Tag Archives: sport

Roundup for 2022!

Posted on by

Like a suburban Sisyphus doing and undoing a jigsaw, having gone to great lengths to mix up the daily sequence of my diverse topics in a stimulating fashion, it’s that time of year when I try and reassemble them into some kind of thematic order (cf. 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021). In September I essayed a handy roundup of roundups, covering some of this ground; and in November I listed Some recent *MUST READ* posts. As ever, in the sidebar you can consult the tags and categories, and even the monthly archive (scrolling waaay down); the homepage still provides useful orientation.

Disturbingly, the items featured below are just a selection, but do click away on all the links…

Perhaps I can begin with a story that combines several of my interests:

While I can’t quite claim to have won the World Cup for Argentina,

and I’m exceptionally fond of

  • Ogonek and Til, for fans of tennis, fado, and Noh drama—wacky diacritics and nasal vowels, with matching anagram and limericks.

Meanwhile I seem to have recovered from being a Ticking Time-bomb:

* * *

China:

And it’s always worth reminding you of my film on the Li family Daoists, and this roundup of posts on them, as well as my work on Gaoluo village.

Tibet (updated roundup), including

I also update my collected posts on Uyghur culture, including

Turkey features prominently in my Roundup of posts on west-central Asia, as I try to educate myself (and even this is only a selection):

leading on to

and William Dalrymple:

Some posts on Ukraine (Applebaum, Snyder, Sands), also linking to

As to other world music,

An Irish music medley, including recent entries:

North Indian music (collected posts):

Jazz (roundup of another extensive series) (Turkish jazz listed above):

And then:

Western Art Music: among this year’s posts on Bach (updated roundup) are

Mahler: my whole series is now listed here, with recent additions

Also

Society, religion, ritual:

A mélange of other topics:

New entries in A Sporting medley include

Drôlerie:

Well, that’ll keep you busy—as a reward, in future perhaps I’ll try posting every three days, rather than every other day, and I might even reblog earlier posts a tad less avidly—not wishing to try your patience (“You must come over and try mine sometime”—Groucho).

Tango for Messi!!!

Posted on by

For Sunday’s World Cup final, a paean to the genius of Lionel Messi. Watch his magical dribbling skills in awe, click here for a compilation of some of his great solo goals (the magnificent finale adorned with suitably ecstatic commentary!), and admire  this longer compilation. Among innumerable tributes, here’s a detailed analysis, and I like this recent article by Anita Asante. See also this BBC documentary.

For comparable artistry, cf. Ronnie: a roundup, and A god retires, under A sporting medley.

* * *      

The vision of Messi dancing his way through flailing defenders reminded me to expand my limited acquaintance with Argentine tango—don’t worry, I’m not going to try and dance. [1]

As with flamenco, fado (here, with sequel), and rebetika, the demi-monde roots of tango in the ports and bordellos were soon co-opted in a typical progression from banning (like the waltz) to bourgeois respectability, as the genre’s sleazy, predatory background gave way to the elegant sensuality of polished cabaret and ballroom performance (for critiques of artistic competition, click here). Please excuse me if I round up some of the Usual Suspects below, and for focusing on music rather than dance.

The early years, and the Golden Age
In the traditional style, the habanera rhythm, with the jagged, staccato syncopation of its 3+3+2 accents (cf. Taco taco taco burrito), is common to other Latin American genres (see this useful wiki page). The tango sound became more distinctive from the late 19th century with the addition of the bandoneón, originally used for church music in Germany (cf. Accordion crimes—including an early Polish tango).

The dance, with its sinuous intertwinings, spread around Europe from 1910. Echoing the “posturing machismo” of flamenco, Ricardo Guïraldes wrote in homage (sic):

Hats tilted over sardonic sneers. The all-absorbing love of a tyrant, jealously guarding his dominion, over women who have surrendered submissively, like obedient beasts…

Naturally, in recent years the sexism of tango dance has been subjected to much critique.

The global fame of tango was spread by the new radio, recording, and film industries. Here’s Rudolph Valentino with a tango-travesty in The four horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921):

Here’s a playlist of early 78s:

And this playlist includes tracks by a host of bandleaders, including Osvaldo Pugliese and Uruguayan violinist Francisco Canaro:

Here’s a remastered album of Julio de Caro’s band in the 1920s:

and the great Aníbal Troilo on bandonéon with singer Edmundo Rivero in Cafetín de Buenos Aires (1948):

Tango is part of a widespread musical family expressing heartache (duende, saudade, sevda, and so on), whose letras lyrics enhance its melodic melancholy; however, in vocal timbre I find none of the harsh anguish of flamenco cante jondo. The quintessential tango singer was Carlos Gardél (1890–1935), heard on playlists like this:

To redress the macho dominance, women singers from the Golden Age—some great tracks here:

“The ultimate tango cliché”
Like other pieces that suffer from over-exposure (such as Bach’s Air, the Mahler Adagietto, Debussy’s Clair de lune, Ravel’s Bolero, Dream a little dream of me…), it would be great if we could hear La cumparsita with original ears, but the kitsch image of Some like it hot (1959) leaves an indelible impression. Slower and more evocative than the first recording by Roberto Firpo (1917) is Eddy Duchin in 1933:

With the lyrics it’s quite transformed—I like Carlos Gardél’s version (#5 in playlist above), reminiscent of fado. Like most performers, he sang the Si supieras version by Pascual Contursi, which is maudlin enough—but the anguish of tango is rarely expressed so extremely as in Matos Rodríguez’s own lyrics, heard in this 1945 recording:

La cumparsa de miserias sin fin desfila                The parade of endless miseries marches
en torno de aquel ser enfermo                               around that sickly being
que pronto ha de morir de pena…                         who will soon die of grief…

Well, that’s the last time I’m inviting him to one of my parties.

The piece must have become a millstone around the necks of tangueros—but its immortality was confirmed by Tom and Jerry:

Piazzolla
Meanwhile, as juntas and Perónism rose and fell, Buenos Aires was in flux; with an ever-swelling immigrant population and changing tastes, “old-guard” tango declined amidst the rise of pop music. And so to the nuevo tango of Astor Piazzolla (1921–92) (Songlines; wiki), “the Boulez of the bandoneón” (an epithet attributed to L’Éxpress, making one worry about its readership figures), who “elevated” the genre to the status of art music in the concert hall (NB What is serious music?!). After his youth working with some of the great bands of Buenos Aires, Piazzolla was drawn to the style of modern WAM composers like Bartók and Stravinsky, studying with Alberto Ginastera and Nadia Boulanger—who, to her credit, insisted that he follow his own path. 

Boulanger with Piazzolla 1955
Studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, 1955.

He also recruited jazz musicians to his groups, although by the standards of jazz his arrangements were over-prescribed (cf. Unpacking “improvisation”).

Again, just a selection. Tres minutos con realidad (1957):

Adiós nonino (1959), a requiem for his father:

Balada para un loco (1969), with his second wife Amelita Baltar:

Libertango (1974) (playlist):

Suite Troileana (1975):

 And the gorgeous Oblivion (1982; danced here, and here):

I’m keen on his late Quinteto Tango Nuevo, with Fernando Suarez Paz (violin), Pablo Ziegler (piano), Horacio Malvicino (guitar), and Hector Console (bass)—click here for their 1984 gig in Utrecht (playlist).

As the “world music” scene took wing and boundaries were breaking down, Piazzolla became a legend. A definitive book is María Susan Azzi and Simon Collier, Le Grand Tango: The life and music of Astor Piazzolla (2000). And here’s the documentary Tango maestro (Michael Dibb, 2004):

Joining a long list of London gigs that I kick myself for missing, in 1985 Piazzolla performed for a week at the Almeida Theatre! Awww…

* * *

The scene has continued to develop, with nuevo tango supplemented by neotango. But as Adam Tully observed, 

It’s too easy to think that [Piazzolla] was leaving it all behind or rejecting it; in truth he was completely a part of this music and wanted it to be ever greater, to grow rather than to stagnate. And the dead end is to think that since Piazzolla innovated, then the natural progression of tango is the language that he invented. The danger there is for other composers, arrangers, and performers to get absorbed into Piazzollean language, which is what happened in the 80s and 90s.

Finally, some bonus tracks. Dance, with its complex technique, remains a vital part of tango’s social life, deserving greater attention than I can offer; but here are some staged representations. Carlos Suara’s 1998 movie Tango:

For Last tango in Paris and The conformist, click here. A scene from Frida (2002):

And Rose and Giovanni in Strictly:

I won’t venture into Finnish tango, but here are a couple of playlists for Turkey (cf. Midnight at the Pera Palace, and Jazz in Turkey). Seyyan Hanım (1913–89):

and Şecaattin Tanyerl (1921–94):

Hmm. Like I’d know—I was just admiring Messi weaving his way through yet another helpless defence, and recalling his time at Barcelona, comparable only to Bach at Leipzig [Late entry for 2022 Pseuds’ Corner Award—Ed.].

[1] Useful starting points include the chapter in The Rough Guide to world music, Songlines (including this selection), and wiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_tango
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_tango
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tango_music
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figures_of_Argentine_tango

For the wider context, see Peter Manuel Popular musics of the non-Western world.

.

Vassalage

Posted on by

Goulet
The Treaty of Le Goulet. Source.

As an arcane warmup for the France–England match tomorrow: one of my favourite expressions, outstanding in its entitled pomposity, is this description of Teresa May’s Brexit plan from the patronising patrician lips of The Haunted Pencil:

the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Phillip II at Le Goulet in 1200.

JRM

The Tree-Frog should know—he was there. Yup, he sure knows how to Get Down with the Kids. So that’s what they teach them at Eton, when they’re not busy hurling racist and sexist abuse at girls visiting from a state school. I wouldn’t know, I only did Woodwork at Skibbereen Comprehensive. *

I’d love to slip the bon mot (oops) into a chat over a pint at the Aardvark and Climbing Boot, but so far even “vassalage” has proved beyond me. Still, it might work as a new model of car (“Tesla Vassalage SR”), or in a catchy pop lyric—an early draft by Ken Dodd, perhaps, interpreted in the suave tones of Wee-Smug himself:

Vassalage

With this government one doesn’t need such a long memory as Tree-Frog, whoever the Prime Minister is this week, presiding over “the greatest fiasco since the day before yesterday”. May we be released forthwith from this Tory vassalage!

* My attachment to Skibbereen goes back to a rainy evening fuelled by inordinate quantities of Guinness on a Mozart opera tour, also memorable for a brilliant story at an Armagh pub session. I briefly flirted with the idea of applying for the Skibbereen Philharmonic, undeterred by the fact that there isn’t one.

A grand slam

Posted on by

Bridge

Just for a change from Daoists, Mahler, and Turkish culture, here’s a delightful bridge challenge!

As you see in my note to Perfection is NOT the word for it, my skills on the baize are rudimentary, having been only modestly maintained on orchestral tours on the back of a bus, suitably lubricated by alcohol. By now I’m even more out of practice than usual, but among a wealth of such problems I find this one particularly charming. Like the abstract beauty of dhrupad, it’s an infinite world.

I can’t see the solution online, but after the opening spade lead from West (almost inevitable, one would think, though it’s the only lead that makes the grand slam possible!) all thirteen tricks must be won in dummy—to which end, declarer must first discard the ❤️A and K on the two opening spade tricks, and then discard all the top diamonds on dummy’s four heart tricks!

Wonderful, eh—pour me another gin…

A god retires

Posted on by

Federer 2

As the divine Roger Federer retires, Barney Ronay has come up with an unbeatable entry for Pseuds’ Corner: *

His backhand was frankly ridiculous, overblown, hilariously good. This, one thought, watching that thing—the flex of the knee, the flourish of the wrist—is a kind of artefact, a European cultural treasure, like a Bach cantata or a complete acorn-fed Iberian ham, the kind of backhand a power-crazed Bond super villain might try to steal from its laser-guarded case and transport to the moon.

And he’s right, of course—while other players achieve greatness by sheer brute force, Federer’s grace as he glides around the court is supreme.

Requiring less athleticism, but just as poetic, is Ronnie‘s elegance around the baize. For more on snooker and tennis, including Cocomania and A playlist for Emma and Leylah, see under A sporting medley. My Bach retrospective has links to the cantatas…

* Pipping to the post cake baking as creative inspiration for Renaissance music, and my own likening of Stewart Lee’s reformulations of previous work to those of Bach and Miles Davis.

Ogonek and Til

Posted on by

For Nick

Allow me to introduce Ogonek and Til, feisty yet (you guessed it) flawed protagonists of my forthcoming crime drama series, as they embark on the hazardous trail of a dastardly ring of international diacritic smugglers…

ogonek

As an avid tennis fan, without being too perfectionist I’m not alone in musing gingerly over how to pronounce the surname of the magnificent Iga Świątek, currently sailing serenely (Serena-ly?) towards the final of the US Open. She gives us a handy lesson:

So the lowly diacritic squiggle indicates that the a sound is both closed and nasal. It’s an ogonek (“little tail”)—which leads us to the mystical realms of Elfdalian, Kashubian, Lithuanian, and Navajo (see here, and here)! To think that I still rather resent having to go to all the faff of inputting grave and acute accents in French, and such non-national fripperies…

Readers with a penchant for Igor Stravinsky anagrams will note that while the cast of the brilliant Gran visits York includes such redoubtable characters as Sir K.Y. Groins-Vat and Kirsty Garvison, one absentee from the urtext is the arcane exhortation

V.S.—or try sink, Iga!

It belongs with those weird dreams common to musos and sportspeople (“unqualified, ill-prepared, running out of time, wrong uniform, lost”). On the eve of yet another crucial Grand Slam match, the Polish star finds herself on stage (quite likely in her tennis outfit) playing percussion in the The Rite of Spring, only to see a prophetic instruction from the composer (revealing a rare aptitude for self-parody): either whip the page over, or just create a noisy diversion with all the pots and pans that surround you!

* * *

ao

Which reminds me, in Portuguese (cf. my paltry dabblings here), I do feel we Brits might make a little more effort in adding a nasal quality at the end of the ão sound in São Paulo (the diacritic on ã being a til, for which English has adopted the Spanish word tilde)—as in

  • não (no)
  • mão (hand)
  • pão (bread)
  • cão (dog)
  • limão (lime, for that caipirinha party)
  • canção (song)
  • Japão (Japan)
  • João (“John”).

Plenty of material there for a couple of niche limericks, to join Myles’s tribute to Ezra £; Alan Watts on Salisbury/Sarum; The young man from Calcutta; The young man from Japan, and The old man from Peru [typical bias against the middle-aged woman—Ed.]. Something like this, perhaps:

There was a young man from Japão
Who fed his cão pão with limão
Waving a mão, he burst into canção
Until João came up and said “Não“.

Estêvão, Çisiq 2022.

Note (cf. Mots d’heures: gousses, rames):
The scene is a dingy immigrant enclave in Coimbra. Despite his eccentric choice of dog-food, the enterprising oriental subject of this ditty seems to have been sufficiently au fait with Iberian folk idioms to experiment in combining the Noh-tinged (Não-tinged?) saudade of fado with the palmas of flamenco; perhaps it was the casual co-option of such percussive accompaniment that so offended the purist killjoy João.

Noh drum
Source.

Recently another interpretation of “Waving a mão, he burst into canção” has been proposed (Acta Musicologica Asiatica-Iberica, LXXIII.2, 2021), which would bypass both fado and flamenco: it may rather depict the haunting kakegoe cries of the Noh drummer as he slowly lifts his hand to bring it down resoundingly on the tense skin of the ōtsuzumi. Although “raising” might have been a more precise verb than “waving”, the burghers of Coimbra might well be alarmed to hear such an alien sound echoing through the cobbled alleys of their hallowed university town.

* * *

Composing a limerick for Iga is more of a challenge:

There was a young star named Świątek
Whose talents spread way beyąd tech
When it comes to the tennis, she sure is a menace—
To play her it’s all hands ą deck.

Sure, the stress-patterning doesn’t quite work: in line 2, it would be helped by an accent on beyond, though that requires knowledge of some spurious back-story whereby Iga has already been spotted as a promising software programmer; and there’s nothing to be done about the final line. But hey… I am proud to announce that my effort was runner-up in the prestigious 2022 Świątek Limerick Contest—in which I was the only entrant… But go on, why not join in too? Hours of harmless fun for all the family!

Iga
“YAYY!!! I’ve got a limerick!!!”

And now I’m already honing my entry for next year’s contest:

To Iga’s fine surname Świątek
I once tried adding a “zee”, ą spec
But that wouldn’t work—I felt such a berk
And now her name’s in neą—Heck!

Again, this falls down on stress-patterning. In line 2 (please excuse my unusual lapse into American English), my misguided spelling was of course Śzwiątek.

* * *

For some Turkish diacritics, click here; and for Nicolas Robertson’s outstanding Oulipean anagram series, here. See also Language learning: a roundup. For more practice with Polish names, and some amazing music, see Folk traditions of Poland; Polish jazz, then and now; Madonna pilgrimage in Communist Poland; and Polish migrants to the USA are among the cast of Annie Proulx’s splendid ethnomusicological novel Accordion crimes. For the Portuguese footballer Jesus, click here. For more ą, sorry I mean on, both football and tennis, see under A sporting medley—including this tribute to the multicultural musical heritage of Emma and Leylah. See also Oh Noh!, featuring Brian and Stewie; and for the clichés of blurb-writing, click here.

Lionesses, YAY and hmm

Posted on by

🥂🥂🥂🥂🥂🥂🥂🥂🥂🥂🥂

Euro headlines

The women’s Euro football tournament has been most inspiring, and the media coverage impressive too!

Amidst all the celebration, as the dénouement approached, two worthy talking points were gleefully slapped down by the PC-gone-mad brigade (cf. Stewart Lee).

RenardAs Anita Asante observed, three of this year’s four semi-final teams were dazzlingly white—the fourth, France, has a substantial and brilliant component of black and brown players, including the captain Wendie Renard.

The English women’s game hasn’t always been quite so white (Hope Powell, Alex Scott, Anita Asante, Nikita Parris, and so on; cf. Bend it like Beckham), but there is clearly a structural problem (see also here, and here). The world of commerce seems keen to celebrate some notional diversity, as in this advertisement. The English men’s squad is quite diverse, but when the team lost in the final of the recent Euros the black players became scapegoats, receiving racist abuse (see also my vignette in the Comments section below).

After the women’s semi-final, Woman’s hour hosted a rather innocuous discussion. Now, we all delight in England’s success (and that of Germany, for that matter, and the whole tournament); the contributions from Anita Asante, Robyn Cowen, and Jacqui Oatley were largely celebratory, but presenter Emma Barnett, reading out a query from a listener, also touched—very lightly—on the apparent sexism of the term “lionesses”.

Predictably, the tabloids lost no time in flying off the handle (Daily mail: “Fans slam calls to change England women’s football team’s ‘sexist’ Lionesses nickname“—the verbal “slam”, like “quiz”, as in “Cops Quiz Immigrants in Drugs Probe”, is a sure pointer to imminent fatuity). While the Loony Right rejoices in losing its rag, the issue seems to require the dispassionate analytical skills of a Janet Radcliffe Richards.

Critics like Piers Morgan and “Culture Secretary” Nadine Dorries (WTAF)—veritable Wittgensteins for our age—come to the defence of “lionesses”, so we can Rest Our Case. Dorries lived in Africa for a year, SO THERE! And Morgan called it “the single most pathetic virtue-signalling campaign ever. […] Just stick a cork in it, you wretched gender-deranged woke wastrels”. All we need for a Full House of Loonies is Jeremy Clarkson and Jacob Tree-Frog.

The Express sounds almost reasonable:

Championing a women’s football team whose nickname embodies female power and pack or team mentality through the image of a pride of lionesses is empowering to women and girls, not demeaning in a sexist way.

But while Anita Asante has no issue with the term lionesses, I find the discussion around zoological verisimilitude (“the FEMALE beasts do the hunting while the males sleep”—Take That!) somewhat of a red herring. Of course, English has a range of terms for male and female animals; of the latter, FWIW, most are separate words, with only lion, tiger, and leopard having female versions ending in “-ess”. To thicken the plot, the English men’s football team aren’t called “lions”—that’s a name for men’s rugby union teams.

I’m more concerned about the linguistic use of “–ess” to denote a variant of the assumed male norm. Besides the animal kingdom, words like actress, waitress, and sorceress have indeed been falling out of fashion, whereas princess (like the whole monarchical system) seems resilient. It’s no simple matter, but it doesn’t seem too revolutionary to query the use of a feminine ending when referring to women.

The Express insidiously undermined the feminist cause:

For many, the idea of changing the name from one of female empowerment to hide behind a more “masculine” term is in itself sexist. […] It is also contributing to the fatigue felt by many with those who identify as feminists [so there!] and nit-pick on such ideas which attempt to re-write femininity into a negative connotation.

Media discussion of sexist coverage, such as this from Grazia, seems to have been rare.

Anyway, all attempts (“these days“) at debating racism and sexism provide yet another rallying cry for the PC-gone-mad, anti-woke brigade, gleefully able to speak their own language again and scoff their bendy bananas, singing Rule Britannia! and waving their Union Jacks as they deplore judges who come down on the side of human rights—like the immigrant’s pet cat furore.

The tournament was delightful; but would it really be so unladylike to question the status quo (cf. Feminist humour)? None of this detracts from the celebration. For BBC TV, Alex Scott and Ian Wright were exhilarated at the same time as they faced the issues.

For more on women’s football (and women’s tennis, another inspiring story), see under A sporting medley: ritual and gender, including Belated recognition and Hope for our future.

Inter-faith ping-pong

Posted on by

Mardin ping pong

Charming images from Mardin in Turkey, where World Table Tennis Day featured a match between an imam and a Syriac church chorister:

Mardin ping pong 2

Of course, the winner was friendship, peace, and table tennis. 

FatmaThis may sound a tad Kumbaya, * but it’s in line with the pleas of Fatma Yavuz for greater religious tolerance in Turkish society. Incorporating gender into the debate, she was among a group of thoughtful, articulate women speaking at a recent series of online panels on Freedom of Belief and Gender in Turkey—here’s the third session, with Fatma’s contribution from 49.18:

More on that initiative coming up soon.

* The wiki entry on Kumbaya is interesting. The song goes back way before the 1950s, when it emerged from its African roots in the southern States to enter into the wider consciousness via the civil rights movement. By the 1990s it was often used in sarcastic criticism of the kind of consensus-compromise politics “that allegedly does not examine the issues or is revelatory of cockeyed optimism”; “singing Kumbaya is not a foreign policy strategy”. More e.g. here.

Line judges

Posted on by

line judges
My Brilliant Friend Augusta always has a lot to explain to me when I visit her in Kuzguncuk—even including the laws of perspective. Now that she’s braving the English “summer” and my lowly Chiswick hovel, I’ve been inflicting Wimbledon tennis on her. She’s game, and can basically follow what’s going on (cf. The first snooker commentary). However, at one stage, noticing the three statuesque people lined up at the back of the court, she asked,

“What are those people doing standing there?”

It does indeed look rather as if they’ve adopted a crafty method of gatecrashing, having failed to get tickets. They don’t seem to be enjoying it much, though—the severity of their demeanour, their identical clothing, and their limited range of robotic movements, suggest a Kraftwerk tribute act, so one keeps hoping they’re about to burst into song.

Kraftwerk
At least Augusta didn’t ask how another ingenious spectator has managed to wheel on a high chair and park it right in the middle of the arena to watch the match. They even get to sit down—such brazen effrontery.

umpireSource: wiki.

Such are the kinds of challenges that face us in seeking to interpret the rules of Chinese ritual zzzzz (cf. Nigel Barley among the Dowayo).

For more on tennis (as well as football, rugby, snooker, and archery in Bhutan), see A sporting medley.

The song of the Italians

Posted on by

anthem 1

I’ve noted the exuberance of national anthems based on the style of Italian opera, notably that of Brazil. But I curiously omitted to pay homage to the Italian anthem, composed by Michele Novaro in 1847 when the concept of “Italy” was still novel. Though it soon became popular, it only became the national anthem in 1946.

With All Due Respect to the spirited renditions of players and spectators, it’s worth relishing it in a polished performance, with three of the six verses (1, 2, and 4):

For anyone not quite ready to sit through an entire Verdi opera, this makes a ready stopgap. The instrumental intro already passes through several moods in quick succession; the song, with its snappy modulation at 0.57, and the fine sequence from 1.18, is just as rousing.

anthem 2

Some of the lyrics may seem a tad niche, all the more so from the mouths of burly athletes—like the openings of verse 1:

Fratelli d’Italia, l’Italia s’è desta, dell’elmo di Scipio s’è cinta la testa.

and 2:

Noi fummo da secoli calpesti, derisi, perché non siam popolo, perché siam divisi.

Verse 4 is rather arcane too:

Dall’Alpi a Sicilia, dovunque è Legnano,
Ogn’uom di Ferruccio ha il core, ha la mano,
I bimbi d’Italia si chiaman Balilla,
Il suon d’ogni squilla i Vespri suonò [noisy Vespas].

And verse 5:

Son giunchi che piegano le spade vendute
Già l’Aquila d’Austria le penne ha perdute [make do with spaghetti then]
Il sangue d’Italia, il sangue Polacco [checks notes]
bevé col cosacco, ma il cor le bruciò.

Yet again, this exhilarating piece, bursting with energy and variety, only underlines the utter tedium of the British anthem (see also Haydn for football). For Italian folk musicking, click here; and do listen to Enza Pagliara!

My World Cup debut thwarted

Posted on by

Stadium

A sporting variation on the musician’s recurring dream:

Out of the blue, I’m summoned to join the attacking lineup in England’s “bid” (As They Say) for the football World Cup. Everyone seems to consider this fair enough—even though in the dream I am my real age now, no longer a sprightly youth. After brief, jovial greetings from Raheem Sterling and Wayne Rooney, I suppose I’m expecting a bit of team training, some practice to slot me into the manager’s master-plan—but there’s no time for any of that. Anyway, how hard can it be?

So after making my way—entirely alone—to the stadium (possibly the Nou Camp in Barcelona), I find myself adrift in the labyrinthine changing rooms, which seem to be full of a motley crew of podgy kids from amateur teams. I wander around frantically trying to locate a room for the England team, and to find the team kit. With time getting on, I look up to see the clock fast approaching the 8pm kick-off, and over the tannoy I hear the sound of the national anthems prefacing the match. Still dressed in my everyday garb, I search desperately for the way onto the pitch.

As usual, I woke up before the dénouement.

Unqualified, ill-prepared, running out of time, wrong uniform, lost—precisely the traits of my dreams as a musician. There’s not even any great anxiety involved: the path to failure unfolds with “all the inevitability of Greek tragedy”.

For a similar dream involving Iga Świątek and Stravinsky, see Ogonek and Til. Cf. somewhat less dystopian fantasies on Lisbon, Mozart opera (note the Larson link!), and Tibet. See also From the archives.

Jesus of Benfica: a cautionary tale

Posted on by

*Guest post by Nicolas Robertson
—author of the magnificent series of anagram tales, no less*

Jorge Fernando Pinheiro de Jesus (which could translate as Jesus’s Christmas tree)—naturally known as Jesus, or, to distinguish him, as Jorge Jesus. Born 24th July 1954; prolific Portuguese midfield football player, and subsequently manager, much-remarked-upon hairstyle. Seventeen years as a professional player from 1973 to 1990, when he switched to a managerial career, so at 36 years old (three years later than his homonym).

His teaching life has lasted as long again, but has not been without turmoil. I first became aware of him during good days in his first stay at Benfica (2009–2015), headlines such as “Jesus is very content with his eleven”. One appreciated his constructive use of language: “For me, a manager has no past nor future, he only has past”, “What was Benfica before me?”, “The manager has to see things that no one else sees”.

Jesus 1

Which leads me to an unlikely but striking encounter with the painter Paula Rego at an exhibition of hers in Cascais in 2014, which he later described: “A manager is like a painter. […] Paula Rego said to me there was a figure called Maria and she is crying, and I thought, oh, is she crying? I can’t see anything—but she knew she was crying. It’s like the manager.”

Having passed through Sporting (2015­–18), Al-Hillal (Saudi Arabia, 2018–19) and Flamengo, Brazil (2019–20), where he managed an astounding series of successes, Jesus found himself irresistibly called back to Benfica (a name which sort of means “May it be well”), with dreams of renewed glory. “We’re not going to play for the double, we’ll play for the triple… and we’ll crush them” [vamos arrasar], though he was careful enough to admit “I don’t know what tomorrow will be”.

Jesus 2Jesus in upbeat mood at crucifixion rehearsal.

Things didn’t go too well, on the Second Coming, Covid took its toll (not easy to see how he was more prejudiced than the others, but he suffered: “One day you can think of eleven and the next you’re without three players”. And more went wrong, results weren’t coming, there was disquiet in the plantel. Since Herod (Luis Filipe Vieira, the boss, who’d been to fetch him, the Messiah, from Brazil in his private jet) had just been put away for massive corruption, Rui Costa (choose your own avatar), the stand-in and subsequently elected president—himself a hero as a player—wanted to make his own mark…

Some headlines from this final playout:

Rui accused of not defending Jesus

Soap opera of Jesus creates bad feeling

J. Jesus ever more alone in the Light [Luz, Benfica stadium]

Because here’s the rub: some Wise Men (top brass from Flamengo in Brazil) had come from the East (if you go the other way round) in search of Jesus again—but found him unavailable, or at least hesitant (he was in mid-contract, after all). And they didn’t wait for an answer, but went off to Poland, and behold, they found Paulo Sousa, manager of the Polish national team; he too was under contract, but hey! it’s only money to get out of it…

More headlines:

Sousa contratado, Jesus amuado [pissed off]

Jesus desolado com Flamengo

And then Jesus was sacked anyway—or rather, both sides agreed it would be best for him to leave: “I came thinking I was a solution and not a problem”… Classic “despised and rejected” (even worse, having been eagerly sought)—but being football, and not life, there’ll be a sequel. Meanwhile Jesus has been seen—and photographed, of course—walking his dogs on the beach in Troia, a wonderfully-named peninsular south of Lisbon, no one else in sight. He’s been offered, or his name linked with, several comebacks in various countries, but no doubt he’s being cautious.

So the Second Coming of Jesus to Benfica ended sadly. I was reminded of a story by Borges, Ragnarök. The parallels are not strict, but what if the gods come back and we don’t like them, they’ve lost touch from being too long away, we can’t even understand what they say (Borges), what if (Christian eschatology) He comes back, and it doesn’t work, doesn’t apply, it’s a flop? If I were a god, I wouldn’t risk it. Too late for that lesson, J. Jesus…

(Jesus’s technical assistant, a sort of Peter, is carrying on pro tem. His results so far are more or less like those of Jesus. His name is Nelson Veríssimo (“absolutely true”). He looks like a decent bloke.)

 

SJ: This is a sequel to my post on Jesus jokes. For the Three Wise Men, see here (The life of Brian)—and, more seriously, here. Just as essential reading as Nick’s anagram tales is the ouevre of Patricia Lockwood, also rejoicing in language and the ambivalence of the Christian Message. Click here for a roundup of wacky headlines, and here for more sporting drôlerie.

A playlist for Emma and Leylah

Posted on by

Emma LeylahPhoto: Timothy A. Clary/AFP.

🥂🥂

The fairy-tale dénouement of the US Open women’s singles was an even more intense and moving contest than anyone dared imagine. Just exhilarated by this rare moment in sporting history, to celebrate youthful inspiration I’d like to offer a wacky little playlist in homage to both players—a paean to migration, riffing freely on their cultural backgrounds. Some of these connections may be approximate, but you get the idea.

Conveniently, my soundtrack for Emma Raducanu (“london|toronto|shenyang|bucharest“) (TEN MATCHES without dropping a set!!!) can also serve the valuable function of irritating Priti Patel and Piers Morgan…

BTL iconHer mum Zhai Dongmei 翟冬梅 comes from Shenyang in northeast China:

  • so here’s a powerful, majestic, gritty shawm band from nearby Liaoyang (#6 in the Music Player as you scroll way down in the sidebar of this blog, with commentary here)—two players striving in unison, occasionally pulling apart, with the drum evoking the sound of the tennis ball (the very opening perhaps satirising Nadal’s pre-serve routine)?! See also Ritual groups of Liaoning; and click here for Emma speaking excellent Chinese (Yeah I know…).

From her dad’s part of the world,

  • From the Canadian background of Emma’s parents, some Inuit throat-singing—another joyous ritualised game (whereas both Emma and Leylah are decorously silent on court, perhaps this evokes a speeded-up soundtrack of the vocalisations of certain other tennis players):

  • Moving on to, um, Bromley, how about David Bowie:

* * *

Just as inspiring—both on court and for a playlist!—is Emma’s opponent Leylah Fernandez.

For the Philippine heritage of her mum,

  • the elegant passion of nanguan (nanyin) ballads from the Hokkien diaspora of southeast China:

Leyla’s dad comes from Ecuador, suggesting a somewhat imprecise connection with

  • festive wind bands from the Bolivian Andes (see Music and the potato), grounded in seasonal rituals (Wimbledon and the other majors):

And for the family’s Canadian heritage,

  • in French-Celtic mode, the irresistible energy of La bottine souriante playing La tuque rouge:

  • along with Leonard Cohen:

Hallelujahs for both stellar players!

International Cultural Exchange indeed… Cf. They come over ‘ere…

See also A sporting medley: ritual and gender—not least Cocomania. For another celebratory playlist from early this year, see Dancing in the streets!!!. And do listen to my Playlist of songs…

Haydn for football

Posted on by

The Euros remind me again of national anthems—like an archaic, stilted Eurovision Song Contest. Italy’s song is a mini-opera, and it’s hard to beat the exuberance of Brazil’s anthem, or the drama of the haka. La Marseillaise (1792) is very fine too:

Marseillaise

As to the German anthem, Joseph Haydn composed Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser in 1797, in honour of Francis II of the Austro-Hungarian empire (wiki here and here). After the song became the national anthem of Germany from 1841, the lyrics continued to go through several revisions under successive regimes.

Kaiser

Written in response to Britain’s plodding God save the king * (superior suggestions here), it’s among several melodies of Haydn said to be inspired by a Croatian folk-song. The song alone outranks the British anthem, but Haydn soon elevated it as the theme for variations in the transcendent slow movement of his Kaiser quartet—tastefully played here by the Quatuor mosaïques:

With All Due Respect, renditions at football internationals don’t quite rise to such heights. But of course, chamber music and football matches serve different functions…

For some more exquisite Haydn, see here. 

* My usual homage to Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “I didn’t know we ’ad a king—I thought we were an autonomous collective”:

Ravi par Pravi: more French chanson

Posted on by

Pravi

Given ethnomusicologists’ taste for all manifestations of the Terpsichorean muse, Eurovision has become a fashionable topic, * but with my head buried in Daoist ritual practice, I’ve always given it a miss (“Call Me Old-Fashioned”).

So it was only when watching the presentations after the French Open women’s singles final this weekend that I was enticed to explore the ouevre of the beguiling Parisian chanteuse Barbara Pravi. **

Pravi tennis

For the Roland Garros organisers, inviting her to perform her recent Eurovision song Voilà may have ticked the boxes, but she matched the intensity of the players’ speeches, with her lyrics (see below) affirming their own strivings; the occasion gave her song a personal, almost informal touch that the streamlined Eurovision inevitably lacks (see this clip). Paying attention to context, even her chic outfit was artfully chosen, as a fan notes:

Barbara was a vision of summer in bright yellow [Dior, I gather]. Her high-rise pleated skirt helped define her silhouette, while her oversized short sleeves gave it added drama. Barbara, who is famously petite [sic], added height with a pair of super-tall platform heels with black straps around the ankles. She wore white booty socks, which brought a sporty element to the elegant look.

Here’s the official video of Voilà:

 Again, it benefits from a more intimate setting:

Écoutez moi
Moi la chanteuse à demi
Parlez de moi
À vos amours, à vos amis
Parler leur de cette fille aux yeux noirs et de son rêve fou
Moi c’que j’veux c’est écrire des histoires qui arrivent jusqu’à vous
C’est tout
 
Voilà, voilà, voilà, voilà qui je suis
Me voilà même si mise à nue j’ai peur, oui
Me voilà dans le bruit et dans le silence
 
Regardez moi, ou du moins ce qu’il en reste
Regardez moi, avant que je me déteste
Quoi vous dire, que les lèvres d’une autre ne vous diront pas
C’est peu de chose mais moi tout ce que j’ai je le dépose là, voilà
 
Voilà, voilà, voilà, voilà qui je suis
Me voilà même si mise à nue c’est fini
C’est ma gueule c’est mon cri, me voilà tant pis
Voilà, voilà, voilà, voilà juste ici
Moi mon rêve mon envie, comme j’en crève comme j’en ris
Me voilà dans le bruit et dans le silence
 
Ne partez pas, j’vous en supplie restez longtemps
Ça m’sauvera peut-être pas, non
Mais faire sans vous j’sais pas comment
Aimez moi comme on aime un ami qui s’en va pour toujours
J’veux qu’on m’aime parce que moi je sais pas bien aimer mes contours
 
Voilà, voilà, voilà, voilà qui je suis
Me voilà même si mise à nue c’est fini
Me voilà dans le bruit et dans la fureur aussi
Regardez moi enfin et mes yeux et mes mains
Tout c’que j’ai est ici, c’est ma gueule c’est mon cri
Me voilà, me voilà, me voilà
Voilà, voilà, voilà, voilà
 
Voilà
 

Though the French entry came second in Eurovision 2021 (“nous wuz robbé”), it was France’s highest-ever score. The song is consistent with the contest’s decisive shift in favour of minor keys over the last twenty years—conveying gravitas to offset the kitsch of the occasion, or even reflecting political unrest?

We Brits are so used to failing dismally in the contest that nul points has long been a widely-known French expression. This under-achievement is discussed in a Twitter thread, and at the start of this episode of BBC Radio 4’s More or less. Despite the old slur of Das Land ohne Musik, it’s an intriguing political and musical issue. It may be seen partly as a reaction against the global dominance of Anglo-American pop; while it predates any disillusion with Brexit among “our European friends”, it may feed into British conservatives’ harrumphing over loss of empire. But other factors are more significant.

Talking of international multi-dimensionality, perhaps we might see Eurovision as a Handel opera, with the recitatives replaced by other boring longueurs. For the Azeri entry, see here.

Back with Barbara Pravi, her father is of Serbian and Algerian Jewish descent, her mother of Polish-Jewish and Iranian origin—I note this with no small envy, since my own parents hailed from the exotic climes of Surbiton and Chippenham (cf. “Palm trees are nothing to us—we’re from Torquay”). She discusses her Persian heritage in this interview (from 6.31).

And I’m most taken with her recent Les Prières for International Women’s Day; this playlist includes all six songs:

including Prière à l’éphémère, inspired by Rumi:

So this post complements my other hommages to French chanson, such as Rameau, Berlioz, Ravel (here and here), Debussy, Michel Legrand, Françoise Hardy, and, um, Pierre Boulez.

For thoughtful perspective on Ukraine’s Eurovision successes in 2004 and 2016, see here. For traditional Iranian singing, click here; for wise critiques of artistic competition, here; and do enjoy A flat miner! For broader perspectives, see What is serious music?!, Society and soundscape, and for gender and music, Feminine endings and Flamenco 2.

 

* See e.g. Dafni Tragaki (ed.), Empire of song: Europe and nation in the Eurovision Song Contest (2013), reviewed here.

** One might expect the drôlerie à demi of my heading “Ravi par Pravi” to be a staple of the French tabloids, but its apparent absence there rather confirms Kate Fox’s observations on the British propensity for headline punning. At least we can win at that.

A guide for bemused rugby fans

Posted on by

scrum

Caption competition:
“Thanks guys, I’m sure I dropped it down here somewhere…”
“Excuse me, but whatever do you think you’re doing down there?”
“I suppose you think I’m going to do your washing for you.”

While the language of rugby union may not be quite so elaborate as that of Daoist ritual, the roster of arcane infringements is quaint, and subject to constant revision. Not only do players have to understand the distinction between a maul and a ruck, they can be penalised for such faux pas as

  • Not rolling away [Mick Jagger]
  • Entering from the side [don’t ask]
  • Bringing down a maul
  • Ball held up
  • Not releasing [Engelbert Humperdinck]
  • Forward pass [cheeky]
  • Taking the man out [ditto]
  • Blood replacement [Transylvania]
  • Not straight (at the lineout)
  • Not driving straight [Afterble, constanoon] *

And one admires the way the players meekly accept the ref’s decision, whatever it’s supposed to mean. And even while the game is flowing, the obliging ref is full of succinct advice on How to Behave—like

 The best bit is TMO (Too Much Oratory), where we all get to watch dastardly behaviour in slow-mo from every angle—like viewing a burglary on CCTV, while the judge makes learned pronouncements. 

As to the basics, the Irish column Ask Audrey offers a helpful explanation:

Guten Tag. I am in Cork for three months and see that everyone is watching the Rugby World Cup. Can you explain the rules? — Karl, Berlin

Here is my understanding of how it works. The fat guys all run into each other, while the slightly slimmer guys stand in a line watching them. Eventually the fat guys get tired and have a lie down on top of each other. The ball comes out the back of this lie down and the skinnier guys kick it back and forward to each other for half an hour. Then the fat guys wake up and start running into each other again. Every now and again the referee stops play because someone dropped the ball. That’s the only thing you are not allowed to do in rugby. Everything else would appear to be okay. Sometimes one group of fat guys pushes the other group over the line and there is some manly hugging, but no shifting like in soccer. After 80 minutes they add up the score and New Zealand wins.

I offer similar interpretations for snooker and tennis; note also The haka, and suitable responses—all part of a series under A sporting medley. More caption competitions here and here.

* As in
   “Excuse me sir, do you realise this is a one-way street?”
   “It’s all right officer, I’m only going one way.”

The first snooker commentary

Posted on by
A sequel to Oh and that’s a bad miss, and various posts under Ronnie: a roundup

Snooker b&w“What shall we do with all these balls?”

The 2021 Masters snooker tournament is now well under way, NOT reaching a crescendo on Sunday.

A most educative aspect of enjoying snooker on TV is the expert commentary by former players. But way back in the Mists of Time, pundits were considerably less well informed. And everyone was hampered by only being able to see the “game” in black-and-white—even live…

Here’s a transcript of the first ever broadcast:

I wonder what he’s going to do with that stick.
I think you’ll find the technical term is “baton”.
Gosh, he used it to hit one ball onto another one. Well that’s a bad start.
Oops, one of the balls has gone down a hole. Obviously another serious mistake.
Yes, unfortunate, that—looks like the ref’s going to punish him by making him take another go.

Hang on, they gave him a goal then, when that ball went down the hole (I think it might be red, but who can tell?). Rewarding failure, if you ask me—Typical!
Yes, but I notice they only score one goal for that. Someone should tell them not to bother.

[zzzzz]

Oh no, now another ball has gone down a hole!
It’s almost as if they’re doing it on purpose.
This time it looks like a black one—makes a change, I suppose. Screwing up once is understandable, but twice in a row, come on! These chaps are clearly amateurs.
Hey, the ref’s put it back on the table—cheating, surely. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? O tempora, o mores!

Have you noticed how they keep hitting the white ball first? Bit unimaginative if you ask me.
It’d be easier without the stick too—whatever it is they’re trying to do.
And they might have thought of the risks and just designed a table without holes in it. Basic design fault, what. I’ll give them a call, once someone gets round to inventing the telephone.
Or they could just play with bigger balls, so they don’t go down the holes.

I think he’s eyeing up a plant!!!
What on earth are you on about? Kindly leave botany out of this. People will think we don’t know what we’re doing.
Sorry, no idea what I meant by that. Mind you, now he’s got a nice angle on the blue to go into the pack, hitting the pink full ball.
You’re at it again.

Hang on—do you reckon the goal is to Attain Emptiness, after the fashion of Huineng and Walt Disney?

[…]
Pour me another gin.
I think I’m starting to get the hang of this.

Hmm, not many red balls left on the table. The ref should put them all back. At this rate they won’t have any more balls left to hit—the whole sorry travesty will just fizzle out. Let’s face it, this is never going to catch on. I’m going to take up accountancy.
Fancy a curry?

Ronnie

Ronnie graces the baize on Wednesday.

Cf. Script to an iconic head-butt. Seriously though folks, don’t miss Ronnie’s divine 147!!!

Discerning rules is pretty much what anthropologists and ethnomusicologists do. This vignette from Nigel Barley on his fieldwork among the Dowayo of Cameroon (cited here) is apposite:

They missed out the essential piece of information that made things comprehensible. No one told me that the village was where the Master of the Earth, the man who controlled the fertility of all plants, lived, and that consequently various parts of the ceremony would be different from elsewhere. This was fair enough; some things are too obvious to mention. If we were explaining to a Dowayo how to drive a car, we should tell him all sorts of things about gears and road signs before mentioning that one tried not to hit other cars.

From the archives

Posted on by

me reading

Don’t like to boast, but in this early photo I am preparing my review of the Sanskrit translation of the pop-up version of Wittgenstein’s Tractato logico-philosophicus.

Arsenal 1958Soon I would even learn to tie my own shoe-laces—which stood me in good stead for joining the Arsenal forward line-up for a record transfer fee of 4 guineas. My artistry is hard to make out in the grainy TV footage of the day, since I was so small, which made me tough for burly defenders to mark; in my own early version of the nutmeg, I kicked the ball between their legs and then crawled through myself.

And here I am giving my first performance of Messiaen’s Vingt regards su l’enfant Jésus:

me piano 1955

Meanwhile I made my Carnegie Hall debut with my own arrangement of the complete Bach cello suites for kazoo. And the rest isn’t history.

See also Wisdom of the elders, A modest literary pedigree, and A short story.

Some pupils of Nadia Boulanger—real and alleged

Posted on by
Boulanger with Stravinsky

With Igor Stravinsky (“Gran visits York“), 1937.

Just in time before it was deleted, I viewed a suggestive wiki page listing well over two hundred distinguished pupils of the great pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979; cf. my post on her sister Lili, for whom see also Nubile gorilla). The wiki editors may have decided it would be shorter to compile a list of musicians who didn’t study with her.

Sure, one might suspect that some of them just popped in for a pot of tea and a macaroon, à la Alan Bennett. The allure of Paris may have played a certain role in Mademoiselle’s popularity—dare I surmise that her wisdom might not have been in quite such demand had she been based in Scunthorpe.

Prominent in the populous Boulangerie were renowned WAM composers and performers—such as Walter Piston, Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, Philip Glass (cf. Ned Rorem, “Am I the only living expatriate American composer who never studied with Nadia Boulanger?”); Darius Milhaud, Jean Françaix; Thea Musgrave, Lennox Berkeley; Shanghai composer Ding Shande; [1] Igor Markevitch, Dinu Lipatti, Idil Biret, Joseph Horovitz, Daniel Barenboim, Clifford Curzon, Kenneth Gilbert, John Kirkpatrick, Kathleen Ferrier…

As would be the case later (see here, under “Performance practice”), new composition and early music went hand in hand. Boulanger’s performances of Monteverdi and Bach were legendary—At A Time When It Was Neither Profitable Nor Popular. In the later HIP scene, she was a formative influence on performers such as John Eliot Gardiner and Robert Levin.

I like this story from Philip Glass’s memoirs:

After proffering his 20-page manuscript, Mademoiselle (as she was known) placed it on the piano’s music rack and cast her eyes over the densely written pages. At a certain point she paused, drew breath and enquired after his health.

“Not sick, no headache, no problems at home?”

“No, Mlle Boulanger, I am really fine.”

“Would you like to see a physician or a psychiatrist? It can be arranged very confidentially.”

“No, Mlle Boulanger.”

She wheeled her chair around and screamed “Then how do you explain this?”

She had found “hidden fifths” between an alto and bass part—a heinous crime, if ever there were one. After upbraiding him for his slackness and lack of commitment he was dismissed and the lesson was over.

Boulanger with Piazzolla 1955

With Astor Piazzolla, 1955.

Intriguing too are those names outside the world of WAM, notably jazzers—Donald Byrd, Quincy Jones, Astor Piazzolla, Michel Legrand, and so on. Most poignantly, Noor Inayat Khan and her siblings—on whom, do please read this moving post.

Here’s a precious 1977 film by Bruno Monsaingeon (cf. his films on Rozhdestvensky), showing evocative vignettes from her salon:

For a festival in 2021, see here.

* * *

Descending into fantasy, I only began to wonder about some of these names when I switched on Football focus to hear Wayne Rooney claiming to be a disciple:

Emm… yeah Gary, me legendary hunger for the ball round the edge of the box—that’s all down to Mademoiselle, like… She taught me everything I know about Renaissance polyphony—[2] mind you, I taught ‘er everything she knows about dribbling, fair dos like. [3]

Perhaps it goes back to the popularity of a CV-writing manual that states “most importantly, always claim to be a pupil of Nadia Boulanger”.

This trend has also influenced historians, such as recent biographers of Genghis Khan (“under her tutelage, he became almost docile”) and Jane Austen—citing a recently-discovered early draft of Pride and Prejudice:

But I was not to be deterred by Mademoiselle’s stern rebukes pertaining to the supposed clumsiness of my chordal voicing on the pianoforte.

(Seriously though folks, do read this interesting article on music and class in Austen’s works).

YAY! Wayne Rooney, Genghis Khan, and Jane Austen—now there’s another great guest-list for a fantasy dinner-party. For some unlikely reviews of my own ouevre, click here.

Left, 1910; right, 1925.

[1] Meanwhile, other students were beating a path to the door of Olivier Messiaen, including the great Chinese composer Chen Qigang.

[2] See his little-known thesis: Wayne Mark Rooney, The art of counterpoint in the late Masses of Josquin des Prez, with special reference to penalty-taking, like (PhD, Université Paris-Sorbonne/Birkenhead Polytechnic, nd).

Note also the (real!) Improvisation for Michael Owen on the qin zither.

[3] Cf. the Harry and Paul spoof interview with S-Simon Rattle, introducing a fascinating (and otherwise earnest) post on Conducting from memory.

A sporting medley: ritual and gender

Posted on by

After all these sacrifices (see note here), it transpires that what the plucky Brits really care about is not so much creating a fairer society, but playing golf and visiting garden centres. FFS. I give up. As Ian Rush is said to have commented about, um, living in Italy, it’s “like living in a foreign country”.

Anyway, following the recent moratorium (welcome to many, no doubt), as sport furtively reappears like a cockroach from behind the fridge, here’s a little roundup of some highlights from the sport tag—not least, connections with ritual, and with feminism.

Snooker—starting with 5’20” of inspired fluency from the great Ronnie:

Daoist football https://stephenjones.blog/2017/09/28/daoist-football/

Football: among many posts,

Rugby:

Tennis:

Not forgetting

https://stephenjones.blog/2020/02/05/bhutan/

Script to an iconic head-butt

Posted on by

headbutt

Since I mentioned Zidane’s iconic head-butt in the 2006 World Cup Final—one of the supreme sacrifices in the cause of performance art—further footage has come to light enabling us to reconstruct one side of the, um, conversations leading up to it [Yeah right—Ed.].

The angle of the grainy amateur video (filmed on one of those new-fangled contraptions that I believe are known as “smartphones”) only allows us to see Zidane’s own reactions to Materazzi’s foul-mouthed torrents of abuse. I hereby translate them, reconstructed with the help of a dedicated team of lip–readers:

Funny you should say that, Marco baby, but I Think You’ll Find that my mother is in fact somewhat conservative in the range of her social engagements. Please allow me to suggest that you must be mistaking her for someone else—might a trip to Specsaveurs be in order? I do also note that you seem to confuse my legs for the ball.

[…]

And as to my sister (and again, I’m not sure this is strictly relevant to the matter at hand)—well, Sir, I think you will concur with me that it ill behoves us to cast judgement on the explorations of young people as they negotiate the rules of social interaction of this complex world in which we find ourselves. Doubtless you are au fait with the ouevre of my esteemed compatriot Simone de Beauvoir—indeed, I believe your own country has some fine discussion groups on gender issues. Perhaps I might remind you that the behaviour of men might also be subject to such scrutiny—with their own all-too-human foibles, they cannot always be renowned as bastions of moral probity.

Anyway, With All Due Respect, I suppose we really should tear ourselves away for a while, however reluctantly, in order to display our athletic prowess in this Beautiful Game of ours for the benefit of the assembled multitudes. It’s been absolutely super chatting with you, little Marco—I must say how much I enjoy our little tête-a-têtes

BAM*@*@*

 

See also The c-word. For an off-pitch bust-up, and a brilliant headline, click here; for Daoist football, and men moving the goalposts, here. For more on women’s football, see here.

 

 

 

Compound surnames in Chinese and English

Posted on by

Left: Sima Qian; right: Zhuge Liang.

For China, besides my post on alternating single and double given names by generation, there are also some intriguing double surnames, often deriving from northern ethnic minorities.

Of the many that were used in early history, some have fallen out of use, with clans often adopting single surnames—a process that took place over a long period, unlike the rapidly changing fashions in given names. Double surnames still quite common are Ouyang 歐陽, Shangguan 上官, Sima 司馬 and Situ 司徒; less so are Zhuge 諸葛, Xiahou 夏侯, Huangfu 皇甫, Huyan 呼延, and Zhongli 鍾離. Oh, and Chenggong 成公 and Geshu 哥舒.

Left: Ouyang Xiu; right: Zhongli Quan.

The latter surname was Turkic in origin. Among ethnic minorities, longer compound surnames are still common, adapted to Chinese style, such as the Manchu Qing imperial clan Aisin Gioro. But with the Han chauvinism of the current CCP this is changing too—for Uyghur names under the current clampdown in Xinjiang, see e.g. this article.

* * *

For the Han Chinese double-barrelled surnames I can’t discern potential for satire, as we class-conscious English like to do for Posh Upper-Class Twits—whether fictional characters like Gussie Fink-Nottle and Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling, and Monty Python’s Vivian Smith-Smythe-Smith, Simon Zinc-Trumpet-Harris, Nigel Incubator-Jones, Gervaise Brook-Hamster, and Oliver St. John-Mollusc (click here)—or real people who really should be fictional, like Jacob Rees-Mogg. There is latitude in the use of the hyphen. Indeed, why stop at two surnames? This wiki article also considers international naming practices, including Germany and Iberia. As Silly Names go, it’s hard to beat Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache, British captain who died in World War One. 

Now the Riff-Raff [sic] are getting in on the act too, with young sporting luminaries such as Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, Trent Alexander-Arnold, and the wonderful Katarina Johnson-Thompson, who soars high above the recumbent Tree-Frog.

In a rather different category is the litany of middle names for Boris Piccaninny Watermelon Letterbox Johnson as documented by Stewart Lee, which grows almost weekly.

See here for more on How to be English.

Bhutan: a tongue-twister, archery festivals, and teasing cheerleaders

Posted on by

Bhutan

Not a Lot of People Know This, but the popular tongue-twister*

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

is a modern American adaptation of an ancient ritual in Bhutan.

Really?—The Plain People of Ireland.
No—SJ.
Begob! You had me there.

The woodchuck song (cf. More stammering songs) dates from 1902—here’s the popular version by Ragtime Roberts, recorded in 1904, just as Mahler was conducting the premiere of his 5th symphony:

I like this 1946 Glenn Miller version, with the follow-up “How many cats would a catnip nip…”:

cartoon
To answer the question, apart from the song’s decidedly surly “A woodchuck would chuck as much wood as a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood”, there have been some hilarious scientific attempts
(cf. Stewart Lee’s pedantic research on “the tip of the cesspit” under The c-word).

* * *

The word woodchuck, first recorded in 1674, is an English rendition of the Algonquin wejack or wuchak. And by way of the etymology of wang in whangdoodle (cf. schlong), I note, with the greatest respect, the many illustrious bearers of the name Wangchuk in Bhutan—which inspires me to

How much wang would a Wangchuck chuck if a Wangchuck could chuck wang?

In translation this may not quite match the elegance of the woodchuck version, with its euphonic “wood” and “would/could”—but I like to imagine that it works even better in the original Middle Bhutanese (just the kind of wacky topic that Sir Harold Bailey might have relished: “Indeed I’d say there’s hardly a line that could not have been understood by any Persian of the fourth century”)—perhaps

Wonga wang wunga Wangchuk chuka wangka Wangchuk wunga chuka wang?

wangsDare I surmise [Yes, I’m afraid you probably do—Ed.]** that wang-chucking festivals were once a major part of the ritual calendar in Bhutan, with ornately decorated wangs,*** assembled from monasteries throughout the region, to be hurled towards a distant target, or tôs-pöt? The arcane sentence might thus be the pious request of a courtly petitioner, curious despite the ineligibility of the royal family to participate in an event of which they were the main patrons.

Indeed, phallic symbols, representing Avalokiteśvara, are common in Bhutan and Tibet, as documented in this substantial (and for once, real) article. One of the names of Shiva is Wangchuk chenpo; and the phallus was a major part of the symbolic repertoire of atsara jesters.

* * *

Perhaps [sic] we may find the modern descendant of the Bhutanese wang-chucking ritual in its archery festivals (cf. Zen archery). OK then, so far this post has been Rather Silly, but now that I come to seek material on archery in Bhutan, I am full of genuine admiration.

Via the splendid community website bongopas.com, I find several videos of archery festivals (do consult the original posts, under bongop videos). Here’s a lovely short documentary from 2015, showing the ritual sequence, with vignettes from flag-bearer and storekeeper as well as the women of the chorus, and—for anyone who likes to think of Bhutan as “unspoilt”—a final comment on the decline of the “old rules” (cf. China, e.g. here):

Women play a major role as cheerleaders [sic], singing songs to tease the archers with their nicknames (cf. French taunting):

Whose forehead is bulging and swollen like a wine-serving spoon, in aimless flight his shaft will drift to hit the mark not even once.

Lips sheltered in a black beard, in aimless flight his shaft will drift to hit the mark not even once.

Here are some more instances (“Forehead is like wine sieve??”, “Dried ears!!!”, “Sneezing carpenter??”, “Pumpkin wine container”, “Polished stone head”):

And some more choral songs:

So while I’m encouraged by their own delight in jocular wordplay, ethnography makes a fine counterpart to my earlier frivolity.

Talking of Bhutanese films, this looks interesting.

Archery festivals are also common in Ladakh and Sikkim, and, with very different modern histories, in Tibet, Kham, and Amdo—as in this documentary, filmed in Lo khog village, Qinghai:

Returning to Bhutan, all this should encourage us to explore the riches of diverse soundscapes there, through sites such as this—not least monastic rituals, such as this 2-CD Lyrichord collection recorded by John Levy in 1971 (liner notes for download here):


The research for this project was not made remotely possible by a generous grant from SPICE, the Society for the Promotion Prevention of International Cultural Exchange; and believe it or not, no ice-cubes were “educated” with Bombay Sapphire during the creation of this post.

* For an operatic tongue-twister, click here; and for a Chinese tongue-twister of mine, here.

** In such exegesis I may be inspired by Mots d’heure: gousses, rames; for other spurious excursions in cultural and linguistic history, see my series on the faqu (“French pieces”) under this roundup of posts on the Tang dynasty.

*** Cf. Dud ‘n’ Pete’s illumination of the lyrics “Mama’s got a brand new bag yeah, gonna groove it the whole night long baby“. More recently, Miranda Vukasovic has amassed an impressive collection of gaily-coloured phallic bottle-openers from Bali.

Enough already

Posted on by

Coco Naomi

In the opening salvos of what will be a wonderful long tennis rivalry, first Naomi Osaka beat the astounding Coco Gauff in the 2019 US Open (and in that post, do watch their beautiful on-court interview!); and now Coco has taken her revenge in the 3rd round of this year’s Australian Open.

But here I have a linguistic point in mind. Commenting on her 2nd-round match, Osaka described her rocky path to victory:

I was like, “Can I just hit a winner already?”

This led me to explore discussions of the usage of “already” as an intensifier to express impatience or exasperation (see e.g. here). It still seems more common in American English than in the UK, but I like it.

Some suggest that it was adapted in the States early in the 20th century from the Yiddish shoyn (genug, shoyn! “Enough already!”). cf. gut shoyn, ”All right already!” in the sense of ”Stop bugging me,” and (one calibration more irritated) shvayg shtil shoyn, ”Shut up already!”. But, thickening the plot, it’s also common in other languages, such as French déjà and Spanish ya. It also rather recalls the emphatic use of the particle le 了 and its expressive variant la 啦 in Chinese.

Doubtless people have been slaving away at erudite PhDs on the subject (“When are you gonna finish your goddam thesis already?”, or perhaps “When are you gonna finish your goddam thesis ‘Already’ already?”).

And now Naomi has won the 2020 US Open too, all the while drawing attention to BLM.

Anyway, both Coco and Naomi are inspiring. Already.

Cocomania

Posted on by

For anyone living on another planet (immersed in medieval Daoist ritual manuals, or whatever)…

As if the Women’s World Cup wasn’t enough, I’m only too happy to subscribe to the mass adulation for Cori Gauff at Wimbledon. Her two victories were just exhilarating.

Mature and focused at 15, she’s an inspiration. Her parents seem great too.

CG parents

She was charming in handling the usual fatuous questions at her 3rd-round press conference:

When you were match point down on Centre Court, were you thinking, what would Venus and Serena do?

Er, no! …

which ranks along with Bertrand Russell’s comment after his plane crash. And at the risk of sounding like the woman visiting the young Living Buddha, I love the way she tucks her chair into the desk at the end.

tweet

[Spoiler: typical Grauniad-reading liberal metropolitan elite quote coming up] At a time when the world seems doomed to suffer under mendacious cynical rich old white men, we all need role models like Coco—a list that might also include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg, Katelyn Ohashi, and indeed Oxana Thaili. It’s no coincidence that the most inspiring of such figures are female.

Cori 2

I wish her well, and look forward to the day when AOC can welcome her to the White House!

Update: US Open, 2019
In the latest episode of the story, Coco’s home crowd has been exulting in her style, social media goes even wilder, and in defeat she is magnanimously persuaded by Naomi Osaka to share this moving post-match interview:

See also Enough already.

Another update: the principled response of Coco and Naomi to the murder of George Floyd.

For the women’s final in 2021, please relish A playlist for Emma and Leylah!

Belated recognition

Posted on by

Clarke

British Ladies’ Football Club, 1895. Back row, 2nd left: Emma Clarke.

It may come as a relief to readers that my posts are currently coming rather less thick and fast than usual. I’m working away, and awaiting some more info—Honest Guv, it’s not entirely due to the stellar conjunction of the Women’s Football World Cup and the new series of Killing Eve.

1895

After China’s defeat to Germany yesterday, we might recall that football seems to have been invented by the Chinese (“Typical!“), and female players were common there. Wiki lists sightings in 12th-century France and 1790s’ Scotland. The British Ladies’ Football Club was formed in 1894 (the illustration depicts their first match in 1895).

Amongst the players was the first black female footballer Emma Clarke (1876–c1905), whose story has recently been rediscovered. One of fourteen children from Bootle, of whom only four survived to adulthood, “the fleet-footed dark girl on the right wing” was also an occasional goalkeeper.

The popularity of women’s football in Britain increased during World War One, with munitions workers taking part keenly (cf. Morris dancing). A golden age occurred in the early 1920s, but it was banned from the grounds of the FA’s member clubs from 1921 to 1971 (no comment).

Patronising early reports (“Grotesque football at Alford”!) had a lasting legacy. The first Women’s World Cup was held in 1991—in China. How inspiring that women’s football is finally making a major impact on the media, all the more so with the 2022 Euros; doubtless among the most excited followers were the girls of a County Durham school, authors of wise and trenchant letters to the FA in 2017.

For more, see Suzanne Wrack, A woman’s game: the rise, fall, and rise again of women’s football (2022, reviewed here).

As to Killing Eve (“homoerotic candy”?), my query, based on Mark’s comment in Peep show, remains unanswered. The temptation to binge-watch (never available for Twin Peaks in the prehistoric 1990s) is tough to resist…KE

The Tzar-spangled banner—diversity—female genius

Posted on by

Ohashi https://stephenjones.blog/2019/01/27/tzar-spangled-banner/

I began writing this as another paean to the great Bill Bailey, to follow his greatest-ever love song (“soaking in the hoisin of your lies“), but it has soon turned into yet another tribute to diversity and female genius.

David Hughes (himself a prolific drôle songwriter as well as leading authority on Japanese music) thoughtfully alerts me to this (allegedly) Kremlin-sanctioned version of The star-spangled banner, which is becoming ever more topical:

See also “I think you’ll find—it’s MINOR!”

To return to the major (sung by a minor), this, from Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja, then 7 (taking a rather different path from Alma Deutscher), is remarkable too:

“They come over ‘ere…” See also And did those feet in ancient time?, and The haka.

While I’m here, how can I resist featuring another most inspiring viral clip—and do follow up with Katelyn Ohashi’s thoughtful blog and innumerable further links, like this and this—bearing on ecstasy and drudge, and the nature of artistic competition:

OK then, for a hat-trick of What Really Makes America Great (see The wise AOC):

Do follow @AOC, the most articulate and engaged advocate for political change!

Yet more much-needed hope for our future… Call me a !typical member of the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati (formerly known as “the Grauniad-reading metropolitan liberal elite”), but long may the likes of “Rear Admiral” Foley turn in their graves.

For another inspirational role model, see here.

Let me see now, what did I come in here for again?

Ronnie: a roundup

Posted on by

Ronnie

As the Masters tournament breaks off again at Ally Pally, it’s that time of year when I make another futile attempt to Rend Asunder the Bonds of Daoist ritual, the Iron curtain, and Bach by extolling the magic of Ronnie O’Sullivan, the Mozart of snooker. Like Mozart, he has his own tag in the sidebar: here’s a cue [sic].

The most essential viewing is his 147 maximum break from 1997—5’20” of sheer genius.

Further posts include

On a lighter note,

If you’re feeling really broad-minded, try the sport tag too. You’ll even find Daoist football there.

Trust me, I’m a doctor, To adapt Hašek,

the first fifty readers to view these posts will receive as a gift a free pocket aquarium.

Guide to another year’s blogging

Posted on by

 

Li Manshan doing paperwork for Hoisting the Pennant ritual, 2003 https://stephenjones.blog/the-film/

Struggling to encompass all this? I know I am. While we inevitably specialize in particular topics, it’s important to build bridges. I guess it’s that time of year when another guide to my diverse posts may come in handy—this is worth reading in conjunction with the homepage and my roundup this time last year.

I’ve added more entries to many of the sidebar categories and tags mentioned in that summary. I’ve now subheaded many of the categories; it’d be useful for the tags too, but it seems I can’t do that on my current WP plan. Of course, many of these headings overlap—fruitfully.

Notably, I keep updating and refecting on my film and book on the Li family Daoists. I wrote a whole series resulting from my March trip to Yanggao (helpfully collected here) and Beijing (starting here, also including the indie/punk scene). Other 2018 posts on the Li family include Yanggao personalities and Recopying ritual manuals (a sequel to Testing the waters).

To accompany the visit of the Zhihua temple group to the British Museum in April, I also did a roundup of sources on the temple in the wider context of ritual in Beijing and further afield, including several posts on this site.

I’ve posted some more introductions to Local ritual, including

Gender (now also with basic subheads) is a constant theme, including female spirit mediums—to follow the series on women of Yanggao, starting here. Or nearer home, Moon river, complementing Ute Lemper.

Sinologists—indeed aficionados of the qin, crime fiction, and erotica—may also like my post on Robert van Gulik (and note the link to Bunnios!).

I’ve added a few more categories and tags, notably

Women of Herat https://stephenjones.blog/2018/10/29/women-of-herat/

Twin Peaks https://stephenjones.blog/2018/10/17/twin-peaks/
The conformist https://stephenjones.blog/2018/11/08/the-conformist/

The film tag is developing, with a side order of soundtracks—for some links, see here.

cof
Gepopo https://stephenjones.blog/2018/09/13/gepopo/

I’ve given basic subheads to the language category (note this post on censorship), which also contains much drôlerie in both English and Chinese. Issues with speech and fluency (see stammering tag) continue to concern me, such as

Following Daoist football, the sport tag is worth consulting, such as The haka, and a series on the genius of Ronnie.

Some posts are instructively linked in chains:

More favourites may be found in the *MUST READ* category. Among other drôlerie, try this updated post, one of several on indexing and taxonomy; and more from the great Philomena Cunk.

Most satisfying is this collection of great songs—still not as eclectic as it might become:

Do keep exploring the sidebar categories and tags!

 

 

Jesus jokes

Posted on by

Last supper

Call me irreverent (cf. The sermon, and We are miserable sinners), but Jesus jokes can be entertaining. There’s a plethora of websites, so here I’ll stick to some of my more niche favourites. Even last-supper jokes are a whole sub-genre—here’s an audio variant:

For a feminist version, click here.

Apart from his brilliant anagram tales, my talented friend Nick, living in Lisbon, has a nice little number going with football reports featuring Jesus, coach of Sporting (as the team is ingenuously called). Among pithy headlines that Nick has spotted are

Jesus pays homage to his Father

and the brilliant

Jesus is very happy with his eleven

(Judas clearly relegated to the bench there—hinting he wants a transfer).

Despite his health travails, Nick has managed to update me. Receiving a head-butt à la Zidane,

Jesus wants out fast

and helpfully (Pontius Pilate please note) *

Jesus is willing to be flexible in negotiations

For Nick’s sequel, click here.

Such is the warm British welcome for foreigners [only joking] that we can play this game too. Moving onto the Brazil forward, I enjoyed this Guardian headline** that appeared but briefly online—all the more apt since it was Holy Week:

Jesus restores some pride after thrashing

When he took a penalty for Man City against Burnley goalkeeper Nick Pope:

Pope saves from Jesus

and one always waits for this one to come up:

Jesus hits woodwork

This one is no less classic for being fabricated:

Jesus saves—but Rooney scores from the rebound

JesusAs to Arsenal’s young star, I’m keen to get this headline in early:

Jesus Set to Make Comeback at Easter

And the celebrated Victorian tombstone:

He fell asleep in Jesus
     to which has been added
and woke up in a siding in Crewe

Gay comedians naturally warm to the theme. Simon Amstell (Help, p.80):

I’m not an atheist. I’m a big fan of Jesus Christ, there’s nobody more thin and vulnerable than Jesus Christ.

And David Sedaris (for whom see also here, and here):

And he always has a fantastic body, shown at its best on the cross, which—face it—was practically designed to make a man’s stomach and shoulders look good.

Not to be outdone, Beatrice Dalle is available for seminars on the history of religion:

I love Christ because he invented bondage.

No trawl through the archives would be complete without Family guy, where Jesus is a regular Special Guest Star, such as:

I must confess [sic] that there are already several related posts on this blog—Chumleys vinegar, more from Alan Bennett (WWJD, feet, and the Christmas card), the Matthew Passion incident, and so on. If you consult the latter post, we can all end with a resounding chorus of Always look on the bright side of life. For “blasphemy”, see also Patricia Lockwood.

In my defence, Daoist jokes are also a niche source of entertainment, like the train deity (also featuring Moses) or the “switch off the light” story. [Call that a defence?—Ed.]

* Pilate plays a cameo role in my post on Laozi.

** For another fine Guardian football headline, see here; for Daoist football and gender, here.

Inspiration: women’s football

Posted on by

WFA

How wonderful to see the Women’s FA Cup Final on BBC1, showing that progress continues despite misogynistic reactions around the globe. The schoolgirls who, this time last year, wrote those brilliant letters to the FA (“We aren’t brainless Barbie dolls”) will be delighted—not a pink fluffy football in sight.

Among numerous posts under the gender tag, see e.g. “Little Miss Mozart“; Vera and Doris; Cunk on femininism; You don’t own me; and how men moved the goalposts for women’s football in medieval China.

“I dunno, they’ll be demanding control over their own bodies next”.

Two geniuses

Posted on by

 

MANCHESTER, ENGLAND – SEPTEMBER 23: Arsene Wenger, manager of Arsenal looks on ahead of the Barclays Premier League match between Manchester City and Arsenal at Etihad Stadium on September 23, 2012 in Manchester, England. (Photo by Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)

It’s all very well me swanning off to China (see flurry of posts since 14th March) and Germany, but one has to keep up with the domestic news. OK, the Windrush affair is shameful, but on a lighter note:

  • The imminent departure of Arsène Wenger from Arsenal has finally produced the tributes he deserves (for his classy send-off, see here). Football will never see his like again. And if you haven’t noticed my post on Daoist football, then DO!
  • And meanwhile in the snooker, the gorgeous and inspired Ronnie is back in action!!! I’m getting this in early (his next match is on Friday), as one never knows, but beholding him is always a thing of magic. Whether or not he progresses further, here’s my occasional reminder that you just have to watch his 147 maximum break from 1997—I will accept no excuses.

And I have another episode of Cunk in Britain to catch up on too!

180!!!

Posted on by

More local cultural knowledge:

One morning in Maida Vale studios, as the great Pierre Boulez was rehearsing the BBC Symphony Orchestra, he stopped and said suavely,

“Please, we play again from measure* 180.”

Brilliant cockney percussionist Gary Kettel, from the back of the orchestra, punched the air gleefully and screamed out,

“ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTYYY!!!”

Since Boulez’s broad erudition didn’t stretch to the world of UK darts, he was somewhat nonplussed [‘Ow you say in French?] by Gary’s recondite allusion to the fabled score of three triple 20s. Still, he and Gary always had the utmost respect for each other’s musicianship.

 

*Boulez always used the French word for “bar”. Endearingly, he called the cor anglais “ze English ‘orn”.

Ronnie again

Posted on by

UPDATE: Cosmic Justice has at least temporarily proved itself amidst a troubled world—I wrote this in the early stages of the UK tournament, but now Ronnie’s won it yet again in another inspiring display!

Ronnie

With his natural grace, Ronnie O’Sullivan is often compared to Roger Federer, but he’s in a league of his own, transcending sport. If you haven’t watched his maximum break from 1997, then do—it’s not merely a world record that is likely to stand for all time, but a thing of exquisite fluent beauty, reminiscent of the nuanced touch of a great musician.

After the morose introspection of yesteryear, Ronnie has come through the early years of obsession and addiction (lessons here for the claustrophobic hothouse of WAM virtuosos), and he’s on great form these days, with a kind of earthy Daoist detachment.

I list my series on Ronnie here.

It’s that man again

Posted on by

More from the diaries of Alan Bennett. I’m filing this 2009 entry under heritage:

23 August. […] I’m glad I’m not a theatregoer living in Elsinore. All they must ever get are productions of Hamlet, while what they’re probably longing for is Move Over, Mrs Markham or Run For Your Wife.

His keen eye for footballers’ physiognomy is in evidence again (2010):

7 April. The open mouth of Frank Lampard, having scored a goal, is also the howl on the face of the damned man in Michelangelo’s The Last Judgement.

This entry depends on a certain cultural knowledge that might challenge translators:

5 July. A child in Settle is said to have asked what the Mafia was and his grandfather said, “It’s like the Settle Rotary Club, only with guns.”

And he often shows his political involvement. When a speech in favour of the NHS from his early play Getting on is well received, he is encouraged to go on:

25 July, Yorkshire. […] whereas nowadays the state is a dirty word, for my generation the state was a saviour, delivering us out of poverty and want (and provincial boredom) and putting us on the road to a better life; the state saved my father’s life, my mother’s sanity and my own life too. “So when I hear politicians taking about pushing back the boundaries of the state I think”—only I’ve forgotten what it is I think so I just say: “I think… bollocks.” This, too, goes down well, though I’d normally end a performance on a more elegiac note.

Nicknames

Posted on by

As Kate Fox observes, the creativity of the English language reveals itself at multiple levels.

The fragrant Gary Lineker recalls how the the team-mates of the footballer Kiki Musampa called him Chris (think about it). There are more where that came from, like Fitz Hall—known as One Size.

Brian Smith, a “straight” symphony-orchestra violinist who became a semi-detached admission to the rarefied early music scene in the 1980s, had a whole series of drôle nicknames for his new colleagues, making his conversation surreal: “I think Identikit’s gone off with Ironing Board”. Once word got round that I was making regular trips to China, I became The Missionary. He only used the real names of musos who had a life outside early music and thus qualified as Real People.

Conductors’ nicknames are another rich vein under the rubric of maestro-baiting. The great Charles Mackerras was known as Slasher—not an allusion to his conducting technique, but an abbreviation of his anagram: Slasher M. Earcrack.

Language and football

Posted on by

Some gems from Alan Bennett’s 2005 diaries, in his recent collection Keeping on keeping on (if it’s not known as KOKO, then I hereby patent the acronym):

1 May. Martha, Charlotte and James’s youngest, has been slow to read but now aged eight is making great strides, particularly enjoying spelling. She is being given additional tuition by the father of a friend, a retired teacher who is also employed by Manchester United; the foreign half of the squad he is teaching to speak English, the English half he is teaching to read and write.

8 December. I buy a bottle of organic wine at Fresh and Wild and looking at the label see that it says “Suitable for Vegetarians and Vagrants”. Momentarily I think, “Well, that’s thoughtful, someone admitting that winos deserve consideration like everyone else”, before realizing, of course, that it says not “vagrants” but “vegans”.

16 December. Roy Keane has the face of a mercenary. Meet him before the walls of fifteenth-century Florence and one’s heart would sink.

Schubert

Posted on by

The Schubert string quintet is one of those pieces that is always there when you need it. The slow movement in particular is deep in the heart of many musicians (and gratifyingly, it’s also one of those pieces that recurs on Desert Island Discs), but it’s all amazing.*

I’ve been appreciating the 1941 studio performance by the Budapest Quartet with Benar Heifetz—part of their amazingly busy recording schedule, and just as bebop was evolving:

Indeed, the group’s history makes a fascinating history of the metamorphoses of a string quartet under the conditions of the 20th century.

Benar Heifetz was the older brother of Jascha—who is quoted as saying:

One Russian is an anarchist. Two Russians are a chess game. Three Russians are a revolution. Four Russians are the Budapest String Quartet.

Which reminds me of the old Cold War joke:

What’s the definition of a string quartet?
A Russian symphony orchestra after a tour of the West.

For viola jokes, see here.

BTW, the long eclipse of WAM in Desert Island Discs since 1942, while not a sample of the general population, makes an interesting window on changing tastes.

More Schubert here!

*PS Any fiddle players got a good fingering for the ending of the Scherzo?

Schubert

I’ve got a sneaky one, but hey—what do I know? Available on request… The last note may be “hit and hope”; Hugh Maguire said he had about a 70% strike rate—better than in football, where the long high ball upfield in the direction of Peter Crouch’s head is even less reliable. But how to negotiate the preceding run is debatable too.

A sporting headline

Posted on by

While we’re on football, in the notorious and grandly-named Saipan incident in the run-up to the 2002 World Cup, Roy Keane’s spat with the Republic of Ireland team manager Mick McCarthy evokes the principled hauteur of an illustrious Ming-dynasty court official going into voluntary exile rather than serving under the new Manchu regime.

The confrontation between player and manager allegedly culminated in this fine rant from Keane:

“Mick, you’re a liar… you’re a fucking wanker. I didn’t rate you as a player, I don’t rate you as a manager, and I don’t rate you as a person. The only reason I have any dealings with you is that somehow you are manager of my country and you’re not even Irish, you English cunt. You can stick the World Cup up your bollocks.”

Reporting the story, the Guardian came out with the magnificent headline

Keane Displays Tenuous Grasp Of Anatomy

Note also my roundup of wacky headlines.

Daoist ritual and football

Posted on by

Daoist football

WOW. Following my post on the Haka, Chinese football has just gone one better. On 23rd September a Henan team had a Daoist ritual performed on the pitch, going on to get their first home win in months—and getting a slapped wrist from the Chinese FA, what’s more:

http://www.scmp.com/sport/soccer/article/2112866/football-no-place-religion-chinese-soccer-club-warned-after-conducting

Sure, unlike the Haka, in this case it’s not the players themselves who perform the ritual—yet.

Chinese Twitter is buzzing with discussion. Daoist fans aren’t taking the stern rebukes lying down: pointing out that Daoist ritual is protected under the brief of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, they deftly play the old “culture, not feudal superstition” card.

有道教网站转发新闻办的微博称：来来来，我给建业支个招，各地的道教音乐中包括全真十方韵，全国很多地方都有批准为非物质文化遗产， 建业去问问那次的道长是传承自哪里，在比赛前进行音乐演奏，非遗文化表演。是受非遗法保护的。《中华人民共和国非物质文化遗产法》里 面有支持其参与社会公益性活动。这么喜闻乐见不如看怎么合理弘扬？

Others worry that it may give rise to competitive rituals in which the other team employs their own ritual specialists to break the magic of the opposition’s Daoists. Of course, it has long been common to hire two or more groups (Buddhist, Daoist, Tibeto-Mongol lamas…) for a single ritual event—competing between each other but not for rival patrons.

Another article defends the move by pointing out various international instances of teams seeking divine assistance (for a recent one, see here).

For a related debate, see here; note also the rebuttals of local government’s restrictions on funeral observances in Shandong.

Early Chinese versions of football were popular, though I’m not going to devote much time to searching for specific blessing rituals in Song-dynasty ritual compendia… Not will I detain you here with a discussion of the constant historical adaptations of Daoists to their patrons…

football painting

Chinese women’s football. Du Jin, Ming dynasty.

I note that during the Song dynasty only one goal post was set up in the centre of the field—now that would be an intriguing modification to the FIFA rules. Further to the magnificent ripostes of young female footballers to the British FA, at a match in the Tang dynasty

records indicate that once a 17-year-old girl beat a team of army soldiers.

YAY! Could it have been after this match that the men shifted the goalposts? Typical!

Under Maoism a leading CCP apparatchik (can anyone put a name to this fine pundit?) observed twenty-two players chasing around after one ball, and in a spirit of egalitarianism, unhappy with the conventions of what he supposed was a misguided capitalist invention, declared grandly:
“We’re a socialist country now—why not give them a ball each?”

Anyway, my new dream is for the Li family Daoists to perform a ritual to help Arsenal win the Champions’ League.

For more on women’s football, see here.

Peccable logic

Posted on by

Lee Mack is always drôle.

Don’t try this at home. Or rather, only try it at home…

Such peccable logic is eclipsed only by Tucker Carlson’s recent

If the NFL owners are racist, why are 70% of their employees black?

Carlson is “honestly confused”. Yeah, right. His comment was soon compared with

If slave owners were racist, why were 100% of their slaves black?

Carlson

Creative graphics design.

Just as fatuous is the recent “proof” from the Chinese Foreign Ministry that Taiwan has always been part of China.

Ritual and sport: the haka

Posted on by

haka

Since I am wont to make blithe analogies between the performances of ritual and sport, the pre-match haka of the All Black rugby team makes a fine illustration, also revealing the enduring depth of folk culture. In its constant adaptations, both in sporting and other ceremonial versions, it’s deeply impressive.

The wiki articles on the traditional and sporting versions make a useful introduction, and there are many fine YouTube clips.

As a Māori ritual war cry the haka was originally performed by warriors before a battle, proclaiming their strength and prowess in order to intimidate the opposition. But haka are also performed for diverse social functions: welcoming distinguished guests, funerals, weddings, or to acknowledge great achievements, and kapa haka performance groups are common in schools. Some haka are performed by women.

Its social use has become widespread. In 2012 soldiers from the Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment performing a haka for fallen comrades killed in action in Afghanistan; and in 2015 hundreds of students performed a haka at the funeral of their high-school teacher in Palmerston, New Zealand:

In 2016, on the 15th anniversary of 9/11, New Zealand firefighters honoured the victims with a powerful haka.

And here’s a moving recent wedding haka:

In 2019 students performed a haka to commemorate the Christchurch shootings:

And the haka was performed for the Standing Rock protests of 2016 (link here if it doesn’t respond below):

* * *

The New Zealand native football team first performed a haka against Surrey (!) on a UK tour in 1888. The All Blacks have performed it since 1905. After witnessing the haka in Paris in 1925, James Joyce adapted it in Finnegan’s wake. For the 1954 version at Twickenham and evolution in the wake of TV, see here. The sequence below begins with 1922 and 1925 renditions, passing swiftly over the comically inept low point of 1973, to the increasingly choreographed versions of recent years:

So it’s no “living fossil”, being subject to regular adaptation. In 2005, to great acclaim, as an alternative to the usual Ka mate the All Blacks, led by Tana Umaga, introduced the new haka Kapa o pango, modified by Derek Lardelli from the 1924 Ko niu tireni:

Its adaptation to the sporting event compares favourably with Chinese concert versions of ritual. However it’s done, it never descends to the kitsch of such adaptations—it’s always performed with great intensity and integrity, giving an impressive glimpse of a serious ritual world. The pride that they take in performing it with such practised commitment contrasts strangely with the casual way in which they sing the national anthem that precedes it—even the Brazilian anthem doesn’t inspire its footballers to such intensity.

As a spurious link to a fine story, I note that the team performed a kangaroo version in July 1903:

Tena koe, Kangaroo                 How are you, Kangaroo
Tupoto koe, Kangaroo!           You look out, Kangaroo!
Niu Tireni tenei haere nei       New Zealand is invading you
Au Au Aue a!                             Woe woe woe to you!

* * *

From the sublime to the ridiculous… Several YouTube wags have suggested suitable responses from opposing teams: a burst of Riverdance by the Irish team, or (from the English) the hop-skip-hand-behind-the-back routine in Morecambe and Wise’s Bring me sunshine.

Morris dancing might unsettle the All Blacks too (music added later; in memoriam George Butterworth, killed in the Great War):

The Intangible Cultural Heritage rears its ugly head again—perhaps the English team could emulate the Britannia Coconut Dancers of Bacup, a 150-year-old troupe of Lancastrian clog dancers.

Not quite à propos, and Don’t Try This at Home—or in the Matthew Passion:

As a further riposte to the haka, even I can’t quite imagine the Daoist “Steps of Yu” (Yubu 禹步), but how about the Sacrificial dance of The Rite of Spring, complete with Roerich’s costumes and Nijinsky’s choreography? That really might take the lead out of the All Black pencil.

But we should celebrate the deeply serious nature of folk culture, and the evolving transmission of performances like the haka.

See also this helpful guide to the rules of rugby.

More Rachmaninoff

Posted on by

I’ve already posted a wonderful performance of Rachmaninoff’s 2nd symphony, but the recent Prom included another moving version, conducted by Thomas Dausgaard. I Like the Cut of his Jib, as Adrian Chiles observed prophetically about Guus Hiddink’s managing of the South Korean football team in 2002. Nor is the BBC Scottish to be sniffed at—I loved their Mahler 5 at the 2015 Proms, with Donald Runnicles.

With typical Proms flair, the concert opened with concert versions of Orthodox liturgy sung by the Latvian radio choir. After Rachmaninoff’s 3rd piano concerto, the encore of Vocalise led me to his own 1929 studio recording of his orchestral version:

Of all versions, you can’t beat it on theremin—here’s the divine Clara Rockmore:

 

And the theremin might lead us to Messiaen‘s ondes martenot…

Wimbledon: sequel

Posted on by

Following my Wimbledon post, what a treat to admire Jo Konta, mature and focused (and object of patriotism—confused, in some less enlightened quarters). Only the stately Venus was worthy to vanquish her, and in the final the sunny Garbine Muguruza made a suitably classy victor in turn.

And then there’s the sublime Roger Federer, magisterial and fluent like Li Qing or Ronnie—utterly different as they are away from the ritual arena.

Just remind me who said women’s tennis (read: sport) was boring? More on the perennial sexism debate:

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/shortcuts/2017/jul/11/andy-murray-the-feminist-that-tennis-needs?CMP=share_btn_tw

And after my remarks on the Beeb’s commentary team, don’t forget Beethoven’s Wimbledon adventure.

Bach and swimming

Posted on by

As I learn more Bach on the erhu, swimming always helps me. I’m just learning to internalize putting my clasped fingers into the water more horizontally, beginning the back-pull more immediately and maintaining the power.

When I get home, I take up the erhu, calibrating my motor-movements—string crossings, changing positions, breathing—in the service of my sound-ideal. Still sounds a bit rubbish, but hey. Practice makes perfect.

A great annual ritual: Wimbledon

Posted on by

Centre Court

The annual Wimbledon ritual is well under way again.

Never mind the tennis, the Beebs’s own line-up is impressive enough—Brits like Trusty Tim, always playing with a straight bat [?—Ed.], and the demure Sam Smith, obligatory Funny Foreigners led by generally lovable but sometimes off-message Mac, wise Tracy Austin and Martina Navratilova, with the ever-hot Pat Cash. It’s entertaining to see how the stalwart female commentators maintain patience with the hapless male pundits negotiating the sexist minefield in the wake of the Inverdale–Bartoli fiasco.

Quaintly more antiquated than the other Majors, it’s a benign celebration for the middle classes (including me—I went to school nearby, and sold ice-creams there). As a Guardian review observed in 2022, the event comes with

that familiar sense of something performative, theatrically static, being British for the British, in front of the British.

Like any ritual, indeed any performance, Wimbledon confirms Correct Behaviour (not least to keep those errant Foreigners in line); and it will mean different things to different people. But it’s a visual treat, despite the retro ritual costumes; and as to the ritual soundscape, the ping-pong [sic] of the ball makes a fine soundtrack too—along with the spectators’ Wimbledon groan.

The Beeb gets it just right by clinging on to the old signature tune (like child chimney-sweeps and Morris dancing) by Leslie Statham (aka Arnold Steck)—here in all its extended glory:

Doubtless this old story will be revisited during the longueurs between matches:

Vitas Gerulaitis lost his first sixteen matches against Jimmy Connors. After finally defeating him at the 1980 Masters, he proudly declared:

“Nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis seventeen times in a row!”

This belongs with my series on The English, home and abroad. For Beethoven’s Wimbledon debut, click here. See also Cocomania.

Philosophers’ football

Posted on by

Philosophers

Having written about football (and here and there), elite/popular cultures, and Confucius, then just in case anyone isn’t familiar with this sketch, it’s another Python classic, full of brilliant lines:

From the commentary by Michael Palin:

Leibniz in goal, back four Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Schelling, front-runners Schlegel, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, and the mid-field duo of Beckenbauer and Jaspers. Beckenbauer obviously a bit of a surprise there.

For the Greeks, “Chopper” Sophocles, and Aristotle, “very much the man in form”…

When Nietsche disputes the referee’s call, Confucius He Say “Name go in book”. Despite Marx coming on as a late substitute, Socrates scores a late winner, whereupon

Hegel is arguing that the reality is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics, Kant via the categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination, and Marx is claiming it was offside.

As the wiki article eruditely observes, the linesmen St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas were Roman African and Italian respectively. The article also describes a live replay in 2010.

Let’s hear it for Latvia

Posted on by

As if the visit of the Li family Daoist band to Paris wasn’t enough, now we can cheer 20-year-old Jelena Ostapenko’s fearless hard-hitting victory in the French Open tennis final. Another victory for hope against fear, perhaps—and the power of the young.

She hits her forehands harder than Andy Murray—OK, the balls are lighter (watch this space), but at least they’re not pink and frilly, FFS.

Again, we need to note the power of sport as ritual.

Of course nationalism* is suspect (as in Macron’s fine rebuke “Let’s make the Planet great again”), UKIP St George flags and all that. When Andy won Wimbledon, “ending a 77-year wait” (“blimey, he’s getting on a bit”), sure it was wonderful, but I couldn’t help feeling, “So that’s what’s been missing from British history, eh—never mind defeating Nazism and setting up the NHS, apparently our constant sense of ennui has resided solely in our failure in a tennis tournament…”

So the thrill of Ostapenko’s win is mainly about her, but in this case it’s cool to get a vicarious pride for Latvia too. So let’s all go and educate ourselves about its modern history!

 

* With all due respect to Dr Johnson, “nationalism is the last refuge of the scoundrel” would have been better—patriotism is generally defined as more benign, though indeed we do need to keep a careful eye on that too.

Real and Zidane

Posted on by

Zidane 2017

After my words of praise for Arsenal and Wenger, the victory of Real Madrid and the gorgeous Zidane in the Champion’s League was even more inspiring.

Sure, we should always remember the artistry of Barcelona and Messi (the latter all the more since he “looks like he works part-time on Saturdays in a video rental shop”).

And Zidane’s headbutt in the final of the 2006 World Cup remains iconic. After all, players like him must be so used to being wound up on the pitch, yet not rising to the bait. With just minutes to go before he could be fêted, canonized, his rash act seems like an even higher form of art, a worthy sacrifice—never mind mundane celebrity, he just had to do it, like in a bullfight. For a fantasy script to the, um, discussions leading up to it, see here.

Ritual: the FA Cup, and a Sage

Posted on by

Wenger

Following a heady week with the Li family band, Mahler 9, and Turangalîla, the FA Cup final is another Grand Ritual, which even I hesitate to compare with the Daoist jiao Offering.

After such a difficult season for Arsenal, I’m so happy for Arsène Wenger that they won. His victory also confirms my renewed infatuation with French culture. For me, in an age when Premier League managers last about as long as Italian prime ministers, Wenger—the archetypal wise father-figure—exemplifies the continuity and values of tradition, and our culture stands or falls with him. I’m delighted that Alan Bennett (still less of a football fan than I) expresses the same pleasure in his diary.

While Sanchez is driven and divine, Theo Walcott comes and goes, and Mehmut Özil, “floating, vulnerable muse”, is sometimes rather too languid, his inspiration elusive and intermittent. If someone doesn’t translate his autobiography Die Magie des Spiels soon, then I’m seriously going to have to learn German—as if Nina Hagen and the Matthew Passion weren’t enough of a stimulus.

Ronnie can lose games too—but it’s the principle (Oops, I nearly came out with “It’s not whether you win or lose, but….”). Like Daoists, he and Wenger negotiate expediencies and maintain a core of inspiration in a mundane cutthroat society. Like Li Manshan, Wenger adroitly juggles a pool of performers—OK, this was expediency, but however did he come up with Mertesacker on the bo cymbals (Shurely shome mishtake?—Ed.] after all this time?! Génial!

While I’m about it, amidst a plethora of mercenary fuckwits posturing on the media stage, the Premier League has seen a sudden and unlikely flowering of civilized generous continental managers, pleasantly marginalizing the former Chelsea incumbent—sulky, pouting, self-obsessed, throwing his toys out of the pram. “Remind you of anybody?”

My secondary education was inspirational, with several brilliant eccentric teachers in Classics, Music, and English. However, having excelled at football at primary level, at my secondary school we played rugby rather than football. Otherwise I would now (Now??? Come off it—Ed.) be joining Sanchez, Özil, and Walcott in the Arsenal forward line-up, and you would all be spared my crazed ramblings on Daoist ritual and WAM… The rest wouldn’t be history. And isn’t really anyway.