Mais j’aime encore cette chanson.
I was gonna do some translations of it until I realized that it’s widely recorded as a jazz number. Now I just wanna know if Cléoma Breaux was listening to jazz or vice versa.
Author: Josh (Page 9 of 19)
I'm currently a PhD candidate in sociolinguistics at the University of Georgia.
Je suis actuellement candidat de doctorat en sociolinguistique à l'University of Georgia.
La Marseillaise, the French national anthem, sung by an opera singer from Spain/Mexico:
Now sung by another opera singer from France:
They’re not singing in English, obviously, but what caught my attention was that Plácido Domingo uses alveolar trills (rolled R’s produced in the front of the mouth) while Roberto Alagna uses uvular trills (produced at the top of the throat, although he does use one alveolar trill around 2:17). Alveolar trills don’t really exist in French except for in older dialects of Quebec French, at least according to Wikipedia, but they do exist in Spanish. Nevertheless, I was more surprised by Alagna’s pronunciation as I’ve heard plenty of native French speakers use the alveolar version in French opera.
This happens in English opera quite a bit, too. Check out this clip from Britten’s Gloriana, particularly around 1:45:
Aveolar trills abound (as well as some unnatural sounding vowels such as in good when they sing “good countess”). These definitely do not exist in any dialect of English and yet these singers are all native English speakers. What’s the deal? Apparently English R’s are ugly and lack clarity. A quick web search will pull up this claim repeated ad infinitum but I’ve yet to find anyone state exactly who decided on this. Afterall, I personally find trills in English singing to sound silly and to completely ruin clarity (I recently watched that Britten opera and had to use subtitles).
I e-mailed a well known phonetician about this as I knew that he also sang in a choir of some sort and he responded that this is a holdover from Italian teachers. This makes sense. Opera is really an Italian form and alveolar trills definitely exist in Italian. Even the vowel shifts make sense with this explanation. Good in the Britten clip sounds like [u] to me, like a Spanish U, which I believe is the same as an Italian U, whereas it should be [ʊ] in most dialects of English.
I’m not too sure why singers have just taken these claims for granted for generations, though. This suggests that basically all music sung in English other than opera sounds terrible to them. Maybe it does. I can name more than one classical music fan that’s pretty elitist in their attitude towards other genres. Maybe it also has something to do with the potential for people to accept authority with little question. Coincidentally, I was recently doing some ethics certifications for human subject research and the Milgram obedience experiment came up:
Avishai Cohen, an Isreali jazz bassist, performing a song sung in Ladino:
I came across his music recently and it grew on me very quickly. He manages to intermingle music from various culture in a very natural way and has a great since of song structure to boot. But what interests me most today is the language.
Ladino is the language that many Jews speak in Spain. It’s actually a Romance language. That might seem odd considering Hebrew is a Semitic language completely unrelated, but this sort of thing seems to happen with Jewish people outside of Israel. Yiddish is a Germanic language and Juhuri is a Persian language. Jews seem to be one ethnic group that excels at developing their own languages out of the dominant languages of the countries they live in. My hunch is this is due to being a minority everywhere–before Israel came into existence–and having a much stronger urge to maintain their cultural heritage due to it being tied up with a religion. (I mean c’mon, Hebrew? No other language revitalization has ever been so successful.)
Although I may simply be ignorant of how often this happens with other ethnic groups. Maybe Chicano English will end up becoming a language separate from English, for instance. But then this never happened with the English dialects spoken by Italians who immigrated to the US at the turn of the 20th century. Most of the examples I can think of are from previous eras and the results are already obviously different from what has happened with Jewish ethnic groups. I’m sure there are many more, though, if anyone cares to share.
I’m also curious about the mutual intelligibility of Ladino for native Spanish speakers. (The lyrics for anyone who wants to check it out.) I feel I can understand much of what Avishai sings (some is actually Hebrew here) with my imperfect grasp of Spanish. I imagine there’s much more cross-over for native speakers. Interestingly, I found this response while looking it up on WordReference:
I a m a native spanish and catalan speaker from Spain, and I just wonder why in the world would someone want to understand some kind’a weird bad-written variation of spanish called ladino.
The commenter is native speaker of Catalan, which is looked at derisively by many native Spanish speakers. WordReference is usually a forum full of people who have a strong respect and understanding of language so it’s amazing to me that someone who speaks a minority language that’s so caught up in controversy would make this extremely hypocritical statement.
Happy Bloomsday. And Father’s Day, too, I suppose.
One thing I got from James Joyce’s Ulysses was that every day is a long, miraculous trek, no matter how mundane. It’s a wonder that it passes at all. Nothing exceptional really happens in Ulysses, it reads like a day in the life of Leopold Bloom, but it feels exceptional. Even the use of language feels exceptional. And why shouldn’t it? Communication is just as much of a miraculous trek. The amount of effort that goes into speaking a single utterance and transmitting all the information that goes along with that utterance can be dissected for a lifetime. My guess is this plays into Joyce’s strange use of language, and his decision to model a day after the mythical Ulysses’ 10 year journey. Life is as strange as we allow it to be.
At least, that seemed to be the point to me. If there was a point at all. I’d be curious to hear what others’ who’ve read it think.
*I’m kinda indulging in the parentheses so feel free to skip those parts. You’ll still get the point.
That right there is Allen Toussaint, who has only recently been brought to my attention as a New Orleans legend. I’m disappointed that I didn’t know of him until now. There’s something really great about the sounds that come out of New Orleans, and my hunch is it’s the blending of cultures, but it doesn’t seem to travel very far past the boundaries.
The reason I’m really posting is because this is because it’s a good example of the life of a song. This is actually a Jelly Roll Morton composition yet it sounds incredibly fresh, even when being played by a 71 year old. He doesn’t actually change all that much, either. It’s still clearly a blues. He adds some runs that you’d sooner hear Chick Corea play or a classical pianist, but they work. He throws in some minor 2nds, like the ones around 4:57, but sparingly, and those have always been pretty acceptable in blues, at least melodically. There might be some perfect fourths in the lower two voices at times, too, but that’s enough technical jargon.
The point is, he’s playing with 70-80 years of history between himself and Jelly Roll. Because others between the two kept the song going, kept making it fresh, it gave him a chance to continue it with all the influences he’s accrued in his own lifetime. It’s another version of folk music traditions, where the song doesn’t even belong to the composer because no one can remember who the composer was. It simply is.
(This is sort of echoed by other people. Kurt Cobain once said something like a song is never as good/the same as the 1st time it’s played. Kaija Saariaho–and Nico Muhly, too, I believe–once said she just composed her music, then it belonged to whoever was performing it. [Sorry, can’t find links, let me know if you can, or can correct me.] A pretty diverse crowd. It’s a good reminder that, really, music is a temporal experience that exists as something new with each repetition, even if the repetitions are reminders of earlier experiences.)
The title is a reference to the Jelly Roll version, which included words:
(Honestly, I like the lyrics a lot. Just remember, he came up in Storyville.)
(And for those interested in the technical stuff, there are definitely some strong impressionist influences in Toussaint’s playing. He often uses a 3 against 4 run that sounds straight out of the 1st part of Debussy’s Deux Arabesques and employs pentatonic scales that aren’t exactly the blues scales. The latter is something Debussy got from Asian music–or Russian music which got it from Asian music?–so Toussaint is sorta bringing the whole world together here.)
For overcast mornings, proof that good things come from Georgia:
Quiet Evenings – Finality from Motion Sickness of Time Travel on Vimeo.
Well, that and Gullah:
Fuck it, I like Georgia. I should go there someday.
Sometimes my notebook is metaphorical. I write down a bunch of words that are barely understandable, hoping to build up a meaningful list, but I forget some things and others simply vanish as the adjacent pages rub together, filtering down to a few leftover segments.
I like that 歌 (uta or /ɯtɐ/) stuck around. It means song.
Or maybe I just need to buy better notebooks.
It’s a shame that the timpani isn’t used more outside of classical music. A well placed timpani can be extremely effective. For instance, Roy Orbison’s use of it in his famous song You Got It:
To me, the timpani makes this song feel epic (along with simply being a great song otherwise). It adds a sort of drive to the chorus that simply wouldn’t work if a crash or something else was used in its place. In fact, a crash is used at the same time but it doesn’t serve to separate this section from the pre-chorus because it’s already been employed. There’s nothing novel about the sound of a crash at that point in the song.
I thought about this because of CocoRosie’s song Lemonade:
They use a timpani throughout and it immediately jumped out of me. It wasn’t that it was out of place, it’s just that it works so well. They manage to use it in a melancholic way and a more aggressive way. It adds atmosphere, maybe because it’s so reverberant, and capable of augmenting the chord changes because it’s actually pitched.
What I’m trying to say is, “I like timpanis.”
There’s a linguistic tidbit to this. Timpani is actually the plural form from the Italian word timpano. I’m curious about how often this happens with Italian loan words. Another obvious example is panini which is the plural of the Italian word panino. I’ve heard people complain about the pluralization of that one but even when I lived in New York I never heard anyone order a panino.
All that is to say that it’s fun to just add an s without any regard to the origins of these words. Fuck it, English is a plural imperialist. We’ll conquer your words and add our s’s.
And I’ll leave you with another famous timpani piece from a more traditional genre used in a non-traditional way:
I am obviously not prone to buying music but I’m honestly considering buying Ashtray Nagivations’ new release Cloud Come Cadaver. Why? Because there aren’t nearly enough people listening to this stuff to make it find-able online for free. I’ve tried already, and I’m good at this; I’ve been pirating software since BBSes (I’d say music since then but this was before MP3s existed).
This creates a weird sweet spot in selling-your-music land. On the one hand, if you’re just completely unknown, you’ll be lucky if people find your music to begin with; while if you’re fairly well known but not being played in shopping malls, your music will probably be too easily accessible to the people that listen to it for them to buy it. (I’m leaving out if you are one of those people whose music is played in shopping malls because they’re part of a whole different world of music business issues.)
But you have this place between completely unknown and well known among music lovers only that allows you the option of actually selling music. I come across it more and more as my tastes continually lead me to noise, glitch, and contemporary classical music. The last category is almost uniformly inaccessible to the file-sharer, with the exception maybe of Nico Muhly and the NOW Ensemble, the latter of which has actually offered their albums for free at one point. Nope, when my Soundamus feed tells me a new Kaija Saariaho release is coming out, I don’t even bother adding it to my calendar because I know I could only listen to it if I bought it.
That last point typifies a couple issues. First, Ashtray Navigations is only selling the album for ₤3 and I imagine they’d be pretty lucky to get even 500 sales (correct me if you’re in the know). That’s ₤1,500. I’m not sure how they go about their recording process but if it’s anything like what I’ve previously described about packaging and distributing music, that money could be 100% profit. Even at that, though, it’s not enough to go into making music as a full time job by itself. They could maybe raise the price but it’s likely that a curve would be created where the more the music costs the fewer people there are that will buy it and so the profits will even out. I certainly wouldn’t pay $10 for the album, because I can still listen to their old music and save that money for bus fare. This is reality for a lot of consumers, which is the second issue typified here. I get probably 10 newly released albums every month but there’s no way I could afford a $100 bill each month. I buy store-brand peanut butter. I can afford $3 a month for a single album that I particularly want to listen to that isn’t available through any others means, though.
I think Ashtray Navigations’ Bandcamp is pretty fair, but the above often leads me to the “lets just make all our music free for fuck’s sake” conclusion. It reminds me of a thesis project a classmate of mine was recently proposing. She’s an economics major and wants to look into altruism in the market and one of the points she made while discussing it is that studies have shown that people will offer their resources much more willingly when it’s not made into a business deal. Blood donors, for instance, were more willing to donate if they weren’t offered cookies or money or anything in return. Maybe this is why those pay-what-you-like albums seem to be turning into a thing these days.
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