Sundry Notes of Music

from Shakespeare’s Sonnets to Sundry Notes of Music,
but, here’s the twist,

it is performed by Principal Edward’s Magic Theatre

https://youtu.be/IKO0v0H1PwI?feature=shared

Maybe not the best quality reproduction , but ….

Now, who else remembers this ?

Eurovision 2024

Unity through music

I really enjoyed Eurovision this year.
I have started viewing it again after many years of neglect.

Sheer spectacle, and that is certainly half of the appeal – and it is so good to see different countries make such good use of the technologies available.

Ah, but the music, so much better than it use to be.
This year was particularly strong on singers.
Some really great acts.

I was impressed by the phenomenal voice of Gunnhild Sundi, lead singer of Gåte, the Norwegian entry. Although the song itself lacked that special element, she stood out.

And the Portuguese entry ! iolanda ! Great voice, strong, tonal, with real range.

The French singer, too, Slimane, so rich and strong. And Latvia’s Dons, lovely voice.

But fun, too, many acts here, with all this pressure, made their entry seem so much fun, enjoyable. Take Croatia’s Baby Lasagne, with Rim Tim Tagi Dim. Joyous.
Of course, who could miss Finland’s Windows95Man and the amazing pants !
Ethnic tunes and traditional instruments were used too; Serbia’s Teya Dora and entourage had such a sense of fun.
And Armenia’s Ladaniva… such energy; lively music.
Let’s also applaud Estonia’s 5miinust x Puuluup – simply joyous.

Ireland’s Bambi Thug, of course, with its mix-up of … was that Slipknot ? And Shakespeare’s Sister ?…. Great blending of harshness and melody. Wonderful choreography.

Which leads to the main blight of the programme for me, and that is the compère, Graham Norton’s inane comments. Admittedly he is not as bad as he use to be, with waspish comments. Could do without him, though.

Nemo, the winner, his balancing on the lip of a rotating disk, was stupendous.
The song, second time around….
Just me.

Update on Sarah Kirsch

Following my attempt at an overview on the work of German writer Sarah Kirsch, I have recently discovered a different side to her, than the ‘professional artist’ side her books present.

Here is a tantalising article on the publication of some of her diaries.
Why tantalising ? Because it is still only in her mother tongue, German – hopefully only for now.
This is a much warmer, more playful Sarah.

Cat lover.
What can you say ?

I write this being stared at by one just-fed cat.

Enjoy.

On Sarah Kirsch’s Regenkatze – Raincat (2007)

Flora’s Holiday

The merry month of May (yes, we have warmth at last), let us rejoice with Henry Purcell’s Nymphs and Shephards

What was it e e cummings wrote ? After April, there is no excuse for May

because May would be an excess after the wonder of awakening that is April. Great celebrator of new growth and Spring awakening, youthfulness and hope and burgeoning with its New York balloon man whistling far and wee.

Well, here is Henry Purcell’s classical take on on all that.

Kurt Wallander’s choice in music

So, I was reading An Event in Autumn, by Henning Mankell, it is a later Wallander book, and …
… not a particularly good book, but …
… and written by request for a give-away with a bought book for a Netherlands promotion …

… this was part of my crime-read phase, which had started with Georges Simenon and his Maigret novels that I read for place, atmosphere, character, and was momentarily disappointed, although Strangers in the House, one of his ‘other’ novels, was enjoyable …

… and then came the hefty (and stodgy ?) and major indictment of the Cultural Revolution, Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem sci/fi novel, and the exact opposite of Jon Fosse’s very short book consisting of one long sinuous sentence, Aliss by the Fire …

… although the earlier phase was still playing out …

… and so the Wallander came along, and while I digested and pondered my earlier reading, for a change of pace I read how …

… but it was more than a change of pace, it was the contrast between the idea-heavy hefty chunk of sci/fi reading combined with the rich and internalised Norwegian novel, with the lighter, less demanding, emotion-tickling crime novels …

… a sense of disappointment hovered …

… with all this going on, and the need for surer, firmer ground, I searched for, and found, it was in how …

as Kurt Wallander was relaxing one tumultuous Sunday’s evening, he put on this record

Beethoven’s String Quartet Number 16 in F Major

And, Yes, Good man, I thought.
All is well.

Scream Painting

Yes, this is a spoof.

From South Korea, he has the Bob Ross painting tutor’s tone and mannerisms off to perfection.

This is really well done. And hilarious.

Did you know there were so many types of screams ?
Could you add more ?

Stick with it to the end. It is translated and subtitled.

Enjoy.

George Wyllie, Scul?ter. Museum opens.

I came across George many years ago, and was quite thrilled. A self-taught artist who gained huge acceptance and affection. He achieved wonderful, off-the-wall effects.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/apr/21/museum-george-wyllie-opens-clyde-the-wyllieum-sculptor

See my earlier post on the man and his art.

https://wordpress.com/post/michael9murray.wordpress.com/10678

Celebrate : Purple Hibiscus

Ibrahim Mahama, from Ghana, visual artist and dynamo, has brought delight to London.

It was the Barbican Centre, in particular, a ‘brutalist’ architectural centrepiece. It certainly needed a lift, life, and vibrancy.

What it got, thanks to the energy and enthusiasm of Ibrahim, was Purple Hibiscus, a Cristo-esque mantle of Ghanaian designed, crafted, and coloured cloth.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-68846770

As the news article points out, there is more to the choice of setting than first appears : The Barbican is sited on what once was the centre of the famous ‘rag trade’ of London, powerhouse of the clothing industry and later London design and fashion.

Ibrahim brought Ghanaian cloth and material craft and skills to meet English craft and skills.

Little Amal

Syrian refugee child – vulnerable, small, and more at risk for being a young girl.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-68784762

Ah, but there we stop, because this is a puppet, an enormous puppet.
And isn’t she just wonderful !

https://www.walkwithamal.org/

This is a non-partisan post.

Sarah Kirsch, German Writer

What constitutes a political poem ?

A current dominant argument is that everything written for public readership has a political position, whether explicit or implicit… or flexing between.

This is our current need. It may not always be so. Nor may it have been so in past moments.

In a self-identifying rational society the other than rational is a recognisable response. But that is still a political stance.
Can you be apolitical ? It is a choice, and so can be viewed as taking a stance.
In contemporary Western society… but, no, when talking culture we must needs be specific. In multi-cultural societies ? Whichever definition it all comes down to specifics, to cultures, countries, individuals, but individuals speaking for others.

The poet with the individual voice and take on things, where can that one stand, how communicate to other than a limited number of others who have known, experienced, grown-up in, similar circumstances ?
It’s in what we all share, irrespective of language, lifestyle, political and/or religious directives. Does it have to be about issues at all ?

Take East Germany, the GDR. Part of the collective experiment, with its socialist-realist cultural directives.
The Marxist mindset made everything political.

Sarah Kirsch (1935-2013) was born and lived in eastern Germany, and what was to become East Germany, until leaving in 1977 in the repercussions from the Wolf Biermann expulsion case. She was one of the signatories of the letter of dismay to the leadership at their cowardly tactics towards him. Life was made too uncomfortable after that, work dried up, micro-aggressions… she applied to leave, and it was granted. They usually dragged it out and dragged it out.

To start over in a different historio-cultural environment. She had believed in the ‘experiment’, it was just the particular interpretation in practice that was unpalatable. 
Now she was with ‘the enemy’, and all its piffling consumerist twaddle.

Still, when you have strengthened your muscle against the iron order of the East, you have something to rely on to get you through.

https://www.dw.com/en/widely-regarded-german-lyricist-sarah-kirsch-dies/a-16830401

So, is this poem political? From 1974, part of her GDR period:

Still a Light on In The Kremlin 

This is Lenin’s cat with white fur
Every night she goes patrolling
And her serious eyes of emerald
Peep on time out the window

She eats wayward bits of writing
With her paw knocks down the inkwell
So that nothing can be read
Masha slips through all the doorways

And if sentries stand before them
She will pinch her eyes so tight
Steering with her sickle tail
Safely through the pairs of black boots

………………………………………………………………
(translated by Magritt Lehbert)

Political because she does not take her subject seriously. In the severe 1970s I should imagine this treatment would not have gone down well, and yet… the subject was in accord in the regime.
This is one of several Russia/Moscow based poems in the 1974 book. I don’t know the circumstances. Perhaps the all-important GDR Writer’s Union required a tribute from its members, perhaps even ordered/arranged a Moscow trip?

Another poem from this volume became quite infamous : Black Beans

Afternoons I pick a book up
Afternoons I put a book down
Afternoons it occurs to me there is war
Afternoons I forget each and every war
Afternoons I grind coffee
Afternoons I put the ground-up coffee
Together again backwards lovely
Black beans
Afternoons I get dressed and undressed
First put on make-up then I wash myself
Sing am silent

That the regime could allow such writing! or That the regime would allow such writing…. The official responses varied over time.
So much can be read in the poem – are the deferrals of action due to specific political calls to act ? The coffee beans, Cuban perhaps ? The book, was it de rigour reading for citizens of the GDR ?
What was the war ? Vietnam ? Is there an echo here of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, where there is always war, to justify the regime’s conditions of control ?
So much can be read in the poem, and yet the official approach could not see that because only one way of writing was acceptable at the time.

On that war subject, take this earlier poem – but first, some details. In 1957 the GDR set up its own People’s Army. After that the GDR promoted its miltary credentials, especially every GDR celebration. 

When He Has to Go to War

I swing myself into the apple tree
Tie myself fast with my hair
I shall wait for you Golden One
One month or more in the wind

(ibid)

The response is more in line with folk song, folk tale, than socialist-realist. Of course using this particular mode she was in line with the cultural models of ‘the people’. 
And here we get a glimpse of how she was able to handle her balancing act on that rope between self and State, sometimes a slack rope, sometimes a tight rein.

There is a comment later on in the memoir Red Love, The Story of an East German Family, by Max Leo, about how the author’s mother, Annette Leo, another disgruntled believer in the GDR, took to reading an author who had retreated into herself rather than reach outward in challenge. I suspect the reference was to the celebrated GDR writer Elke Erb.
You could see Sarah Kirsch responding similarly, writing from and asserting the individual, rather than collective experience.
That writing is always the hardest to achieve, because it demands a word on word attention, tuning each one out of the mass tone, and into the personal.

The Preface to Anvil’s Winter Music selection of her work writes of her techniques of Gliding enjambments… frequent omission of punctuation… (that) offer resistance to any quick, superficial reading… some of her lines never yield a ‘correct’ reading but remain ambiguous….
This can illustrated in the poem Calling Formula from her 1970s Magic Spells collection

……………………
Swim
Under his eyelid mingle
With my hair
Bind him so he doesn’t know
Is it Monday is it Friday and….…
……………

A lot of these literary techniques are second-nature to us now. At the time they must have been a little outrageous – how rigid even the most revoluntionary systems can be !
The writing used outrageous techniques, and completely avoided socialist realist subject matter. I think we begin to grasp how and why the writing of Sarah Kirsch was a bit of a problem.
Even her name ! She had changed it from Ingrid as too Teutonic, to the more Hebraic Sarah. Anti-Semicism still lingered from the Third Reich, no matter how vehemently the new regime repudiated those times. To go back to the book, above, Red Love even there there was a school episode where Jewish identity was a serious problem.

So how did her writing change after she left East Germany ? Like many, she realised and relished a world without a wall –

from Billet of Thanks

This is a beautiful day. I sit down into it, the eucalyptus|
leaves fly down and up, up for a long time, and when I see|
the tree body naked and white I know that it is a lovely|
day.

An opening up, and not the negotiated desire of before.
Initially she moved to West Berlin, but soon afterwards moved away, to northern Germany, towards the Danish border.
I cannot help but think of this poem as a distant relation of The Coat, by W B Yeats. My connection only, perhaps. If there was a need to walk naked, it seems only a passing one.

She seemed to be seeking out an austerity, a bleakness of landscape, that met her inner landscape. Her later work captures these moods very well, but offers little comfort. Her techniques continue, but are more in service of expression of selfhood, than marking out a difference from the State as before. The new State was identifiably German, but a lot less controlling.
An opening up, and doing away with the mask, to be able stand as oneself.
There is another poem Crow Tree, that tells of a tree whose blackened autumn leaves blow away. Once again the naked tree, only this time a crowd of black crows fly into it, as the leaves had blown away.
How we present ourselves to the world; that is a masking also.

We have the well-endorsed list of dissenting writers, known mostly for their meticulous stands against their regimes. Sarah Kirsch owns a place here also, the quality of her imagination and writing weigh differently but the strength of her dissent is unquestionable.