones was banned from the Soviet Union, his interests turned to the growing encroachment of Japan in the Far East. On the eve of his 30th birthday in 1935—just as Robert van Gulik was arriving in Harbin on his first visit to China—he was kidnapped and murdered by “bandits” in Japanese-occupied Manchukuo.
Had Jones lived to visit Yan’an after 1936, perhaps he would have been more critical than Edgar Snow or Agnes Smedley; and if he had travelled in China around 1960, he might have been more observant than other journalists at the time—and taken more photographs to accompany his record of the Holodomor.
North Shanxi, Ten Kings ritual painting, detail: see here.
*Companion to two posts on the fates of blind bards in Ukraine and China*
Hunger, malnutrition, and famine are an essential backdrop to the lives and cultures of people we meet doing fieldwork in China, including expressive culture and ritual. They loom large in the life stories of peasants whom I’ve got to know—like the villagers of Gaoluo in Hebei, and the inhabitants of Yanggao county in Shanxi (see below). And I haven’t even visited the worst-affected regions, like Henan, Anhui, or Gansu.
Yet this is just the kind of memory that the rosy patriotic nostalgia and reifications of the Intangible Cultural Heritage project are designed to erase.
I began by writing about expressive culture under state socialism in Ukraine and China, and I’ve given links to some basic readings on the Chinese famine. Globally, one might also adduce 1840s’ Ireland, Bengal 1943, North Korea, and chronic famines in Africa. A classic study is
Amartya Sen, Poverty and famines: an essay on entitlement and deprivation (1981).
However, one estimate suggests that 80% of 20th-century famine victims died in the Soviet Union and China.
Ukraine: the 1933 Holodomor Here I discuss the Holodomor; in a post to follow I’ll take the story on to World War Two.
I found it useful to read these works in conjunction:
Robert Conquest, The harvest of sorrow (1986) (for a review of his work by Sheila Fitzpatrick, see here)
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010)
Anne Applebaum, Red famine: Stalin’s war on Ukraine (2017): reviewed by Sheila Fitzpatrick here, and, more critically, by Sophie Pinkham here.
One might begin with Applebaum’s summary of research in her Chapter 15 “The Holodomor in history and memory”, as well as Chapter 14 “The Cover-up” and her Epilogue. Snyder’s Chapter 1, “The Soviet famines”, makes a useful summary. While Conquest’s book, written before the collapse of the USSR, was a fine early study (for a review, with a fractious exchange, see here), Applebaum writes with the benefit of three decades of further research, using impressive Ukrainian sources and oral history projects since the 1980s (the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute and many websites, including an interview database led by William Noll); and she offers insights on the changing political scene since the 1990s. Her maps are very good too (and note this site).
Conquest’s book was published soon after the 1985 documentary Harvest of despair (following the film proper, from 54′, are further interviews).
Note also Sergei Bukovsky, The living (aka Spell your name, or Live, 2006):
* * *
In the aftermath of World War One (see e.g. Robert Gerwarth, Why the First World War failed to end) and the Russian revolution, as the population was bludgeoned into submitting to the kolkhoz collective farms, the term kulak was soon devalued to denote anyone questioning Party policy—“enemies of the people”, as an odious phrase currently in vogue goes. Vasily Grossman cited a woman activist (Harvest of sorrow, p.129):
What I said to myself at the time was “they are not human beings, they are kulaks” … Who thought up this word “kulak” anyway? Was it really a term? What torture was meted out to them! In order to massacre them it was necessary to proclaim that kulaks are not human beings. Just as the Germans proclaimed that Jews are not human beings. Thus did Lenin and Stalin proclaim, kulaks are not human beings.”
Conquest (p.118) cites an activist in 1930:
He has a sick wife, five children and not a crumb of bread in the house. And that’s what we call a kulak! The kids are in rags and tatters. They all look like ghosts. I saw the pot on the oven—a few potatoes in water. That was their supper tonight.
This reminds me how fellow villagers of kindly Daoist Li Qing (see also my film, and book) ribbed him for his status as a “rich peasant” (see here, under “The sojourn of Educated Youth”).
Over a long period there was constant unrest, with mass executions and deportations. Defiance (which indeed soon offered the only hope of survival) took the form not only of lethargy; violent resistance was common—not least from women. Rebellions had broken out as early as 1919 (Harvest of sorrow ch.3, Red famine ch.2). A widespread famine ensued in 1921. But it wasn’t kept secret, and international aid was welcomed (notably from the American Relief Administration)—whereas by 1933 the scale of the disaster was concealed, and no foreign aid was accepted.
While periodic retrenchments, and “indigenization” policies, were brief, an uneasy stalemate prevailed in the 1920s. Conquest opens The harvest of sorrow thus:
At the beginning of 1927, the Soviet peasant, whether Russian, Ukrainian, or of other nationality, had good reason to look forward to a tolerable future. The land was his; and he was reasonably free to dispose of his crop. The fearful period of grain-seizure, of peasant rising suppressed in blood, of devastating famine, were over, and the Bolshevik government seemed to have adopted a reasonable settlement of the countryside’s interests.
Even by 1929 (Red famine p.113–14),
as Dolot remembered it, the presence of the Soviet state in his village had been minimal. “We were completely free in our movements. We took pleasure trips and travelled freely looking for jobs. We went to the big cities and neighboring towns to attend weddings, church bazaars, and funerals. No one asked us for documents or questioned us about our destinations.” […] The Soviet Union was in change, but not every aspect of life was controlled by the state, and peasants lived much as they had in the past.
Politics had remained loose and decentralised. The choice of Ukrainian or Russian schooling was made in the locale itself; villages were still self-governing, and the various groups tried to accommodate one another. In a passage reminiscent of China (see e.g. here, under “Old and new stories”), for Christmas Day in Pylypivka,
the boys made a star [traditional for carollers] and thought about how to design it. After some debate, a decision was made: on one side of the star, an icon of the Mother of God would be featured, while on the other, a five-pointed [Soviet] star.
In addition, they learned not only old carols, but also new ones. They made a plan: when they were approaching a communist’s house, they would display the five-pointed star and sing the new carols, but when they approached the house of a religious man, they would display the icon of the Mother of God, and would sing [old carols].
But such flexibility was short-lived. Pressure escalated from 1927; as urban activists met stubborn resistance from peasants, they soon found that brutal coercion was the only way of fulfilling their brief. The new wave of collectivization soon led to famine. Despite the introduction of “internal passports”, starving peasants continued their migration to urban industrial centres. The gulag system (on which, among the vast literature, Applebaum also has a definitive study) expanded massively.
Major rebellions erupting in 1930 caused Stalin to tone down the rhetoric briefly (though the title of the anthem of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, “Ukraine has not yet died”, sung by armed rebels in 1930, doesn’t seem entirely encouraging.)
At the height of the famine, as later in China, cannibalism and insanity became common. Meanwhile there were purges at all levels of the Party too.
Conquest gives a prophetic quote, further foretelling the current total surveillance in Xinjiang:
What gave the regime its advantage both in 1930–31 and even more in 1932–33 was that it was now organized and centralized as it had not been in 1921. Herzen, back in the 1860s, had said that what he most feared was a “Genghis Khan with the telegraph”.
Religion and culture The church (in Ukraine, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church—currently engaged in a divorce from the Moscow Patriarchate) was both a target of and a focus for resistance—as later in China. Church bells were melted down, icons smashed. The rituals of traditional peasant life—and thus musical traditions—were disrupted.
Alongside the major branches of the church, the repression and survival of the diverse sectarian groups is a rich theme, including Protestants, Evangelicals, and the Molokans—see also Margarita Mazo, “Change as confirmation of continuity as experienced by Russian Molokans”, in Retuning culture: musical changes in central and Eastern Europe (1996).
As to expressive culture, the itinerant kobzariblind minstrels soon disappeared. Meanwhile,
The Ukrainian musician Yosyp Panasenko was dispatched by the central authorities with his troupe of bandura players to provide culture [sic] to the starving peasants. Even as the state took the peasants’ last bit of food, it had the grotesque inclination to elevate the minds and rouse the spirits of the dying. The musicians found village after village completely abandoned. Then they finally came across some people: two girls dead in a bed, two legs of a man protruding from a stove, and an old lady raving and running her fingernails through the dirt. (Bloodlands, p.47)
With all this background it becomes easier to understand why the blind minstrels were dying out, along with the culture of which they were part—although I wonder why they were not erased so efficiently in China under Maoism.
One member of a local concert band recalled playing for funerals of activists murdered by irate peasants:
For us it was a happy event because every time somebody was killed, they would take us to the village, give us some food and then we would play at the funeral. And we were looking forward every time to the next funeral, because that meant food for us. (Red famine, p.150)
Again, I heard similar stories in China, such as north Shanxi:
When Li Yuanmao’s father died of hunger in 1960, no-one even had the strength to dig a grave for him. In a village in nearby Tianzhen county, even the village cadres volunteered to carry the coffin just so they could get a paltry mantou steamed bread roll to eat (Daoist priests, p.119).
In Ukraine by 1933, apart from the banning of traditional funeral rites,
Nobody had the strength anymore to dig a grave, hold a ceremony, or play music. “There were no funerals,” recalled Kateryna Marchenko. “There were no priests, requiems, tears. There was no strength to cry.”
Meanwhile, cultural institutions, writers, and academics—historians, ethnographers, museum curators—were also under assault.
Talking of documenting folk-song (see here, and here), Snyder cites a children’s song (Bloodlands, p.36):
Father Stalin, look at this
Collective farming is just bliss
The hut’s in ruins, the barn’s all sagged
All the horses broken nags
And on the hut a hammer and sickle
And in the hut death and famine
No cows left, no pigs at all
Just your picture on the wall
Daddy and mommy are in the kolkhoz
The poor child cries as alone he goes
There’s no bread and there’s no fat
The party’s ended all of that
Seek not the gentle nor the mild
A father’s eaten his own child
The party man he beats and stamps
And sends us to Siberian camps.
And a collective farm song from the 1930s (Red famine p.113, cf. p.145):
Green corn waves new shoots
Though planted not long ago
Our brigadier sports new boots
While we barefoot go.
I wonder if Chinese people were singing similar songs around 1960. Still, there neither religious nor cultural life was such a blank slate under Maoism as one might suppose.
The cover-up and aftermath Somehow, through a series of grudging concessions, the death toll fell by 1934. But with resistance broken, collectivization accelerated.
And no less telling is the story of the cover-up, suggesting further Chinese parallels. The findings of the Soviet census of 1937 were suppressed, and the responsible demographers executed. During the Great Terror of 1937–8,
Mass graves of famine victims were covered up and hidden, and it became dangerous even to know where they were located. In 1938 all the staff of Lukianivske cemetery in Kyiv were arrested, tried, and shot as counter-revolutionary insurgents, probably to prevent them from revealing what they knew.
There were plenty of outside witnesses too, such as Vasily Grossman, Arthur Koestler, Malcolm Muggeridge, Andrew Cairns, Rhea Clyman—and Gareth Jones, to whom I devote a separate post. The photos of Alexander Wienerberger also provided firm evidence. The influential Walter Duranty knew well, but chose to deny. On the left, pundits like the Webbs averted their gaze in the interests of the greater cause. And diplomatic silence reigned, already aware of the impending need for an alliance with the Soviets against Hitler. Conquest describes the apologists—a large and influential body of Western thought—as “the lobby of the blind and blindfold”. With bitter irony, it was only the Nazis who were prepared to publicize the 1933 famine.
Emerging evidence gave pause to left-leaning scholars like Eric Hobsbawm. But the whole topic still remains highly charged ideologically, as shown by some agitated reviews from both left and right. But exposing the iniquities of state socialism shouldn’t be reduced to a blunt implement monopolized by those on the right to bludgeon the left.
Here’s a trailer for Hunger for truth: the Rhea Clyman story:
And Grossman (cited in Harvest of sorrow, 286) observed:
And the children! Have you ever seen the newspaper photographs of the children in the German camps? They were just like that: their heads like heavy balls on thin little necks, like storks, and one could see each bone of their arms and legs protruding from beneath the skin, how bones joined, and the entire skeleton was stretched over with skin that was like yellow gauze. And the children’s faces were aged, tormented, just as if they were seventy years old. And by spring they no longer had faces at all. Instead, they had birdlike heads with beaks, or frog heads—thin, wide lips—and some of them resembled fish, mouths open. Not human faces.
He compares this directly with the Jewish children in the gas chambers and comments, “these were Soviet children and those putting them to death were Soviet people.”
The Holodomor and Great Terror were soon followed by yet more devastating atrocities in World War Two. The population had been decimated and brutalized long before the Nazis invaded. In desperation, many hoped for an invasion to rid them of tyranny.
Ukraine was further devastated by the famine that struck the USSR in 1947—this time alleviated by foreign aid. Applebaum also places the complex interpretations of the famine within the context of Ukraine’s troubled recent history.
Other minorities The populations of Ukraine (also including Russians, Jews, Poles, Germans) were certainly the worst casualties of the famine: Stalin was waging war not just on recalcitrant peasant individualism but on Ukrainian nationalism. But other minorities also suffered—like the Kazakhs and Kyrghyz, who, when not being deported, were desperately migrating to and from Xinjiang as conditions changed. Bashkirs, Buryats, Khalkas, Chuvash, and Kalmyks were also hard hit (and the efforts of ethnographers to study the cultures of such peoples were frustrated by censorship and imprisonment). Conquest’s ch.14 on Kuban, Don, and Volga—Cossacks of Ukrainian origin, German minorities, and the North Caucasus—leads to further disturbing stories.
Famine in China Again, the so-called “three years of difficulty” from 1959 to 1961 were not an isolated tragedy: food shortages in the wake of coercive collectivization were long-term. For many in the countryside, it was a case not of three years of famine but of thirty years of hunger. So I’m impatient with any diachronic ethnography of the lives of rural Chinese dwellers that fails to recognize hunger and malnutrition. I’ve cited some basic sources for the Chinese famine here.
In Yanggao county, home of the Li family Daoists, I recall the satirical couplet posted during the Cultural Revolution, deploring the lack of clothing and food. But even official sources offer clues. While many county gazetteers compiled since the 1980s may be cautious, that for Yanggao contains impressively candid material (pp.66–72, 26–31; see my Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.118–22).
While appearing to recognize the impact of natural disasters, the gazetteer hints at the deeper political problems, with sections on the “Communist wind”, the “wind of exaggeration”, the Great Leap Backward, and the short-lived communal canteens. Indeed, it offers alternative insights on the whole Maoist era—such as its account of the model commune of Greater Quanshan, where in the summer of 1958, amidst a flurry of visits by bigwigs, the brutal exactions of a militarized railroad project goaded five hundred peasants to flee (Daoist priests, pp.122–3). Inner Mongolia, a traditional refuge in times of adversity, was a common destination until travel restrictions were enforced. Yanggao dwellers were still hungry for some years after Li Manshan married in 1971 (see here, under “Yao Xiulian”). For more on the Yanggao county gazetteer, see here.
So that’s the background behind my internet session with Li Manshan, when I showed him the surprisingly candid Chinese wiki article on the Holodomor.
Comparisons, figures
In China the whole process of collectivization, and the famine, make the most appalling instance of wilfully ignoring the lessons of history; both Chinese and Soviet regimes were in denial.
Felix Wemheuer, Famine politics in Maoist China and the Soviet Union (2014)
and review essays by Lucien Bianco (also a major author on peasant uprisings under Maoism):
“From the great Chinese famine to the Communist famines”, China perspectives 2013.3, here
“Comparing the Soviet and Chinese famines: their perpetrators, actors, and victims”, East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies 3.2 (2016), here, with many further refs.
Note also
Andrea Graziosi and Frank E. Sysyn (eds), Communism and hunger: the Ukrainian, Chinese, Kazakh, and Soviet famines in comparative perspective (2016).
And for a comparison between the famines of Ukraine and Kazakhstan, see here.
It’s ironic that the official story in China, still often parroted there today, was that food shortages were caused by China’s need to repay the Soviet debt (Dikötter, Mao’s great famine, ch.14). And it puts in a chilling perspective my fine lunch at the “1958” restaurant on the People’s University campus in Beijing earlier this year.
In Ukraine and China there was a similar time-lull between famine and renewed terror: in Ukraine from 1933 to 1937, in China from 1960 to 1964. Ukraine suffered a severe post-war famine in 1947, but hunger in China was longer lasting.
Before the famines, rural poverty seems to have been significantly worse in China than in Russia. And (allowing for impressionistic statistics) even in 1926, the literacy rate in Russia was c56%; in China it was still only c20% by 1950. As to life expectancy at birth, for China in 1950, I find a single figure of 35–40 years—lower than that for Ukraine before 1932, for which Applebaum cites: urban men 40–46, urban women 47–52; rural men 42–44 years, rural women 45–48.
By contrast, Ukrainian men born in 1932, in either the city or the countryside, had an average life expectancy of about 30. Women born in that year could expect to live on average to 40. For those born in 1933, the numbers are even starker. Females born in Ukraine in that year lived, on average, to be eight years old. Males born in 1933 could expect to live to the age of five. (Red famine, p.285)
Applebaum cites around 3.9 million excess deaths, plus 0.6 million lost births—around 13% of the Ukrainian population of 31 million. She goes on to delve into regional variations, concluding that
The regions “normally” most affected by drought and famine were less affected in 1932–3 because the famine of those years was not “normal”. It was a political famine, created for the express purpose of weakening peasant resistance, and thus national identity. And in this, it succeeded.
In China from 1959 to 1962 there may have been over 40 million excess deaths (Dikötter, Mao’s great famine, ch.37—Wemhauer and Bianco provide important further nuance); even by percentage of population, that gives a very rough estimate of around 16%, still greater than that for Ukraine. In many villages in both Ukraine and China virtually the whole population was wiped out.
Besides, deaths don’t tell the whole story; even for survivors, lives are ruined by malnutrition, desperation, and trauma.
In China, though extreme violence was also endemic, there was less mass murder, and less pervasive use of the secret police. Other patterns were distressingly similar: resistance to collectivization, raids on non-existent hoards, war on markets, travel restrictions—and denial, then and now. Thaws, retrenchments, strategic retreats were all brief. Warnings were sent all the way up the hierarchy; those given to Mao by Peng Dehuai and the Panchen Lama echo those given by senior Party leaders like Hryhorii Petrovskyi and Martemyan Ryutin to Stalin in 1932. All spoke out in vain, and at great personal cost.
While Ukraine was a specific target of Stalin, under Maoist China Tibetan areas were gravely affected, but Han Chinese suffered just as badly (though note Wemhauer).
While studies such as those of Applebaum and Dikötter inevitably use a broad brush to paint the wider tragedy, the kind of detail afforded by ethnographies of a particular community, like those of Thaxton, Friedman, Pickowicz, and Selden, or Guo Yuhua, is also valuable.
Worldwide, with humane values and truthful reporting under renewed assault, and incitements to hatred ever more common, these histories matter. And for China, I expect such social and political discussions to form an intrinsic part of our studies of expressive culture and ritual, all the more since the topic is still suppressed in public memory. Even as we document the ritual manuals of household ritual specialists, or the melodies of shawm bands, it seems like a basic human duty to record their life stories. All this suffering is deep in the hearts and bones of those who survived.
James Fox and Mick Jagger make mesmerising, disorienting presences, along with Anita Pallenberg (like Anouk Aimée, already a veteran of La dolce vita) and Michèle Breton. Watch the complete film here.
In an effective soundtrack, most brilliant use of music is the Iranian santur dulcimer accompanying the languid threesome of Jagger, Pallenburg, and Breton (from 43.17)—actually a most beautiful scene (and allegedly, um, method acting—I’m like, hello?), although it may not be quite the image that the Iranian Ministry of Culture envisages. Complementing the mood perfectly, it’s taken from a Nonesuch Explorer album played by Nasser Rastegar-Nejad.
On the somewhat remote chance that you would rather focus on the gradual unfolding of the melody without the distraction of watching the threesome, here’s his 1970 LP:
Left: Mick with Paul Bowles, 1989. Right: Brion Gysin and William Burroughs.
Of course Indian music was in the air by the 60s, and the spirit of experimentation also led to Brian Jones’s first trip in 1968 to the “Master Musicians of Jajouka” in the mountains of north Morocco. Early beneficiaries of the World Music craze long before the label had been invented, they were already playing for beat audiences in the 1950s, who were drawn by the likes of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs—and notably Paul Bowles, long-term resident of Tangier. Later, inevitably, schisms appeared in the village along with global fame. The wiki article, and this Songlines introduction, have useful links. If only this had led to wider appreciation of shawm music further afield…
Here’s the first of three parts from a 1989 Arena documentary, including Mick chatting with Paul Bowles:
Among many readings on Performance, as well as on the Stones in Morocco, Keith Richards’ autobiography Life is revealing, nay astounding. For the trail east, and Herat in the 70s, see here.
Nic Roeg died in November 2018—among tributes, this is very fine; see also under Bertolucci.
While I am most averse to the current wave of vapid patriotic moralising in China, I am partial to the occasional judicious quote from Confucius—like my tribute to the Li family Daoists on their 2017 French tour.
Further to my motto for the Stammerers’ Association (“We have ways of making you talk”), Who Better Than Confucius (answers on a postcard please) to supply a maxim for the Chinese branch? James Legge’s classic translation of Analects §4.24 goes
The Master said, “The superior man wishes to be slow in his speech and earnest in his conduct.”
子曰：君子欲訥於言而敏於行。
The distinguished Tian Qing, my favoured calligrapher-by-appointment—see here for the sign that he wrote for Li Manshan’s latrine)—has kindly written the maxim for me in lishu script. For Shan Fuyi’s scroll with the ingenious poem that Gaoluo villagers wrote for me, click here.
The 訥 there (“slow”) has also been rendered as “hesitant” (for an allusion to the dictum in the name of a fine scholar of Tang culture, click here). Of course, unlike Moses, there’s no suggestion that Confucius was himself a stammerer. In his calligraphy Tian Qing has dispensed with the “wishes” character, since as he observes wryly, I’ve already attained the “slow in speech”… But rather than advocating a speech impediment, Confucius’s bon mot may serve for the afflicted as a reminder of slowed speech, or even deliberate stammering, as therapy—perhaps with Robert Peston as model, rather than Gepopo.
There’s some data on stammering worldwide, but historically, I wonder how common it was in ancient China. Perhaps further broken down by age and sex, as Keith Richards might have called his autobiography.
There’s a related, more expansive passage in Analects §1.14:
The Master said, “He who aims to be a man of complete virtue [:] in his food does not seek to gratify his appetite, nor in his dwelling place does he seek the appliances of ease; he is earnest in what he is doing, and careful in his speech; he frequents the company of men of principle that he may be rectified—such a person may be said indeed to love to learn.”
子曰：君子食無求飽，居無求安，敏於事而慎於言，就有道而正焉，可謂好學也已。
BTW, this classic quote from the Tree Frog illustrates just how far he is prepared to go to Get Down with the Kids, sonorously describing Teresa May’s Brexit plan as
the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Phillip II at Le Goulet in 1200
High fives all round. Also BTW, I now wonder if Confucius’s 敏于事 (Legge’s “earnest in what he is doing”) might even be rendered as “diligent in ritual” (cf. Doing things). As to “appliances of ease” (again, I might suggest “comfort” or “security”), I’ve never been one for a microwave myself.
“Such a person may be said indeed to be a pompous misogynist“. Drawing a veil over Confucius’s views on gender (indeed, feminist critiques, and even defences, of his ouevre are in vogue, if not in Vogue: see e.g. Su Zheng, cited here), if he were with us today (cf. WWJD), if he couldn’t get a job as advisor to some dictator in a banana republic minus the bananas, he could make a fortune selling Christmas-cracker maxims. Gary Larson has a fine cartoon on Confucius at the office with some of his rejects (“Looks like we’re in for some rain”).
For a handy claim to classical erudition, see here. As ever, Laozi has the best line:
He who knows does not speak; he who speaks does not know
知者不言，言者不知。
And for Liezi, see here. For illustrious Chinese stammerers, ancient and modern, see here.
However did they film the captivating restaurant scene near the opening? I’m mortified that I can’t find it on YouTube—but it’s OK, you can just watch the film! As the characters of Jean-Luis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée, both widowed, explore their bond through their respective kids, the camera delights in their blossoming relationship, lingering adoringly on her complex, enchanted, enchanting expressions. This is one of several scenes suggesting the improvisation that Lelouch encouraged.
Pausing to wallow in the gorgeous leap of a minor 9th that opens the melody in the instrumental version of Plus fort que nous, here are Nicole Croisille et Pierre Barouh (Anouk’s real husband at the time) singing it live in 1969, with exquisite touches on accordion (Francis Lai himself!) and piano:
And Barouh with À l’ombre de nous—again with tasteful keyboard commentaries:
Stimulated by the 1851 Great Exhibition in London and the 1889 Exposition universelle in Paris, I was interested to read
Angela Kang, Musical chinoiserie (PhD thesis, University of Nottingham, 2012).
Among composers she discusses are Purcell, Debussy, Puccini, and Stravinsky; but here I’d like to continue my series on Mahler by reflecting on his possible exposure to Chinese music. While the “imitations” of Tang poems by Hans Bethge that Mahler used for Das Lied von der Erde have been much discussed, Kang discusses the oboe lines of Der Abschied (see also here):
One can ponder whether Mahler may have heard the reedy timbre of the traditional and popular Chinese instrument called the sheng on the wax cylinders given to him by his friend Paul Hammerschlag. M. De La Grange gives an account of an event which may have strongly influenced the Chinese dimension in Das Lied:
During the last fortnight [of the summer of 1908] Mahler had a visit [at Toblach] from Paul Hammerschlag and his wife. Later, the banker recalled two memories of that summer, particularly one of a lively discussion during which, to his great surprise, Mahler suddenly threw up his table napkin so that all the guests could see that he had slashed it with his knife as it was on his knees. Another, more interesting, concerned some cylinders of Chinese music, recorded in China itself, that Paul Hammerschlag had bought in Vienna in a shop near the cathedral, and that he had given to Mahler at that time. This makes it quite certain that Mahler had not only read, but actually heard music from that far- off land before composing Das Lied.
There is no evidence with regard to what types of music the cylinders contained, and whether it was instrumental, percussive, or vocal music. And one can only speculate whether it was popular, celebratory, religious, or funeral-like.
Indeed, I don’t know why Kang chooses the sheng mouth-organ here, rather than the guanzi oboe that accompanies it in north Chinese ritual; after all, Mahler didn’t feature the organum characteristic of the sheng. Still, it makes an equally intriguing speculation. Unfortunately, neither the shengguan ensemble nor the deafening shawm bands make likely candidates: several scholars have been studying early recordings of Chinese music, but most were vocal, with chamber ensemble of plucked and bowed strings. Had Mahler heard early recordings of the solo qin zither, such as those among the wax cylinders made by Herbert Müller in China between 1903 and 1913, that meditative sound-world might have appealed more to him.
Anyway, Kang goes on:
Traditional Chinese music tended to be categorized according to social function. Aside from the possible influence of the wax cylinders, there was also research being undertaken in Vienna on non-Western techniques (as in other major centres of musical creativity). This was no doubt as a result of current fashion, thinking, and growing academic interest in sinology and ethnomusicology as we have already witnessed in France in chapter 3. Guido Adler’s article “Uber Heterophonie” (1908) is a prime example of the fascination with and thinking about non-Western traditions that was common in Vienna at that time. Adler writes:
Although there is as yet a very incomplete, and largely unreliable body of exotic music extant, it is, nevertheless, possible—thanks to reliable material on music for several voices, whether vocal or instrumental—clearly to distinguish one kind of treatment that is essentially different from both homophony and polyphony. We may then sum up the main corpus of the kind of exotic music just referred to as follows: the voices begin in unison, in harmony or in octaves, only to separate from one another subsequently. The main theme is paraphrased and distorted, so that secondary and transitional melodies arise to join the main theme, now consonantly, now dissonantly. This paraphrasing and distorting, then, lead one to suppose that the instrumentalists and singers wanted to add something of their own, whether in individual deviatory sounds or merely in grace notes. But these deviations soon give the impression that the instrumentalist or singer has only unconsciously deviated from the right path, that the deviation is merely a coincidence, either because the performers have had a mental aberration or because they do not consider these middle sections worthy of their attention. As at the beginning, the voices then approach the end almost invariably in unison, or in a regular parallel movement. This kind of movement of several voices is the main branch, even the stem, of heterophony.
Today Adler’s comments hardly stand up. Anyway, I wonder if anyone can now find further clues to those wax cylinders. Still, whatever sounds they captured, I doubt that they were the ethereal transcendent tones of Mahler’s imagination. However timeless anyone might suppose Chinese music to be, he was seeking neither to reproduce the Chinese music of his own time nor to recreate that of the Tang. So in all, any precise links with actual Chinese soundscapes remain elusive; like Bethge’s poems, his fantasy of the Mystic East is uppermost—which is fine by me.
All the same, how I wish I could have introduced Mahler, and Berlioz—not to mention Bach—to the exquisite shengguan ensemble of the Li family Daoists, who only managed to perform in France and Germany long after they were gone.
I’m grateful to Vanley Burke’s recent Desert island discs for opening my ears to this fantastic archive compilation from 1956 in the ever-stimulating Smithsonian Folkways series:
Always showing their African origins, the tracks of the kumina magico-religious cult, as well as the Revival Zion and Pukkumina Christian cults, are particularly fascinating—further explored on an earlier album, Jamaican cult music (1954).
There’s plenty of material here to help us consider diverse ways of using the voice—and percussion—to communicate with mortals and gods. And as ever, the soundscape should lead us to explore the changing society.
The unflattering views on Chinese music expressed by Berlioz have been much cited. He may have been an iconoclast within his own culture, but it would be asking too much to expect his horizons to transcend the limited aesthetics of his day.
In The Cambridge companion to Ravel, Robert Orledge cites Berlioz’s comments on hearing Chinese musicians at the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in London in 1851—only a few years after the Opium Wars:
The melody, which was altogether grotesque and atrocious, finished on the tonic, like our most undistinguished sentimental songs [!]; it never moved out of the original tonality or mode. […] Nevertheless, the ludicrous melody was quite discernible, and one could have written it down in case of real need [!].
And as Orledge comments, his conclusion, after listening to a wider range of exotic musicians, was that
Chinese and Indian music would be similar to ours if it existed [WTF]; but that, musically speaking, these nations are still plunged in a state of benighted barbarianism and childish ignorance where only a few vague and feeble instincts are dimly discernible; that, moreover, the Orientals call music what we should style cacophony, and that for them, as for Macbeth’s witches, foul is fair.
Another passage has been translated thus:
As for the Chinaman’s voice, I have never heard anything so strange in my life—hideous snorts, and groans, very much like the sounds dogs make, when they wake up, stretch their paws and yawn with an effort.
A PLEASING addition has been made to the Chinese Collection, consisting of a Chinese Lady, named Pwan-ye-Koo, with small lotus-feet only 2½ inches in length, a Chinese professor of music, his two children (a boy and a girl), the femme de chambre of the lady, and an interpreter. The children are gay, lively, and intelligent, the lady herself agreeable and interesting, and the gentleman civil and obliging. A Chinese concert forms part of the entertainment: the lady Pwan-ye-Koo singing a Chinese air or two, accompanied by the professor, who likewise treats the public with an exhibition of his vocal powers. The group is one that has much to commend it: it is picturesque and peculiar, and presents an image in high relief of the native manners of a Chinese family. The conduct of the domestic blended the humble and the familiar in a significant manner; and there was an air of freedom, and a sense of mutual obligation manifested in the whole party, calculated to make a favourable impression on the spectator.
Still, if we read the full passage, Berlioz did at least make an effort. Further to A French letter, here’s some more language practice [sections between asterisks translated above]:
A propos de cantatrice, j’ai enfin satisfait le désir que j’avais d’entendre la fameuse Chinoise, the small-footed lady (la dame au petit pied), comme l’appelaient les affiches et les réclames anglaises. L’intérêt de cette audition était pour moi dans la question relative aux divisions de la gamme et à la tonalité des Chinois. Je voulais savoir si, comme tant de gens l’on dit et écrit, elles sont différentes des nôtres. Or, d’après l’expérience assez concluante que je viens de faire, selon moi, il n’en est rien. Voici ce que j’ai entendu. La famille chinoise, composée de deux femmes, deux hommes et deux enfans, était assise immobile sur un petit théâtre dans le salon de la Chinese house, à Albert gate. La séance s’est ouverte par une chanson en dix ou douze couplets, chantée par le maître de musique, avec accompagnement d’un petit instrument à quatre cordes de métal, du genre de nos guitares, et dont il jouait avec un bout de cuir ou de bois, remplaçant le bec de plumes dont on se sert en Europe pour attaquer les cordes de la mandoline. Le manche de l’instrument est divisé en compartimens, marqués par des sillets de plus en plus rapprochés au fur et à mesure qu’ils se rapprochent de la caisse sonore, absolument comme le manche de nos guitares. L’un des derniers sillets, par l’inhabileté du facteur, a été mal posé, et donne un son un peu trop haut, toujours comme sur nos guitares quand elles sont mal faites. Mais cette division n’en produit pas moins des résultats entièrement conformes à ceux de notre gamme. Quant à l’union du chant et de l’accompagnement, elle est de telle nature, qu’on en doit conclure que ce Chinois-là du moins n’a pas la plus légère idée de l’harmonie. *L’air (grotesque et abominable de tout point) finit sur la tonique, ainsi que la plus vulgaire de nos romances, et ne module pas, c’est-à-dire (car ce mot est généralement mal compris des personnes qui ne savent pas la musique) ne sort pas de la tonalité ni du mode indiqués dès le commencement.* L’accompagnement consiste en un dessin rhythmique assez vif et toujours le même, exécuté par la mandoline, et qui s’accorde fort peu ou pas du tout avec les notes de la voix. Le plus atroce de la chose, c’est que la jeune femme (la [small-]footed lady), pour accroître le charme de cet étrange concert, et sans tenir compte le moins du monde de ce que fait entendre son savant maître, s’obstine à gratter avec ses ongles les cordes d’un autre instrument de la même nature, mais au manche plus long, sans jouer quoi que ce soit de mélodieux ou d’harmonieux. Elle imite ainsi un enfant qui, placé dans un salon où l’on exécute un morceau de musique, s’amuserait à frapper à tort et à travers sur le clavier d’un piano sans en savoir jouer. C’est, en un mot, une chanson accompagnée d’un petit charivari instrumental. Pour la voix du chanteur, rien d’aussi étrange n’avait encore frappé mon oreille: *figurez-vous des notes nasales, gutturales, gémissantes, hideuses, que je comparerai, sans trop d’exagération, aux sons que laissent échapper les chiens quand, après un long sommeil, ils bâillent avec effort en étendant leurs membres.* Néanmoins, la burlesque mélodie était fort perceptible, et je porterai un jour du papier réglé chez les Chinois pour la noter et en enrichir votre album. Telle était la première partie du concert.
A la seconde, les rôles ont été intervertis ; la jeune femme a chanté, et son maître l’a accompagnée sur la flûte. Cette fois l’accompagnement ne produisait aucune discordance; la flûte suivait la voix à l’unisson tout simplement. Cette flûte, à peu près semblable à la nôtre, n’en diffère que par sa plus grande longueur, par son bout supérieur qui reste ouvert, et par l’embouchure qui se trouve percée à peu près vers le milieu du tube, au lieu d’être située, comme chez nous, vers le haut de l’instrument. Du reste, le son en est assez doux, passablement juste, c’est-à-dire passablement faux, et l’exécutant n’a rien fait entendre qui n’appartînt entièrement au système tonal et à la gamme que nous employons. La jeune femme est douée d’une voix céleste, si on la compare à celle de son maître. C’est un mezzo soprano, assez semblable par le timbre au contralto d’un jeune garçon dont l’âge approche de l’adolescence et dont la voix va muer. Elle chante assez bien, toujours comparativement. On croit entendre une de nos cuisinières de province chantant: «Pierre! mon ami Pierre», en lavant sa vaisselle. Sa mélodie, dont la tonalité est bien déterminée, je le répète, et ne contient ni quarts ni demi-quarts de ton, mais les plus simples de nos successions diatoniques, est un peu moins extravagante que la romance du chanteur. C’est tellement tricornu néanmoins, d’un rhythme si insaisissable par son étrangeté, qu’elle me donnera sans doute beaucoup de peine à la fixer exactement sur le papier pour vous en faire hommage. Mais j’y mettrai le temps, et, en profitant bien des leçons que me donnera le chien d’un boulanger voisin de ma demeure, je veux, à mon retour à Paris, vous régaler d’un concert chinois de premier ordre. Bien entendu que je ne prends point cette exhibition pour un exemple de l’état réel du chant dans l’Empire Céleste, malgré la qualité de la jeune femme, qualité des plus excellentes, à en croire l’orateur directeur de la troupe, parlant passablement l’anglais. Les dames de qualité de Canton ou de Pékin, qui se contentent de chanter chez elles et ne viennent point chez nous se montrer en public pour un shilling, doivent, je le suppose, être supérieures à celle-ci presque autant que Mme la comtesse Rossi est supérieure à nos Esmeralda de carrefours.
D’autant plus que la jeune lady n’est peut-être point si small-footed qu’elle veut bien le faire croire, et que son pied, marque distinctive des femmes des hautes classes, pourrait bien être un pied naturel, très plébéien, à en juger par le soin qu’elle mettait à n’en laisser voir que la pointe.
Mais je penche fort à regarder cette épreuve comme décisive en ce qui concerne la division de la gamme et le sentiment de la tonalité chez les Orientaux. Je croirai, seulement quand je l’aurai entendu, que des êtres humains puissent, sur une gamme divisée par quarts de ton, produire autre chose que des gémissemens dignes des concerts nocturnes des chats amoureux. Les Arabes y sont parvenus, au dire de quelques savans; ils ont pour cet art inqualifiable une théorie complète. Je parie que les savans qui ont écrit ces belles choses ne savent rien de notre musique, ou du moins n’en ont qu’un sentiment confus et peu développé. Que la théorie des Arabes existe, cela est fort possible, mais elle n’ôte rien à l’horreur de ce qu’ils font en la mettant en pratique.
La musique des Indiens de l’Orient doit fort peu différer de celle des Chinois, si l’on en juge par les instrumens envoyés par l’Inde à l’Exposition universelle de Londres. Cette collection se compose, 10 d’un grand nombre de mandolines à quatre et à trois cordes, quelques unes même n’en ont qu’une; leur manche est divisé par des sillets comme chez les Chinois; les unes sont de petite dimension, d’autres ont une longueur démesurée; 20 d’une multitude de gros et de petits tambours en forme de tonnelets, et dont le son ressemble à celui qu’on produit en frappant avec les doigts sur la calotte d’un chapeau; 30 d’un instrument à vent à anche double, de l’espèce de nos hautbois; 40 de flûtes traversières exactement semblables à celles du musicien chinois; 50 d’une trompette énorme et grossièrement exécutée sur un patron qui n’offre avec celui des trompettes européennes que d’insignifiantes différences; 60 de plusieurs petits instrumens à archet, dont le son aigre et faible doit rappeler les petits violons de sapin qu’on fait chez nous pour les enfans; 70 d’une espèce de tympanon dont les cordes tendues sur une longue caisse paraissent devoir être frappées par des baguettes; 80 d’une petite harpe à dix ou douze cordes, assez semblables aux harpes thébaines dont les bas-reliefs égyptiens nous ont fait connaître la forme, et enfin d’une grande roue chargée de gongs ou tamtams de petites dimensions, dont le bruit, quand elle est mise en mouvement, a le même charme que celui des gros grelots attachés sur le cou et la tête des chevaux de routiers. Je conclus, pour finir, que *les Chinois et les Indiens auraient une musique semblable à la nôtre, s’ils en avaient une; mais qu’ils sont encore à cet égard plongés dans les ténèbres les plus profondes de la barbarie ou dans une ignorance enfantine où se décèlent à peine quelques vagues et impuissans instincts.*
Detail: Hee Sing.
Also part of the Great Exhibition was a Chinese junk moored on the Thames—occasion for the curious case of the “fake Chinese mandarin” Hee Sing, who appears in a painting depicting the retinue of the royal family. In Berlioz’s Les soirées de l’orchestre (21st evening, including a variant of the above) he was even more underwhelmed by the soiréesmusicales etdansantes given onboard by the sailors:
Maintenant écoutez, messieurs, la description des soirées musicales et dansantes que donnent les matelots chinois sur la jonque qu’ils ont amenée dans la Tamise; et croyez-moi si vous le pouvez.
Ici, après le premier mouvement d’horreur dont on ne peut se défendre, l’hilarité vous gagne, et il faut rire, mais rire à se tordre, à en perdre le sens. J’ai vu les dames anglaises finir par tomber pâmées sur le pont du navire céleste ; telle est la force irrésistible de cet art oriental. L’orchestre se compose d’un grand tam-tam, d’un petit tam-tam, d’une paire de cymbales, d’une espèce de calotte de bois ou de grande sébile placée sur un trépied et que l’on frappe avec deux baguettes, d’un instrument à vent assez semblable à une noix de coco, dans lequel on souffle tout simplement, et qui fait : Hou ! hou ! en hurlant ; et enfin d’un violon chinois. Mais quel violon ! C’est un tube de gros bambou long de six pouces, dans lequel est planté une tige de bois très-mince et long d’un pied et demi à peu près, de manière à figurer assez bien un marteau creux dont le manche serait fiché près de la tête du maillet au lieu de l’être au milieu de sa masse. Deux fines cordes de soie sont tendues, n’importe comment, du bout supérieur du manche à la tête du maillet. Entre ces deux cordes, légèrement tordues l’une sur l’autre, passent les crins d’un fabuleux archet qui est ainsi forcé, quand on le pousse ou le tire, de faire vibrer les deux cordes à la fois [sic]. Ces deux cordes sont discordantes entre elles, et le son qui en résulte est affreux. Néanmoins, le Paganini chinois, avec un sérieux digne du succès qu’il obtient, tenant son instrument appuyé sur le genou, emploie les doigts de la main gauche sur le haut de la double corde à en varier les intonations, ainsi que cela se pratique pour jouer du violoncelle, mais sans observer toutefois aucune division relative aux tons, demi-tons, ou à quelque intervalle que ce soit. Il produit ainsi une série continue de grincements, de miaulements faibles, qui donnent l’idée des vagissements de l’enfant nouveau-né d’une goule et d’un vampire.
Dans les tutti, le charivari des tam-tams, des cymbales, du violon et de la noix de coco est plus ou moins furieux, selon que l’homme à la sébile (qui du reste ferait un excellent timbalier), accélère ou ralentit le roulement de ses baguettes sur la calotte de bois. Quelquefois même, à un signe de ce virtuose remplissant à la fois les fonctions de chef d’orchestre, de timbalier et de chanteur, l’orchestre s’arrête un instant, et, après un court silence, frappe bien d’aplomb un seul coup. Le violon seul vagit toujours. Le chant passe successivement du chef d’orchestre à l’un de ses musiciens, en forme de dialogue; ces deux hommes employant la voix de tête, entremêlée de quelques notes de la voix de poitrine ou plutôt de la voix d’estomac, semblent réciter quelque légende célèbre de leur pays. Peut-être chantent-ils un hymne à leur dieu Bouddah, d’ont la statue aux quatorze bras orne l’intérieur de la grand’chambre du navire.
Je n’essaierai pas de vous dépeindre ces cris de chacal, ces râles d’agonisant, ces gloussements de dindon, au milieu lesquels malgré mon extrême attention, il ne m’a été possible de découvrir que quatre notes appréciables (ré, mi, si, sol). Je dirai seulement qu’il faut reconnaître la supériorité de la small-footed Lady et de son maître de musique. Evidemment les chanteurs de la maison chinoise sont des artistes, et ceux de la jonque ne sont que des mauvais amateurs. Quant à la danse de ces hommes étranges, elle est digne de leur musique. Jamais d’aussi hideuses contorsions n’avaient frappé mes regards. On croit voir une troupe de diables se tordant, grimaçant, bondissant, au sifflement de tous les reptiles, au mugissement de tous les monstres, au fracas métallique de tous les tridents et de toutes les chaudières de l’enfer… On me persuadera difficilement que le peuple chinois ne soit pas fou…
[For a fine English version, see Berlioz, translated Barzun, Evenings with the orchestra (Chicago, 1956/1999 edition), pp.246–250.]
At the evening performance the queer old craft is lighted up with festoons of coloured lamps—a sort of miniature [missing] hall, and in the midst stands an open orchestra, in which four or five instrumentalists (“barbarians,” not Chinese) prepare the ear for the extraordinary combination of sounds which is to follow. Nothing can exceed the gravity of the “celestials,” as they take their position in the midst of the assembly on the main-deck, and proceed to fright the ear with gong and drum, and cymbal and agonizing cat-gut: the leader beating time with a stake upon a sort of tin saucepan-lid supported on three legs. Then the vocalization! The extraordinary squeaking duet, half plaintive, half comic, between the said leader (who is a sort of Costa and Mario rolled into one) and a younger aspirant in the background—what can possibly exceed its harrowing and ludicrous effect? Nothing except that impromptu feline discourse which we sometimes hear on house-tops at the dead of night.
The concert being concluded amidst the breathless silence of an astonished auditory, the war demonstrations and feats of arms then commence and these are certainly no less extraordinary than what has gone before. The first set consists of a set of grotesque posturing, in which the performers disport themselves severely one after the other, each succeeding one striving to outdo the other in the wildness and extravagance of his gesture—flying and leaping round the deck, thrusting out the arms right and left, threatening, retreating, &c. the musicians all the time keep up a terrific clang.
Next come a series of somewhat similar performances with long poles or lances, this scene closing with a set-to between two performers, which we have endeavored to embody in our engraving. Swords are also introduced and brandished about in the same manner, which, if intended to give any idea of the military science of the Chinese, shows them to be very far behind any other known nation in the world in that respect. One young hero, in the course of his “war demonstrations,” afforded great amusement every now and then, particularly after some very startling efforts at cut and thrust, by throwing himself down, and turning a somersault over his shield. When we left, the “barbarian” orchestra was about to strike up again, and dancing, it was said, was about to commence, but we did not wait for it.
For a recent French recreation, see here. Indeed, both the family and the junk had already appeared for P.T. Barnum’s Chinese museum: see Krystyn R. Moon, Yellowface: creating the Chinese in American popular music and performance, 1850s–1920s (2005), pp.62–6. For another portrait of the family, see here.
Hector’s Napoleon impression always brought the house down.
Ironically, in reviews by Berlioz’s contemporaries of his own new works he was hoist on his own petard—using rather similar vocabulary, as if taking revenge on behalf of the Chinese. Here are just a few among an embarras de richesse, cited in Slominsky’s wonderful Lexicon of musical invective, pp.57–61:
His rare melodies are deprived of meter and rhythm; and his harmony, a bizare assemblage of sounds, not easily blended, does not always merit the name. I believe that what M. Berlioz writes does not belong to the art which I cusomarily regard as music, and I have the complete certainty that he lacks the prerequisites of this art.
Berlioz, musically speaking, is a lunatic; a classical composer only in Paris, the great city of quacks. His music is simply and undisguisedly nonsense.
M. Berlioz is utterly incapable of producing a complete phrase of any kind. When, on rare occasions, some glimpse of a tiune makes its appearance, it is cut off at the edges and twisted about in so unusual and unnatural a fashion as to give one the idea of a mangled and mutilated body, rather than a thing of fair proportions. Moreover, the little tune that seems to exist in M. Berlioz is of so decidely vulgar a character as to exclude the possibility of our supposing him possessed of a shadow of feeling.
I can compare Le Carneval romain by Berlioz to nothing but the caperings and gibberings of a big baboon, over-excited by a dose of alcoholic stimulus.
For Berlioz’s prophetic word-painting of a 1960s’ curry-house menu, cliquez ici; and for his evocation of furniture removal, ici. For Mahler’s vision of the mystic East, see here; and for Cantonese music in post-war London, here.
After Keats and Chapman (“F. Huehl and his Monet are soon parted”) and some fine successors here and here, recently I’ve also spotted online:
A Tale of two cities was originally serialised in two Midlands local papers.
It was the Bicester Times, it was the Worcester Times.*
That one may go back to Frank Muir and Denis Norden in My word!. This is harder to date:
Why did the anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon only drink herbal tea?
Because he believed that proper tea is theft.
Which leads us to this story:
A tourist visiting Liverpool goes down the pub for a pint. The barman notices he’s underwhelmed by the beer, so he tells him,
“Y’ know, mate, you really should try our most distinctive local bevvy.”
“Oh really—so what’s that then?”
“Well, there’s this tea made from koala bears, like—used to be dead popular round ‘ere, it did! I only know one place you can find it These Days,** though.”
The barman directs him to a tiny hovel down by the riverbank. So he knocks and goes in. Inside he makes out an old crone stirring a boiling cauldron.
“Um, hello,” he asks her, “I’m told your tea is highly unusual—might I possibly have a tasting?”
Cackling, she starts to ladle him out a helping of the steaming broth. As he takes a look in the cauldron, he sees it’s full of hair, sinews, and an eyeball floating at the top.
“Um, do you have a strainer?”
Offended, she retorts haughtily,
“I’ll have you know, The Koala Tea of Mersey*** is not Strained!”
For more Shakespeare, see here; for a host of Chinese puns, here.
* If any laowai or non-nationals find this difficult, then try Alan Watts’s limerick in n.2 here.
** “These Days”: to be enunciated in such as way as to allude to “Just Can’t Get the Staff, Nowadays”.
*** Most online versions use the (notional) Australian town of Mercy, but this one (which I heard as early as the 1970s) is more surreal.
The conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970), based on the 1951 novel by Alberto Moravia, is a most captivating film, visually sumptuous—with the gorgeous Jean-Louis Trintignant, Stefania Sandrelli, and Dominique Sanda bringing out the interplay of political and sexual themes.
As with Bertolucci’s other films like Last tango in Paris, music and dance play a crucial role. The soundtrack (by Georges Delerue) has the ambivalence of Cinema paradiso and Twin peaks. As with all the best film music, just the opening theme transports us instantly into the story’s troubled world. Here’s the complete film:
The female radio band near the opening (from 4.12) reminds me of Franco Cerri’s recollections in my post on Chet in Italy.
By way of comparison with the final dance, here’s the equivalent scene in Last Tango in Paris:
As this review observes, Last tango is not about sex but about pain.
Made in France four years after the disillusionment of 1968’s failures, it’s about characters who can’t see past their own emotional and psychological problems, who are solipsistic in the extreme, locking themselves away from everything they can’t face in the outside world.
Pauline Kael’s famous rave review, comparing the film’s importance to that of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, is critiqued in this retrospective, a particularly cogent view of the on-set abuse of Maria Schneider—a revelation that has severely marred the film’s image, which is regrettable since it’s a work in which deep emotions and anguish are conveyed. Among innumerable other reviews, Last tango is also the subject of this excellent 2011 discussion. See also under Godard.
* * *
Bertolucci died in November 2018 (see also here), soon after Nic Roeg (for an assessment of both together, see here). Many more films to revisit, not least The sheltering sky (based, indeed, on the great novel by Paul Bowles, though he was less than keen on the result), The dreamers, and the epic 1900. And Godard died in 2022.
His name is reminiscent of a ritual title for a Daoist priest—like that of Zhang Daoling, handed down in the Li family (my book, pp.11–12; film, from 2.48):
Ancestral Master,
Heavenly Worthy of the Grand Ritual
who Supports the Teachings of the Three Heavens,
Assists the Numinous,
and Embodies the Way.
Actually, that’s quite a succinct one: appellations to the Daoist gods, recited (mercifully fast, by contrast with the slow hymns) in the course of rituals, are lengthy (see.e.g. here), and ritual titles still handed down today to household Daoist priests in south China upon their ordination may be a mouthful too.
John Cleese’s interview technique is perhaps a less probing model for the fieldworker than that of Peter Cook.
All this long before Stewart Lee made a whole art form out of trying the audience’s patience.
The great David Sedaris (now with his own tag in the sidebar) wrote this piece as early as 2008 in the run-up to the US election, but has recycled it since—and never has it been more apposite than now:
The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
Some years ago—sorry, that should read “More Years Ago than I Care to Remember”—I found myself on the courtyard outside SOAS at midday, where whoM [pedant—Ed.] should I bump into but the erudite Tim Barrett—Emeritus* Professor of East Asian History, no less. [1]
Though we had known each other at Cambridge Even More Years Ago than I etc., we hadn’t met up for some time. So it was a welcome opportunity to swap notes, updating myself on Tim’s encyclopaedic knowledge of Tang studies and imperial Chinese religion while outlining my more grubby work in the field—disciplines that don’t always correlate clearly.
While we were immersed in our arcane chat, a queue began to form behind me—as if for the services of Johnny the shoe shine boy. Fortuitously, every day at lunchtime impoverished students line up for the free vegetarian curries handed out by Hare Krishna acolytes, often well before the food trolley arrives. Looking up, we found that the queue was growing rapidly—they must have mistaken us for down-and-out early birds waiting to cadge a square meal.
This didn’t occur to me at the time—rather, I was impressed that Tim’s wisdom on the Wonders of the Mystic East was in such great demand.
He will appreciate this link to the popular Tang poetic genre On visiting a hermit and not finding him in. Indeed, in plain clothes he does bear a passing resemblance to Hanshan (cf. Li Manshan and Andy Capp). He has been dubbed “Bodhisattva of the Plastic Bag”—though more recent ecological concerns have tended to make him favour cloth or even hemp.
* Unlike Peter Cooke, I’ve Got the Latin, so I note smugly that emeritus seems to mean “without merit” (cf. this appraisal of a recording of medieval music). Continuing the religious theme, here’s Catch-22:
“Chaplain, I once studied Latin. I think it’s only fair to warn you of that before I ask my next question. Doesn’t the word Anabaptist simply mean that you’re not a baptist?”
[1] Apart from Tim’s voluminous published ouevre, he and Frances Wood make a mellifluous Brian and Stewie double-act in the China coverage of Melvyn Bragg’s BBC Radio 4 series In our time. By 2023 a charming series of chats appeared on YouTube (1, 2, 3), suggesting his broad vision.
Just as I was immersing myself in Afghan singing, how nostalgic the other day to hear the limpid slow movement of Haydn’s G major piano trio on Private passions (for the first of several posts inspired by the series, see here).
Today I wonder how we got into such early recordings, like the late Beethoven of the Busch quartet. They meant a lot to me—but I can’t quite say what: this was considerably before I became involved in early music, or began to care about changing performance styles. Indeed, in those days I was more interested in the politics of the Tang court than in the experiences of our more recent European forebears.
But now I think of the trio’s London audiences between the wars (my great-aunt Edith Miles was losing her hearing in 1927), and wartime audiences in Britain and Germany (doubtless the appalling Hans Frank loved the trio). The group had been working together since 1906; but Casals, a firm opponent of franquismo, later broke with Cortot for the latter’s collaboration with the Nazi occupation of France.
Cortot’s 1932 recording of the break in Brandenburg 5 is also great, but early renditions of baroque music may not always suit modern tastes, like Mengelberg’s 1939 Matthew passion.
Haydn dedicated the set of trios to Rebecca Schroeter, Scottish widow of an immigrant German musician (for a taste of late-18th-century mores, see here). So we might further try to imagine cosmopolitan London in 1795 (for “das Land ohne Musik“, see David Wyn Jones ed., Music in eighteenth-century Britain, and for London concert life, here; cf. audiences of Tang-dynasty Chang’an, enriched by Central Asian musics—”They come over ‘ere…“).
I don’t know how to fill in the 19th-century lacuna, but despite all the vast social changes since 1795, maybe Haydn’s day isn’t so distant: we seem to have a photo of Mozart’s widow, and Casals was born in 1876.
Haydn’s trio is named after its “gypsy” finale all’ongarese, which we can enjoy without wondering too much about his exposure to folk music—it is what it is (cf. Norman Lebrecht’s ambitious claim for Mahler 4). From where we are in 2018, all three movements are delightful, but it’s the slow movement (in the lustrous key of E major, like Bruckner 7 and north Chinese ritual suites for wind ensemble!) that continues to enchant me. As the players lovingly pass the tunes around (the second one is even more spellbinding!) above pearly triplets, via Cortot’s simple translucent links, they explore them like tiny jewelled caskets, deep in meditation.
Stephen Jones: a blog 