If all the people who love to quote :A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
Granted it's one of the ten most malapplied phrases, but it seems to work.
So having posted the second reprint in three postings, I start it with the disclaimer that I seldom do that sort of thing.
So that grump of Emerson's floats in the back of my head like an irritating floating thing. But all is not lost. At least I'm hearing the Streisand use of the line in what is arguably her funniest film.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
I don't usually do reprints, but.....
..... this one falls into the classification of "THAT"S what I've been trying to say for the last seven drafts!!"
Since I'm not hearing anything one way or the other from the San Francisco Folk Music Club, from whose newsletter Harmony I draw the following, I'm going to reprint it, and claim that it's part of the folk process to increase understanding of the music and its practitioners. So go blame Pete Seeger.
I was going to put some commentary at the end of this, but I'll leave it until another time.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Message: 4
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:01:28 -0700
From: Adam Miller <autoharper@earthlink.net>
Subject: [Harmony] Mary Travers
To: SFFMC` LIST <harmony@sffmc.org>
Message-ID: <e61471f7bc99814b6b690fe0fb8d1500@earthlink.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
Subject: Mary Travers
Date: September 25, 2009 8:44:30 AM PDT
RRC subscriber John Ross writes:
In the days leading up to the Iraq war nothing made that modern media invention–the conscience-stricken hawk–quite as queasy as the spectre of the “Peter, Paul and Mary” liberal turning the new adventure into “another Viet Nam.”
That kind of insight was, of course, less than brilliant on infinite levels, but there was some justice in the basic conclusion: the special relationship between music and politics that’s now called to mind by the catch-all phrase “the sixties” was not, after all, just some weird accident.
The stark, unsettling contradictions that boiled to the surface in that generation have been wallowing in the American psyche since the beginning and are with us still, while the notion that musicians and other artists should confront them is, if not quite that old, at least far, far older than the recording industry.
By contrast, a reality where this very confrontation could produce gold records–and the powerful, insidious, earworm relevance in modern American life that this has always implied–was entirely modern and called forth very specifically by three earnest folkies who, as if to prove history really does have a sense of humor, were assembled by a quasi-corporate process not all that different from the one that produced the Monkees.
Partly for those reasons, the group was something of a punching bag among the hipper-than-thou left long before their massive success began to haunt bigots and mad bombers.
At least some of that was envy, but for art to work as politics the art has to come first and P,P&M had two elements of genius. The first was the magical “other” that is created when the members of any great harmony group blend their voices.
The second was Mary Travers.
It was Travers who gave the group’s sleek sound the gravitas it needed to become a dividing line and a cultural force that went far beyond selling records. A lot of what Peter, Paul and Mary did–children’s songs, stale stage-patter, tiresome renditions of “true” folk songs by way of Merry Olde England–was innocuous or worse and can safely be consigned to the nostalgia bin if not the dust bin.
What’s left are a couple of dozen diamond-pure sides that did what art very, very rarely does–changed things.
Nearly every one of those sides featured Mary Travers as either lead or de facto soloist.
It was her voice that put Bob Dylan on the charts for the first time.
Her voice that brought Pete Seeger back to the top ten after nearly a decade in blacklisted exile–not with Weavers-style balladry but with a political anthem. Her voice wailing on the key line in Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In” that makes it sound even now like something college kids really would call forth as naturally as breathing when they were being beaten with night-sticks and tossed into paddy wagons at the “liberal” Democratic Convention in 1968.
The poetry of “the whole world is watching” was Dylan’s but it was almost certainly Travers who Middle America heard when the fragment was recited for evening newscasts or morning newspapers just as it was effectively Travers, almost alone, who first put “protest” music into the proverbial million living rooms where Martin Luther King might as well have been the antichrist.
It wasn’t for nothing that Civil Rights paragon Ossie Davis–as righteous a defender as African-American culture will ever have–called her white-bread folk group “the movement set to music.”
All of that would make her one of the most important voices of the century but she could be even better.
“500 Miles” was recorded in 1962 and, with the tumult still largely in front of her, Travers used that completely artificial confection as a vehicle for collapsing time. Standing on the cusp of a cultural earthquake that would not have been entirely possible without her, she made a commercial folk song sound as if it had always existed and always would, as if everything that was about to happen had already been and gone and she was the only one left to speak of it. Much like the sixties themselves, her version can make you smile behind the eyes or rip your heart out–can be steeped in as much hope or damnation as a listener chooses.
Where “500 Miles” was a pure abstraction–a reach for something that could be grasped but not quite held–“Leaving on a Jet Plane” was utterly prosaic. Travers simply took John Denver’s best song–a fine, if conventional lament on that most jealously guarded male prerogative, i.e., the freedom to come and go and have the little woman wait for you to make up your mind–and turned it inside out.
What was left was possibly the strangest record of the entire rock and roll era. At once supremely radical and profoundly reassuring, recorded just as the women’s movement was taking off, it made no grand statements in the manner of “Respect” or “I Am Woman,” or even “These Boots Are Made For Walking,” but instead simply took for granted everything genuinely useful such a movement might achieve. Where others had proclaimed, Travers simply made the most powerful assumption of all. That the right to make the most profound decisions in a relationship was no more than her–or anyone’s–just due. She called special attention to nothing–and missed nothing. The freedom and attendant responsibility that lay behind her bold assumptions got exactly the weight they deserved and no more, lessons that have been missed by generations of male rock critics and upper-class “feminist” scholars alike, but were likely not lost on the wave of female singer-songwriters (Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Roberta Flack, et al) who were about to leave their own deep mark.
It was perhaps appropriate for “Jet Plane” to hit number one in the last month of a decade synonymous with tumult. It seems at least possible that after a deluge of assassination and war and riot, the culture simply took that highly symbolic occasion to draw a deep breath and reach back for some sense of itself, for some reminder of the bedrock that would be waiting when the brick and mortar stopped flying. If cultures can do such things–and if ours did such a thing at that moment–it is both heavily ironic and completely unsurprising that it was Travers’ voice we reached for.
The critic Ralph Gleason once famously called Peter, Paul and Mary “two rabbis and a hooker,” and to be honest that’s one of the funniest things any critic has ever said. But the real joke is that it was the hooker–not the rabbis or the critic–who turned out the have the biblical voice.
Before her, the great voices of American protest music remained in the underground or on the sidelines. Before her, if a “folk” group had a really big hit it was “Good Night Irene” or “Tom Dooley” or, “Michael” (as in row the boat gently and safely ashore). Before her, when Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit,” it scraped the charts for a week before being banned. Before her there was no way Woody Guthrie
singing “Deportee” or Louis Armstrong singing “Black and Blue” or, for that matter, Bob Dylan singing “Blowin’ In The Wind,” could get anywhere near a chart. After her, there was no way “Turn, Turn, Turn,” or “For What It’s Worth,” or “Fortunate Son,” or “Ohio,” or “A Change Is Gonna’ Come” or “Born In the U.S.A.” or “The World Is a Ghetto,” or “What’s Going On” or “Fight the Power” could miss.
As we head into an age when the party of “limited” government (which, laughably, still goes by the name Republican) has laid the groundwork for an assumption of draconian federal powers the old House Un-American Activities Committee that hounded Pete Seeger would never have dreamed possible, the American music charts are, in most ways, as free of pointed relevance as they were in 1961 and every year prior. These days even so-called “hardcore” rappers and punks confine their protests to their albums. Few others bother with even that much.
I’d like to think that the moment is always right for some new version of Mary Travers to take over those charts but I won’t be holding my breath.
Truth is, the blonde chick in Peter, Paul and Mary has gone to her reward and I have a funny feeling they only made one of her.
John Ross
Havana, Florida
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Since I'm not hearing anything one way or the other from the San Francisco Folk Music Club, from whose newsletter Harmony I draw the following, I'm going to reprint it, and claim that it's part of the folk process to increase understanding of the music and its practitioners. So go blame Pete Seeger.
I was going to put some commentary at the end of this, but I'll leave it until another time.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Message: 4
Date: Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:01:28 -0700
From: Adam Miller <autoharper@earthlink.net>
Subject: [Harmony] Mary Travers
To: SFFMC` LIST <harmony@sffmc.org>
Message-ID: <e61471f7bc99814b6b690fe0fb8d1500@earthlink.net>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
Subject: Mary Travers
Date: September 25, 2009 8:44:30 AM PDT
RRC subscriber John Ross writes:
In the days leading up to the Iraq war nothing made that modern media invention–the conscience-stricken hawk–quite as queasy as the spectre of the “Peter, Paul and Mary” liberal turning the new adventure into “another Viet Nam.”
That kind of insight was, of course, less than brilliant on infinite levels, but there was some justice in the basic conclusion: the special relationship between music and politics that’s now called to mind by the catch-all phrase “the sixties” was not, after all, just some weird accident.
The stark, unsettling contradictions that boiled to the surface in that generation have been wallowing in the American psyche since the beginning and are with us still, while the notion that musicians and other artists should confront them is, if not quite that old, at least far, far older than the recording industry.
By contrast, a reality where this very confrontation could produce gold records–and the powerful, insidious, earworm relevance in modern American life that this has always implied–was entirely modern and called forth very specifically by three earnest folkies who, as if to prove history really does have a sense of humor, were assembled by a quasi-corporate process not all that different from the one that produced the Monkees.
Partly for those reasons, the group was something of a punching bag among the hipper-than-thou left long before their massive success began to haunt bigots and mad bombers.
At least some of that was envy, but for art to work as politics the art has to come first and P,P&M had two elements of genius. The first was the magical “other” that is created when the members of any great harmony group blend their voices.
The second was Mary Travers.
It was Travers who gave the group’s sleek sound the gravitas it needed to become a dividing line and a cultural force that went far beyond selling records. A lot of what Peter, Paul and Mary did–children’s songs, stale stage-patter, tiresome renditions of “true” folk songs by way of Merry Olde England–was innocuous or worse and can safely be consigned to the nostalgia bin if not the dust bin.
What’s left are a couple of dozen diamond-pure sides that did what art very, very rarely does–changed things.
Nearly every one of those sides featured Mary Travers as either lead or de facto soloist.
It was her voice that put Bob Dylan on the charts for the first time.
Her voice that brought Pete Seeger back to the top ten after nearly a decade in blacklisted exile–not with Weavers-style balladry but with a political anthem. Her voice wailing on the key line in Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In” that makes it sound even now like something college kids really would call forth as naturally as breathing when they were being beaten with night-sticks and tossed into paddy wagons at the “liberal” Democratic Convention in 1968.
The poetry of “the whole world is watching” was Dylan’s but it was almost certainly Travers who Middle America heard when the fragment was recited for evening newscasts or morning newspapers just as it was effectively Travers, almost alone, who first put “protest” music into the proverbial million living rooms where Martin Luther King might as well have been the antichrist.
It wasn’t for nothing that Civil Rights paragon Ossie Davis–as righteous a defender as African-American culture will ever have–called her white-bread folk group “the movement set to music.”
All of that would make her one of the most important voices of the century but she could be even better.
“500 Miles” was recorded in 1962 and, with the tumult still largely in front of her, Travers used that completely artificial confection as a vehicle for collapsing time. Standing on the cusp of a cultural earthquake that would not have been entirely possible without her, she made a commercial folk song sound as if it had always existed and always would, as if everything that was about to happen had already been and gone and she was the only one left to speak of it. Much like the sixties themselves, her version can make you smile behind the eyes or rip your heart out–can be steeped in as much hope or damnation as a listener chooses.
Where “500 Miles” was a pure abstraction–a reach for something that could be grasped but not quite held–“Leaving on a Jet Plane” was utterly prosaic. Travers simply took John Denver’s best song–a fine, if conventional lament on that most jealously guarded male prerogative, i.e., the freedom to come and go and have the little woman wait for you to make up your mind–and turned it inside out.
What was left was possibly the strangest record of the entire rock and roll era. At once supremely radical and profoundly reassuring, recorded just as the women’s movement was taking off, it made no grand statements in the manner of “Respect” or “I Am Woman,” or even “These Boots Are Made For Walking,” but instead simply took for granted everything genuinely useful such a movement might achieve. Where others had proclaimed, Travers simply made the most powerful assumption of all. That the right to make the most profound decisions in a relationship was no more than her–or anyone’s–just due. She called special attention to nothing–and missed nothing. The freedom and attendant responsibility that lay behind her bold assumptions got exactly the weight they deserved and no more, lessons that have been missed by generations of male rock critics and upper-class “feminist” scholars alike, but were likely not lost on the wave of female singer-songwriters (Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Roberta Flack, et al) who were about to leave their own deep mark.
It was perhaps appropriate for “Jet Plane” to hit number one in the last month of a decade synonymous with tumult. It seems at least possible that after a deluge of assassination and war and riot, the culture simply took that highly symbolic occasion to draw a deep breath and reach back for some sense of itself, for some reminder of the bedrock that would be waiting when the brick and mortar stopped flying. If cultures can do such things–and if ours did such a thing at that moment–it is both heavily ironic and completely unsurprising that it was Travers’ voice we reached for.
The critic Ralph Gleason once famously called Peter, Paul and Mary “two rabbis and a hooker,” and to be honest that’s one of the funniest things any critic has ever said. But the real joke is that it was the hooker–not the rabbis or the critic–who turned out the have the biblical voice.
Before her, the great voices of American protest music remained in the underground or on the sidelines. Before her, if a “folk” group had a really big hit it was “Good Night Irene” or “Tom Dooley” or, “Michael” (as in row the boat gently and safely ashore). Before her, when Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit,” it scraped the charts for a week before being banned. Before her there was no way Woody Guthrie
singing “Deportee” or Louis Armstrong singing “Black and Blue” or, for that matter, Bob Dylan singing “Blowin’ In The Wind,” could get anywhere near a chart. After her, there was no way “Turn, Turn, Turn,” or “For What It’s Worth,” or “Fortunate Son,” or “Ohio,” or “A Change Is Gonna’ Come” or “Born In the U.S.A.” or “The World Is a Ghetto,” or “What’s Going On” or “Fight the Power” could miss.
As we head into an age when the party of “limited” government (which, laughably, still goes by the name Republican) has laid the groundwork for an assumption of draconian federal powers the old House Un-American Activities Committee that hounded Pete Seeger would never have dreamed possible, the American music charts are, in most ways, as free of pointed relevance as they were in 1961 and every year prior. These days even so-called “hardcore” rappers and punks confine their protests to their albums. Few others bother with even that much.
I’d like to think that the moment is always right for some new version of Mary Travers to take over those charts but I won’t be holding my breath.
Truth is, the blonde chick in Peter, Paul and Mary has gone to her reward and I have a funny feeling they only made one of her.
John Ross
Havana, Florida
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Speaking of cheap instruments
A few weeks ago, I was driving through the town of Downey en route to my Doctor's office, when I spotted a little independent music store. Deciding I had the time, and with the available of that California rarity -- a parking space -- I decided to take a look. Nice guitars, even better prices. I'd not heard of the brands before, but the feel was good, as was the sound. Unfortunately, the guy at the counter was taking care of a customer, with another one waiting, so I saved the questions for later and headed on to see the Doctor.
A couple days later, in a posher neighborhood, I stopped in at a Big Box music store, and saw the same instruments with a BRAND NAME (Ta-daaaaaaa!!!), for only three times the price. Same feel, same tap sounds, and the only difference was better strings. But I gave them a fair trial, and left with some questions in the back of the head. A couple hours later, I'm back in Downey, giving a couple guitars a more thorough playover.
As may have mentioned, I'm spending an increasing percentage of the year down in Southern California taking care of my mother. I've been schlepping a guitar back and forth, and the poor thing is starting to show the trials of the process. So I needed something I could take to jams and song circles without worrying about it a bunch. The six-string banjo and the nine-string parlor guitar are more robust (or, in the case of the banjo have passed that point where minor damages become character ... sort of like myself), but the guitar.... not so much.
So, we have a no-name instrument who needs a home, and a part-time folkie who has never subscribed to the "price tag equals level of wonderfulness" theory.
Obviously, we should have gotten along well. This is the point where I have to fess up to a whole raft of glitches that I could have avoided for just a few hundred dollars more. Sorry. I like the sound, the shop gave me a new set of strings, and I got 75% off of the price of a gig bag. OK, the bag has the store name on the side, but as long as I don't take it to places outside of the state, I should be fine. The treble is a little weak, and the bass is a tad overbalanced, but with a name like Carter, that just has to be useful. Price: under USD150. I like the plain spruce top for purely cosmetic reasons, but it turns out to gentle the sound better than the one with a top that matched the sides and back.
A couple days later, in a posher neighborhood, I stopped in at a Big Box music store, and saw the same instruments with a BRAND NAME (Ta-daaaaaaa!!!), for only three times the price. Same feel, same tap sounds, and the only difference was better strings. But I gave them a fair trial, and left with some questions in the back of the head. A couple hours later, I'm back in Downey, giving a couple guitars a more thorough playover.
As may have mentioned, I'm spending an increasing percentage of the year down in Southern California taking care of my mother. I've been schlepping a guitar back and forth, and the poor thing is starting to show the trials of the process. So I needed something I could take to jams and song circles without worrying about it a bunch. The six-string banjo and the nine-string parlor guitar are more robust (or, in the case of the banjo have passed that point where minor damages become character ... sort of like myself), but the guitar.... not so much.
So, we have a no-name instrument who needs a home, and a part-time folkie who has never subscribed to the "price tag equals level of wonderfulness" theory.
Obviously, we should have gotten along well. This is the point where I have to fess up to a whole raft of glitches that I could have avoided for just a few hundred dollars more. Sorry. I like the sound, the shop gave me a new set of strings, and I got 75% off of the price of a gig bag. OK, the bag has the store name on the side, but as long as I don't take it to places outside of the state, I should be fine. The treble is a little weak, and the bass is a tad overbalanced, but with a name like Carter, that just has to be useful. Price: under USD150. I like the plain spruce top for purely cosmetic reasons, but it turns out to gentle the sound better than the one with a top that matched the sides and back.
Suspicions Confirmed?
Retrieved September 20, 2009, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2009/09/090914111418.htm
Fungus-treated Violin Outdoes Stradivarius
ScienceDaily (Sep. 14, 2009) — At the 27th “Osnabrücker Baumpflegetagen” (one of Germany’s most important annual conferences on all aspects of forest husbandry), Empa researcher Francis Schwarze’s "biotech violin" dared to go head to head in a blind test against a stradivarius – and won! A brilliant outcome for the Empa violin, which is made of wood treated with fungus, against the instrument made by the great master himself in 1711.
September 1st 2009 was a day of reckoning for Empa scientist Francis Schwarze and the Swiss violin maker Michael Rhonheimer. The violin they had created using wood treated with a specially selected fungus was to take part in a blind test against an instrument made in 1711 by the master violin maker of Cremona himself, Antonio Stradivarius. In the test, the British star violinist Matthew Trusler played five different instruments behind a curtain, so that the audience did not know which was being played. One of the violins Trusler played was his own strad, worth two million dollars. The other four were all made by Rhonheimer – two with fungally-treated wood, the other two with untreated wood. A jury of experts, together with the conference participants, judged the tone quality of the violins. Of the more than 180 attendees, an overwhelming number – 90 persons – felt the tone of the fungally treated violin "Opus 58" to be the best. Trusler’s stradivarius reached second place with 39 votes, but amazingly enough 113 members of the audience thought that "Opus 58" was actually the strad! "Opus 58" is made from wood which had been treated with fungus for the longest time, nine months.
Skepticism before the blind test
Judging the tone quality of a musical instrument in a blind test is, of course, an extremely subjective matter, since it is a question of pleasing the human senses. Empa scientist Schwarze is fully aware of this, and as he says, “There is no unambiguous scientific way of measuring tone quality.” He was therefore, understandably, rather nervous before the test. Since the beginning of the 19th century violins made by Stradivarius have been compared to instruments made by others in so called blind tests, the most serious of all probably being that organized by the BBC in 1974. In that test the world famous violinists Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman together with the English violin dealer Charles Beare were challenged to identify blind the "Chaconne" stradivarius made in 1725, a "Guarneri del Gesu" of 1739, a "Vuillaume" of 1846 and a modern instrument made by the English master violin maker Roland Praill. The result was rather sobering – none of the experts was able to correctly identify more than two of the four instruments, and in fact two of the jurors thought that the modern instrument was actually the "Chaconne" stradivarius.
Biotech wood, a revolution in the art of violin making
Violins made by the Italian master Antonio Giacomo Stradivarius are regarded as being of unparalleled quality even today, with enthusiasts being prepared to pay millions for a single example. Stradivarius himself knew nothing of fungi which attack wood, but he received inadvertent help from the “Little Ice Age” which occurred from 1645 to 1715. During this period Central Europe suffered long winters and cool summers which caused trees to grow slowly and uniformly – ideal conditions in fact for producing wood with excellent acoustic qualities.
Horst Heger of the Osnabruck City Conservatory is convinced that the success of the “fungus violin” represents a revolution in the field of classical music. “In the future even talented young musicians will be able to afford a violin with the same tonal quality as an impossibly expensive Stradivarius,” he believes. In his opinion, the most important factor in determining the tone of a violin is the quality of the wood used in its manufacture. This has now been confirmed by the results of the blind test in Osnabruck. The fungal attack changes the cell structure of the wood, reducing its density and simultaneously increasing its homogeneity. “Compared to a conventional instrument, a violin made of wood treated with the fungus has a warmer, more rounded sound,” explains Francis Schwarze.
Adapted from materials provided by Empa, via AlphaGalileo.
So it wasn't the blood of bats in the varnish, and it wasn't secret techniques found in a cave. Like so many folk who try to get sounds out of wood and strings, the guys got lucky with the wood supply. So does that mean people will stop paying the price of a really nice yacht for a violin that was once stored in the same vault as a Strad?
So it wasn't the blood of bats in the varnish, and it wasn't secret techniques found in a cave. Like so many folk who try to get sounds out of wood and strings, the guys got lucky with the wood supply. So does that mean people will stop paying the price of a really nice yacht for a violin that was once stored in the same vault as a Strad?
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