Simple gifts?



Light at the end of the tunnel? Or a train coming the other way?

Something rather more chewy here.
Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Comments

Unknown said…
The middle section sounded like a rather curious mixture of "All Creatures of Our God and King" and "Lord of the Dance". Do either of these tunes have any particular siginificance for Barack H. Obama? Or maybe they weren't in fact the tunes they sounded like?
1:07 pm
Kyle L said…
Pliable, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. Very cryptic though. As for the John Williams piece, I rather liked it. I was fearing the worst, but I thought it was quite good.

And Andrew, it sounds like you're not familiar with "Simple Gifts" or Copland. It has the same melody as "Lord of the Dance." It's a nice tune and ever since Copland used it in Appalachian Spring it has always had a special place in Americana.
4:59 pm
La Cowntessa said…
Urg urg urg, Simple Gifts was a SHAKER HYMN written by Joseph Brackett. All the other versions are arrangements or appropriations.

It's possibly one of the most American pieces of music there is -- something written by an American, for Americans.

It was a perfect and appropriate tune to arrange for the occasion. The text is as follows:

'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free,

'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.

When true simplicity is gain'd,

To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd,

To turn, turn will be our delight

'Till by turning, turning we come round right.
6:10 pm
La Cowntessa said…
Aaaaaaaaaaand because I can't shut up on this topic, and missed my calling as a musicologist -- Simple Gifts is also, in a way, a distillation of American music and American music history.

Our musical tradition was built and developed around religious music -- Puritan hymns, Shaker hymns, shaped Note hymn singing, spirituals, etc. There is a certain American "sound" or style that is embodied in Copland, and it is the direct influence of the music on which the US was built.

While there are many Big Names in the classical music tradition from the US, the true representatives of our musical culture are composers like Alice Parker, Moses Hogan, H.T. Burleigh, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and yes, Copland.
6:22 pm
Pliable said…
Email received:

Hello,

Am I alone in being disturbed by how similar Williams's treatment of Simple Gifts to that of Copland? The first appearance of the tune in the clarinet in the same register; the lightly bustling accompaniment...

--
James Primosch
10:12 pm
Unknown said…
Thank you Kyle, Pliable, and others, for the enlightenment here and in the post above. I'm not familiar enough with Copland, and my familiarity with Shaker musical tradition is limited to the adaptation of "Simple Gifts" by Sydney Carter in his hymn "Lord of the Dance". It is interesting that the opening of "Simple Gifts" is almost identical to the opening of the hymn tune "Lasst uns erfreuen" to which the hymn "All creatures of our God and King" is usually sung. A shared musical path in the distant past, perhaps?
11:14 pm
saintrussell said…
And now we learn the musicians were miming to a recording. I would not have planned to feature instruments that can't be played effectively in cold weather as part of an outdoor event in January.
5:23 pm
Post a Comment

Recent popular posts

David Munrow - more than early music

Image
'David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London transformed our view of medieval music. The impact of their performances far surparssed any that had gone before: by demonstrating how medieval music could sound normal, they created a niche for it in the concert hall and on record that it has never lost' ~ From Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's notes for Music of the Gothic era May 15 2007 is the thirty-first anniversary of the death of David Munrow. His contribution to the acceptance, understanding and performance of early music almost defies summary. He was born in 1942, and learnt the bassoon and recorder as a child. Between school and university he travelled and taught in South America , and started the collection of ethnic instruments that were to give him, and the world, a new perspective on early music making. He read English at Pembroke College , Cambridge, and was encouraged by Thurston Dart to take an active role in the music-making of that most musical of cities. ...
Read more

Classical music must be doing something wrong

Image
Classical music's website of choice Slipped Disc  today runs a story on the latest RAJAR UK radio listening figures . This story states that a "...record number of individual hours was spent listening to [BBC Radio 3]. They must be doing something right". Which is good news; but only for those who believe that facts should never stand in the way of a good story. Because simple arithmetic shows that BBC Radio 3 is not doing very much right, while UK classical radio in its entirety is doing something wrong.   In the quarter ended September 2024, BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM audiences were 2.039m and 4.416m respectively. Which gives a total audience for the two classical stations of 6.455m. For the same quarter in September 2023 the audiences were 2.002m and 4.467m, giving a total classical radio audience 12 months previously of 6.469m.  So BBC Radio 3's "something right" turns out to be a fractional increase in its audience year on year, and a contribution ...
Read more

Soundtrack for a porn movie

Image
"No, you have not landed on Slipped Disc by mistake. Respected electronic music pioneer Klaus Schulze tells the story himself.  The origins of " Body Love " are quite funny. I received a call from a movie producer named Manfred Menz and I wound up becoming his principal composer for a period of time. Amongst others, I composed the "Barracuda" soundtrack for him [1978, previously unreleased on album]. This led to a friendship which lasts till today. Menz now lives in Malibu, California where I visited him a couple of years ago. Anyway, this guy calls me and asks if I would compose the score to a porn movie. I said: "Porn? Nah, I don't do that kind of thing".  As it turned out, the director of the movie, Lasse Braun, had already shot it and had used my albums " Timewind " [1975] and " Moondawn " [1976] as a kind of "working soundtrack". This was obvious because the couples in the film were moving in time to my gro...
Read more

All aboard the Martinu bandwagon

Image
Depressing, but predictable, to see the mainstream media scrambling aboard the Bohuslav Martinů bandwagon as soon as BBC Radio 3 announces a cycle of his superb symphonies . Equally depressing, but a sign of the times, to see the Independent publishing an appreciation of the composer's symphonies by a writer who confesses elsewhere to never having heard a single note of them. As Norman Lebrecht famously wrote in the Evening Standard back in 2006: ‘... until bloggers deliver hard facts … paid for newspapers will continue to set the standard as the only show in town’. Sadly the hard facts now show that Norman is no longer at the Evening Standard , and, as from next Monday, the Evening Standard will no longer be a paid for newspaper . But you can find pre-bandwagon appreciations of Martinů here and here . Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of ...
Read more

All is not lost, but where is it?

Image
It is appropriate today to provide a heads up to the Suns of Arqa 2015 album All is not lost, but where is it? which features contributions from Youth , Raja Ram , The Orb , and the performance poet  John Cooper Clarke . Like all Arqa albums it was masterminded by Michael Wadada, who famously defied the classical nimbies by successfully combining a re-imagined Fauré's Requiem with early rumblings of Dub Step , Hindustani ragas, and Nyabinghi Dub Poetry on another album . My 2020 interview with the now sadly-departed Michael can be read via this link . Track 6 on the album has a sampled John Cooper Clarke - who was a regular Arqa collaborator - reciting his poem The Truth Lies Therein . Here are some of the prescient lyrics.  He shall be taken with out the walls of the city Where pestilence shall hold dominion over all The water will stink and prove bitter on his tongue A plague of isolation shall deliver him to decrepitude Wither shall he fly in such misery He wants t...
Read more

Classical music is not connecting with its rewired audience

Image
A typical American adult spends more than 11 hours each day interacting with media. Our brains are being rewired by this extended use of all-pervasive digital technologies, and the resulting re-synapsing of neural connections is fundamentally changing behaviour patterns and value systems. My proposition is that classical music is not adapting to these fundamental changes with the result that the artform is failing to connect with a new audience. A simple example of how quickly and easily neural connections are rewired is provided by an experiment carried out by the respected neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandaran . Test subjects viewed an image of jumbled black dots on a white background. After a short time the dots were seen to form a dog. Detailed brains scans taken during the recognition process showed that neurons in the temporal lobes became permanently altered once the dog had been recognised. That the dog was easily seen subsequently is confirmation of the new neural connections...
Read more

The purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness

Image
Two contrasting responses from America to my post Third rate music on Naxos' American classics? Flinging merde - ' Granted some of the stuff that Naxos has packaged in that series has been less than distinguished but operating in a cultural establishment where critics treat every cow patty ever dropped by the likes of Alwyn (above) and Bax and Finzi and Michael Tippitt (sic) as if it were fois gras, Clements is hardly in a position to fling merde' - from Sequenza21 , and I'm sure Norman Lebrecht would approve of that misspelling of Tippett. The true beauty of the effort - ' Personally speaking I expect listener reaction to concert music is heavily dependent on emotional mood and cultural/historical context . The concept of "ratings" and "tiers" for composers is pretty much an over-rated specialization of critics, which serves the purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness. My father is the American composer George Frederick McKay (photo be...
Read more

The act of killing from 20,000 feet

Image
Today's Guardian reports the attempted suicide bombings at UK airports under the headline ' A plot to commit murder on an unimaginable scale' . Any attempt to take human life is abhorrent, and thank heavens the alleged plot was foiled. But let us not forget that killing on an unimaginable scale by aircraft is not the monopoly of any one ideoology. ' As German fuel supplies dwindled in the autumn of 1944 and into the final months of the war, aircraft were grounded, tanks halted, training for replacement pilots could not be maintained, and most of the new and highly effective Messerschmitt 262 jet-fighter aircraft (photo above), of which over 1,200 had been produced by the end of 1944 and which might have considerably prolonged the war, had neither fuel to fly nor trained pilots to fly them. The ME 262s were anyway extremely fuel-hungry aircraft, and those that went into action had to be towed to their end of their runways to conserve fuel, cows were used to do the towin...
Read more

The complete works on Future Radio

Image
Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is one of his best known works, and Tudor church music was a major influence on the composer. During 2008 I am playing all the Vaughan Williams symphonies on my Future Radio programme , and this Sunday (Feb 17) it is the turn of the Eighth Symphony. This for many, including me, is one of his finest works, and it certainly destroys the myth of the composer as a backward looking English pastoralist, with its scoring for vibraphone, xylophone, tubular bells, glockenspiel and three tuned gongs. I'm coupling all the Vaughan Williams Symphonies with choral music from Thomas Tallis . This will be taken from the splendid new 10CD box of Tallis' complete works at bargain price from Brilliant Classics sung by the Chapelle du Roi directed by Alistair Dixon . Tallis also composed a number of instrumental works which are included in the box. They are not of the same peerless quality as his choral works, but are, nevertheles...
Read more

Music behind the great firewall of China

Image
In that classic 1968 film The Graduate Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) is given some of the most famous advice in cinema history: Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you - just one word. Ben: Yes sir. Mr. McGuire: Are you listening? Ben: Yes I am. Mr. McGuire: 'Plastics.' Ben: Exactly how do you mean? Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it? Ben: Yes I will. Mr. McGuire: Shh! Enough said. That's a deal. Right now that conversation is being repeated with a slight twist: Agent: I just want to say one word to you - just one word. Musician: Yes sir. Agent: Are you listening? Musician: Yes I am. Agent: 'China' ... Orchestras are listening , composers from Gustav Mahler to Damon Albarn have been listening for years, Google are listening , and even Jordi Savall is listening . I'm quite sure Terry Riley and the Kronos Quartet don't need to listen to their agent, but their latest CD is on-message anyway. Th...
Read more