Author: Laura Conrad

La Marseillaise

Since I recommended reading the Declaration of Independance on
July 4, I decided to recommend reading (or, better, singing) La Marseillaise on July 14, Bastille Day.

It isn’t as strong of a recommendation; the writing really
isn’t as good, nor are the sentiments as elevating.

But you really have to understand 19th century European
nationalism to have any shot at understanding the way the world
is still organized in the 21st century. So you should read this
as well as the patriotic songs of other countries. And for
understanding why you should oppose war on almost all occasions,
there still isn’t any text better than Psalm
137.

This
site has several versions of translations into English. The
one done by a French committee is interesting — I’d love to see a
summary of the discussion that led to “patrie” being translated “Motherland”.

If you’re in this area, we’ll sing all or most of the verses
tonight at the Cantabile Band
rehearsal tonight.

The Amazing Mrs. Palin

I didn’t think until this morning to connect Sarah Palin to the
tv show The
Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, which describes a supermarket manager
who becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain.

The New York Times has an article
this morning
about the ways the Republican establishment attempted to advise
her on how to become one of them. The quote that struck me was:

Mr. Malek [described earlier in the article as “a longtime Republican
kingmaker”] said he told Ms. Palin that “You have got to set up a mechanism so you can return calls.”

“You are getting a bad rap,” he recalled saying. “Important people are
trying to talk to you. And she said, ‘What number are they
calling?’ She did not know what had been happening.”

I am someone who frequently tries to organize people whose desire
to be in touch with the world isn’t ardent enough to have forced
them to organize the possible ways of getting in touch with them
so that there’s a reliable way to make contact. That “What number
are they calling?” sounds really familiar. You have work phones
and home phones and cell phones and email addresses and fax
numbers, and nobody could possibly check all of those all the
time, so if you hear that someone has tried the wrong one, you
tell your informant what the right one this week is. And I can
see where kingmakers aren’t used to dealing with
people like this. In my part of the world, even successful
organizers on a much lower level than the ones who run campaigns
for Governor are better organized about how to tell people how to
get in touch with them than this.

As I remember the TV show, Mrs. Pritchard does have some
trouble adjusting to living in the middle of the mechanisms set
up so that a Prime Minister’s phone calls get returned and
commitments get recorded. It’s part of the unreality of the
format that it’s a temporary adjustment difficulty that gets
wrapped up in a 50-minute show. But it’s also part of the
portrayal of Mrs. Pritchard as an unusually intelligent woman that
she does realize the necessity of the mechanisms.

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This is England

This
movie is about a 12 year old boy who is temporarily
recruited into a skinhead group in northern England.

It’s very well-done. I could have sworn I smelled the pot
during the scene where they all get high and sit around
giggling.

It’s also fairly unpleasant to watch a fair amount of the
time. So watch it when you’re in the mood for that. I realized
I was when I was browsing through the channel guide and it was
on one of the stations I don’t get, so I logged on to Netflix
Watch Now.

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Gojira

This
movie is the original Japanese version, which the Raymond
Burr version was loosely based on.

This one has an all Japanese cast, with a more than usually
active pretty girl and three scientists, of varying degrees of
madness, but none of them evil.

It was made only 9 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the
characters’ struggle with the idea of a weapon of mass
destruction, even in the face of a monster dealing out mass
destruction is inspiring.

The older scientist who wants to try to communicate with
the monster even though everyone else is trying to figure out ways
to kill it should have remained a stock character in monster
movies, and for some reason didn’t. Probably for the same reason he gets ignored in this movie.

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Wakefield Summer Band concert

The first Wakefield Summer Band concert of the year is
tonight. If you’re near Wakefield, and want to spend a pleasant
evening on the shores of Lake Quannapowitt (it looks like for a
change we’re getting good weather today), I gave details in the
weekly Cantabile
Band post.

I never played in a band in high school, so I’ve never been
properly socialized as either a tuba player or a band musician.
And there are lots of kinds of music I’d rather put the time into
than band music, although the really good arrangements are a lot of
fun to play.

Two summers playing tuba in a summer band (and one on alto
horn) isn’t enough to make you a very good tuba player, but it’s
amazing how useful you can feel just playing the easy notes on the
tuba arrangements.

From a low brass perspective, the best arrangement on tonight’s
program is Phantom of the Opera, where the
direction says “With a menacing manner”.

When I got the tuba and took it to Osmun Music to buy it a
mouthpiece, they guessed it was made in about 1910, so it’s almost
100 years old. It’s in Eb, which makes it easier to carry around
than the currently more usual Bb tubas. It’s also closer to the
same range as the serpent.

I’m not the only person in that band who doesn’t work seriously
on their instrument during the winter, so from the point of view
of hearing a good concert, you should probably wait to come until later
in the summer. The concert will last less than an hour, and if
there are good places to go drinking afterwards in the area, I
haven’t found them, so it isn’t worth driving a long
distance, but it’s certainly a pleasant option for how to spend
your evening if you live in Wakefield.

Flyer for West Gallery Workshop on August 11


[2003 workshop]

The West Gallery
Quire is sponsoring a special workshop in West Gallery
Music led by Francis Roads on Tuesday, August 11,2009, at
7:30 PM at St Mary’s Episcopal Church,
258 Concord Avenue, Newton Lower Falls,
Massachusetts .

Come and explore the sacred music of the English rural villages
with an acknowledged authority in this field. This workshop is suitable for all types of voices and most melodic instruments; music will be
provided. Admission is free; a collection will be taken to cover the expenses. For more information,
please contact:
Bruce Randall, 218 Broadway, Haverhill, MA 01832, (978) 373-5852, melismata@hotmail.com.

If you want to look at the music in advance, he has it all on this web site:
ridingmusic.co.uk.
If you know any clarinet players or others who want transposed parts,
it’s possible to accommodate them. Let Bruce know.

Francis Roads studied music at Pembroke College, Oxford and at the Royal College of Music,
London. He took early retirement in 1994 from a 30 year teaching career, and is devoting his retirement
to researching and performing West Gallery church music; he has led West Gallery workshops
throughout Britain and is an active member of the West Gallery Music Association. He has also
devoted himself to editing and publishing West Gallery music, both in hard copy and on the internet.

In 1997 he founded the London Gallery Quire, which rehearses in St. James Garlickhythe, a Christopher
Wren church in the City of London. In 2002, he was awarded a PhD from the University of Liverpool
for a thesis on the Colby MSS, a set of West Gallery part books from the Isle of Man.

Please tell as many people as possible, and post flyers if you
can.

Torture in Tolkien

I’m rereading the Lord
of the Rings, which I do every couple of years.

I’m at the house of Tom Bombadil right now. Thanks to Kate
Nepveu’s reread on tor.com,
I’m enjoying the verse Tom Bombadil speaks in — I knew he had his
own rhythm, but I’d never noticed the rhyme scheme before.

So far, the only other thing that’s struck me as new this time
is thanks to the political debate on torture.

In the second chapter, The Shadow of the Past, Gandalf says to Bilbo:

What I have told you is what Gollum was willing to tell – though not, of course, in the way I have reported it. Gollum is a liar, and you have to sift his words. For instance, he called the Ring his “birthday-present”, and he stuck to that. He said it came from his grandmother, who had lots of beautiful things of that kind. A ridiculous story. I have no doubt that Sméagol’s grandmother was a matriarch, a great person in her way, but to talk of her possessing many Elven-rings was absurd, and as for giving them away, it was a lie. But a lie with a grain of truth.

The murder of Déagol haunted Gollum, and he had made up a defence, repeating it to his “Precious” over and over again, as he gnawed bones in the dark, until he almost believed it. It was his birthday. Déagol ought to have given the ring to him. It had obviously turned up just so as to be a present. It was his birthday-present, and so on, and on.

I endured him as long as I could, but the truth was
desperately important, and in the end I had to be harsh. I put
the fear of fire on him, and wrung the true story out of him,
bit by bit, together with much snivelling and snarling. He thought he was misunderstood and ill-used. But when he had at last told me his history, as far as the end of the Riddle-game and Bilbo’s escape, he would not say any more, except in dark hints. Some other fear was on him greater than mine.

The emphasis is mine.

I had never before noticed that Gandalf had tortured Gollum,
using much the same rationale as the Bush administration.

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United Breaks Guitars

Ran into this
video, by singer/songwrite/guitar player Dave Carroll about his
experience checking his guitar on United Airlines and trying to
recover damages when it was broken. He claims it will be a trilogy. The link on the youtube page
is broken, so here’s
a little more information about the incident.

This is a serious problem for all musicians who travel, and
more of them should be fighting back this way. I know of several
large recorders that have suffered serious damage in airline
travel.


Report on the July 7 meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will be having our usual dropin meetings on Tuesdays at
7:45 PM at my
place.

We’ll probably skip August 11, so that people can go to the
special West Gallery
Quire workshop with Francis Rhodes.

Other Events

The Wakefield Summer Band (Laura Conrad, tuba) will be giving
concerts this summer on the banks of Lake Quannapowitt. The first
one will be this Friday, July 10, at 7 PM. You can get directions
to the park from the First
Parish Congregational Church site.

Pride and Prejudice fanfic

After reading all that science fiction last week in order to
vote for the Hugos, I was ready for a change of pace. I picked
Pride and Prejudice (free online
version) because one of the novelettes (Pride
and Prometheus, by John Kessel)
uses characters from it, and I wanted to confirm my impression
that it directly contradicted what Jane Austen said.

The novelette continues the history of Mary and Kitty, the two
sisters who remain unmarried at the end of Pride and
Prejudice. Jane Austen says about them:

Kitty, to her very material advantage, spent the chief of her
time with her two elder sisters. In society so superior to
what she had generally known, her improvement was great. She
was not of so ungovernable a temper as Lydia; and, removed from
the influence of Lydia’s example, she became, by proper
attention and management, less irritable, less ignorant, and
less insipid. From the further disadvantage of Lydia’s society
she was of course carefully kept, and though Mrs. Wickham
frequently invited her to come and stay with her, with the
promise of balls and young men, her father would never consent
to her going.

Mary was the only daughter who remained at home; and she was
necessarily drawn from the pursuit of accomplishments by
Mrs. Bennet’s being quite unable to sit alone. Mary was
obliged to mix more with the world, but she could still
moralize over every morning visit; and as she was no longer
mortified by comparisons between her sisters’ beauty and her
own, it was suspected by her father that she submitted to
the change without much reluctance.

In the novelette, Mary and Kitty are both living with their
parents; Mrs. Bennet has given up on Mary, but is still working
hard to marry off Kitty. Mr. Kessel does pick up, as I had not,
on Kitty coughing and being generally more delicate than her
sisters. But certainly Jane Austen did not envision an affair
with a butcher’s son.

But it is interesting to note that Victor Frankenstein is a
contemporary of the Bennet sisters, and to envision Mary having
a crush on him.

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