Latest Articles by Sarah Canice Funke
*This quote is for Rachel H., my old roommate, since she shares the aesthetic opinions voiced by this music critic of a century past.
"'Brass band music,' the young Henry Finck wrote, 'always reminds me of a threshing machine through which live cats are being chased."
(Highbrow, Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America by Lawrence Levine, pg. 165.)
I also wish these days were still around...
"At a performance of Richard III with Junius Brutus Booth at New York's Bowery Theatre in December 1832, the holiday audience was so large that some three hundred people overflowed onto the stage and entered into the spirit of things, the New York Mirror reported. They examined Richard's royal regalia with interest, hefted his sword, and tried on his crown; they moved up to get a close look at the ghosts of King Henry, Lady Anne, and the children when these characters appeared on stage; they mingled with the soldiers during the battle of Bosworth Field and responded to the roll of drums and blast of trumpets by racing across the stage. When Richard and Richmond began their fight, the audience 'made a ring round the combatants to see 'fair play,' and kept them at it for nearly a quarter of an hour by 'Shrewsbury's clock.''" (pg. 28 of same book)
These statements refer to earlier posts:
Hey, you got multiples! that's awesome. I've been listening to it so much lately. My favorite song is the last (number 8, I think). Sometime I think that beep is regular and sometimes I think it's irregular. Maybe it's both, depending on the time. Pitchfork included Multiples in their top 50 albums of the year, which is a huge surprise (even for pitchfork).
I have heard the Psalters a little here and a little there. But somehow, they've never compelled me to be intentional about hearing them. I hear them and then I forget them. But now, I will hear them more carefully. which album was it that you like so much? Their samples tend to bother me. Like I remember they sampled the Martin Luther King "I have a dream" speech into one of their songs and I thought it sounded lame.
Hmmm. I was listening to Patrin IV (which was recorded live). Interesting that you found the "I had a dream" sample to be lame. I am not really sure what I think of it myself, because on one hand, it struck me as rather eerie, with the relentless repetition of the string motif against the half-wail cadence of MLK's voice. It really did make me uncomfortable. On the other hand, I can see how it could border on the melodramatic.
What I loved about the album was the drumming and the chanting. Percussion is not my expertise, so for all I know the drumming could be the simplest of patterns, but nevertheless its relentlessness intrigued me. And the fact that it was combined with an Eastern European/Yiddish melody line and yet still seemed to work without sounding like some ethnic hybrid.
I am sure that a slew of questions regarding authenticity surround this band (is this really a Yiddish melody or just some band's idea or representation, etc.). However, whatever the conclusion to these questions, I just liked the music, whether it contains authentic African drumming or not.
nice, cozy place you got here :)..
Posted by: guile at 25.01.06 4:58