Monthly Archives: September 2023

A Hollywood roundtable

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March 1963
Leaders at the front of the march. Source.

Following the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on 28th August 1963, the United States Information Agency (USIA) broadcast a “Hollywood roundtable” (useful summary here), with Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston [hmm], * Sidney Poitier, Joseph Mankiewicz, James Baldwin, and moderator David Schoenbrun:

As a commentary observes:

The Hollywood Roundtable did not portray the United States as a perfect nation. Instead, the USIA used honesty and humility in an attempt to relate to foreign audiences. Throughout the film, the celebrities emphasised the nation’s faults while still promoting American values. Writer and director Joseph Mankiewicz perhaps put this best: “This is the only country in the Western world where this [the march] is possible, but also the only country where this is necessary.” (11.45)

The emphasis on hope and potential is another theme meant to lure foreign viewers to the American way of life. James Baldwin states, “No matter how bitter I become I always believed in the potential of this country. For the first time in our history, the nation has shown signs of dealing with this central problem.” (18.58)

When word spread that the government was broadcasting images of domestic inequality to foreign nations, many Americans were not pleased with USIA officials. Shortly after, Edward R. Murrow stepped down as USIA president and was replaced by Carl Rowan. At the time, this made Rowan the highest ranked African American in public office.

That such an articulate, enlightened debate was aired at the time seems all the more impressive today, with the media perilously dumbed down and Republicans renewing their energies in assaulting the rights of minorities and women. The March was a predecessor of later demonstrations leading up to those for George Floyd and for womens’ rights. Here’s a film of the March itself:

As Michael Thelwell of SNCC commented:

So it happened that Negro students from the South, some of whom still had unhealed bruises from the electric cattle prods which Southern police used to break up demonstrations, were recorded for the screens of the world portraying “American Democracy at Work”.

As in the Roundtable, women were conspicuously absent as speakers at the March. Gloria Richardson, Rosa Parks, and Lena Horne were escorted away from the podium before Martin Luther King’s speech. Women who were allowed to sing included Marian Anderson and Joan Baez; and here’s Mahalia Jackson singing How I got over and I’ve been buked and I’ve been scorned:

MLK dream
Martin Luther King delivering his I Have a Dream speech at the March.

For the tragic end of Martin Luther King, see Memphis 1968.

* The wiki article on Heston (under “Political views”) has a summary of his later conversion to racism and the NRA, ranting against Political Correctness.

The beauty of frisbee

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Frisbee
Source.

My sermon today is taken from the Gospel According to Steven Wright:

Today I was wondering, “why does a frisbee appear larger the closer it gets?”.
And then it hit me.

With builders still perfecting the house, we’ve had plenty of opportunities to retreat to the local park to play frisbee, recalling my distant youth—the beauty of frisbee on Mediterranean beaches by the water’s edge, like playing Bach or juggling.

The wiki article on frisbee begins charmingly:

Walter Frederick Morrison and his future wife Lucile had fun tossing a popcorn can lid after a Thanksgiving Day dinner in 1937.

The name frisbee became common from 1957, after a pie company.

As in all walks of life including music and religion, an impressive taxonomy has evolved, of throws ranging from the basic three to more advanced manoeuvres that are the preserve of the frisbee nerd, such as high- and low-release backhand, chicken wing, elevator pass, roller throw, scoober, wheeler, airbrush, pizza throw, paintbrush, bogo, and ninja…

Inevitably frisbee has been marshalled into a competitive sport (cf. Alexei Sayle) since the early 1970s; sadly, there’s even disc golf.

Flamenco at Jamboree!

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Just can’t seem to keep away from Jamboree at the moment. After the Kurdish party last week, the club hosted a flamenco evening with Leo Power accompanied by guitarist Ramon Ruiz, joined by dancer Alba Heredia Villalobos.

flamenco 1

Leo Power (website; YouTube)—based in Cádiz before settling in London—is a commanding presence on stage, while Ramon Ruiz (website; YouTube), guitarist of choice on the London flamenco scene, is a truly creative musician, his reflective, nuanced explorations balancing Leo’s more earthy, driven style. Here they are with Anita La Maltesa:

Emerging naturally from the cante was the passionate dancing of 19-year-old Alba Heredia— who, coming from a distinguished flamenco family in Jerez, has been dancing since she was a toddler.

Like Indian raga or Middle-Eastern maqam, flamenco is a miraculous microcosm. No longer aspiring to even a basic grasp of the palmas metres and rhythms, instead I just bask in the endless adaptability of the performers—the guitar harmonies and timbres, along with the singing, all urging the dancers to respond with the endlessly varied percussive barrage of hands and feet.

flamenco treeI may relish the anguish (aka “posturing, self-pitying machismo”) of the slower cante jondo genres, but as is clear from the great cantaores of yesteryear, lighter genres like bulerias and alegrias can also be intensely expressive.

On a rainy evening, the gig had a certain informality reminiscent of the juerga, with friends and aficionados among the small audience—clapping out the patterns, joining the musicians on stage towards the end for some festive dancing.

flamenco 2

Here’s Ramon in Granada with a gifted young local singer:

My flamenco series is based on the remarkable documentaries Rito y geografïa del cante; cf. Flamenco in Chiswick.

Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero

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Einsatz
A kneeling man staring into the camera as a member of Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen brings a gun to his head. Behind him, an assortment of men—Hitler Youth members, marching band musicians, off-duty rank-and-file, watch with anything between mild interest and boredom.

Amidst the current war, Channel 4’s recent documentary Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero (review here) makes a grim reminder of one of the most horrifying episodes in world history.

While the Nazi death camps have become an indelible image of inhumanity, it is far less well-known that more Jews were killed by execution than in the death camps; and that one out of four Jews who died in the Holocaust resided in what is the territory of Ukraine today.

Following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen (see e.g. here, and wiki) moved through the territories along the Eastern Front, committing open-air mass shootings, town to town, village to village. Beside Ukraine, Belarus and the Baltic states were also deeply scarred, their populations decimated. Commandants ordering the mass murders included monsters such as Friedrich Jeckeln.

The programme uses archive photos and footage, with commentary from well-informed scholars (and some survivors). It should lead us back to Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin, which I introduced at some length here.

The mass murders began at Kamianets-Podolskyi, on to Bila Tserkva and the notorious massacre on 29–30 September 1941 at Babi Yar ravine, near Kyiv, where 33,771 people were killed over two days. Many further executions took place at sites such as Lubny.

Babi Yar
Babi Yar.

Another appalling crime was the large-scale mass murder of Soviet POWs. War crimes trials took place in the Soviet Union as early as 1943.

For a roundup of posts on Ukraine—including its soundscapes—click here. Note Philippe Sands’ books East-West street and The Ratline, and the work of Anne Applebaum.

Kurdish culture in London

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gig with dancing
All images: Augusta.

Last week we went along to Jamboree, a lively little venue near King’s Cross, for an evening of Kurdish song—and dance—led by the singer Suna Alan (see e.g. here, and YouTube), with a band featuring bağlama plucked lute, guitar, and funky percussion, for an audience with a substantial Kurdish component.

The Kurdish/Alevi singer, now based in London, moved in early childhood with her family to Izmir (whose culture remains cosmopolitan despite the expulsion of the Greeks a century ago), and through her formative years she was imbued with the music of Kurdish dengbêj bards and Kurdish-Alevi laments. Alongside Kurdish folk songs, she sings Greek, Sephardic, Arabic, and Turkish songs; her set last week featured several Armenian ballads.

Suna Alan gig

While well aware that most of the audience had come to dance, she gave instructive spoken introductions to her slow ballads of suffering—often alluding to political persecution—that are at the heart of her message; but their intensity might have come across better had the audience listened with more attention. Online, I like her more intimate acoustic songs where she sings seated—here’s a session with Greek musicians (cf. Songs of Asia Minor):

The persecution of the Kurds within Turkey is illustrated by the fate of Suna Alan’s cousin İlhan Sami Çomak (b.1973; see e.g. here, and here). At Jamboree Suna sang for Nûdem Durak, jailed for 19 years for singing in Kurdish, and for all political prisoners:

I’m a white dove
I’m wandering outside of your window but I can’t see you
I’m a white dove
I’m flying over your walls, but I can’t reach you.

The door, the door, the door is also closed,
you are the prisoner/flower of freedom
The Ivy under the wall!
Raise your head, and sing a song

I’m a white dove
The friend of the Ivy in the prison.
Grow Ivy!
Through the concrete, through the prison walls …

Grow from the walls, raise your head to the sky
The ivy under the wall!
Raise your head, sing a song
Sing a song, Ivy
From that dark room to freedom!

Back at the gig, the climactic dancing, soon dispelling the taint of conga, displayed the vitality and energy of such communities.

And then, to my delight, in a seamless transition to the world of traditional festivity, a piercing dahol­–zurna drum-and-shawm duo showed up to inspire the dancers still more, with a caller leading the group singing—a truly joyous occasion.

Yet again I’m struck by the riches of London musical life, beyond the pop, jazz, and “classical” scenes: every night one could relish such events among communities from around the world (see e.g. Indian raga, flamenco—including Flamenco at Jamboree!).

For more on Kurdish culture, note the films of Yilmaz Güney, and several other posts under West/Central Asia: a roundup, such as Dilber Ay and Aynur. Suffering is a major theme of folk songs around the world (see e.g. Musics lost and found, and under A playlist of songs).

Maestros behaving badly

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JEG

Few “Great Artists” are angels. Occupational musicians around the world are prone to “deviating from behavioural norms”—not just those of lowly social status, or rank-and-file orchestral musos letting off steam on tour, but composers, maestros and prima donnas throwing their toys out of the pram.

After last month’s incident involving the “venerated” John Eliot Gardiner was exposed on Slippedisc, it soon went viral (e.g. here), making clickbait even for the tabloids. We riff-raff seem to derive particular pleasure from deflating authority figures; orchestral musicians, only too aware that maestros can be difficult, find a paltry safety valve in maestro-baiting.

Celi viola
Celibidache!

Setting forth from Norman Lebrecht’s stimulating The maestro myth, Michael Landor Brodeur has written a perceptive article in the Washington Post. With the age of the dictator largely over (he cites Solti, Reiner, Szell, Ormandy, Böhm, Toscanini—“bullies with batons”—do watch the “scary and fascinating” video clips of rehearsals here), recent decades have seen a general improvement in behaviour. As Richard Morrison wrote in The Times, “young conductors today tend to be well-schooled, well-mannered technocrats, good at their jobs but rarely making outrageous demands.”

JEG

While Gardiner is highly demanding, generally he is the soul of charm, most cordial with singers and players. Still, for musicians who have worked with him (and I played for the English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique for nearly two decades—see e.g. The Mary Celeste) the incident came as no surprise (see e.g. here). Brodeur cites this 2013 talk by Gardiner:

The article goes on:

Listen to him talk about that composer’s own “combative” personality and “deeply flawed” character. Listen to him rail against the “deplorable tendency” among biographers to omit this side of Bach, and in doing so, “imply that great music requires a great man and a great human being and a great personality to be behind it.”

“Of course great music requires a creator, but he doesn’t have to be a paragon of virtue,” Gardiner says to the viewer. “And Bach certainly wasn’t.”

It’s hard not to hear him pleading his own case.

After the Incident the language of Gardiner’s press releases may seem formulaic—withdrawing from engagements to focus on his mental health while engaging in a course of counselling, “taking a step back in order to get the specialist help I recognise that I have needed for some time. I want to apologise to colleagues who have felt badly treated and anyone who may feel let down by my decision to take time out to address my issues. […] I am heartbroken to have caused so much distress and I am determined to learn from my mistakes”. Still, he appears genuinely contrite—by contrast with Tory ministers today, who would never dream of apologising for anything.

Musicians agree that Gardiner’s concerts are astounding, albeit unduly stressful. I can’t help contrasting S-Simon Rattle—who, when a passage doesn’t sound quite right in rehearsal, will work out how to communicate better, rather than blaming the musicians for deliberately sabotaging his artistic vision.

For Gardiner’s journey in performing early music, click here; for his brilliant book Music in the castle of heaven, here and here; his recordings feature in many posts listed under A Bach retrospective. For what the future for early music may hold without him, click here. See also The art of conducting: a roundup. For Freud and Mahler, see Men behaving badly.

Twice a stranger: an update

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Smyrna

I’ve just added two short documentaries to my post on the 1922–23 Greek–Turkish population expulsions—complementing the excellent novel Birds without wings.

Both the immediate logistics and the consequences of the expulsions caused immense suffering. The relocations posed severe social and economic challenges in both countries. Yet both Bruce Clark and Louis de Bernières observe the disjunct between simplistic political ideology and a popular yearning to reconnect.

See also The Armenian genocide and other posts under West/Central Asia: a roundup.

It’s what it is

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what it is

In Istanbul over the summer, punctuated by the call to prayer, I watched not only my usual woke fare of black-and-white subtitled foreign-language films with amateur actors, but also a succession of classic mafia movies—three instalments of The Godfather, plus Goodfellas, perhaps the greatest of all. I still have to watch Casino.

I wasn’t previously aware of The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019; reviewed by Roger Ebert and Mark Kermode), but it’s just as compelling, with a star-studded cast. For me, among all the immortal dialogue, two scenes stand out with Robert De Niro, as he tries to relay the unwelcome news from Jo Pesci to Al Pacino, and as it becomes clear that his best friend is gonna have to get whacked:

and

We may be used to “It is what it is”, but here “It’s what it is” makes an even stronger line. Cf. Pilate’s pithy line in Bach’s John Passion, n. here.

The female gaze is only fleeting in The Irishman, but the revulsion in the face of Frank’s daughter Peggy offers a rare glimpse of a moral core to the story. These movies are particularly topical amidst the current mafia state prosecutions in the USA.

It will come as no surprise to regular readers if I note that “It is what it is” makes a suitable bumper-sticker for the descriptive anthropologist of Daoist ritual, by contrast with the prescriptive agenda of scholars seeking clues in modern ritual to the religious doctrine of ancient times (see Debunking “living fossils”) [Oh FFS—Ed.].

On a more topical note, the astounding Coco Gauff used the expression in her wise reflections after her semi-final in the US Open was (briefly) disrupted. She is Good People.

Mahler 9 at the Proms!!!

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Rattle Mahler 9

At the Proms last week, to follow Mahler’s 3rd and 7th symphonies, S-Simon Rattle marked his final concert as Musical Director of the LSO with the 9th.

Do watch it on BBC4!!!
(radio broadcast here).

I wrote about the 9th symphony in my Mahler series soon after observing his climactic use of quintuplets, “struggling to emerge from the stone”; I reflected here on a Barbican performance last year with Daniel Harding and the Concertgebouw. The chamber arrangement, far from a mere curiosity, is also most affecting.

Mahler 9 has inhabited me since my teens, even when I wasn’t actually listening to it. How amazing to get hold of tickets—”of all the performances I’ve heard in my life,” that was one of them—no really, it’s always overwhelming, but nothing could be so as Rattle bidding farewell to London with this symphony, the LSO in fabulous form. Yet again, conducting from memory made the occasion even more intense. The Prommers extended the silence of the long final Abschied.

* * *

S-Simon began the concert with Poulenc’s challenging Figure humaine, an a cappella hymn to Liberté from occupied France to texts by Paul Éluard. It was brilliantly sung by the BBC Singers, who gave the first performance in 1945. Rattle began another Mahler concert with the piece in April this year, in solidarity with protests over the philistine government’s threat to axe the choir—his speech then is well worth reading.

Splåtergørd

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I’m most resistant to new-fangled kitchen gadgets, but, um, splashing out on a splatter guard for my little Moka makes a delightful early birthday present.

splatter guard

In a felicitous coincidence, the Norwegian centre-forward Einar Splåtergørd was the first footballer to break the £10 transfer-fee barrier, going on to score the winning goal for Burnley in their legendary 1959 Cup Final victory over Tranmere Rovers [You nearly had me there—The Plain People of Ireland].

For more diacritics, note Ogonek and Til!

Talking of kitchen gadgets, the African American businessman and inventor Alfred L. Cralle patented the “Ice Cream Mold and Disher” in 1897, forerunner of the ice-cream scoop.

scoop

Cf. the inventions of the fridge, tobacco, and the helpline.