The Wizard’s Medal
At last night's gala ceremony, President Obama handed out the Presidential Medal of Freedom to what is inevitably described as a diverse group, though most of the winners run to a predictable type: Toni Morrison, an incompetent and dirty writer of anti-American fictions, Madeline Albright an incompetent and brutally savage statesgirl, John Glenn the showboating flyboy who held a press conference every time he shot down an enemy plane and spent his political career moving as far to the left as he could, John Paul Stevens the weak-minded justice who betrayed the people who put him on the Supreme Court, Pat Summit the queen of girls' basketball, Gordon Hirabayashi--the poster child for the sufferings of those poor interned Japanese who would not give up dual citizenship or renounce the Emperor, a co-founder of the United Farmworkers, and, best of all, Bob Dylan.
The President, in a comic vein, praised Dylan's singing voice. On NPR they played Dylan's funniest song, "Blowin' in the Wind," which contains this line that borders on parody: "How many deaths will it take till they know that too many people have died?" Gosh, I don't know. By now it must add up to trillions, and they're still dying even as I write. I guess if Americans had rolled over and played dead for the Soviets, the USSR would have outlawed death they way it outlawed capital punishment.
Well, who cares? The Presidential Medal of Freedom--always described as the "nation's highest civilian honor"--has nothing to do with the nation and often too little to do with honor. Jack Kennedy established it by a presidential order in 1963 as part of his project to convert the real United States into a Potemkin village Camelot.
The Medal represents nothing more serious than the whims of whatever incumbent is currently disgracing the White House. I have more respect for any soldier, sailor, or marine, who did his duty competently and faithfully, for any hardworking teacher of Latin or math or chemistry, for any mother who has done her best to raise her brood of unruly children. In the unlikely event of an honorable man ever being elected President, I wouldn't take such a medal from his hands in the still less likely event of an offer.
Sometimes there is a good apple in a barrel of rotten apples, and last night a medal was given posthumously to Jan Karski, a Polish officer and resistance agent who gathered information on the Nazi occupation and later testified. Inevitably, Barack Obama blew the moment by insulting the entire Polish nation with a reference to the "Polish death camp." Polish defense minister Radek Sikorski tweeted his friends, "The White House will apologize for this outrageous error.
In the film version of The Wizard of Oz, the bogus wizard presents the Cowardly Lion with a medal which cures him of his cowardice. (In the book, he is given a green liquid to drink, which I take to be 110 proof Green Chartreuse, a far more valuable and authentic stimulus to courage than a meaningless award!) In a country whose subjects long ago surrendered their freedoms, it is then altogether fitting that such a President honors such people such a medal.
Entries(RSS)
Weird Al is quite clever, and his parodies are often better than the songs he is spoofing. (And he sings better than Bob Dylan ever has).
An early Dylan song that still amuses me. Thanks, Mr. Yurick. Just one small correction, though. Dylan sings, "try to be a suc-cess", not "subset". I refer you to the film Don't Look Back, which opens with that song, during which Dylan, not singing, drops in time with the recording, a succession of cards on each of which is printed the line-ending words of the song.
Is early chant, as is so often claimed in textbooks, an outgrowth of Palestinian Jewish music or does it reflect common Greco-Roman traditions? But this question begs another: How different were Greek and Middle Eastern music?
Interesting questions, and ones that beg a thought I hadn't had before. If memory serves me right, a great number of Christian converts in the first century were drawn from the Hellenized Jewish, Judaized Hellenic and Proselyte populations. We know the Hellenophonic Jews had their Septuagint, so this begs the question of whether they had a Greek psalter for rituals and whether this influenced subsequent Christian readings of the Hours. But then this itself may well have been influenced by the Hebrew psalters of old (to the extent that such temple liturgies exited prior to the Hellenization, though I have no idea). Also, Christianity does have a Syriac family of rites in addition to the Latin and Byzantine ones, and this first was more plausibly modeled closely on the old Palestinian Jewish rites (being culturally and linguistically closer).
All this is pure speculation, of course. Fortunately there exist in my neighborhood parishes dedicated to the Latin (Tridentine), Greek (Melkite) *and* Syriac rites. Perhaps I'll attend these latter two for a change this weekend and see what I hear to report back...
"If memory serves me right...All this is pure speculation."
Speculation serves no purpose in such matters, and there can be no memory unless there is first information. We simply don't know the proportion of Jews and Greeks in the Church in, say, the year AD 100. Scholars have tried to extrapolate from what we do know to draw a picture of early congregations that were dominated either by Hellenized or Hebraic Jews and then worked backward to imagine they can find echoes of Aramaic texts, but the best one can say about such work is, "Maybe, maybe not." What might seem like translations from Aramaic might also be the way a Hellenized Jew spoke Greek. I seriously doubt that one could learn anything by sampling a variety of liturgies as they are today.
There is no substitute for the actual very hard work one would have to undertake to begin even to frame these questions.
I reckon it's peach pickin time in heaven.
Re the relationship of Persian to Byzantine music: A fruitful area of study here may be in the Georgian musical tradition. A young friend of mine in Paris, son of a Georgian princess and choir director at one time or another at both Russian and Georgian churches, says that Georgian liturgical music is descended to a great extent from ancient Persian music. He is a very serious person when it comes to his Georgian-ness and would not say this lightly, and therefore there is probably something to this. Anyone interested in taking this on?
An area of study more germane to most of our spiritual and cultural lives is that of the relationship of Byzantine music to Gregorian chant. The reconstructions of medieval Western chant by Ensemble Organum under the direction of Marcel Peres are wonderful listening, as well as a possible spur to greater study in this area to someone really interested.
There are fundamentally two competing schools of thought about Byzantine chant: The theory that held sway in my youth, as least among Western musicologists, was that of Egon Wellesz, a Hungarian, who argued that prior to the Turkish conquest Byzantine music was nearly devoid of chromaticism and extreme melismatic ornamentation, which two features were later introduced by the influence of the Islamic conqueror.
The newer and now more popular school of thought is that melismatic ornamentation and chromaticism were not only found in pre-conquest Byzantine music, but were, as a matter of fact, a feature of Western chant as well. The Ensemble Organum recordings and the work of Peres with Lycourgos Angelopoulos have carried the banner for this theory, which is, after all, more appealing to us than thinking that the Mohammedans virtually re-created our music. One piece of evidence for this theory is the folk music of Corsica, which sounds an awful lot like the folk music of the Balkans. A priest friend of mine attended an Ensemble Organum concert at St. Patrick's in NY a few years ago, and went up to talk to Peres and Angelopoulos afterwards. He discovered that Peres had gone into the wilds of Corsica and recruited several village worthies to become part of Ensemble Organum, after ascertaining that they had learned medieval vocal technique at grandmother's knee.
Why, then, is received Western chant so "smoothed out," so to speak? One theory is simply that Dom Prosper Gueranger, genius and hero that he was, simply did not understand the whole picture when he and the Solesmes brotherhood virtually re-constructed Gregorian chant in the 19th century.
frsteven,
" He discovered that Peres had gone into the wilds of Corsica and recruited several village worthies to become part of Ensemble Organum, after ascertaining that they had learned medieval vocal technique at grandmother's knee."
Much has been lost forever. The Carthusians still have a different chant than the Solemnes congregations which appears to the innocent ear as more austere and simple than the beautiful rich chant of the19th century recovery. One of the greatest gifts Dom Gueranger conserved and passed down for the Church was his commentary on the Liturgical Year and his understanding of its antiquity and purpose in the life of the Church. It is truly a shame when participation at Mass was most needed ( the learning of the various chants and responses at Mass to be handed down at grandmother's knee, as Peres put it) that we confused this type of participation as understood by the Church, for altar girls, feminism, lay readers, extraordinary minsters for every ordinary Sunday and all the rest that today remains so "cool and crass that celebrates itself at Mass."
thanks. then forget the comment (good) after subset, if it's 'success'. yuk, who wants to be that (dylan did) in this milieu. i'm the anti-success. by the way scandle is spelled scandal. i was just testing you ray. i misspelled it because 'scandals' in this milieu are mostly bogus, dude.
Correction: My sentence should have read "...Dom Prosper Gueranger, genius and hero *though* he was..."
frsteven:
I have heard of the connection between Georgian liturgical music and the Persian tradition, but can't really say much about that since I'm only familiar with Persian instrumental music, and then only passingly familiar. It would be an interesting line of enquiry.
It would seem to me that liturgical music would be, like liturgical language, quite conservative and resistant to change. That's why I tend not to believe that Turkish music would influence Byzantine chant.
After hearing some Coptic liturgical chant (online, of course, not in person) I tend toward the notion of an ancient connection between Coptic and Byzantine chant as well as plainchant, but that's only a surmise, partly based on a silly romantic notion of my own that perhaps we can hear something of ancient Egyptian pagan religious music in later liturgical chant, providing us with a musical connection to remote antiquity. More seriously, if the monastic tradition started in Egypt and spread to Europe, then it's a good possibility that Egyptian liturgical music had some influence in both east and west.