Monthly Archives: August 2023

Bach at the Proms!

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Bach Prom

Back from Istanbul in time for the “late-night” * Bach Prom with Iestyn Davies and the English Concert directed by Kristian Bezuidenhout from the harpsichord.

Listen here!!!

Between the typical Proms fare of monumental romantic symphonies, the Royal Albert Hall also make a wonderful setting to tune in to the more intimate sound-world of early music—even Bach’s suites for unaccompanied violin and cello have featured in the large hall.

The ensemble projects a classy image, with Iestyn Davies occupying his own niche in the counter-tenor superstar gallery carved by singers such as Alfred Deller, Michael Chance, and Andreas Scholl. Kristian Bezuidenhout, a versatile early keyboard specialist, is clearly supportive of the band’s creativity. The upper strings stood to play, adding another layer of communicative energy.

I’m always fascinated to imagine the original Leipzig congregation, steeped in Lutheranism—Bach’s new music must have amazed them every week. By contrast, today our sound-world is infinitely more diverse (and secular), subsuming Mahler, film music, rock, and ringtones; and the way we rejoice in Bach is quite different too.

The programme notes cite an 1898 review of a Bach Prom, praising music that was probably “new for the very large majority of those present, for it is doubtful if it had ever been played before in the metropolis”.

The intensity of the occasion was enhanced by Davies singing without a score—Bach’s own counter-tenor (clearly outstanding, though we don’t know who he was) must have used one, having only got hold of it a few days earlier, with the copyist’s ink barely dry. The music was entirely new to performers and audience—and they would be lucky if they ever heard it again, whereas today both performers and audience can also listen to a range of recordings. Tom Foster relished Bach’s solo organ writing, while oboes enriched the string sound.

The group played two cantatas first performed in Leipzig in 1726:

  • Cantata 170, Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust (Bach cantatas site, and wiki), for the sixth Sunday after Trinity (for those of us who keep track of seasonal rituals), “longing for a virtuous death as a release from the world’s swarming violence and death”.

BWV 170 score

The cantata plunges us right into a magical world—John Eliot Gardiner’s thoughts on Bach are always insightful (notes here):

The opening aria is pure enchantment, a warm, luxuriant dance in 6/8 [?!] in D. You can almost feel Bach’s benign smile hovering over this music, an evocation of Himmelseintracht, “the harmony of heaven”. One of those ineffable Bach melodies that lodges itself in one’s aural memory, it takes a whole bar to get going but once launched, seems as though it will never stop (actually it is only eight bars long, but the effect is never-ending). Yet this expansive melody given to oboe d’amore and first violin acquires its beauty and its mood of pastoral serenity only as a consequence of its harmonic underpinning. The gently lapping quavers in the lower strings are slurred in threes, suggestive of “bow vibrato”, or what the French referred to as balancement, while the downward-tending bass line sounds as if it might be the first statement of a “ground”—in other words, the beginning of a pattern that will repeat itself as though in a loop. Well, it does recur, but not strictly or altogether predictably. With Lehms’ text in front of him, Bach is searching for ways to insist on spiritual peace as the goal of life, and for patterns that will allow him to make passing references to sin and physical frailty.

Here Gardiner accompanies Michael Chance in the first and final arias:

The slow aria Wie jammern mich doch die verkehrten Herzen with organ, is another miracle—the lack of continuo “symbolic of the lack of direction in the lives of those who ignore the word of God”. The violins and violas play a middle-register line in in unison—Gardiner again:

This special texture, known as bassettchen, is one that we have encountered on a number of occasions this year when Bach decides that a special mood needs to be created and removes the traditional support of basso continuo. He uses it symbolically in reference to Jesus (someone not requiring “support”), protecting the faithful from the consequences of sin (as in Aus Liebe, the soprano aria from the St Matthew Passion), and at the other extreme to serial offenders, as in that other marvellous soprano aria, Wir zittern und wanken from BWV105, or (as here) to those “perverted hearts” who have (literally) lost the ground under their feet in their rejection of God. The aria is written from the standpoint of a passive witness to the “Satanic scheming” of the backsliders as they “rejoice in revenge and hate”, so that one can sense the observing singer’s anxiety in the fragmented rhythm of the bassettchen line. 

Here’s the complete cantata with Gustav Leonhardt and Paul Esswood in 1985:

Just as astounding is

  • Cantata 35, Geist und Seele wird verwirret (“Spirit and soul become confused”: Bach cantatas site, and wiki), for the twelfth Sunday after Trinity, six weeks later!

healing deaf
Léonard Gaultier, Christ healing a deaf man (1579).
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

In two parts, to be performed before and after the sermon, the Gospel for the day was St Mark’s account of Jesus curing a deaf mute (cf. my stammering series—where’s Jesus when you need him, eh?). Again with obbligato organ and oboes, the cantata expresses both the “sorrow-laden yoke of pain” and a sense of celebration. Here’s Gardiner during the 2000 Bach Cantata Pilgrimage (notes here):

Between the two cantatas, the third Brandenburg concerto was exhilarating—like the Duke Ellington band, as I keep saying. How ungrateful was Bach’s patron!

All Bach cantatas are miraculous—for more, see The ritual calendar, and other posts in my Bach series; see also Bach and the oboe. For meretricious, woke, yet fascinating speculations on the colour scheme of early keyboards, see Black and white.

* In the sense of befuddled octogenarians nodding off over a cup of Ovaltine. I mean, 10.15 is a perfectly normal starting time for a regular evening concert in Andalucia…

The Black Wave

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In the same vein as my penchant for subtitled black-and-white movies with amateur actors [zzzzz—Ed.], you can’t beat 1960s’ Soviet-bloc satire, as Stewart Lee would say.

Hole in the soul
Source.

I dimly recall being bemused by W.R.: mysteries of the organism (Dušan Makavejev, 1971) at university, but now, thanks to a recent review by Peter Bradshaw, I’ve been relishing the same director’s 1967 Yugoslavian pulp classic

Makavejev (1932–­2019) was a “satirist, political subversive and eroto-evangelist, a performance artist of ex-Yugoslavia’s cinematic Black Wave”. In exile from 1973, his early films are inevitably compared with Godard.

Love affair poster

The doomed love affair is between switchboard operator Izabela and Muslim rodent sanitation inspector Ahmed (don’t you love it when you can type a sentence like that?). The film

is about politics, sex and death. Or mostly sex and death. Or mostly sex. Sex is the great rebellion in this film, and the great warning. Izabela is killed by a male figure who for all his own unorthodoxy and boozy indiscipline is a submissive follower of the party line. Sex can be an apolitical form of conflict; it does not explicitly exist in opposition to the government, but the erotic mode is revolutionary by its very nature. This film is a short, sharp shock of exhilaration and artistic dissent.

It’s full of incongruous, stimulating disjunctions. The drama is interlaced with patriotic songs. Izabela may be a “tease”, but Makavejev teases us too. While the seduction is going on, what starts as a scene-setting pan to a TV newsreel of the desecration of churches gets us involved, threatening to distract us from the bedroom action. The camera lingers on bodies, alive and dead.

Love affair scene

Roger Ebert’s original review is excellent too, with the fine sentence

He eventually does not exactly hurl her into a deep well.

Makavejev’s first movie Man is not a bird (1965) is on YouTube too:

And his 1994 self-portrait Hole in the soul, for the BBC (fine review here), is no less wacky:

* * *

Also part of the Black wave was I even met happy gypsies (Aleksandar Petrović, 1966; cf. this post, under “Roma”). This upload of the complete film, and these two excerpts, are alas without English subtitles:

Note also the Prague Spring (Closely observed trains, Kundera), Punk in Croatia, and other posts listed under Life behind the Iron Curtain.

Futbol in Turkey, then and now

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Early history (a pitch raid, Greek pre-eminence, Black Stockings FC);
Mesut Özil supports the Uyghurs; and a clerical tournament

Football was introduced to the Ottoman empire by English residents of Saloniki in 1875, the teams consisting of Greek, Armenian, and English players (wiki, and here). Over in Smyrna, the numinously-named Orpheus Music and Sports Club was founded in 1890.

James La Fontaine, who developed football in İzmir [Smyrna], moved to Istanbul in 1889, and the game started to become popular there. Expats and non-Muslim Ottoman citizens played in the city’s Kadıköy and Moda districts.

The first document on football in the Ottoman archives is a police report dated Nov. 23, 1890:

Around 20-25 English youth, under the supervision of the sons of Monsieur Witek, a Moda resident, gathered at Kuşdili and played with a ball made of a tire in an encircled area. The play area had two doors at both ends. This incident was investigated and it was understood that they were playing charity matches for schools. After the game, those who won would donate the prize money to schools. The English will do exercises every Saturday until the final match is played. The Üsküdar Lieutenant Governorship is looking into when the real match will be played, how much money will be collected and which schools it will be given to. It is necessary to take precautions and report developments to the police so nothing improper happens.

Black Stockings team
Black Stockings players (“purportedly”), 1901. Source.

The first club with Turkish players was Black Stockings FC in Kadiköy (wiki—more in the Turkish version), abruptly dissolved after their first and only match on 26th October 1901 when the players were arrested after the Sultan’s detective Ali Şamil Bey and police raided the pitch, suspicious that the purpose of the team was to organise a coup against the Sultan. Fuat Hüsnü Kayacan (right; source), the first ever Turkish football player, was a soldier on assignment in İzmir in 1898.

Elpis 1905
Elpis FC, Greek team in Istanbul, active 1904–1910. Image from 1905.

The first competitive league was founded in 1904. Galatasaray, the first Turkish football club, was founded in 1905, Fenerbahçe in 1907, Beşiktaş in 1910. But as an impressive TRT article shows, through the years preceding the 1923 population expulsions, Istanbul teams were dominated by Greek players (cf. Songs of Asia Minor). Significantly, the Turkish national team was formed in 1923.

Turkish team 1929
The Turkish national team, 1929.

* * *

Ozil

I’m still a great fan of Mesut Özil (“floating, vulnerable muse”, a descendant of Gastarbeiter) from his days at Arsenal. Apart from his wizardry on the pitch, in 2019, still some time before China’s suppression of the Uyghurs became a widely-subscribed international cause, his principled protest prompted the club to disassociate from his comments. The position of Uyghur refugees in Turkey remains precarious.

* * *

One weekend in Istanbul recently we were invited to a sports ground in a village along the Anatolian shoreline, where a brilliant initiative is under way: an amateur football tournament consisting of forty 7-a-side teams of religious clerics from all over the metropolis (cf. Inter-faith ping-pong). The matches are timed to take place between the dawn and noon calls to prayer.

This weekly social event makes a great opportunity for them all to meet up, beyond formal, intermittent symposiums. They are young and jovial, the matches competitive; we saw one yellow card, and a muezzin later bemoaned the unjust award of a penalty against his team.

Our host, the enterprising organiser of the league, mischievously introduced me as former Real Madrid striker Stefan (none other than the legendary Alfredo Di Stéfano). Fortunately I wasn’t called upon to demonstrate the legendary dribbling skills of my heyday—but it evoked my dream in which I was called up for the England squad (aged 70) and couldn’t work out how to change into the team strip or make my way onto the pitch.

Happy to learn that we are keen on a good ezan, some of the finest muezzin in Istanbul invited us to come and hear them. We also met a standup comedian there who serves worthy social and political causes; even as the Turkish economy collapses, Istanbul seems full of people doing good things. Afterwards we meandered through the lovely shoreline villages for brunch in a fine commune-run restaurant in Beykoz.

My sojourns in Istanbul have been blessed with such wonderful encounters, like attending Alevi cem rituals, visiting Sufi tekkes, a master craftsman, and an instrument maker, and getting to know our Kuzguncuk neighbours…

* * *

Note also women’s football in Turkey since 1954—again starting in İzmir—and its current thriving scene. Cf. Daoist ritual and football and other posts under A sporting medley: ritual and gender.

Iran: Women, Life, Freedom in film

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Cinema is one of the great strengths of Iranian culture (wiki; playlist of films with English subtitles). I’ve admired works such as Samira Makhmalbaf’s The apple and Blackboards, as well as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (a graphic novel turned into an animated film), turning the spotlight on the plight of women under a repressive regime (see under Iranian lives).

Iran protest
Source.

The current “Women, Life, Freedom” movement is the latest and boldest in the decades-long struggles of Iranian women (and men) to overcome oppression (see e.g. here). The issue has receded from world headlines in recent months, but it mustn’t.

In these struggles, the world of cinema has long played an important role.

What makes this uprising so powerful is that women and cinema are at the heart of it. Both speak to the Iranian people across all social and ethnic divides and both target the heart of the regime’s anti-modern ideology.

By imprisoning the figureheads of Iranian cinema, the regime neither succeeded in silencing them, nor in intimidating the protesters. It even made them more vocal. Filmmakers both in and outside prison have made statements in support of the uprising and have amplified the voice of the protesters. Realising that the detainment of filmmakers had empowered them even more, the regime decided to grant them amnesty. Yet, this amnesty again put the global spotlight back on the filmmakers, who used this as another opportunity to garner worldwide support for the Iranian uprising.

Circle poster

Looking back, the kind of film I’ve been looking for is

The film was shot in 35 days over a 53-day period. As usual, Panahi used non-professional actors, * with the exceptions of Fatemeh Naghavi and Fereshteh Sadre Orafaiy. He saw the lead actress, Nargess Mamizadeh, in a park one day and immediately offered her the role. The film opens with one long, handheld shot that lasts over three minutes and took thirteen attempts to achieve. Panahi adopted a different camera style to depict each of the four main protagonists’ lives. For the first, an idealistic woman he used a handheld camera. For the second woman, the camera is mounted on a constantly moving dolly. The third woman’s story is told at night in darker outside, and the camera is static with pans and tight close-ups. For the last, least optimistic, both the camera and the woman are completely immobile and very little sound is used.

Earlier film of Panahi include The white balloon (1995) and Offside (2006, in six parts starting here, without subtitles). He has been arrested several times, most recently in 2022.

* * *

Milani
Tahmineh Milani. Source.

Among woman directors (both in Iran and in exile), note Tahmineh Milani (b.1960). She was briefly imprisoned for her film The hidden half (2001) before pressure from international directors brought her release. Here’s a scene:

and a short feature:

I’m also keen to see her film The fifth reaction (2003), as well as Marzieh Meshkini‘s The day I became a woman—here’s a trailer:

Further leads welcome.

See also New musics in Iran and other posts under West/Central Asia: a roundup. Cf. the secular theocracy of China, where independent directors such as Ai Xiaoming and Wang Bin, Jiang Nengjie and Xu Tong manage to make challenging films.

* Predictably, as a fully paid-up member of the Guardian-reading tofu-eating wokerati, I’m a sucker for foreign-language films with amateur actors. But seriously though folks, much as I admire Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, we just can’t help being aware that they’re Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep—which, you must admit, is a serious flaw. I dream of a global ban on actors ever appearing in more than one film, but I do realise it might not go down so well.

Kuzguncuk 1955

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Modifying the image of inter-ethnic harmony

1955 cover

Since I’ve been spending so much time in the neighbourhood of Kuzguncuk on the Anatolian shore of Istanbul, I’ve followed up Amy Mills’ fine study by reading

  • Emircan Kürküt, Anti-Greek riots of 6-7 September 1955 and their effects in Istanbul’s Kuzguncuk quarter (2019).

Impressively airing delicate topics, Kürküt uses a range of archival and published sources (notably the work of Nedret Ebcim and Dilek Güven), and like Mills, he’s sensitive to the locals’ own narratives, seeing through the harmonious image. A barely-revised edition of his MA thesis, its English could have done with more editorial polishing, both for sense and fluency of reading.

Since the 198os, media images of Kuzguncuk have congealed, milking the nostalgic fantasy of ethnic minorities—Greeks, Armenians, Jews—happily coexisting with their Muslim neighbours, even though waves of Anatolian migrants have almost entirely replaced those minorities since the 1960s.

The pogroms of 6–7 September 1955 are well known in the central Pera/Beyoğlu area, on the European side of Istanbul; but a polite veil is commonly drawn over how the events unfolded in Kuzguncuk.

Rioting in Beyoğlu. Source.

Though the chapter devoted specifically to the 1955 riots in Kuzguncuk provides only limited further detail, it’s a diachronic survey, from the millet system of the Ottoman empire right through to the (Muslim) character of Kuzguncuk and Istanbul today—both before 1955 (Armenian genocide, the 1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange, the “Citizen, speak Turkish!” campaign from 1928, Thrace pogroms of 1934, the 1941 conscription of non-Muslims, the 1942 capital tax, the 1948 foundation of the state of Israel), and after (the 1964 deportations, the Cyprus military operation in 1974).

1955 map
Source: wiki.

Kürküt outlines studies of the 1955 pogrom in Istanbul, with Turkish security forces transporting people from Anatolia to take part in looting and rioting. As he notes, beyond Pera/Beyoğlu, the substantial non-Muslim populations of neighbourhoods (see map) such as Yeşilköy, Kumkapı, Moda, Fatih, Çengelköy, Ortaköy, Bebek, Eyüp, Kuzguncuk; even the Princes Islands suffered. This 2006 thesis on the long process of homogenization in Cihangir mahalle is cogent, with detailed material.

Focusing on Kuzguncuk, the multi-ethnic discourse was mobilised to deny the effects of the pogrom there. Most residents are aware that the neighbourhood was formerly dominated by non-Muslims, but rarely care to interrogate how the demographic changed. Different faith groups did indeed part in each other’s life-cycle and calendrical events; but such multi-ethnic communities were common throughout Turkey, and they weren’t necessarily a showcase for tolerance.

Population figures aren’t easy to interpret, but a 1933 census of Kuzguncuk shows that 90% of dwellers were non-Muslim. Armenians seem to have become more numerous than Jews until the eve of the 1915 genocide. While migration in the early 1960s brought Muslims from the Black Sea region, non-Muslims were emigrating to Israel, Greece, the USA, Armenia, and Australia..

As to the 1955 pogrom in Kuzguncuk, Kürküt finds archival sources to supplement often-contradictory memories. We find two common narratives (also heard in other neighbourhoods—and in conflict zones around the world): that the violence was instigated by gangs arriving from outside (notably Üsküdar just along the shore), by ship or in trucks; and that Muslims protected their non-Muslim neighbours. But while there were indeed noble instances of the latter, other Muslims helped the gangs.

Another strategy adopted by locals was to downplay the events by comparison with the violence on the European side of Istanbul. But Kuzguncuk houses, shops, and religious buildings were vandalised—displaying a Turkish flag did not necessarily save a building from attack. Rioters set fire to the Greek church, and though the blaze was soon extinguished, the building was desecrated and looted; locals protected the priest.

Four Muslim residents of Kuzguncuk were arrested. Compensation from an aid committee set up by the Istanbul Chamber of Commerce was inadequate. As elsewhere in Istanbul, non-Muslim groups had already suffered from earlier Turkifying measures; some residents claimed that they continued to coexist, but the pogrom inevitably soured relations. Non-Muslims had already been leaving before 1955, and would continue to do so until 1974; by then, those who remained were greatly outnumbered by Muslim immigrants from the Black Sea region.

Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the elimination of the economic power of non-Muslims not just by direct violence but by appropriating their properties, notably with the 1942 Wealth (Capital) Tax but also in various other ways. Here Kürküt focuses on the architectural spaces of Kuzguncuk: religious buildings and schools, houses and workplaces. As Black Sea migrants moved in, gecekondu shanty dwellings encroached on former non-Muslim sites such as the Jewish cemetery on the hill. Both the new migrants and the state colluded in the gradual expropriation. Street names were being Turkified as early as the 1930s. Naturally, shops and restaurants (hitherto owned by the non-Muslim majority) were now taken over by a new Muslim majority. Conversely, any impact from the “Citizen, speak Turkish!” campaigns largely affected people’s behaviour outside the village, such as on ferries.

Following Mills, Kürküt unpacks the founding of the Kuzguncuk mosque in 1952, right next to the Armenian church. Whereas this is paraded by the nostalgists as a beacon of inter-faith tolerance, the very fact that no mosque was needed until 1952 confirms how very few Muslims had been living there, and symbolises their growing presence.

While the 1964 deportation of Greeks took place without violence in Kuzguncuk, the Greek church and cemetery—as well as Armenian schools—were further attacked during the 1974 Cyprus military operation, which also consolidated nationalist feelings among the new Muslim majority.

With the nostalgic fantasy already firmly embedded, when Güngör Dilmen’s play Kuzguncuk Türküsü (Ballad of Kuzguncuk) was staged at the State Theatre in 2009 (excerpts; see e.g. this positive review), locals took exception to his candid portrayal of the 1955 pogrom—see e.g. rebuttals here and here.

Confounding the media portrayal of the neighbourhood, Kürküt concludes,

Kuzguncuk was not special as a result of its tolerance culture, peaceful relationship between non-Muslims and Muslims and multi-cultural property. In other words, Kuzguncuk was Turkified and homogenized by the Turkish Republic throughout history just like other non-Muslim neighbourhoods.

Similarly, I might add, there’s nothing surprising in the reluctance of communities around the world to dwell on a traumatic past. Not all genocides around the world can be publicly commemorated; perhaps the best we can hope is for that history to be publicly acknowledged (as in Germany or the USA) and not suppressed by the state (as in China). In Turkey, more liberal media would be able to counteract state propaganda. But it’s not even so rare for the silence about Kuzguncuk’s past to accompany a rosy media image.

Bill Evans: Blue in green

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“The Bill Evans of jazz”—Robert Offergeld

Kind of blue session
Source.

The Miles Davis album Kind of blue (1959) is so iconic that every note has come to seem sacrosanct. But we need to remind ourselves that jazz is improvised; now that covers a lot of ground (as the ever-perceptive Bruno Nettl explains), but no two performances will sound the same—as when Bach and Mozart played, and as with almost any folk music you care to mention. More still than Messiaen’s Messe de la Pentecôte, or Gershwin’s Rhapsody in blue, fossilised by the exigencies of Western Art Music, jazz recordings are merely a snapshot capturing one moment in the life of an ever-changing organism.

The sessions for Kind of blue were almost entirely unrehearsed—Evans opens his liner notes with a tribute to the spontaneity of Japanese painting. * I featured Blue in green, the album’s most meditative track, in my page on Ravel, whose harmonies it very much evokes—how I wish Ravel could have heard it! Its material seems to belong more to Bill Evans than to Miles (who claimed the royalties). Still, Miles appreciated him immensely:

Bill had this quiet fire that I loved on piano. The way he approached it, the sound he got was like crystal notes or sparkling water cascading down from some clear waterfall. I had to change the way the band sounded again for Bill’s style by playing different tunes, softer ones at first.

Anyway, to return to improvisation, we can gently rattle the cage we’ve entered of our own accord by tuning in to other versions of Blue in green, like the three 1960 takes featuring Evans’s “first” trio with Scott LaFaro on bass and Paul Motian on drums—starting with this:

(Take 2 here, 3 here).

Indeed, even before Kind of blue, a resemblance can be heard in Evans’ recording of Alone together with Chet Baker:

On this collaboration, Michael Quinn wrote:

While both were peerless masters of their instruments and shared a rich, evocatively lyrical playing style that bordered beguilingly on the introspective, Baker and Evans were polar opposites when it came to the discipline of performance.

Though both were heroin addicts, the musically-trained Evans never let it interfere with his meticulously precise flights of invention while the self-taught Baker became increasingly erratic and inconsistent.

* * *

Evans trio

You can’t have enough Bill Evans… As we bask in the archive on YouTube, it’s worth consulting Ted Gioia’s informed  selection. Here’s Peace piece, 1958:

After his brief but formative time with Miles, he went on to form his “first” trio—here they are live at Birdland NYC in 1960:

And Gloria’s step, live at the Village Vanguard in 1961:

Grieving at the early death of Scott LaFaro, Evans formed a trio with Chuck Israels on bass and Larry Bunker on drums. Here’s their 1965 London appearance on Jazz 625 (ending with Waltz for Debby, cf. the a cappella version here):

Nardis also features in my post on the eponymous Istanbul jazz club—in this 1970 gig Evans plays it with Eddie Gómez on bass and Marty Morell on drums:

In 1966 he played a moving extended solo in memory of his father:

His solo album Alone again (1975):

His 1977 album Together again with Tony Bennett includes You must believe in spring! And listen to his version of My favorite things here.

As one might surmise, not least from the physical similarity of their styles at the keyboard, Bill Evans seems to have been Glenn Gould’s favourite jazz pianist. Glenn O’Brien reports,

Glenn Gould said of Evans, “He’s the Scriabin of jazz”, to which the classical music critic Robert Offergeld said, “More to the point, Bill Evans was the Bill Evans of jazz. He could produce a broader tonal color in 32 measures than Glenn in his whole career.”

Discuss…

The intense meditation of his style is still evident in Reflections in D, live in Montreux, 1978:

See also Middle-period Miles, The spiritual path of John Coltrane (whom Evans, as well as Yusuf Lateef, turned on to the wisdom of Krishnamurti), Lives in jazz, and many posts in my jazz roundup.

* In interview Evans commented:

I was interested in Zen long before the big boom. I found out about it just after I got out of the army in 1954. A friend of mine had met Aldous Huxley while crossing from England, and Huxley told him that Zen was worth investigating. I’d been looking into philosophy generally so I decided to see what Zen had to say. But literature on it was almost impossible to find. Finally, I was able to locate some material at the Philosophical library in Manhattan. Now you can get the stuff in any drugstore.

But, like a Zen monk, he didn’t make a meal of it:

Actually, I’m not interested in Zen that much, as a philosophy, nor in joining any movements. I don’t pretend to understand it. I just find it comforting. And very similar to jazz. Like jazz, you can’t explain it to anyone without losing the experience.

For more on the Zen boom, see e.g. The magic of the Zen bookshop, Zen and haiku: R.H. Blyth, The great Gary Snyder, More East-West gurus, J.D. Salinger, and even The Celibidache mystique; cf. Daoism and standup. 

Water and ritual

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flood
Source.

The current floods in north China are severely affecting counties on the Hebei plain such as Zhuozhou, Laishui, Bazhou, Xiongxian, and Anxin, whose villages were our fieldbase through the 1990s (see under Local ritual).

1930 donors' list, South Gaoluo
1930 donors’ list, South Gaoluo.

While the climate crisis intensifies, faith in the protection of the gods has diminished under the assaults of Maoism and capitalism. Those villages relatively unaffected by natural disasters traditionally attributed such immunity to the divine blessings afforded by their ritual association—as in Gaoluo, where the floods of 1917 and 1963 are still part of popular memory. The 1963 flood came during a brief cultural restoration between famine and the Cultural Revolution (see Cai An’s story here).

But whether or not villages still have active ritual associations, the current flooding is devastating people’s lives and livelihoods. Political decisions made to protect key economic areas (e.g. here, here) have also led to protests.

* * *

Conversely, the main affliction of north China is drought—as Li Manshan observes at the start of our film, “nine droughts every ten years”. For this the folk recourse for villagers was to make collective processions to pray for rain. Hence the importance of the Dragon Kings and their temples (note images on the website of Hannibal Taubes), and related deities like Elder Hu in north Shanxi.

SB rain DVD 2
Rain procession, Shaanbei.

As in much of the third world, for the fieldworker it is a salutary reminder of the precarity of life to wash one’s hands and face over the day in a single shared enamel bowl of water fetched from the well.

Fetching Water, Zhuanlou village funeral, Yanggao 1991.

shui in LQ shishi manual

Shishi quanbu Bestowing Food manual, copied by Li Qing,
segment on water from line 5, to be recited.

qushui placard

Template of memorial for Fetching Water to Release the Deceased, no longer displayed.
From Li Qing’s volume of miscellaneous ritual documents.

As to ritual, Fetching Water (qushui 取水) or Inviting Water (qingshui 請水) segments are common throughout China, for temple fairs, domestic blessings, and funerals, parading to a nearby well or stream. One might expect them to be especially meaningful in the drought-prone north. Inviting Water is common in temple ritual and in south China (e.g. Hunan), but I have hardly heard of it in northern folk ritual, where Fetching Water is standard (for Yanggao in Shanxi, see my film Li Manshan, from 41.06, and the DVD Doing Things; see also Daoist priests of the Li family, pp.67–8, 209–10).

The text on the right (“I declare, sprinkling the ritual water of the three lumens”) is a shuowen introit preceding the Gātha to Water on return to the soul hall.

Though running water has gradually been reaching more villages since the 1980s, such rituals continue to be a significant component of the whole symbolic repertoire of ritual sequences, perpetuating historical memory.

For water, religion, and politics in barren Gansu, see The temple of memories.

Healing with violin in the heel of Italy

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I’ve featured taranta in several posts, starting with the 1959 fieldwork of Ernesto De Martino (The land of remorse) and Diego Carpitella in Salento. Reading the new Italian translation of Klaus Voswinckel‘s novel Tarantella oder Hölderlin tanzt (2016), set in the same region, inspires me to seek further leads.

Klaus cover

Klaus’s story, a synthesis of his lifelong immersion in literature, music, film, and his devotion to the folk culture of Salento, is animated both by the apparition of authors past (Hölderlin, Novalis, Beckett, Celan) and by living characters in the taranta scene—such as Titina, Maristella, the musicians of Officina Zoè, and notably the singing and charisma of the great Enza Pagliara (to whom I paid homage here). I can’t attempt to convey the depths of the novel, but it’s permeated with evocative accounts of musicking in local communities around Salento, as well as reflections on the changing modern history of taranta.

* * *

It’s important to bring to life the individuality of folk performers immortalised in seemingly anonymous old photos and recordings. Biography has become a popular thread in ethnomusicology; the intersecting of social change and people’s life stories is a major theme of my work on Gaoluo and Daoist ritual.

While the black-and-white images from De Martino and Carpitella’s fieldwork are renowned, I had never sought more on the stories of the musicians shown there. Klaus’s novel led me to the great healer-violinist Luigi Stifani [1] (1914–2000). 

taranta

Resident in Nardò, Mesciu [Maestro] Gigi started training to become a barber from the age of 8. At first learning guitar and mandolin, he then bought a violin for 2 1⁄2 lire—paying in instalments! By age 14 he was taking part in taranta healing sessions, shutting up shop whenever he was needed to attend a domestic exorcism. [2] Even after the 1970s, as taranta was relocating to the public stage, he was still occasionally required to play on behalf of the mildly possessed.

Over the years following his initial encounters with De Martino and Carpitella, Stifani maintained contacts with scholars and the media, his barbershop becoming a kind of centre for taranta studies (see e.g. this series of interviews from 1998). His own diaries are published in Elenco del tarantolismo: biografie delle tarantolate di Nardò e della provincia e fuori provincia and Io al Santo ci credo.

Among Stifani’s notes is this passage, cited by Klaus:

1959, Rita di Surano, bitten by a black spider, 22 years old. She danced for eight days continuously in the month of August. Her dance was rather swift, but always on the ground. We began playing from 9 in the morning and stopped at 6 in the evening. It was only that she couldn’t see any colours while she was dancing—she only wanted to see black. Indeed, her relatives and neighbours had to wear black. And if someone didn’t, she would chase them and rip off their shirt.

The violin doesn’t always feature alongside the tamburello, organetto, and chitarra, but its invigorating energy can play a crucial role in healing.

Martino scoreTranscription by Diego Carpitella.

Besides the startling 1959 films (in my original post), here’s the famous 1967 stage performance in Milan in the Sentite buona gente series, curated by Diego Carpitella and Roberto Leydi:

Playlists such as this show his influence on later generations, even as the social function of taranta shifted—such as Mauro Durante:

Mesciu Gigi died on 28th June 2000, the very day of the festa of San Paolo (patron saint of the tarantate), so memorably described in The land of remorse.

* * *

As media awareness of taranta grew, two feature films appeared:

La sposa di San Paolo (Gabriella Rosaleva, 1989)

Pizzicata (Edoardo Winspeare, 1996):

For my notes on recent staged performances, click here and here. See also Italy: folk musicking; Sardinian chronicles; Bernard Lortat-Jacob at 80. Cf. Spirit mediums in China, and Shamans in the two Koreas.

* * *

What survives the transition from domestic ritual to the world-music stage is the essential somatic energy of life: voice, percussion, dance, gathering together. But as with flamenco or ahouach, while musicians can bring vigour to the spectacle of grand festivals, nothing can compare to the ambience of a smaller-scale communal event where the distance between performers and audience dissolves.

[1] Note this article on the useful site of Vincenzo Santoro, as well as Inchingolo Ruggiero, Luigi Stifani e la Pizzica Tarantata (2003), and articles by Luigi Chiriatti and Roberto Raheli in Luisa Del Giudice and Nancy van Deusen (eds), Performing ecstasies: music, dance, and ritual in the Mediterranean (2005). See also e.g. here, and wiki.

[2] Stifani later gave recollections of 29 cases from 1928 until 1972—only a partial list (he also wrote “I have cured over fifty”); and his was just one of numerous such groups in the region.

You couldn’t make it up

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Hyde cover

Political satire may be impotent (as in Peter Cook’s “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War”), but apart from making us Guardian-reading tofu-eating wokerati feel smug, it affords us a modicum of sanity. On both sides of the pond, this has been a golden age for satirists, whose only problem is that no matter how exaggerated their fantasies, they couldn’t possibly dream up anything so absurd as the behaviour of the politicians themselves.

The Guardian is blessed with a kind of Brian-and-Stewie double act in the form of John Crace and Marina Hyde. The latter’s columns since 2016 have been collected in the handsome tome

  • Marina Hyde, What just happened? Dispatches from turbulent times (2022; 512 pages).

In her Introduction she addresses the reader:

You have chosen to be reminded that the path to the sunlit uplands goes right through shit creek.

And she reflects:

I know some people like to think of column-writing as an art, but for me, it’s definitely not. It’s a trade. You get up, you write something to fill a space, and you hope it’s not one of your worst shots and that readers enjoy it. Maybe some people are out there imagining they’re writing the first draft of history, but I feel like I’m just sticking a pin in a moment.

While it’s topical to read her dispatches weekly, it’s also salient to digest them en masse under loosely-grouped themes, or rather characters: not just politicians, but

a queen, various princes and duchesses, celebrities, wicked advisers, reality TV monsters, billionaires, philanthropists, fauxlanthropists, Hollywood sex offenders, judges, media barons, populists, police officers, and all kinds of other heroes and villains.

Ms Hyde is happy to be “the journalistic equivalent of a chocolate digestive or a packet of salt and vinegar crisps”, interspersing showbiz and sport with politics and always thinking associatively (“for me the reflexive way of making sense of a lot of things is by using references to other things”). But beyond the dazzling stylistic brilliance of her satire, many columns evince her genuine passion about events where levity is unthinkable, such as the murder of Jo Cox and the Manchester Arena bombing.

It’s all there—Brexit, Covid and Partygate, with the Orange Baby taking a relatively cameo role. Will our grandchildren ever believe any of this, or will it be eclipsed by duplicities and iniquities as yet unimaginable? Copious columns of Ms Hyde excoriate the Tories floundering over Brexit and its “opportunities”, from Theresa May (“the Florence Foster Jenkins of politics”) to the arch-villain BoJo, “matinee idol of the Tory shires”, “the blond black hole”,

journalist, novelist, Churchill biographer, politician, urban planner, diplomat. At this stage in Boris Johnson’s storied career we have to ask: is there anything he CAN do?

I’ve already featured the classic scene in Outnumbered where a visiting German student refuses to believe that “Boris” could possibly be a real politician (see note here). Ms Hyde’s epithets for him are magnificent:

not so much a statesman as an Oxfam donation bag torn open by a fox

this radioactive haystack, this Frankenstein assemblage of all the rejected personality disorders of the minor Greek gods

puts the “I am” into iambic pentameter

lying, hypocritical degenerate

looks like Chucky if he’d borrowed a suit for a court appearance, or a Yewtree version of Worzel Gummidge, or what would happen if you started making Margaret Rutherford out of papier maché but got bored halfway through

and

The level of self-congratulation with which he produces a phrase like “tricephalous monster” marks him out as the classic stupid-person’s-idea-of-a-clever-person, but among the faithful it is undeniable that some of his most recycled lines still bring the house down. And the lovely thing is, he’s never buried in the rubble.

Ms Hyde is incisive on the way “Boris” stokes up Islamophobia. And from October 2021:

For pretty much the entire pandemic, right up until about 10 minutes ago, Johnson has been the teacher who wants to be cool. You know the type—messes his hair up and calls you “mate”. High-fives you when you get a right answer but claims that, in many ways, there are no wrong answers. Tells you to call him by his first name. Deals with early speculative breaches in discipline by announcing he’s not going to send you to the headmaster, mate, because he comes at this stuff from different angles. Tells you to rip out the introduction to your pandemic textbooks.

Insists he’s the same as you guys and totally gets what you’re going through, in fact he actually feels it more deeply. Claims to have been expelled from three schools as a teen. Says he hates teaching because he’s “about freedom”. Rides a dirt bike. Raps Cardi B. Chaperones a school trip where 47 pupils die.

And his Rasputin, the éminence grise Dominic Cummings,

shiftily meeting the camera’s gaze with the same defensive sneer you’d see on the proprietor of a holiday caravan park who had just been released on police bail after a fatal gas explosion thought to have been caused by poor maintenance,

whose intrepid research trip to Barnard Castle, at a time when the feckless riff-raff were just lounging around on their own at home, is yet another priceless gift to satirists.

And then there’s the Haunted Pencil, “someone [Boris] would unquestionably have pitied mercilessly at school”, giving him a patrician endorsement:

“Two years ago, in the Conservative Party leadership campaign, I supported Boris Johnson, because I thought he would deliver Brexit extraordinarily well”, Rees-Mogg intoned, suggesting he has inherited all his father’s gifts of prophecy. “I haven’t seen anything that would cause me to change my mind on that.” Not anything?! He should have gone to MonocleSavers.

Among many classic reproaches to his absurd, sinister shtick is this.

Further sections are devoted to “Big Guys: from street harassers to Supreme Court judges”, Billionaires, and the Royal Family. Ms Hyde’s sports columns are acerbic too, such as “Pity the poor man who’s had the Women’s World Cup shoved down his throat”,

at the expense of one of the four great civil rights questions of our era: 1) When are we getting a White History Month? 2) When is International Men’s Day? 3) Isn’t it time we had Straight Pride? and 4) Can you imagine how sexist people would say it was if we had a men’s World Cup? […]

Ways that it can be shoved down his throat include “being on TV” and “being on a website he normally looks at”.

And Oh No, he’s Being Branded Sexist!

No one more than me wants to help the guy whose chief point about the 2019 World Cup is: “I would so much rather watch parks football on a Sunday morning”. I would also rather he did this.

She pays homage to Marcus Rashford, “worth a hundred ministers”, with his initiative for free school meals; and to the emotional maturity of the England men’s football team after the 2020 Euros, “in stark contrast to that of the prime minister and government”:

It is, on every level, absurd that it should feel socially necessary for footballers barely out of their teens to pen missives to the nation apologising for missing a penalty, but not for a government to even acknowledge vast and lethal mistakes, much less say sorry for them.

In the section on still more recent débacles (“12 parties, three prime ministers, and a war”), she deplores the shameful failure of the “government” to help refugees from Ukraine—or indeed (one might add), refugees from anywhere, or to help anyone ever, except themselves. And I’ve already cited her riposte to the rabid critics of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.

Indexes can give a succinct, drôle flavour of a book’s tone; the index here is entertaining in itself, while somewhat more restrained than those of Paula Clarke Bain, or my own draft index for Nicolas Robertson’s mind-blowing anagram tales. The substantial entry for “Johnson, Boris” includes sub-headings such as

banal psychopathy
dishonesty
self-love
and death of shame
farming sunlit uplands
fridge-hiding
…

See also my roundup of posts on Tory iniquity.

The art of emoji

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Emoji zzzAmong all the New-Fangled media that are making us feel old, even I can’t help noticing that emoji are a really useful means of communicating (yup, I’m leaping right in there and being geriatically pedantic about the plural already—see also here and here).

emoji plural

Pictograms evolving out of emoticons, emoji have been constantly developing since the early smiley face 😀, and there’s a wealth of discussion (e.g. wiki; and articles such as this). A 2017 study found that

The French use heart emoji ❤️ the most. People in countries like Australia, France, and the Czech Republic used more happy emoji, while this was not so for people in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina, where people used more negative emoji in comparison to cultural hubs known for restraint and self-discipline, like Turkey, France and Russia. […]

Linguistically, emoji are used to indicate emotional state, they tend to be used more in positive communication. Some researchers believe emoji can be used for visual rhetoric. Emoji can be used to set emotional tone in messages. Emoji tend not to have their own meaning but act as a paralanguage adding meaning to text. Emoji can add clarity and credibility to text.

Psycholinguistically, the use of emoji differ depending on speaker and setting. Women use emoji more than men. Men use a wider variety of emoji. Women are more likely to use emoji in public communication than private communication [see also e.g. here].

Extraversion and agreeableness are positively correlated with emoji use, while neuroticism is negatively correlated. Emoji use differ between cultures: studies in terms of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory found that cultures with high power distance and tolerance to indulgence used more negative emojis, while those with high uncertainty avoidance, individualism, and long-term orientation use more positive emojis.

Succinct and expressive of nuance, emoji may be misunderstood according to the cultural and contextual interpretation of sender and recipient. Of course, verbal language (both written and spoken) can be misunderstood too, and it can also be a useful device; deliberate ambiguity is easier to detect in speech, which can provide more clues to your meaning.

emoji feminist

Feminism is also on the agenda (e.g. here, and here). And emoji designers are careful to reflect skin colours:

emoji skin

Emoji use by country has interesting but quite minor variations (see e.g. here, and here).

Emoji FWTOJ

The Face with Tears of Joy emoji has led the field since 2015. It

started to decline in popularity around the early 2020s, because Generation Z began to associate it with older generations, thus perceiving it as “uncool”. It has been predominately replaced by the sobbing emoji (😭) and skull emoji (💀) to express similar emotions. However, CNN did note that “sometimes teens and twenty-somethings use emoji—like the laughing crying one—ironically, such as by sending six or seven of them in a row to friends, to exaggerate it. But, overall, that emoji is a no-go”. Whilst the emoji has maintained its popularity with millennials, Generation Z utilises the emoji as a form of irony. Following the decrease in usage over Twitter, the Face with Tears of Joy emoji was briefly dethroned as the most popular Twitter emoji. Researchers speculate that this decrease in popularity is due to its over-saturation and overuse within online communities. In late 2021 and early 2022, however, it returned to the top of Twitter’s most popular emoji.

Victor Mair writes on its Chinese connotations here.

I’m fond of the angel emoji 😇, also ambiguous, ingenuous. And emoji will keep evolving. The brilliant, useful “HELLO?” (or “Like, Duh”—also “Like, hello?” and in reported speech, “I’m like, hello?”) doesn’t quite seem to be covered yet (see this post featuring the sinister Haunted Pencil 👻✏️, adding emoji for racist sexist Tory bigot)—one could use the basic Waving emoji 👋, the Face with Rolling Eyes 🙄, or something in this range 🤔🤭, but we surely need a more focused one.

After Moby Dick, I look forward to emoji versions of Pride and prejudice and the Matthew Passion.

The likes of The Haunted Pencil may tut, but like Popular Beat Combos and the telephone (see Staving off old age), it looks like emoji might really catch on. YAY!

💃  🍾