He who joins in singing a chorale, or who listens to the mass, the Christmas oratorio, the passion... wants to make his soul stand with both feet in time, in the most real time of all, in the time of the one day of the world of which all individual days of the world are but a part. Music is supposed to escort him there.
--Franz Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, quoted in this interesting piece. (There's some unspoken stuff here as well about the interplay between satisfaction and surprise in the coming of Jesus, the promised Messiah in distinctly unpromising form....) Link via First Thoughts.

IF MY HEART WERE A HOUSE YOU'D BE FROM A BROKEN HOME BY NOW: The Mountain Goats, redux. I'll catch up with myself in the next post. (Really!)


All Hail West Texas: Yes, I know I already talked about this disc. I have a lot of feelings, okay?

This is an album about the American experience as, above all else, transience. Post-office boxes in towns we don't live in anymore. I wonder how much this contributes to our obsession with marriage--cf. Andrew Cherlin on European obsession with birthrates rather than marriage, for example. Home is anywhere you hang your head. Home is anywhere you hang my effigy.

The standard, effective guitar chords often serve in place of rhyme--a way of making simplicity seem more than sincerism. The chords make the songs rhyme in your heart, if you're an American raised on the "three chords and a hope" of rock'n'roll.

"Blues in Dallas" is a 25-cent hymn on a jukebox heard from the bottom of a bottle. "Will I see you there/When that final trumpet blows?/Will I see you there/When that final trumpet blows?/If I don't see you there/I will run/a comb through my hair/and I will wait./I will wait./I will wait."

"And night... night comes to Texas." (last song on this album, quiet, shaky)

Tallahassee: "Moon stuttering in the sky like film stuck in a projector"--this is the exact kind of expressionist metaphor which will always work for me. Art is more real, in our experience of life, than the raw experience itself.

"And I hand you a drink of the lovely little thing/On which our survival depends./People say friends don't destroy one another./What do they know about friends?"

I got really into Elvis Costello because of his lyrics. I don't know if that can happen with the MG (this is how it really happened for me) but maybe if I quote the lyrics enough you can find out for yourself.

"The House that Dripped Blood": the whole first verse is amazing, and that killing harmonica whine at the end just makes it. Dostoevsky had a spider the size of a marriage; this song has a mosquito.

"the cellar door is an open throat"

"dig up the laughing photographs"--wow, this really is a horror movie of a song. I bet this house has laughing windows, too.

And then that IV needle of a harmonica, which carries you all the way into the vein.

I hope I've already made clear what I think of "No Children." It's like getting punched in the face by all the girlfriends you never even got the chance to disappoint. It's what dripped into Loki's face all those years in the cave with Sigyn. It's like if the present and future and subjunctive tense ganged up on the past and beat it up in an alley and stole its lunch money--and then spent the money proving it right.

Oh hey, I seem to have crossed "This Year" with "Old College Try" even though they're basically opposites. Story of my life! "Things will shortly get completely out of hand." Wow, the contrast between the easy chords and bass and synth/organ here vs. the brutal, hope-in-a-hopeless-world lyrics really hit me in a part of my 1980s day-glo heart which will always be badly bruised. Fans of Diamanda Galas's poppier, more fluorescent songs might like this.

"Oceanographer's Choice": Disorienting, bitter, catchy, poppy, self-lacerating. Are we totally sure this isn't an '80s MTV hit with the synth stripped out? ...Seriously, not sure I could love this more unless it somehow incorporated the Reagan-era "it's happy hour in America!" day-glo swizzle-stick aesthetic.

"And night comes to Tallahassee." (not the last song, but ferocious and vengeful)

I SWEAR I'M NOT ALWAYS GROSS AND BITTER. Sometimes I also listen to music?

The Mountain Goats, All Hail West Texas. It's kind of amazing how catchy he already is. I get these songs stuck in my head all the time now. Everybody needs to know "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton" because we've all known those guys (...I hope?) and also I'll say that the one time I really did fly in to DFW they really did pretty much tell me, "Come on in; we haven't slept for weeks. Drink some of this; it'll put color in your cheeks." In general I think patient fans of the Weakerthans would like these guys, but then, if you like the Weakerthans you probably know that already so maybe I should run this recommendation the other way around.

Tallahassee. You know, finding out that John Darnielle is happily married was just like finding out that Philip Roth was a Gentile woman. (...Except for the part where the first thing happened.) "No Children" is one of the best and harshest songs about marriage ever written, and we've had a long time to enter that sweepstakes. There are other good songs on this album, which explores the divorce of a fictional couple, but seriously do you need more than one bullet through the heart?

The Sunset Tree: Apparently the only album which is definitely autobiographical, and it's just as bruised as you might expect. Ranges from the anthemic ("This Year") through the ambiguous ("Up the Wolves") to the randomly- (and perhaps unnecessarily; I like this song less than most people, I think) Dostoevskyan ("Love Love Love").

Next batch of albums in next post, as I am running out of Friday.

WHY WE LISTEN TO SAD MUSIC WHEN WE'RE SAD:

...It's counterintuitive, but Johnson's story suggests that the desolation in Schostakovich's music, resonating with the desolation in their hearts, served to bolster the spirits of the Russian populace at the time. The premise postulated by Johnson and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, who co-hosted the event, is the oft-repeated idea that music, by conferring a narrative structure to emotion, brings emotion closer to thought. "There is something about seeing your own mood reflected that allows you to let go of that feeling," says Johnson.

But it is not so simple. As Tallis, who was standing in for an absent Robert Winston, pointed out at the start of the evening's conversation, there is a complex interplay between the emotion the composer attempts to write into the music, that conveyed by the music, the listener's interpretation, and the listener's mood. This was resoundingly reflected in the results of an experiment carried out on the evening's audience.

more (via the Rattus)

CONTEMPORARY CHRISTIAN MUSIC: In which I ramble about three adaptations of, respectively, "The Little Match Girl"; Revelation; and the Gospel of Luke.

First, a disclaimer which is actually an apology: I know nothing about this kind of music whatsoever. I have no vocabulary for it. I will be throwing out random analogies and metaphors and people who actually know what they're talking about here will probably laugh until they cry. On the other hand, that means that if you are also not well-versed in this kind of music (what is it even called? It comes up on iTunes as "classical" but that seems silly) maybe this post will give a sense of whether you might like these discs!

David Lang, The Little Match Girl Passion (and some other things). The difficulty with adapting this story, I think, is that when you're reading it in the solitude of your skull it's easy for the sublimity of the tale, the fever-dream intensity, to shiver into your consciousness. But music makes it somehow public and touchable in a way which my instinct says might emphasize the sentimentality which is also a real part of the story. I'm still not convinced that Lang works against the sentimentality enough (and there's one very on-the-nose use of bells which I found distracting), but a second listen convinced me that there's more cold rapture in this music than I'd thought at first.

Lang opens very strong, with a haunting chorus of overlapping voices calling, "Come, daughter," chilly and doomy. Then he begins to alternate between clipped, precise storytelling ("It was terribly cold and nearly dark on the last evening of the year") and a sort of penitents' chorus which offers aching soliloquies from the point of view of someone watching, or remembering watching, the little girl's suffering. I still think that some of the girl's visions and stations of the cross could be given a greater edge of hysteria, a greater sense of the music spiraling out of control. But overall this is a really memorable and poignant piece of music. I'd play it for kids who like Andersen as well as adults.

The other, short pieces on this disc (an adaptation of the Song of Songs, a Yiddish folk song, a riff on Genesis, and a sort of paraphrase of Ecclesiastes) didn't move me, but might work better for you. I still felt like there was too much control here, too much deliberate, intellectual, maybe even self-consciously poignant pacing.

Phil Kline, John the Revelator. It's wild to listen to this right after The Little Match Girl Passion, because the rhythm and emotion of the music is so different! We open with a terrific hymn or marching song--I really don't think it's just the "Glory, hallelujah!" chorus which put me in mind of Civil War songs--and from then on we alternate between relatively straightforward adaptations of the Mass in Latin, and deeply shaken, crisis-and-rapture songs in English. I loved "Alone" and "The Unnamable," and also the take on "What Wondrous Love Is This?" which closes the disc. This is a fierce, tough piece of work which offers its broken heart up on a platter.

Krzyzstof Penderecki, St. Luke Passion. This one might be the hardest for me to talk about, in part because the parts which strike me and how they strike me keep changing. (I've listened to it three times in the past two days.) One thing I really love is how it captures so intensely three of the sharply-contrasting moods of an actual Palm Sunday or Holy Week Mass: the matter-of-fact statements of what went down; the scuttling, hissing chatter of the crowd, who can only agree and come together when they're baying for Christ's blood; and the agony and isolation of Christ.

The first time I listened to this, I remember thinking somewhere around maybe "Deus meus" that Penderecki really does convey the hysteria, alienation, the horror of the Passion narrative. "This music sounds the way Carnival of Souls looks," I remember thinking. I haven't had quite that reaction the other two times, but each time I've found something else which worked. The pacing really helps here, as you're taken very naturally from one of the three moods to another, never quite allowed to settle in and get comfortable with any one way of relating to the music and story. And the setting of "Into your hands I commend my spirit" shakes me every time.

...And now, having exhausted the possibilities of the present, I'm listening to the Essential Tallis Scholars, which I cannot recommend highly enough!

KEEP YOUR MUSIC FOR EVENINGS, AND YOUR COFFEE FOR CALLERS: Offer your suggestions in the comments for the music of tomorrow's monks. I'm therein with a theremin, baby.

"LITURGY OF THE OTHER HOURS": In which I rant about the Weakerthans, at Godspy.