Music

Franz Gruber’s Silent Night (1818)

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It’s Christmas time and once again, like many of you, my family and I enjoyed a candlelit carol service at our local church. I do like this event each year; it marks the arrival of Christmas-proper and is the time when you can pause from the merry-go-round that is Christmas-in-practice and just enjoy the moment. Carols such as O Come All Ye Faithful and Hark, The Herald Angels Sing are ideal for a packed church with a rousing organ (who doesn’t enjoy blasting out those barnstorming Victorian lines such as “Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb” and “Hail th’incarnate Deity”?). The carol that I want to write about today, on the other hand, is better suited to a far more reserved affair: Silent Night is made for hushed tones and a gentle accompaniment, and for me is the very epitome of the reflective element of the season.

The story goes that the carol was first performed on the evening of Christmas Eve in 1818, in St Nicholas Church, Oberndorf, in present-day Austria. The young Catholic priest at the church, Joseph Mohr, found himself in a bit of a pickle when the church organ became incapacitated just before that evening’s Christmas Mass service (in the manner of boilers breaking down at just this wrong time of year, I suppose). Thinking on his feet, he remembered that he had written a nice poem a few years before called Stille Nacht, and wondered if local schoolmaster and organist Franz Gruber might set its six stanzas to music for guitar.

Gruber readily agreed to step into the breach and wrote a melody there and then – and that night, the two men sang Stille Nacht for the first time at the church’s Christmas Mass, with Mohr playing guitar and the choir repeating the last two lines of each verse. According to Gruber, the organ builder who serviced the instrument at the Oberndorf church, was so enamoured of the song that he took the composition home with him to the Zillertal valley in the Tyrol where he shared it with musical friends. From there, two travelling families of folk singers, the Strassers and the Rainers, included the tune in their shows, and its popularity spread all over Europe.

Rainer family

It’s a very moving and humbling song; as a testament to its global popularity, it was sung by troops during the famous Christmas truce of World War I, perhaps because it was the one tune that was familiar to all of them. How poignant the words must have seemed at that particular moment!

German lyrics English lyrics
Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Alles schläft; einsam wacht
Nur das traute hochheilige Paar.
Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar,
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh!
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh!Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Hirten erst kundgemacht
Durch der Engel Halleluja,
Tönt es laut von fern und nah:
Christ, der Retter ist da!
Christ, der Retter ist da!Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Gottes Sohn, o wie lacht
Lieb’ aus deinem göttlichen Mund,
Da uns schlägt die rettende Stund’.
Christ, in deiner Geburt!
Christ, in deiner Geburt!		 Silent night! Holy night!
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon virgin mother and child!
Holy infant, so tender and mild,
Sleep in heavenly peace!
Sleep in heavenly peace!Silent night! Holy night!
Shepherds quake at the sight!
Glories stream from heaven afar,
Heavenly hosts sing Alleluia!
Christ the Saviour is born!
Christ the Saviour is born!Silent night! Holy night!
Son of God, love’s pure light
Radiant beams from thy holy face
With the dawn of redeeming grace,
Jesus, Lord, at thy birth!
Jesus, Lord, at thy birth!

Here is a rendition by the Spanish sopranos Montserrat Caballé and her daughter Montserrat Martí. Merry Christmas!

Franz Gruber
Music

Dire Straits’ Sultans Of Swing (1978)

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As well as writing about art and culture, your blogger has also been known to wield a mean guitar (by “mean”, I mean “average”) and, although fame failed to beckon after the vanity-funded release of the damn fine album Sarabanda by The Mavis Trains in 1999, I still know my approximate way around a fretboard and continue to play from time to time in the comfort of my home. Recently, for a bit of fun, I videoed myself performing an acoustic version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, to mildly amuse some selected friends. As a result, I was challenged by the son of one of those friends to have a go at that Dire Straits’ classic, Sultans Of Swing.

I suspect, given Mark Knopfler’s obvious technical prowess, that the challenge was delivered with something of an internal chuckle and the thought “good luck with that!”. And so, the ensuing weeks have seen me watching online tutorials, scrutinising line after line of tablature, and furiously practicing with a view to bamboozling my imagined detractors’ assumption of failure. Curse them, and curse Mark Knopfler’s super-fast dexterity and total command of his instrument!

In all seriousness though, Hugo (for it was he), Sultans Of Swing is a great shout; it’s a tremendous song. It was inspired apparently by a real-life encounter with a jazz band in an almost empty pub in Deptford on a rainy night in 1977. Amused by the juxtaposition of the band’s nondescript and shabby appearance (I’m imagining Chas and Dave types) with their grandiose name (“we are the Sultans of Swing!”), Knopfler began to pen what would become his band’s debut single in the following year.

Knopfler wrote the song on a National Steel guitar (a special kind of resonator guitar used by the Bluesmen of old before the days of electronic amplification) but it wasn’t until he played it on a Stratocaster that the song took on the vibrancy with which we associate with it today: “It just came alive as soon as I played it on that ’61 Strat … the new chord changes just presented themselves and fell into place”.  It certainly came alive: let’s hear it again in all its glory, below.

Dire Straits
Art

Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding Feast At Cana (1563)

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Great art comes in many shapes and sizes, from portrait miniatures right up to monumental canvases depicting epic scenes with casts of thousands. Today we’re going to look at an example of the latter, one which hangs in the Louvre and deserves to have the same-sized crowd of admirers that perpetually gather around the Mona Lisa there (and perhaps it does usually, but I do have a memory of being able to admire it unmolested by other people and able to take in its considerable features). It’s Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cana (Nozze di Cana, 1562–1563), depicting the biblical story of the Wedding at Cana, in which Jesus miraculously converts water into wine, thus justifying his invitation several times over.

It’s a whopping 6.77 m × 9.94 m and indeed as such it’s the largest painting in the Louvre. Veronese executed his painting slap-bang in the middle of the period in art known as the Mannerist age (c.1520-c.1600), in which there was a tendency of artists to take the ideals of the High Renaissance (1490-1527) – proportion, balance, ideal beauty – and exaggerate them such that arrangements of human figures have an unnatural rather than a realistic feel to them. It’s as if artists felt that everything that could be achieved had already been achieved by the likes of Da Vinci, Raphael and Michelangelo, and they needed a different approach.

The canvas was originally hung in the San Georgio Monastery in Venice, until Napoleon’s soldiers nicked it as war booty in 1797. It depicts a crowded banquet scene in the sumptuous style characteristic of 16th century Venetian society but framed in the Greco-Roman architectural style of classical antiquity. There are 130 human figures dressed fashionably in Occidental and Oriental costume alla Turca, and there are indications that we are post-feast, with guests sated and awaiting the wine service.

In the foreground are musicians playing stringed instruments of the late Renaissance, with legend having it that the musician in the white tunic is a depiction of Veronese himself and the other musicians modelled on fellow artists Jacopo Bassano, Tintoretto and Titian. Behind the musicians are seated Jesus of Nazareth, the Virgin Mary, and several apostles. Amongst the wedding guests are depicted many historical personages from Veronese’s day, such as Mary I of England, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and Suleiman the Magnificent. There are so many quirky elements to discover– a little dog on the table here, a lady picking her teeth there, a dwarf holding a bright green parrot – that to do so could take up some considerable time.

Here are some details (click on them to enlarge), with the whole masterpiece in its entirety below.

 

Art

James Cox’s Silver Swan Automaton (1774)

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Visitors to the Bowes Museum in the town of Barnard Castle in County Durham are regularly blown away by the treasures housed in this provincial town, miles away from the major cities where art collections of this quality may be expected. The building alone is worth the visit; it is elaborately modelled in the style of the French Second Empire, purpose-built to house the art collection of John Bowes, and opened to the public in 1892.

Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle

The collection contains paintings by El Greco, Goya, Canaletto, Fragonard and Boucher, as well as items of decorative art, ceramics, textiles, tapestries, clocks and costumes. The pièce de résistance, however, is today’s subject, the Silver Swan automaton, created by London jeweller James Cox and the inventor John Joseph Merlin.

The Silver Swan was first recorded in 1774 as a crowd puller at the famous Cox’s Museum of James Cox, an entrepreneur as well as a talented jeweller. The exquisitely crafted swan has an internal clockwork-driven mechanism with 2000 moving parts (designed by Merlin), and at an appointed time each day at Bowes Museum, the automaton is cranked up and goes through its 32-second performance.

The swan sits in a stream made of glass rods and surrounded by silver leaves, and small silver fish can be seen “swimming” in the stream. When the clockwork is wound, the music box plays and the glass rods rotate giving the illusion of flowing water. The swan turns its head from side to side, preens itself, and after a few moments bends down to catch and eat a fish. The swan’s head then returns to the upright position and the performance is over.

The Silver Swan was exhibited at the 1867 Paris International Exhibition, and it was here that John Bowes and his wife saw it, fell in love with it, and in 1872 had the opportunity to purchase it (for £200, or about £20,000 in today’s money, still an absolute steal). The American novelist Mark Twain also saw the Silver Swan at the Paris exhibition in 1867 and described it in his book The Innocents Abroad:

I watched the Silver Swan, which had a living grace about his movement and a living intelligence in his eyes – watched him swimming about as comfortably and unconcernedly as it he had been born in a morass instead of a jeweller’s shop – watched him seize a silver fish from under the water and hold up his head and go through the customary and elaborate motions of swallowing it…

If this inspires you to see the swan for yourself, leave it a few months: it is currently being restored but is expected to return to its public next year.

Literature

Washington Irving’s The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow (1820)

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Well, Halloween is coming round again so I thought it timely to write about a compilation of creepy tales that I have recently finished reading by the 19th century American short-story writer Washington Irving (1783–1859). If you are unfamiliar with the author, you may be more familiar with the titles of two of his more famous stories: Rip Van Winkle (1819) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820). He was one of the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and he was admired by the likes of Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, Mary Shelley and Walter Scott.

Irving had more strings to his bow than just short story writing: he was a diplomat, serving as American ambassador to Spain in the 1840s, and a historian, responsible for several histories of 15th-century Spain. This no doubt explains why several of Irving’s stories are set in and around Granada and involve ghostly encounters in places like the Alhambra Palace with long-gone Moors from before the Reconquista. Many other stories, on the other hand, are set deep inside another area close to Irving’s heart, rural New York State including the Catskill Mountains (where Rip Van Winkle is set) and the bucolic environs of modern-day Tarrytown on the Hudson river (where The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is set and where, in fact, Irving would end his days).

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow story revolves around local schoolmaster Ichabod Crane and his competition with town alpha-male “Brom Bones” for the hand of beautiful heiress Katrina van Tassel. The supernatural element to the story, however, is provided by local legend which has it that a Hessian soldier who was decapitated by a cannonball in battle still roams the area as a Headless Horseman. Irving was by no means the first to invoke the motif of the headless horseman – they have appeared in numerous stories from Gaelic, Scandinavian and German folklore, for example – but Irving’s is the one that has resonated down the ages, right down to Tim Burton’s (somewhat liberty-taking) movie of 1999, Sleepy Hollow.

Ichabod’s encounter with the headless horseman happens after his rejection by Katrina at the van Tassel household and he is returning home, crestfallen, on a borrowed horse, Gunpowder. Passing though a menacing swamp, he sees a cloaked rider and is horrified to see that the rider’s head was not on his shoulders but in his saddle. A frenzied race ensues as Ichabod rides for his life, desperately goading Gunpowder down the Hollow; as they cross a bridge, Ichabod turns back in terror to see the headless rider rear his horse and hurl his severed head directly at him: the missile strikes Ichabod and sends him tumbling headlong into the dust. The following morning, Gunpowder is found chomping at the grass, with the only sign of Ichabod, who is never seen again, being his discarded hat alongside a mysterious shattered pumpkin…

Washington Irving

Art

George Stubbs’ Cheetah And Stag With Two Indians (1765)

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If you happen to be in Manchester with a spare hour or two, do call into its art gallery on Mosley Street where you’ll find a host of interesting paintings, not least of which is Cheetah and Stag with Two Indians by George Stubbs. Stubbs was an English artist, born in Liverpool in 1724 and who moved to York in 1744 to pursue his passion for human anatomy, studying under the surgeon Charles Atkinson at York County Hospital. He was also a natural and entirely self-taught artist, and worked as a portrait painter in York for ten more years, but he would become famous later not for painting human sitters but animal ones, particularly horses (of which his best-known, Whistlejacket, is at the National Gallery in London).

Whistlejacket

By 1764, Stubbs had established a reputation for his anatomically accurate animal paintings, and attracted the attention of the royal court, who had commissioned him, the year before, to paint Queen Charlotte’s South African zebra. He was, then, the obvious choice when a certain outgoing Governor General of Madras, Sir George Pigot, arrived back in London with a menagerie of “wild beasts and curiosities” as gifts for King George III, and was looking for an artist to paint a portrait of the most exotic of those gifts, a magnificent cheetah.

Easily tamed and trained, cheetahs had been used as hunting animals by the Mogul Emperors for hundreds of years. In that spirit, the King’s uncle, the Duke of Cumberland, was eager to put the King’s cheetah through its paces and so arranged a demonstration in Windsor Great Park, where George Stubbs was present to capture the occasion on canvas.

A stag was duly placed in an enclosure of the royal paddock while the cheetah was prepared by Pigot’s Indian servants. First, they ‘hoodwinked’ the animal by tying a red blindfold over its face, whilst one of the servants held it by a restraining sash around the hindquarters. A servant then pulled back the hood back to allow the cheetah a first sight of its quarry, whilst the other one gestured towards the stag, and the predator was unleashed. What happened next was not quite what was intended: according to the St James’s Chronicle the stag staunchly defended itself and ended up chasing the cheetah off!

The painting has been praised for its sincere rendering and lack of European condescension: in an age when foreign visitors were pictured at best as colourful exotics, at worst as sinister or ridiculous caricatures, Stubbs endowed the servants with a grace and authenticity equal to the magnificent creature they were caring for.

Postscript Cheetahs are no longer to be found wild in the Indian sub-continent: the last three individuals were reportedly shot in 1947 by the Maharajah of Surguja.

Cheetah and Stag with Two Indians
George Stubbs, self-portrait
Film, TV, and Theatre

The Two Ronnies’ Mastermind Sketch (1980)

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Like Morecambe and Wise before them, the comedy partnership of Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett as the Two Ronnies was one made in heaven. Two strikingly affable guys with naturally funny bones, remarkable chemistry, and an obvious mutual deep friendship, the Two Ronnies’ legacy has happily been besmirched by neither time nor scandal. Their TV show was a hugely popular feature of Saturday night entertainment from 1971 to 1987 and everyone growing up during this period will remember their shows with great fondness, and perhaps conjure a mental picture of the Ronnies as newsreaders, reading spoof news items and ending each show with:

Corbett: That’s all we’ve got time for, so it’s “Goodnight” from me.

Barker: And it’s “Goodnight” from him.

Both: Goodnight!

The Ronnies had met each other back in 1963 and first appeared on television together in 1966 in The Frost Report with David Frost and John Cleese. However, their big break occurred as a result of an eleven-minute technical hitch at a BAFTA awards ceremony at the London Palladium in 1970, in which they filled in, unprepared and unscripted, with such aplomb that two audience members, Bill Cotton and Sir Paul Fox (the Head of Light Entertainment and the Controller of BBC1 respectively), offered them a show on the BBC!

The Two Ronnies show was filled with sketches, either standalone or featuring recurring characters, and often involving clever word-play (their Four Candles sketch being a case in point). Many of the jokes revolved around Corbett’s lack of height, with the self-deprecatory Ronnie C delivering many of them himself:

Barker: This next part does suit Ronnie C. right down to the ground.

Corbett: Mind you, that’s not far is it?”

The Ronnies also had their own solo section: Ronnie B usually appearing as the head of some ridiculously-named organisation, and Ronnie C delivering a discursive monologue to camera from his famous armchair. Each series also had an ongoing comic serial featuring private detectives Charley Farley and Piggy Malone (remember The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Old London Town?), giving ample scope to guests such as Diana Dors and Kate O’Mara to ham it up.

My favourite sketch though is this classic from 1980, the hilarious Mastermind sketch, which you can enjoy below and then perhaps go on to read the transcript of the revised, expanded (and in some places even corrected) version which was performed as part of their 1983 London Palladium residency.

Transcript:

MAGNUS: And so to our final contender. Your name, please?

SMITHERS: Good evening.

MAGNUS: Thank you. In the first heat your chosen subject was Answering Questions Before They Were Asked. This time you have chosen to Answer the Question Before Last each time. Is that correct?

SMITHERS: Charlie Smithers.

MAGNUS: And your time starts now. What is palaeontology?

SMITHERS: Yes, absolutely correct.

MAGNUS: Correct. What is the name of the directory that lists members of the peerage?

SMITHERS: A study of old fossils.

MAGNUS: Correct. Who are David Owen and Sir Geoffrey Howe?

SMITHERS: Burke’s.

MAGNUS: Correct. What’s the difference between a donkey and an ass?

SMITHERS: One’s a Social Democrat, the other’s a member of the Cabinet.

MAGNUS: Correct. Complete the quotation, “To be or not to be…”

SMITHERS: They’re both the same.

MAGNUS: Correct. What is Bernard Manning famous for?

SMITHERS: That is the question.

MAGNUS: Correct. Who is the present Archbishop of Canterbury?

SMITHERS: He’s a fat man who tells blue jokes.

MAGNUS: Correct. What do people kneel on in church?

SMITHERS: The Most Reverend Robert Runcie.

MAGNUS: Correct. What do tarantulas prey on?

SMITHERS: Hassocks.

MAGNUS: Correct. What would you use a ripcord to pull open?

SMITHERS: Large flies.

MAGNUS: Correct. What did Marilyn Monroe always claim to wear in bed?

SMITHERS: A parachute.

MAGNUS: Correct. What was the next new TV station to go on the air after Channel Four?

SMITHERS: Chanel Number Five.

MAGNUS: Correct. What do we normally associate with Bedlam?

SMITHERS: Breakfast television.

MAGNUS: Correct. What are jockstraps?

SMITHERS: Nutcases.

MAGNUS: Correct. What would a jockey use a stirrup for?

SMITHERS: An athletic support.

MAGNUS: Correct. Arthur Scargill is well known for what?

SMITHERS: He puts his foot in it.

MAGNUS: Correct. Who was the famous clown who made millions laugh with his funny hair?

SMITHERS: The leader of the mineworkers’ union.

MAGNUS: Correct. What would a decorator use methylene chlorides to make?

SMITHERS: Coco.

MAGNUS: Correct. What did Henri Toulouse-Lautrec do?

SMITHERS: Paint strippers.

MAGNUS: Correct. What is Dean Martin famous for?

SMITHERS: Is he an artist?

MAGNUS: Yes – what kind of artist?

SMITHERS: Erm… pass.

MAGNUS: Yes, that’s near enough. What make of vehicle is the standard London bus?

SMITHERS: A Singer.

MAGNUS: Correct. In 1892, Brandon Thomas wrote a famous long-running English farce – what is it?

SMITHERS: British Leyland.

MAGNUS: Correct. Complete the following quotation about Shirley Williams: “Her heart may be in the right place but her…”

SMITHERS: “Charley’s Aunt”.

MAGNUS: Correct, and you have scored 22 and no passes!

The Two Ronnies
Poetry

Alexander Pope’s An Essay On Criticism (1711)

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When it comes to literary “wits”, two names are often bandied about, namely Samuel Johnson and Oscar Wilde, but honourable mention should be reserved for a veritable club of wits that thrived in early 18th century London. Founded in 1714, The Scriblerus Club was an informal association of writers comprising prominent figures of the English literary scene such as the satirists Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope and John Gay. One of the club’s purposes was to ridicule pretentious writing of the era which they did through the persona of a fictitious literary hack, Martinus Scriblerus. They were the Private Eye of their time.

Swift would become famous for his 1726 prose satire Gulliver’s Travels; John Gay for The Beggar’s Opera in 1728; and Alexander Pope for a series of erudite mock-heroic narrative poetry including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An Essay on Criticism. Despite its dry title, the latter was indeed poetry, one of Pope’s first major poems, in fact, and one which had already been published prior to the coming together of the Scriblerati. It is the source of the famous quotations “To err is human; to forgive, divine“, “A little learning is a dang’rous thing“, and “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread“, which is a pretty impressive set of additions to the lexicon for just one poem.

An Essay on Criticism was composed in heroic couplets (pairs of rhyming lines of iambic pentameter) and written in the manner of the Roman satirist Horace (65–8 BCE), known for his playful criticism of the many and varied social vices of Roman society through his light-hearted odes. Essentially, Pope’s poem is a Horatian-style verse essay offering advice about the chief literary ideals of his age and critiquing writers and critics who failed to attain his (evidently pretty high) standards.

Pope’s opening couplets contend that bad criticism is even worse than bad writing, thus signalling that even critics should be on their guard, not just pure writers. Dare I say, it has an element of contemporary “rap battles” or “roasts” with its gentle ribbing of inferior writers; it’s not too hard to imagine a modern-day rendering of these lines, perhaps with a mike-dropping flourish at the end:

‘Tis hard to say, if greater Want of Skill
Appear in Writing or in Judging ill;
But, of the two, less dang’rous is th’ Offence,
To tire our Patience, than mis-lead our Sense:
Some few in that, but Numbers err in this,
Ten Censure wrong for one who Writes amiss;
A Fool might once himself alone expose,
Now One in Verse makes many more in Prose.

Pope points out common faults in poetry such as settling for easy and clichéd rhymes:

While they ring round the same unvary’d Chimes,
With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.
Where-e’er you find the cooling Western Breeze,
In the next Line, it whispers thro’ the Trees;
If Crystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep,
The Reader’s threaten’d (not in vain) with Sleep.

The couplets are impeccably and relentlessly delivered, 372 in all, each rapped out in that steady da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum iambic pentameter. Pope only breaks out of iambic pentameter once, and that’s deliberate:

A needless Alexandrine ends the song,
That, like a wounded snake, drags its slow length along

The second line of this couplet is itself an Alexandrine, which is iambic hexameter, a form that Pope evidently regarded as laboured and inelegant with that extra da-dum and which this line demonstrates (geddit?). The whole piece is a masterclass in poetry, and all written when Pope was just twenty-two, so take that, pretentious and turgid writers of the 1700s!

Alexander Pope
Music

Sam & Dave’s Soul Man (1967)

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In the sixties, just as Berry Gordy up in Detroit was driving the Motown sound, down in Memphis the most influential creator and promoter of that crossover of blues/soul/pop music known as the Memphis sound was Stax Records, founded in 1957 by Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton (Stewart/Axton = Stax). Unprecedented in that time of racial tension and strife in the South, Stax’s staff and artists were ethnically integrated, including their legendary house band Booker T & the MGs, who played on hundreds of recordings by artists including Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and Bill Withers.

Booker T & the MGs c. 1967 (L–R): Donald “Duck” Dunn, Booker T. Jones (seated), Steve Cropper, Al Jackson Jr.

Another successful Stax act was Sam & Dave, made up of harmoniously-compatible soul singers Samuel Moore and David Prater, and today let’s enjoy their 1967 recording, Soul Man, written by Isaac Hayes and David Porter. Hayes had found the inspiration for the song in the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement. In July 1967 he had watched a television newscast about the aftermath of the 12th Street riot in Detroit, Michigan, and noted that black residents had daubed the word “soul” onto their buildings in the hope that the rioters would pass them by – analogous to the biblical story of the Passover, it was their way of saying “Please don’t wreck my building, I’m one of you” (so to speak). The idea morphed in Hayes’ mind into an expression of pride and defiance: “I’m a soul man!”.

The MGs were drafted in to record the song, with the help of horns from that other reliable Stax house band, the Mar-Keys, and the result was an instant smash that would enter the Grammy Hall of Fame. Sam and Dave take it in turns to sing the verses, joining in together for the choruses, and complementing each other seamlessly. One of Steve Cropper’s guitar licks is introduced by the exclamation “Play it, Steve”, a nuance that was repeated some years later when Soul Man was included as one of the soul classics paid tribute to by the makers of 1980’s The Blues Brothers movie (in which Cropper makes an appearance).

Here’s a TV appearance by the duo singing Soul Man (sans Cropper and thus sans the “Play it Steve” snippet but hey…) to an audience that doesn’t quite yet know how to move to the rhythm!

Sam and Dave

 

Art

Wassily Kandinsky’s Yellow-Red-Blue (1925)

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My appreciation of art spans many centuries. I’ve marvelled at the Greco-Romano art of the classical world; contemplated frescoes adorning Byzantine monasteries and churches in Turkey, Armenia and Cyprus; spent hours in galleries musing over paintings from the Medieval and Renaissance periods, through the eras of Baroque, Neoclassicism and Romanticism to late nineteenth-century Impressionism and on to…well to be honest, when we hit the twentieth century, my enthusiasm starts to wane. Sure, Art Deco was a bona fide, aesthetically pleasing and innovative art movement, and Cubism had its place, but when I start to consider Surrealism, Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism, I’m less impressed.

Sure, sure: it’s eminently possible to sit and enjoy a monumental and vibrant Jackson Pollock canvas in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art – and I have done – and there will always be exceptional and intriguing art to be found throughout the twentieth century. But my contention is that overall these tend to be outliers, and that in amongst the gems there is a broad seam of distinctly uncaptivating art. You can enjoy a Mark Rothko but can you really be captivated by it? I can’t. And don’t get me started on the truly modern “art” of the last four decades, the likes of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, the Chapman Brothers, Martin Creed et al…please!

Having said that, I’m going to give a free pass to one of the head honchos of Abstract Expressionism, the Russian painter and art theorist Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944). With Kandinsky I can embrace the new century vibe and be inspired by all that art theory behind colour and form. Kandinsky wrote voluminously about art theory: his writing in The Blue Rider Almanac and the 1910 treatise On the Spiritual in Art were bold affirmations that all forms of art can reach a level of spirituality. He founded the short-lived but influential Blue Rider group (Der Blaue Reiter) with like-minded artists such as August Macke, Franz Marc, and Albert Bloch, who experimented boldly with colour, lines and form, and gave priority to spontaneity and improvisation.

Kandinsky’s paintings are expressive explosions of colours, lines and shapes that have an extraordinary force and musical quality about them. Kandinsky recognised that there were important connections between music and abstract art: music is abstract by nature and does not try to represent the exterior world but instead expresses the immediate inner feelings of the soul. That is why Kandinsky referred to his works as “compositions”. I get it. I seem to remember having this composition – 1925’s Yellow-Red-Blue (Gelb-Rot-Blau) – on my kitchen wall in the nineties, and, to extend the musical metaphor, I find it rather jazzy!

Kandinsky, Yellow-Red-Blue
Wassily Kandinsky

Commentaries on excellence in art, music, film, and literature