Light On Dark Water

52 Guitars: Week 10

When I set out on this series, I didn't think about the quesiton of Lent. I generally either give up music entirely for Lent or cut way back on it, and this year I'm giving up pop music entirely. But it will mess up my plan if I shut this down for six weeks. So I'll continue it, but no more rock guitar  until after Easter, and probably no more jazz. It will be all classical guitar, maybe supplemented with folk or something else of a non-rock nature, as I'm not sure there are enough classical guitarists whose work I know and admire well enough to fill every slot.

So: here's Christopher Parkening with a transcription of the famous opening chorale from Bach's cantata 140:

 

And here's a pretty impressive transcription of the second movement of cantata 29.

 

I had a cd of Parkening doing Vivalid lute and mandolin concertos on guitar, pieces that I've loved for many years, and eventually gave it away because it just didn't seem to have the spark I wanted in that music. But these are excellent.

Ashes

I guess it is my fate every Ash Wednesday to hear that song I detest at Mass (I can't bring myself to call it a hymn). It seems to have become the standard for the occasion.

"The dreams not fully dreamt"? What does that even mean?!?

Attempting to be charitable, I'll say that I think I can see what the writer was trying to say, and there's a valid point in there, about offering our failures and faults to God along with everything else. And there's nothing at all wrong with the last verse. But really, some of the phrases in it have a physically unpleasant effect on me.

Perhaps appropriately, I just burned the piece of cheese toast that was my lunch. Maybe there's some kind lesson about ashes in that: if you didn't like those ashes, try these, Mr. Critic.

A Few Mardi Gras Pictures

I've posted these before, but it's been awhile. I don't have any new ones. We went to a couple of parades this year, but got no really good pictures. Mardi Gras is essentially over for me, though it's only Tuesday afternoon. I do hope to have some really self-indulgent meal this evening--maybe fried chicken. My wife and I are planning to try for the first time to do without meat for the whole of Lent.

She took these two pictures in 2005. 

I really like this one, the clock emblem of one of the "mystic" societies, with the blurred hands capturing the sense of time fleeting. And I note with a little dismay that it was taken nine years ago.

 

From a rainy night in 2009:

Also from 2009, a standard Mardi Gras feature: a booth that sells very unhealthy food like corn dogs, sausages, and funnel cakes. A funnel cake is a sort of mutant doughnut, strands of fried dough covered with powdered sugar: delicious, and I haven't had one for a long time.

 

Happy Mardi Gras, and I hope you have a blessed and spiritually productive Lent. I've about decided to take a vacation day tomorrow, and never mind the fact that people will probably think I'm recuperating from a bender. It really gets Lent off to a bad start for me if Ash Wednesday is just an ordinary hectic work day. What shall I read this year? I think maybe Augustine's Confession, which I've started twice and never finished.

"There are moments when people love crime," Alyosha said pensively.

"Yes, yes! You've spoken my own thought, they love it, they all love it, and love it always, not just at 'moments.' You know, it's as if at some point they all agreed to lie about it, and have been lying about it ever since. They all say they hate what's bad, but secretly they all love it."

--The Brothers Karamazov

52 Guitars: Week 9

The renowned flamenco/jazz guitarist Paco de Lucia died this past week. I don't have much acquaintance with his music, but what I've heard has been pretty impressive. So, in memoriam:

 

I'm always struck by the sheer physical force of flamenco players (not that this is pure flamenco, exactly, but it's rooted in flamenco). Sometimes they just seem to be beating the hell out of their instruments. I used to know a classical guitarist who didn't think highly of flamenco players in classical repertoire, and I was a little puzzled b ythat, as it was all the same to me: nylon-string guitar, Spanish-sounding. I understand now--when he plays classical music, de Lucia does sound a little coarse. But that's almost irrelevant; flamenco seems to be much more about passion than subtlety and finesse. Here's a 17-minute concert clip that makes that point pretty well. It includes a singer, and a dancer, male, who I suspect will raise female pulses. As you can see, there is a 35-year distance between the two performances, but de Lucia's technique seems intact. 

 

Does that singing sound Middle Eastern to you? It's not an accident: flamenco has roots in the region of Spain that was Moorish for hundreds of years. I don't know what he's saying but it's powerful stuff.

RIP.

A little something extra: Paco may be most widely known in this country as one of the members of a rather stunning guitar trio which included John McLaughlin and Al di Meola. Each of those may get his own post in this series, but here is a performance by the trio. I doubt there have been many occasions when so many notes were played on guitars in six minutes and thirty-nine seconds.

 

 

 

The Changing, and Not Changing, Language of Pop Songs

Someone has created a fascinating visual depiction of the changes in the language of pop music since 1960 by graphing the occurrence of various words in the Billboard Top 100 songs from 1960 until the present. It's a slide show, including twenty or so words. Each rectangle represents a song, and darker colors represent greater frequency of the word in question. "Baby," shown below, seems to have remained fairly constant. But I think you'll find some very interesting and significant differences in others; interesting, but mostly not surprising to me. Click here to view the entire sequence.

An Urgent Question

Are noodles pasta?

This arose in connection with an incident related on Facebook in which a British-born wife requested that her American-born husband bring her some noodles, and was displeased when he brought her a species of pasta. It turns out there are some significant variations in usage of the term "noodle." As Wikipedia says: "The material composition or geocultural origin must be specified when discussing noodles."

I'm not entirely sure what the wife had in mind, but I think it was some sort of Asian noodle. If you had asked me, I would have said, as several people in the discussion did, that noodles are a subset of pasta, namely pasta in an elongated cylindrical or tubular form--that is to say, recursively, noodle-shaped pasta. Where I'm from, one might refer, for instance, to "spaghetti noodles" when referring to the yellowish-white part of spaghetti, and "spaghetti sauce" when referring to the red part. And fan- or corkscrew-shaped pasta would not be called noodles.

But then there are flat noodles, too...still, they are noodle-shaped in being elongated.

I think "pasta" is a word of relatively recent introduction to middle-class America. At any rate I don't recall it being used when I was growing up. There was spaghetti and there was macaroni, and each had its characteristic noodle, and I don't recall other varieties of pasta, though at some point--in the '70s, maybe, with the advent of the yuppie--the word became widespread.

I'm interested in what the usage is in other parts of the country and the world. Do you think of noodles and pasta as two different things? If you asked for noodles and got pasta, would you be annoyed?

 

Noodles, and also pasta

Also noodles, but not pasta?

 

Pasta, but not noodles