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When it comes to musical taste, I guess you could say Arb and I are a little… odd? We’ve shared our love of classical and choral music quite a bit, but then we also like the hard stuff. Here is a whole group of young people who seem to feel the same way:
Viva Vox Choir from Belgrade was formed almost ten years ago by a group of high school graduates who, together with their music teacher and conductor, Jasmina Lorin, wanted to continue the wonderful musical cooperation they had in their high school choir. The choir got its current name in 2005, and in 2009 they introduced beatboxing in their performance, which, along with song arrangements written by the members of the choir, formed the unique sound that made them known throughout the globe. The sound of Viva Vox choir has undergone a number of transformations, and today it is characterised by authentic a cappella (voices only) interpretations of pop-rock and alternative music, accompanied by beatbox.
And for the goth in me:
And finally – this doesn’t work quite as well because they have cultured voices and sing very much in tune, but for sheer audacity it takes the cake:
Arb may not be such a fan of Silent Night, but it will always be special to me. In my church while I was growing up, we would end our Christmas Eve service by all getting out of the pews to stand in a huge circle around the sanctuary. We’d pass out candles, then turn out all the lights, so there total darkness except the Advent candles at the altar. Somebody who had perfect pitch – usually my mom – would sing the first note, and then we would all join in, and sing Silent Night a cappella, in English and German, while passing the flame from candle to candle around the room. After it was done, we’d all stand in reverent silence for a little while, then the lights would come back on and we’d blow out our candles and put on our coats and quietly file out into the normal world again.
As Arb said last week, we’ve sung Silent Night in choir every year since we joined. It is getting a little old – I wouldn’t mind a new arrangement – but this year our concert at the women’s prison made it new for me again. Here’s the arrangement we always use – this video is in Swedish because our director is Swedish and she likes this arrangement by the Swedish composer Anders Öhrwall. We do it generally in English, and sometimes in other languages. I usually sing the solo.
Our choir has a ‘sister’ choir at the prison; this was a joint concert with them. The women’s choir took the solo line together and I joined them to add a bit of power. We did the middle verse multiple times, in multiple languages: we sang softly on “ooo”, as we were joined by a prisoner who sang in French, a couple prisoners who sang in Cree, an off-duty guard who came in on her day off to sing in Ukrainian, and the chaplain who sang in Afrikaans. Finally, another prisoner had composed a rap to be spoken over us. Each soloist – even the guard – got applause and cheers. As we did our last verses with the rapper, the room fell silent except for the sobs of a couple prisoners in the second row who held one another as they openly wept, then as the rapper finished the whole room burst into rapturous applause and cheering. Even the on-duty guards allowed themselves to smile.
It’s funny. I hate everything prisons stand for, and I don’t believe in Christmas, but that night I felt the Christmas spirit for the first time since I was a child. And it’s real. That sense of community, that despite our differences we’re all family, even if only the most distantly related, is something we need to carry with us out into the cold night, and keep in our hearts the whole year.
So…
Wishing you joy, whatever holidays you may or may not celebrate at this time of year. May your days be merry and bright.
Us folks at DWR seem to be all full of Holiday sweetness and light and goodwill, this year. Just to reassure y’all that we haven’t gone totally soft, I’d like to share this video with you. It helped me earlier in the season, when I wasn’t ready for celebrating yet, and I needed an antidote to the hype and the cheer and the carols my co-worker was playing at her desk, with the speakers up on the cubicle walls to be sure everybody could share and enjoy.
For everybody who’s just not feelin’ it…
Just a great article through and through. Go read it all here.
“I sort of kicked the hornets’ nest the other day, by expressing feminist opinions about books. It all came down to Lolita. “Some of my favorite novels are disparaged in a fairly shallow way. To read Lolita and ‘identify’ with one of the characters is to entirely misunderstand Nabokov,” one commenter informed me, which made me wonder if there’s a book called Reading Lolita in Patriarchy. The popular argument that novels are good because they inculcate empathy assumes that we identify with characters, and no one gets told they’re wrong for identifying with Gilgamesh or even Elizabeth Bennett. It’s just when you identify with Lolita you’re clarifying that this is a book about a white man serially raping a child over a period of years. Should you read Lolita and strenuously avoid noticing that this is the plot and these are the characters? Should the narrative have no relationship to your own experience? This man thinks so, which is probably his way of saying that I made him uncomfortable.
All I had actually said was that, just as I had identified with a character who’s dismissively treated in On the Road, so I’d identified with Lolita. I read many Nabokov novels back in the day, but a novel centered around the serial rape of a kidnapped child, back when I was near that child’s age was a little reminder how hostile the world, or rather the men in it, could be. Which is not a pleasure.
The omnipresence of men raping female children as a literary subject, from Tess of the d’Urbervilles to Less Than Zero, along with real-life accounts like that of Jaycee Dugard (kidnapped at 11 in 1991 and used as a sex slave for 18 years by a Bay Area man), can have the cumulative effect of reminding women that we spend a lot of our lives quietly, strategically trying not to get raped, which takes a huge toll on our lives and affects our sense of self. Sometimes art reminds us of life.”
A love of Beethoven was one of the things Arb and I bonded over, early in our relationship. Going on a road trip in the mountains together, we brought along all nine symphonies, and the combination of gorgeous music, gorgeous scenery, and of course, plenty of New Relationship Energy, made for an almost transcendent experience.
Here’s a very unusual, and really well done take on the first movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. I wasn’t expecting to like it, but I really do. It’s fresh and full of energy and even though it’s different, the feel of the original is there. And the kid’s enthusiasm is just infectious.
I used to have a fantasy, before I knew how hard composing actually is, of writing a Rachmaninoff-style virtuosic concerto for electric guitar and full symphony orchestra. I think this just goes to show, somebody needs to do it.
(I’m writing this early in the week, for publication Friday. I’m dreading coming back and editing this list…)
and Garissa, Kenya; Yola, Nigeria
and all the places being terrorized by “our” side…
Gustav Mahler wrote his song cycle Kindertotenlieder, Songs on the Death of Children, over a century ago, a setting of five (out of over 400) poems written by Friedrich Rückert some sixty years earlier, in reaction to the death of two of his children from scarlet fever.
“Now the sun wants to rise as brightly”
- Now the sun wants to rise as brightly
- as if nothing terrible had happened during the night.
- The misfortune had happened only to me,
- but the sun shines equally on everyone.
- You must not enfold the night in you.
- You must sink it in eternal light.
- A little star went out in my tent!
- Greetings to the joyful light of the world.
Almost every knitter or crocheter’s taste in yarn goes through a similar evolution as their skill progresses. When you’re just starting, everything takes forever, so thick yarns seem like a good idea – yay, fewer stitches makes more fabric! And you buy yarn based on how pretty the ball looks, without much concept of what it might look like once it’s worked up. Low-end yarn manufacturers, I’m sure, are aware of n00b yarn buyers’ purchasing habits, and pander accordingly. Which is why the yarn aisle at Michael’s is full of stuff like this:
What on earth could go wrong? I mean, it’s so cheerful, right? Unfortunately, the length of each coloured segment is such that when you knit or crochet it, you don’t get a pretty rainbow, you get a wild splatter effect that looks like a clown exploded. Hence the term, in the crafty circles in which I travel (not the mild-mannered granny circle!), “clown barf”. And here’s the thing: I have a tendency to buy yarn faster than I crochet it, so when I was a n00b and had not yet become a yarn snob, I unknowingly bought a lot of clown barf, before I had a chance to learn my lesson. And now that clown barf is languishing in a box in the basement, because I can’t possibly throw it out, but why would I want to work with it, when I also have Icelandic wool brought home from Iceland, and cashmere and silk blends?
Fortunately for the size of my stash, the Arbourist occasionally asks me to make something where fancee yarn would be inappropriate. Like this tea cozy (we recently Got Civilization and started using a teapot!). As you can see, cute on the ball (above); garish and splattery when made up. Read the rest of this entry »
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