Month: February 2017

Black History Month – Spirituals: Becoming Art Music

African American spirituals bring together musical traditions slaves brought from Africa and the Christian religion forced on them in the United States. Unaccompanied vocals, the first collection of black spirituals was published in 1867. These songs were a crying out against the crime of slavery and a hope for a future of freedom, a future without pain, a future where all ills are made good. Frederick Douglass wrote about them:

I did not, when a slave, understand the deep meanings of those rude, and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle, so that I neither saw or heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension; they were tones, loud, long and deep, breathing the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains. The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirits, and filled my heart with ineffable sadness. The mere recurrence, even now, afflicts my spirit, and while I am writing these lines, my tears are falling. To those songs I trace my first glimmering conceptions of the dehumanizing character of slavery. I can never get rid of that conception. Those songs still follow me, to deepen my hatred of slavery, and quicken my sympathies for my brethren in bonds

They were songs of resistance in a place where there was little room for it.

The Fisk Jubilee Singers (from HBCU Fisk University) put together what’s sort of a canonic group of the songs and begin performing them in the 1850s. It’s a fundraising thing. Perhaps because they are performing in front of white audiences ($$$ remember), they sing in what people called a European style. In this 1906 performance, you can hear that they sound a lot like a glee club. Compare them to this undated recording, with its call and response.

From this far back there are two strains of performance with spirituals, a formal style and a faith style, like the way that people would be singing at a service (even if these are recorded).The forma style goes from these college singers at HBCUs to standard parts of black singers repertoires. Here are Marian Anderson singing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I Seen” from 1924 and  Paul Robeson’s “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” from 1933.

Leontyne Price’s “Where You There When They Crucified My Lord” is definitely a high art performance, a cappella virtuosity. Anonymously created works, spirituals inhabit a space in the concert repertoire equal to the songs of Mahler, Brahms, Fauré, and other composers of western art music. Here are opera divas Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle singing “There is a Balm in Gilead” with full orchestration, conducted by James Levine.

The are so much a part of concert performance that they are sung by non-black singers. I’ll end with the late, great Lorraine Hunt Lieberson singing “Deep River.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda Explains How to Make a Mix(tape)

How did it all shake out?

No word on how the recipient of the mix feels. Sometimes it’s the journey, not the destination.

Black History Month – Head Voices

Women and men have different vocal ranges, mainly because physiology. Women’s voices tend to be higher; men’s voices tend to be lower, though there’s considerable overlap. Right now, a deeper, more sonorous voice is considered more manly. (Don’t believe me? The website The Art of Manliness has a whole post on it.)

But there is a long history of men singing in the ranges more usual in women. This arises with sacred Christian music* (I Corinthians 14:34) but there are other musical traditions that exploit this range too**.

There’s a tradition of high male singing in African America pop music. It’s so variable. There’s Jimmy Scott, whose voice rides an androgynous line. It’s a fey voice, not masculine, not feminine, fully emotionally charged.

A very different style is Nick Simpson’s use. He goes between his usual baritone and falsetto, using the falsetto mainly to harmonize here on “Solid.” Prince also uses both voices, but his “Kiss” is all glorious head voice, sexy and high.

Curtis Mayfield uses the slightly uncanny quality of his falsetto for sly menace in “Pusherman” on Superfly.***

Earth, Wind, and Fire had two great singers in Maurice White and Phillip Bailey. It’s Bailey’s voice – sweet, melodic , with a lot of silken power – that soars over songs like “September” and “Fantasy.”

Although his high’s are not that high, TV on the Radio’s Tunde Adebimpe pushes into his head voice on “Killer Crane” to change the color of the song (which is lovely).

 

I left Smokey Robinson until last because he’s probably the best known black falsetto singer. Everyone knows Smokey’s work with the Miracles, all the song-writing he did for Motown, his solo work. Everyone knows these songs:

The other reason I left him until last is I saw Smokey perform two summers ago, in the middle of a meadow is a red satin suit, with a Vegas backup group of singers and dancers and that voice was as good as it ever was.

*The Christian thing led to castratos, which is weird and fascinating and horrible.

**Purcell wrote a lot of countertenor material and I’ll write about that at some point.

***One of the best soundtracks ever made

Black History Month – Leotyne Price

She wasn’t the first black woman to sing at the Metropolitan Opera in NY. That was Marian Anderson, who deserves her own post. Price was, however, probably the first black diva.

Although she was most associated with Verdi operas, I first heard her in Bizet’s Carmen. I had the (then three album) recording. The richness of her voice  and the lightness of the performance in a song like “Près des remparts de Séville” turned me into an opera lover, completely wiping out an unfortunate experience with Wagner in middle school. Her final duet with Corelli in Carmen is fatalistic, determined. She knows she is going to die at the hands of her stalker, but refuses his entreaties. At the end of the act, she hisses at him, “Lassez moi passer” or let me go. He doesn’t, because this grand opera.

My favorite Price is not the opera work, but her performances of Samuel Barber’s songs. She had decided on a concert career before she broke into opera and sang a lot of work by mid-century composers like Barber and Lou Harrison. The Hermit Songs are a setting of poems written by anonymous Irish monks, 8th to 13th centuries. Here’s a recording of Price singing them with Barber on piano. Auden did the translation of my favorite, “A Monk and His Cat.”

She turned 90 on February 10th.

“Cynical Girl,” Marshall Crenshaw

I had Marshall Crenshaw’s self-titled debut album on heavy rotation last year. It’s catchy, harmonic, and fast-paced, and the sappiness of the love songs is tempered by what I considered to be Crenshaw’s cynicism. “Someday, Someway” bounces along as the protagonist ruminates: “I can’t stand to make you sad / I can’t stand to see you cry / You can’t tell me what you need / All I can do is wonder why / Someday, someway…baby I’ll understand you.” On an album filled with well-constructed tunes, one of my favorites is a song in which he tells a girl “You’re my favorite waste of time.” The happy beat and the jaded stance seemed to me for quite a while to add up to a portrait of Crenshaw, or at least his persona, as a cynic–someone always keeping his emotions at arm’s length because he can’t get rid of them, exactly, but he figures all they are is a way to get hurt.

In context, though, Crenshaw is more of a romantic than he initially sounds. He knows he’s going to get hurt, knows he can’t always bridge the gap between him and a lover: “She was my girl not too long ago / How I lost her I’m not sure I know.” But heartbreak never attenuates his girl-craziness: two songs later, he’s singing about “Girls, Girls, Girls.” (Sample lyrics: “You know I feel fine ’cause all I ever have in mind is / Girls girls girls / And anytime I turn on my TV / Girls girls girls.”)  By “Brand New Lover,” he knows the only cure for his out-of-control feelings is to find someone to be with.

So while “Cynical Girl” has Crenshaw searching for a partner in cynicism, someone who “has no illusions,” his vision of how they’ll be together is pure romanticism: “I’ll be lost in love / And havin’ some fun with my cynical girl.” I hope he found her.

Feeling myself: Sexy songs and no, it’s not what you think

It’s taken me nearly half my life to feel settled into my body. I’m finally feeling like my body is a safe place to inhabit and claim as an experience worth having.  I have eventually learned that my body is a location in time and space worth embracing, as opposed to ignoring because I don’t fit into a preconceived societal notion of what i should look like: thin, pretty, white and certainly not fat.  I can’t say I ever truly hated my body but I did feel a sense of embarrassment and shame over it: all this dumb flesh everywhere, what was I going to do with it?   I tried to make it go away and make myself shrink literally by dieting and figuratively by making my voice very still. I actively made sure I  never took up too much space anywhere, I tried staying in the background, in the corner, being evasive as much as possible.

However, sometimes I have certain opinions and ideas and a penchant for speaking up so my plan to be quiet didn’t work out so well – my voice was something that needed to grow and be shown to other people. I grew into a person that engaged in public speaking for fun, these days that means having a serious side hobby of facilitating meditation groups and giving talks on Buddhist teachings. This is not what a person does who is seriously interested in hiding.  I continue to be fat and have claimed that label for myself as a descriptor not as a thing to hide from or pretend isn’t there, or to hate myself for: Yes, I am fat. I am a fat Chicana brown woman and I refuse to hide anymore.

Music has always been my steady companion in growing up and finding out who I am and who I am not.  My exploration into eventually deciding my body was worth living with, was accompanied of course by music.  Dance music helped me along the journey in showing me that I do have a body that can move, and that I can have pleasure in my body’s rhythms. Dance music showed me that I have a capacity for joy in bodily movement.

There are certain songs that I notice these days that don’t necessarily make me want to dance, but they do make me want to strut around my apartment. These songs inspire me to hold my head just a little higher as I walk confidently down the street, and maybe put an extra bounce in my step.  These songs make me feel sexy, not in the sense that I’m ready to have sex with someone, or even necessarily have sex with myself! It’s more like I feel a sense of power within my bones, like my body is a force to be reckoned with, and it’s a fun, sensual feeling. Yes, I suppose it has a little bit to do with sex and desire, or maybe it’s just that these songs make me want to strut. The confidence that I feel then translates into just feeling sexy and audacious in general – like I’m ready for anything that comes my way.

So this is my “feeling myself” playlist.  These are the songs that make me want to head out into the world looking good, feeling good and walking with boldness.  Yes, I do dare to take up space and I enjoy doing so these days! This is also a great play list when I’m getting ready to go out, putting on my best clothes, great shoes, and looking good. This really doesn’t have a whole lot to do with what anyone else thinks of me, although admiration is nice it if happens to come my way.  It’s more about enjoying the body that I have, while I move with energy and assurance.

The Feeling Myself Playlist (in no particular order):

  1. Last Night by The Strokes
  2. Miss You by The Rolling Stones
  3. Let it Go by Keyshia Cole ft. Missy Elliott, Lil Kim
  4. Heartbreaker (Remix) by Mariah Carey ft. Da Brat, Missy Elliott
  5. Brass In Pocket – The Pretenders
  6. Can’t Wait – Jill Scott
  7. Portions for Foxes – Rilo Kiley

R.E.M.’s Inaugural Message

Rich McLaughlin at Paste Magazine has reassembled what appears to be the entirety of R.E.M.’s lyrics into a manifesto for our times. I cannot express how strongly I wish I had thought of this run-on dada art. I’ll have to settle for annotating the first of eight (!) paragraphs McLaughlin came up with. Play against the home team: how many of these R.E.M. songs can you recognize without clicking through?

“Here comes that awful feeling again. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel…low, low, low. The battle’s been lost, the war is not won. We lay defeated. I’m sorry, so sorry, but I demand a rematch. I decree a stalemate. It’s a sign of the Time’s Man of The Year. A day in the life of an addled republic, a bitter refund. I won’t pine for what could have been—I’m preoccupied. The strong man kicked sand into my breakfast cereal bowl. These bastards stole their power from the victims of the “Us vs. Them” years. We’ve gotten lost before—1980, ‘84, ‘88, ’92 …I’m lost in the confusion and it doesn’t seem to matter. Goddamn, your confusion. I never knew that it could be so strange. It’s all too much—the pressure. The world is collapsing around our ears, and we can’t hear it. Silence means security, silence means approval. We’ve found a way to talk around the problem. Should we talk about the weather? Should we talk about the government? If the storm doesn’t kill me, the government will. Where to turn? There’s no one left to take the lead. The story is a sad one, told many times. I’m not sure where we’re headed, but I’m very scared for this world.”

(Blue Thumb was able to identify 15 of the 28 song fragments quoted here. Let us know if you ate our score for breakfast. And if you’re able to identify either of the two fragments we couldn’t track down, we’ll post on a topic of your choosing.)