Tag Archives: music

The Wind that Shakes the Pine Trees

It’s a sunny day with a brisk wind blowing. Pine needles are in the air. M. and I both slept in a little last night after returning at midnight from one of the Spanish Peaks International Celtic Music Festival concerts.

We went to one last year too, to hear Kim Robertson’s harp and to watch Jerry O’Sullivan fight the uilleann pipes and win.

It’s truly a little odd to hear stars of the Celtic music scene play in the old coal-mining town of Walsenburg, which is definitely in the non-fashionable part of Colorado, for all that they are trying to promote it now as “gateway to the Southwest.”

Last night the harpist was Lynn Saoirse, while Seamus Connolly played fiddle and emceed. Add cellist Abby Newton, her fiddler daughter Rosie, Connolly’s Maine neighbor Kevin McElroy, John Mullen, and the duo of Kim McKee and Ken Willson, who have moved to the area and whom my Celtic music-loving colleague wants to bring to campus.

Now: house-cleaning, cabin-cleaning, desk-cleaning, and somewhere I there I have to read essays from my creative-nonfiction class.

Gallimaufry

• Get your fringe archaeological theories here, including a study how Pagan uses of megalithic sites compares to the “postprocessual” trend in archaeology. Maybe academic jargon does get the better of her at the end, when she refers to Paganism as a “discipline.”

• The Boston Globe describes “The Age of Steampunk,”, following up on Wired’s piece. You can go straight to the workshop.

• The Red Witch blog is posting old photos, book jackets, etc., of interest to those following Craft history. (Some photos NSFW.)

&bull Jason Pitzl-Waters discusses new releases in “dark” and Pagan-esque folk music. I am playing some sample cuts right now.

Subduing the Uilleann Pipes

William Jackson, Jerry O'Sullivan, Grainne Hambley

On stage at the second annual Spanish Peaks Celtic Music Festival, from left, William Jackson, Jerry O’Sullivan, Grainne Hambly

.Jerry O’Sullivan of New York City is an outstanding player of the uilleann pipes. I just bought one of his CDs.

It had been a few years since I watched the pipes played close-up. If you have not, consider that the uilleann pipes look like a three-way collision between a musket, a fife, and a sofa pillow.

During a jig or other fast-moving piece, the player does not look so much as though he is playing the instrument, but rather as though he is trying to subdue it.

But in the hands of a master, it sounds so grand!

Pagan with a Small ‘p’

Pueblo, Colorado, is a perplexing city. As Pueblo Chieftain columnist Chuck Green wrote in today’s paper, it “suffers from a traditional inferiority complex, looking like a haggard woman when a little bit of care could reveal an attractive lady. Sometimes it seems like the city has accepted some self-fulfilling subordination imposed by outsiders.”

And yet some local organizations just produced a outstanding performance of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.

Go figure: it’s a shot-and-a-beer, get-pregnant-and-drop-out-of-high-school city with an equally flourishing “high culture” side.

Orff (1895-1982) was a German composer who believed in creating powerful, sensual music that could be performed by nonprofessionals. One organization still carries on his music-education principles.

The “carmina” are medieval songs from a collection found in a German monastery, but their world view is not Christian. It is a frank admittance that sometimes you are up, and sometimes, no matter how you strive, the universe has decided that today is not your day. So you drink a toast to Lady Fortune, and you keep on keeping on.

The gods may favor you, or they may not; meanwhile, “Hail, light of the world. Hail, rose of the world. Blanchefleur and Helen, noble Venus!”

The performers ranged from professional singers to dedicated amateurs (The Pueblo Choral Society) to university students (the solid CSU-Pueblo Percussion Ensemble) to kids (the South High School Cecilian Choir and the Sangre de Cristo Ballet Theatre)–nearly 200 performers in all.

From the first crashing notes . . . O Fortuna velut luna statu variabilis (O Fortune, you are changeable like the Moon), I was carried away. Back to the fog-wrapped dormitory at Reed College where I first heard the Carmina Burana on my girlfriend’s stereo, back to the final scenes of John Boorman’s Excalibur back to, yes, even the credit-card commercial where the barbarians invade the shopping mall. So what–Orff’ s music stands like a wall.

Weapons of Singing Destruction

Since Google sends some readers seeking news and photos about such new Arab singing stars as Haifa Wehbe and Nancy Ajram to this blog, here are two articles by Charles Paul Freund that might interest you.

“Look Who’s Rocking the Casbah: The Revolutionary Implications of Arab Music Videos,” Reason magazine, June 2003.

“Weapons of Singing Destruction” The Escalating Storm over Arab Pop Videos,” Reason magazine, October 29, 2003.

Freund writes:

If you add the voluminous press and publicity machine that has grown around this scene, it begins to take on the proportions of a cultural frenzy. Such phenomena have a long and fascinating history; they occur when a cultural form becomes available to an audience that uses it to assert and validate its quickly shifting sense of itself. The Netherlands famously experienced such a phenomenon in the 17th century, when members of its suddenly enriched middle class latched onto paintings of themselves and their world as a way to express and validate their new social power. At the time, such subject matter was a departure for painters; indeed, it was the first time that anyone outside the aristocracy had owned paintings. The emerging British middle class of the 18th and 19th centuries went through a fiction-reading frenzy (of Grub Street “trash,” mostly) as it sought models for its emerging social opportunities and identified with characters grappling with an industrializing, urbanizing world. Similarly, movies and rock music were powerful forms for different generations of 20th-century Americans. They used such forms to play with the new possibilities of identity that were coming within their grasp.