The history of early twentieth century African-American vocal ensembles is a rich one: the highly successful Mills Brothers inspired a large number of singing groups in the years of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Using only their voices and sometimes some sparse instrumentation, these groups combined jazz, pop, and gospel to produce music that anticipated the rise of R&B, rock ‘n roll, and doo-wop in the 1950s. Such groups as the Spirits of Rhythm, the Golden Gate Quartet, the Four Vagabonds, Cats and the Fiddle, the Ravens, and the Ink Spots were all pioneers and integral parts of musical history.
The Ink Spots gained international fame in the 1930s and 1940s and were widely accepted in both the white and black communities. They had started out in 1934 as a group singing comedy jive songs in the manner of Fats Waller or Cab Calloway, but when their original tenor singer Jerry Daniels left the group, his replacement Bill Kenny would transform them into a seriously melodic vocal harmony group that would sell millions of records. It’s no exaggeration to say that every singer who sang a ballad in the 1950s and early sixties was influenced by the Ink Spots.
If I Didn’t Care was the record that defined their trademark sound. Written by Jack Lawrence, it is the perfect showcase for the Ink Spots’ deliciously warm harmonies. The angel voices of Bill Kenny and bandmates Charlie Fuqua, Deek Watson, and Orville Jones, harmonise together like honey. Check them out here.
The art world didn’t used to be quite sure what to do with an artist who hadn’t come up through the ranks in the conventional manner, by studying at somewhere like the Royal Academy of Arts or one of the Écoles des Beaux-Arts. They certainly didn’t know what to do with Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) who only started painting in his early forties, was completely self-taught, and had previously been earning his living as a tax collector (hence his later nickname Le Douanier). His style, too, was not treated kindly by critics – although it would later be referred to as primitivism or Naïve art, Rousseau’s paintings had a childlike simplicity and frankness about them that were widely disparaged by the highbrows.
Picasso, though, knew a natural born artistic genius when he saw one; when he happened upon one of Rousseau’s paintings being sold on the street as a canvas to be painted over, he immediately sought out and met Rousseau. Later he would host a banquet in Rousseau’s honour which would become famous as a notable social event due to the timely presence of so many artists and literary figures from the time (Guillaume Apollinaire, Juan Gris, Gertrude Stein et al).
Rousseau painted a lot of jungle scenes, even though he never visited a jungle nor even left France. Here’s a gallery of Rousseau’s art that showcases his distinct style, with appealing simple shapes and blocks of colour.
The Sleeping Gypsy (French: La Bohémienne endormie) is probably Rousseau’s most famous painting. Painted in 1897, it is a fantastical depiction of a lion musing over a sleeping woman on a moonlit night. Rousseau’s own description is as good as any:
“A wandering Negress, a mandolin player, lies with her jar beside her (a vase with drinking water), overcome by fatigue in a deep sleep. A lion chances to pass by, picks up her scent yet does not devour her. There is a moonlight effect, very poetic. The scene is set in a completely arid desert. The gypsy is dressed in oriental costume.”
It is a bewitching image; The Sleeping Gypsy is held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is housed right next to Vincent van Gogh’s famous The Starry Night. That’s not a bad pairing!
I don’t often go in for biographies or autobiographies and am usually found reading material by people rather than about people (though I suppose biographies are also by people, but you know what I mean). However, it’s a genre as old as writing itself. In the 1st century CE, Plutarch wrote his Parallel Lives in which he pairs up and writes about famous Greeks and Romans that seem to have an equivalence e.g. the orators Demosthenes (Greek) and Cicero (Roman). In the 3rd century, Diogenes Laërtius was writing his Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers about all the known Greek philosophers from Thales to Epicurus. In the 16th century, Georgio Vasari wrote The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects covering Renaissance artists from Cimabue to Bronzino. Incidentally, reading these three books is a good way to acquire a pretty comprehensive classical education!
What these biographies have in common is that they are essentially sketches; they write potted histories of multiple people. When it comes to full-blown biography about one individual, however, one book stands out as an early landmark of the genre and that is James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), about English writer and literary critic Samuel Johnson. It enjoys a reputation as being one of the greatest biographies ever written, and it is valued as an important source of information not just about Johnson but his times.
Samuel Johnson was a celebrated character in 18th century London, admired for his intellect and pithy one-liners (a bit like Oscar Wilde or Stephen Fry in different ages) and famed for his reputation in literary criticism and lexicography in the form of his Dictionary of the English Language (1755). It was Johnson who famously said “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. And it was Johnson also who provided a memorable response to the new, monist, idealist philosophy of George Berkeley, which conjectured that all that exists – including “matter” — could be reduced to one ontological fundamental, namely “mind”. When asked, whilst out for a walk, what he thought about this idea, Johnson is said to have kicked a stone with a contemptuous “I refute it thus!”.
In 1763, travelling Scottish lawyer James Boswell first met Johnson in the book shop of a friend of Johnson’s and they quickly became friends. In the ensuing years they spent a lot of time together in long conversations whilst on walking holidays in places like the Hebrides. Boswell was a diligent keeper of journals and thoroughly recorded his day-to-day experiences, and it was on this large collection of detailed notes that Boswell would base his works on Johnson’s life. Johnson commented on Boswell’s excessive note-taking: “One would think the man had been hired to spy upon me!”.
Boswell first published his account of their walking holiday The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides in 1786, published after Johnson’s death, and this proved to be a decent trial run of his biographical method for when he took on his Life of Johnson. With the success of the Journal, Boswell started working on the “vast treasure of his conversations at different times” that he recorded in his journals. His goal was to recreate Johnson’s “life in scenes”, and this he did spectacularly well, with the first edition published in 1791.
James Boswell by George WillisonSamuel Johnson by Sir Joshua Reynolds
Another stalwart from my memories of our primary school bookshelf, the brilliant, ground-breaking The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis, published in 1950 as the first in what would become a series of seven, collectively known as The Chronicles of Narnia:
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) Prince Caspian (1951) The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952) The Silver Chair (1953) The Horse and His Boy (1954) The Magician’s Nephew (1955) The Last Battle (1956)
I can picture the covers of some three or four of these in my own collection of books that I had at home, though criminally, I don’t think I actually read any of them other than the TLTWATW (even the acronym is a mouthful). I must have done? Well perhaps, but it was a long time ago…
Still, I definitely read TLTWATW and I remember it as a magical experience. There can’t be many people who don’t know that it involves a portal to the realm of Narnia, a world of magic, strange beasts and talking animals, found by four evacuee children at the back of a wardrobe in their temporary guardian’s country home. They find themselves called upon by the lion Aslan to protect Narnia from the evil White Witch and become embroiled in adventures that go on for years without affecting the real world’s timeline.
The story was prompted by Lewis’s own hosting of three evacuated schoolgirls at his house in Risinghurst near Oxford, in September 1939. The experience prompted him to begin a story, and the rest is history. Writing about it later he wrote:
At first, I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time. Apart from that, I don’t know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once he was there, he pulled the whole story together, and soon he pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him.
A number of years ago I went to an interactive event at a converted church building in Leeds in which all we participants started the journey by walking though a long line of coats and clothes in a “wardrobe” before breaking through to a snowy landscape people by actors playing the various animal characters. Let’s read the excerpt from the book that this experience actually recreated very impressively. The children are exploring their new environment and Lucy has been left behind in one of the rooms, intrigued by a big old wardrobe which she opens and enters…
Looking into the inside, she saw several coats hanging up — mostly long fur coats. There was nothing Lucy liked so much as the smell and feel of fur. She immediately stepped into the wardrobe and got in among the coats and rubbed her face against them, leaving the door open, of course, because she knew that it is very foolish to shut oneself into any wardrobe. Soon she went further in and found that there was a second row of coats hanging up behind the first one. It was almost quite dark in there and she kept her arms stretched out in front of her so as not to bump her face into the back of the wardrobe. She took a step further in — then two or three steps always expecting to feel woodwork against the tips of her fingers. But she could not feel it.
“This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!” thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room for her. Then she noticed that there was something crunching under her feet. “I wonder is that more mothballs?” she thought, stooping down to feel it with her hand. But instead of feeling the hard, smooth wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and powdery and extremely cold. “This is very queer,” she said, and went on a step or two further.
Next moment she found that what was rubbing against her face and hands was no longer soft fur but something hard and rough and even prickly. “Why, it is just like branches of trees!” exclaimed Lucy. And then she saw that there was a light ahead of her; not a few inches away where the back of the wardrobe ought to have been, but a long way off. Something cold and soft was falling on her. A moment later she found that she was standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air.
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, book coverC S Lewis
Easter is round the corner once again so it’s perhaps time for a themed blog, and this week I’m taking a look at the “shaped” poem Easter Wings by 17ᵗʰ century poet and theologian George Herbert. “Shape” poetry, AKA “concrete” poetry or “pattern” poetry, is a form of visual poetry in which the words are arranged into a relevant shape, mimicking the poem’s sense. For example, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll includes a quirky poem featuring a mouse, shaped into the tail of a mouse (and known, punningly, as The Mouse’s Tale):
On the face of it, shape poetry is indeed “quirky” and clearly lends itself to kids’ poetry or to some light-hearted testing of one’s creative mettle. However, the concept dates to way, way back: the Renaissance brought to light several poems from ancient Greece of just such a genre, for example Simmias of Rhodes and his poem Wings (c. 300BC), arranged on the page to display a pair of wings:
We assume that George Herbert (1593–1633) would have been aware of the Simmias poem from the Greek Anthology (a collection of Greek poetry, widely available in scholarly circles). His own attempt in English, Easter Wings, was originally formatted similarly to the above, i.e. written sideways on facing pages, which was the tradition of ancient Greek shape poetry, but now it’s commonly presented horizontally so we can read it properly.
Technically, Herbert has opened the poem with a standard iambic pentameter line (5 “feet” or pairs of syllables, da dum), the second line is in tetrameter (4 feet), the third trimeter (3 feet), the fourth dimeter (you get the idea)…then the lines build back up again to pentameter in the final line of each stanza.
As for the subject of the poem, the first stanza deals with the Fall of Man in the first half (“lost”, “decaying”, “poore”), whilst in the second half the narrator directly asks God to draw him up (on angel’s wings?). The second stanza is about the narrator’s state of sin but also the concept of redemption of humanity through Jesus Christ, the route from alienation to salvation, isolation to communion.
Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store, Though foolishly he lost the same, Decaying more and more, Till he became Most poore: With thee O let me rise As larks, harmoniously, And sing this day thy victories: Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
My tender age in sorrow did beginne And still with sicknesses and shame. Thou didst so punish sinne, That I became Most thinne. With thee Let me combine, And feel thy victorie: For, if I imp my wing on thine, Affliction shall advance the flight in me.
The Night of the Hunter is an American thriller directed in 1955 by Charles Laughton (his first and only directorial feature) and starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters and Lillian Gish. I streamed this from the Internet Archive site recently, and what a movie it is! Mitchum excels as creepy serial killer cum self-styled preacher-man Harry Powell who, whilst doing some bird, catches wind from Death Row convict Ben Harper about a hidden stash of money, somewhere in the family home of Harper’s wife and two young children.
Upon release from the penitentiary, Powell hightails it down to the small village in the Ohio River valley of West Virginia, where he inveigles himself into the community there. He uses his tattooed knuckles LOVE and HATE to tell religious parables and hide the fact that he’s a jailbird and a wrong ‘un. He also proceeds to woo and wed Harper’s widow Willa (Shelley Winters). Whilst Powell has won Willa’s and the town’s trust, who assume him to be a good and pious man, young John Harper, on the other hand, is instinctively suspicious of the newcomer. Nonetheless, under Powell’s probing John accidentally reveals that he and Pearl know where the money is hidden, although he determinedly sticks to his vow given to his father at their final meeting to never reveal the secret.
Powell’s patience runs thin and finally he murders Willa and dumps her body in the river, telling the town that she’s scarpered for a life of sin. With the mask well and truly off, the sinister Powell threatens the children into revealing that the money is hidden inside Pearl’s doll. The kids, however, manage to do a runner with the doll and flee downriver in their father’s small boat, finally finding sanctuary with Rachel Cooper, a tough woman with a heart of gold who looks after stray children but can handle a gun.
Powell eventually tracks them down, but Rachel sees through his deceptions and runs him off her property with a shotgun. Powell returns after dark and an all-night standoff ensues, during which the unflappable Rachel gives Powell a face full of birdshot. She summons the state police, who arrive and arrest Powell for Willa’s murder. John and Pearl spend their first Christmas together with Rachel and her brood of waifs and strays.
The Night of the Hunter premiered on July 26, 1955, in Des Moines, Iowa, but to largely negative reviews. Over the years, however, the film has been positively re-evaluated and is now considered one of the best films ever made. French film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma selected The Night of the Hunter in 2008 as the second-best film of all time, behind Citizen Kane. This modern trailer gives a good sense of the peril
Animation as an art form essentially got underway with the advent of celluloid film in 1888. Several different animation techniques were developed over the ensuing decades including stop-motion with objects, puppets, clay or cut-out figures, and hand-drawn or painted animation, the latter becoming the dominant technique of the 20th century. Today of course, traditional animation has been completely usurped by computer animation, with the trend beginning with 1990’s The Rescuers Down Under, the first film to be made with a computer and no camera. Today’s blog subject, director Brad Bird’s 1999 debut film The Iron Giant, was a hybrid of traditional and digital and was a fittingly fin de siècle marker of that transition to full-on digital-only in the early 2000s.
The film was loosely based on the 1968 science fiction novel The Iron Man by future Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, with screenplay by Tim McCanlies and Brad Bird. The film stars the voices of Jennifer Aniston, Harry Connick Jr, and Christopher McDonald, with Vin Diesel providing the deep metallic grunts of the Iron Giant himself. Set in 1957, slap bang in the middle of the period of Cold War paranoia in the US, the film revolves around a young boy named Hogarth Hughes, who discovers and befriends a giant alien robot who has crash-landed from space and recently arrived in the forest near Hogarth’s house in Rockwell, Maine.
When rumours of the discovery reach the ears of federal agent Kent Mansley (McDonald), a train of events is set in play which will eventually bring the might of the US Army to bear on this misunderstood alien threat. Hogarth, meanwhile, having learnt that the giant is in fact perfectly friendly and means no harm, teams up with beatnik artist Dean McCoppin (Connick Jr), to thwart the authorities’ attempts to find and destroy the giant, whilst simultaneously trying to protect his mother (Aniston) from the truth of his nightly escapades.
The animation in the film is exquisitely done and the voice actors conspire with the celluloid images to create a deeply characterful film. The budding relationship between the boy and the Iron Giant are at times highly moving, whilst the machinations of the sneaky Mansley produce as suitable a villain as any live action drama could evoke. The film was nominated for several awards and since its home video releases and TV syndication has acquired something of a cult following, being widely regarded as a modern animated classic. Not bad for a directorial debut (Bird would later be responsible for family favourites The Incredibles [2004] and Ratatouille [2007]).
In the course of my work, I am occasionally called upon to visit the village of Mentmore in Buckinghamshire, serviced by the nearby railway station of Cheddington. I have boarded and alighted trains here on perhaps a dozen occasions (the latest being just a couple weeks ago) and on not one occasion have I ever met another soul on its platforms. I guess it’s because I travel there off-peak and it’s no doubt totally different at rush-hour when the commuters leave and return to their rural homes, but it puts me in mind of the poem Adlestrop by the poet Edward Thomas (1878–1917), one of the Dymock poets whom we last visited when I wrote about Rupert Brooke’s The Soldierhere.
The poem is based on a railway journey on the Cotswold line Thomas took on 24th June 1914, during which his train briefly stopped at Adlestrop in Gloucestershire (a station long closed down, one of the many victims of the Beeching cuts in the sixties). Thomas recorded the occasion in his notebook, writing that the train, from Paddington to Malvern, had stopped at Adlestrop at 12:15. He recorded his observations of the grass, the wildflowers, the blackbirds and the silence interrupted only by the hiss of steam at the stop. The poem itself was written a few months later. Since then, the poem has become a popular symbolic piece due to its simple references to a peaceful era and location just before the outbreak of the Great War.
Adlestrop Station
Thomas enlisted the following year, and was killed soon after he arrived in France, at the Battle of Arras, in 1917. His poem was published in the New Statesman, just three weeks after his death. One hundred years to the day after the original journey, an “Adlestrop Centenary Special” Cotswold Line train was arranged, carrying 200 passengers from Oxford to Moreton-in-Marsh and stopping at Adlestrop in the place where the station formerly stood. Adlestrop village also held a celebration to mark the centenary, with a public reading of the poem by actor Robert Hardy. The old railway sign can still be seen in the village’s bus-stop.
Here is Thomas’s simple but elegant poem; knowing it was written just before the war that changed everything might quietly break your heart.
Yes. I remember Adlestrop— The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June.
The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. No one left and no one came On the bare platform. What I saw Was Adlestrop—only the name
And willows, willow-herb, and grass, And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, No whit less still and lonely fair Than the high cloudlets in the sky.
And for that minute a blackbird sang Close by, and round him, mistier, Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) is often hailed as Russia’s greatest composer (from a strong field), and his works epitomise the emotional depth for which Russian music is known. You might say he was something of a Russian Beethoven, with the same genius for dramatic intensity and emotional range, and indeed Tchaikovsky deeply respected and acknowledged Beethoven. Although his true love was in fact Mozart, it is Beethoven’s influence that is evident in his compositions, particularly his later symphonies such as his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, with its exploration of melancholia. Today, however, I’m highlighting his remarkable Piano Concerto No. 1 in B♭ minor, Op. 23.
It’s one of those tunes from the world of classical music which you instantly recognise when you hear it even if you don’t necessarily know it from its title. It was composed during the several months leading up to February 1875 and first performed in October of that year, in Boston, by pianist Hans von Bülow. It was to become one of the best known piano concerti of all time and in a nutshell it is a sublime piece of music. Strange then, that it should have been so roundly slated by the man who Tchaikovsky had originally wanted to play it before approaching von Bülow, namely Nikolai Rubinstein.
As the story is related, Tchaikovsky invited Rubinstein to the Moscow Conservatory to demo his composition, just three days after completing it. Full of anticipation and hope that Rubinstein would be blown away and agree to play it, Tchaikovsky sat at the piano and played the first movement. To Tchaikovsky’s chagrin not a single word was spoken and after a period of silence he could stand it no more: “Well?” he said, to which Rubinstein’s tactless and rather brutal response is described in Tchaikovsky’s own words:
“It turned out that my concerto was worthless and unplayable; passages were so fragmented, so clumsy, so badly written that they were beyond rescue; the work itself was bad, vulgar; in places I had stolen from other composers; only two or three pages were worth preserving; the rest must be thrown away or completely rewritten.” Rubinstein went on to say “that if I reworked the concerto according to his demands, then he would do me the honour of playing my thing at his concert. ‘I shall not alter a single note,’ I answered, ‘I shall publish the work exactly as it is!’”.
You can only imagine the indignation Tchaikovsky must have felt at that cutting critique. And that’s why Tchaikovsky approached von Bülow to play it…
Postscript: Rubinstein changed his opinion of the piece and became a big fan (you know what it’s like, you sometimes need to hear an album three or four times before properly appreciating it), and finally even played it, with gusto, in Moscow, St Petersburg and Paris, in 1878.
Let’s hear the opening four minutes as played by the seventeen-year-old prodigy Evgeny Kissin, under the direction of Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Salzburg 1988.
Kate Bush is nothing if not innovative. She burst onto the scene in 1978, aged nineteen, with her debut single Wuthering Heights. Whilst the rest of the charts were populated either by the new generation of punk and new wave or the old generation of disco and soft rock, here was Kate singing theatrically about a Victorian novel and dancing ethereally on Top of the Pops. The nation was strangely hooked and it went to number one (and no doubt Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights experienced a boost in sales at the same time).
Kate had been writing songs for years, having grown up in a music-loving household in Kent, and had recorded a bunch of them on demo tapes. One of these tapes found its way into the hands of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour who immediately recognised the song-writing talent and other-worldly vocals. He encouraged Floyd’s label EMI to sign her up, which they duly did. She was sixteen and still at school so she continued her studies, honed her craft, learned interpretive dance under choreographer Lindsay Kemp, and in the interests of good research read Wuthering Heights (she had written the song before actually reading the book, having caught the back end of a BBC TV adaptation of it). And the rest, as they say, is history — she went on to record nine studio albums all of which reached the UK Top 10, and recently enjoyed something of a renaissance following the use of her song Running up that Hill in the Netflix blockbuster series Stranger Things.
Cloudbusting remains my favourite Kate Bush song. If the record-buying public thought that the subject matter of Wuthering Heights was somewhat quirky, it hadn’t seen nothing yet. The song took inspiration from the 1973 memoirs of Peter Reich (Book of Dreams), written about his close relationship with his father the psychiatrist and inventor Wilhelm Reich, at their farm named “Orgonon”, in Maine. Wilhelm Reich had been experimenting with a cosmic energy which he termed orgone, and had built devices called orgone accumulators which he claimed could cure cancers and promote health. Later he would build a rain-making machine called a cloudbuster and father and son would spend hours on their farm pointing it at the sky and trying to make rain. Like all promoters of fringe ideas (ask Nikola Tesla), Reich eventually fell foul of the authorities, was imprisoned, and had his inventions and ideas suppressed.
Kate’s musical interpretation of the story is outstanding. It is at once mesmeric with its mantra-like backing vocals and hypnotic cello strokes, and a masterclass in story-telling with its setting of the scene from the very first line “I dream of Orgonon”. That line, with that word, had such an intriguing feel to it, long before I discovered its true back story. The video accompanying the single, is genius: a masterstroke casting of Donald Sutherland as the father, and Kate herself with a pixie cut to stand in for the son. The “cloudbuster” itself, designed by the same people who designed the “xenomorph” for Ridley Scott’s Alien, is a wonderful steam-punk invention. After Reich’s arrest, we see Kate/Peter taking over the reins and achieving success with his father’s inventions – I don’t know how true this is, but at least Kate was gratified that the real Peter Reich hailed the video and said it captured the situation and the emotion perfectly. Watch and enjoy here…
Kate Bush
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