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The First Piece Of Music Ever Broadcast

November 3, 2011 5 Comments

There are long periods of time during the workday when I have a mask over my face and earmuffs clamped on my head. It lends itself to a sort of underwater effect.

I have an MP3 player hooked up to some old computer speakers in my workshop. The little harddrive holds a lot of music, but I don’t bother much with it. With all the racket I rarely hear much of it, so the same things can cycle around quite a bit without getting boring.

Sometimes, during a quiet interregnum, the music will synch itself with the slant of the light through the window, and the lull in the fighting, and the effect can be quite profound. Like the shade of a tree on a hot day. Which brings us to Ombra mai fu, from Handel’s opera Xerxes. It’s an aria about the shade of a tree, after all.

Tender and beautiful fronds
of my beloved plane tree,
let Fate smile upon you.
May thunder, lightning, and storms
never bother your dear peace,
nor may you by blowing winds be profaned.
A shade there never was,
of any plant,
dearer and more lovely,
or more sweet.

Ombra mai fu was probably the first piece of music ever broadcast on the radio.

 

On the evening of December 24, 1906 (Christmas Eve), Fessenden used the alternator-transmitter to send out a short program from Brant Rock. It included a phonograph record of Ombra mai fu (Largo) by George Frideric Handel, followed by Fessenden himself playing the song O Holy Night on the violin. Finishing with reading a passage from the Bible: ‘Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men of good will’ (Gospel of Luke 2:14). He petitioned his listeners to write in about the quality of the broadcast as well as their location when they heard it. Surprisingly, his broadcast was heard several hundred miles away, however accompanying the broadcast was a disturbing noise. This noise was due to irregularities in the spark gap transmitter he used. (Wikipedia)

Hmm. A beautiful piece of music, during a time of quiet and reflection, interrupted by a disturbing noise. Handel had me pegged.

Caruso, Two Tin Cans, A String, And You

August 26, 2011 5 Comments

Think of a progression of musical bigshots. Spare me the Biebers and Gagas and Eagles. I’m talking transformative, iconic persons. Perhaps I’m not qualified to offer an opinion on current musical affairs, or they’re so atomized the there’s no overarching person lately. I’ll start back a bit.

There were the Beatles. Before that was Elvis. Before that was Sinatra. Before that was Gershwin. Before that was opera, and the tubby Neapolitan. I think his musical shadow might have been bigger than all that followed.

You have to read about him to get the whole gist of him. Recording the voice was invented around him; it was all very low-fi, and time-constrained, you have to interpolate just how powerful and sweet his voice must have been. I feel like a poor street urchin with my ear pressed up to an opera house door when I listen to recordings of him. A world full of street urchins did, and the rattling of jewelry inside the houses never drowned him out.

Vesuvius erupted near Caruso’s  hometown of Naples, and reporters went to San Francisco to ask Caruso about it. Then San Francisco rattled apart and burned to the ground, and the world asked: Is Caruso OK?

Famous Opera Jokes

July 3, 2011 2 Comments

“I once saw Arteta play Musetta at the Lyceum.”

“Really? Who won?”

Pretty Girls Can Run Their Mouths And Get Away With It

May 29, 2011 2 Comments

The “Flower Duet” from Lakmé, by Clément Philibert Léo Delibes

Under the dense canopy
Where the white jasmine
Blends with the rose
On the flowering bank
Laughing at the morning
Come, let us drift down together
Let us gently glide along
With the enchanting flow
Of the fleeing current
On the rippling surface
With a lazy hand
Let us reach the shore
Where the source sleeps
And the bird sings
Under the dense canopy
Under the white jasmine
Let us drift down together

If it sounds familiar, it should; Hollywood, video games, Madison Avenue, and every fruit stand and conglomerate alike have been raping it for thirty years now.

According to Wikipedia’s list of uses of the melody in pop culture, you listened to it in sorrow as you shoveled Godiva chocolates in your gob with one hand while smearing Ghirardelli chocolate all over the rest of your face with the other. You were bereft; your lover left you when you demanded he stop playing video games like Fallout: New Vegas instead of watching Kirstie Alley waddle around the Dancing With The Stars stage leaving footprints in the hardwood floor, while dead Leo’s old warhorse purred in the background of both. You’d already had a tiff over whether David Usher’s sample of the song or LL Cool J’s sample of the song was superior; then the cad said he liked the cello-based rock band Rasputina’s gloss on the song best, which they called “Mr. Romberg” for some reason, and you knew it was over. What a barbarian.

So he split town on British Airways, kited high into the stratosphere by its dulcet tones, and you went to your Netflix queue and erased True Romance, Private Parts, The American President, The Oh in Ohio, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, Meet the Parents, Superman Returns, Five Corners, Someone to Watch Over Me, The Hunger, Carlito’s Way, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, because you knew they’d use some version of the thing — one that sounded like a chicken pecking it out on a toy piano if they couldn’t afford the rights to a talented live person singing it — and it would remind you of that beast. You tried cable for a while, but CSI: Miami, The Animal Planet, Nip and Tuck, Alias, and pretty much everyone outside R. Lee Ermey had it on a continuous loop — and even Ermey looked like he might go wobbly on you — so you decided to end it all, and took a bottle of pills.

As you drifted off, you knew in your heart they’d play it at your funeral .

Crime Wave

March 3, 2011 4 Comments

I’m a devotee of police blotters.

The Intertunnel loves police blotters. Lots of newspapers and websites grab mugshots from police websites and get a few jollies looking at the ebb and flow of squalid run-ins with the law. It allows some people to easily find other people to look down their nose at, and so feel better about themselves for no reason other than they’re currently at large. Since every celebrity of every sort is arrested more or less weekly (it’s how they got all celebrified in the first place, sometimes), there’s a luxuriant undergrowth of familiar faces standing in front of a concrete block wall holding up a number in a desultory fashion, too. Those are fun, of course, but they can’t compare to small town police blotters.

I publish the Rumford, Maine police blotter at the Rumford Meteor most every week. It’s notable for the lack of notable crimes, mostly, and the achingly small sums involved in everything. There’s not a lot of poetry to the entries here, and pathos is in short supply;

11/26 – 6:57 PM, Ptl. Miller investigated a gas drive off from a local business. Suspect was located and returned to pay for the gas. No charges.

Its lack of CSI Wherever material is not a detraction for me. Regular people bumping along are interesting. And so it was to fertile ground that reader and commenter Dinah broadcast her suggestion to look into the Bozeman, Montana police blotter. It doesn’t disappoint. It’s got a no-nonsense Jack Webb kind of vibe, with just a hint of Fife:

  • At 1:20 a.m. a female was found walking down Seventh Avenue wearing pants and a bra. She said that her boyfriend had taken her shirt and kicked her out of the car.
  • An employee of a Main Street business reported “intoxicated or high” teenagers were approaching store customers. Officers determined the teens were not intoxicated.
  • A mother called for help after her 3-year-old daughter’s thumb got stuck in the top of a Parmesan cheese container. The girl’s thumb had started turning blue.
  • An injured ram was reported on the west side of U.S. Highway 191.
  • Cash register tape that unrolled may have triggered a burglar alarm at a North Seventh Avenue store around 3 a.m.
  • A man was warned around 4 a.m. about his loud singing as he was walking to his vehicle in a parking lot on East Main Street.
  • A man got out of his vehicle on North 19th Avenue to yell at another driver around 3 p.m.
  • A woman reportedly threatened a man on Facebook.
  • A vehicle stopped in the middle of Springhill Road around 9:30 p.m. with bright lights on belonged to a man looking for his cat.
  • A caller captured a weasel near Catron Street around 2:30 p.m. A wildlife agent was contacted.
  • Someone egged a forklift parked near Cedar Wood Circle and Thatch Wood Lane over the weekend.
  • A Montana Rail Link employee asked deputies to keep an eye out for anyone trying to steal grain out of derailed rail cars near Heeb Road until they unload them Wednesday.
  • Three intoxicated males were “flipping the bird” to passing vehicles on Tracy Avenue at 1 a.m.
  • Someone cut the tail off of a man’s horse on Cameron Bridge Road.
  • A 20-year-old female was arrested for stealing sandwiches from a business on 11th Avenue.
  • A group of teenagers hanging around a construction site on West Lamme Street around noon weren’t doing anything; they were just hanging around.

This is not a police blotter. It is a lyric poem. For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn would be just another entry on it.

Banishing A Constant Source Of Annoyance

February 28, 2011 7 Comments
 

I work alone 99 percent of the time.

I am not a solitary man by nature. There is an adjective made from my name that means sociable, after all. But the world does not make the best use of much of anything anymore.

I rarely wear safety glasses while working. They are superfluous most of the time. But the noise; oh, how I’m tired of noise. Everything makes noise. Unpleasant, loud noises. There is a hook next to the saw with big ear muffs on it and I reach for them constantly. I would not willingly insert more noise into the admixture. But I wouldn’t mind some music. That’s not so easy.


A woodworking shop will eat most any electronic device alive. Table radios sturdy and disposable enough to last can’t cadge anything out of the ether worth listening to. I refuse to listen to most radio stations anyway. I ask you (to no one in particular):does anyone really ever have to hear Margaritaville, or Wonderful Tonight, or Old Time Rock n’ Roll, or any one of a million other organized noises that grew tiresome when they were halfway over the first time, ever again? I know I don’t. And to have it mixed in with the truckling of radio hosts and importuning of car salesman every ten minutes pushes the effect over into hurling heavy objects territory.

I can’t pay attention to it, either. If it requires reloading or any other attention, it’s no good. And injecting noise directly into your ears is insane if you’re sitting on a hard plastic seat on a subway. Having an apparatus on your belt with a dangling wire with corks banged into your ears where real work is done is way, way past insane.

There was a blessed interregnum with the last tabletop POS, when I played CDs in it for an hour or so at a time, until the shellac and sawdust in the ether did its slow work on its guts. My wife couldn’t understand how I could leave the same disc in there for a month at a time. I’d press the button and if it worked, I didn’t dare change it, and kept pressing the button to pass a happy hour in peace. Changing the disc might consign you again to the prison of the machine noise alone. I never got tired of the disc, at any rate, because I’d never hear more than five minutes out of five hundred with all the other things drowning it out. Who gets tired of Mozart, anyway?

It died utterly a while back, and I worked alone in the silence and the noise and the cold  for a spell. It got me to thinking, which is never desirable.

I blew forty bucks on a solid state hard drive with a little screen on it. It has not fruit on it. The fruit is for people with more money than sense. I took a cable left over from who knows what and stuck it in the stereo jack where a lunatic plugs in their earbuds, and put the other end into a set of computer speakers of the type you accrete by buying desktops every decade and wondering what you’ll do with another set. They are worthless, and so are precious to me because I don’t have to worry about them.

And I will have my goddamn Mascagni today while I hit my thumb, and that’s that.


Tag: opera

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A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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