Is Candide Really Candid?

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This is one of those posts in which I could go on and on and on. I could talk about the original novel Candide by the 18th-century French satirist Voltaire, or the character of Candide in the novel, or the musical in its many iterations overseen by Leonard Bernstein, from which our selection is taken. I’ll try to hit each of these areas just a little.

So, to answer my rather silly question in relation to the above: No. Candide is not candid, but Candide is. Little grammatical joke there.

Voltaire’s novel is not in the least candid; that is, it is not naïve, gullible, sincere, or innocent. We use the word today in a slightly different sense; if you say to someone, “I’m going to be candid with you,” you usually mean “I’m going to say something tactless to you.” But you can see how this idea derives from the original definition. If you’re very frank and open yourself you’ll tend to be that way with other people. The novel itself, however, is biting, bitter and sarcastic, full of truly awful events. Even for modern readers, steeped in horror movies and violent video games, it doesn’t make for pleasant reading. (I personally could barely get through the synopsis on Wikipedia.)

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Three Lovely but Bittersweet Autumn-Themed Songs

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Image by Pepper Mint from Pixabay

Ah, autumn! On the one hand it’s the start of crisp, invigorating fall weather and the new school year; on the other it’s the end of summer and the inevitable slide towards winter. I’ve always loved fall, but as a gardener I also mourn the end of the growing season, trying to comfort myself with the refrain, “Next year!”

Three pieces of film/stage music capture this two-sided aspect of autumn: “The Summer Knows” from Summer of ’42 (1971), “Les Feuilles Mortes”/”The Autumn Leaves” from the post-WWII French film Les Portes de la Nuit (The Gates of the Night), and “September Song,” originally written for the 1936 Broadway musical Knickerbocker Holiday and later used in the 1950 film September Affair.

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What three strands produced our selection “Friendship” by K. Lee Scott?

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Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

Ecclesiastes 4:12 says, “A threefold cord is not quickly broken.” Certainly there are at least three cords, or strands, of friendship that have characterized the relationship of composer K. Lee Scott with the Cherry Creek Chorale and especially with one of its members, Ron Lester.

Ron has been a member of the chorale for over 15 years, first joining us because he was looking for variety and fun in the music being performed as well as a certain amount of flexibility in rehearsal attendance due to his work schedule. (I wonder what other chorales he looked at! Our rehearsal schedule is pretty demanding, to my mind at least.) He ended up serving on the board in various capacities and feeling such a part of the group that when he and his wife Ann started estate planning, he says, “We thought it would be a lot more fun to give a gift to the Chorale now and be a part of that gift.”

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Blue Bird Thoughts

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Photo credit: Jim Simons

I’ve written about bluebirds before, when I asked why Uncle Remus had a bluebird on his shoulder in the song “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” and I revisited that image when I talked about “Over the Rainbow.” Now I want to re-revisit the topic in a short post about the short piece “The Blue Bird” by Charles V. Stanford with lyrics by Mary Coleridge. I probably can’t add anything to the musical analysis given below by a professional, so I’ll confine myself to some info on the author of the text and also about the composer.

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Who’s Sylvie, and Why Is She Carrying Water?

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Slaves working in a cotton field. From Tupelo by John H. Aughey.
Slaves working in a cotton field. From Tupelo by John H. Aughey.

Well, Sylvie, or Silvy, or Silvie, may have been a real person, a slave woman on a plantation being implored by someone in the fields to bring him a drink. Or she may have been the aunt of the man who popularized the song. Let’s start with him, the great black folk and blues singer Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, who performed throughout the first half of the 20th century, making recordings, holding concerts, and hosting his own radio program for a brief time. He came to the attention of the father/son team of John and Alan Lomax, who traveled the South during the 1930’s recording folk music on “portable aluminum discs” for the Library of Congress. He also spent a fair amount of time in prison for various offenses, including a stabbing, and his nickname was apparently assigned to him there:

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Does the song “Don’t Let the Rain Come Down” make any sense?

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Ersel Hickey.jpg
Ersel Hickey, image accessed via Wikipedia.

This cheerful, seemingly simple song is far from simple and not even all that cheerful. I’ll have to admit up front here that my rabbit trails petered out before any definitive conclusions were reached. But here’s what I was able to come up with:

Let’s start out with the original nursery rhyme about a crooked man and his various crooked accoutrements:

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile,
(or, in some versions, he had a crooked smile,)
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

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Was the Song “Singin’ in the Rain” Written for the Movie “Singin’ in the Rain,” or Vice Versa?

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Singing in the rain poster.jpg
Image accessed via Wikipedia

I had watched the entire movie Singin’ in the Rain at some point many years ago, and my memory of it was spotty. I remembered Gene Kelly’s description of his childhood and early career: “Dignity. Always dignity,” and of course the title song, and that the whole plot centered around the advent of talkies and the demise of silent movies. I also had this vague notion that the song had something to do with smiling in the face of adversity, sort of along the same lines as “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head.” (Rabbit trail alert: Of course I had to look up “Raindrops” and watch the clip of its occurrence in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for Sundance to take the time for this little romantic bike-riding interlude with Etta Place, his schoolteacher girlfriend, since he and Butch are on the run from the law, but there it is. Maybe someone decided that the story had been going on too long without any fun stuff. The song itself doesn’t advance the plot directly, but the director wanted something to go with the scene, and Burt Bacharach, who was writing the score, apparently had the first line in his head and wanted to use it. You can shoehorn the lyrics into the plot of the story somewhat, but it takes effort. I will point out, by the way, that this scene includes no rain. Sheesh.) But back to “Singin’,” which isn’t about adversity at all. Gene Kelly’s character is simply in love. He’s just said goodnight to his new girlfriend Kathy, and he’s so happy that he’s perfectly willing to dance through the storm. No angst at all is involved.

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What Are the Main Water Images in “Wade in de Water”?

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Image by skeeze from Pixabay

Black spirituals are true folk songs that were passed down by word of mouth over many years, with various versions being developed, before they were eventually written down. The texts reflect this variety, as there’s no one “official” version. The arrangement I’m using as a reference for the spiritual “Wade in de Water” has stripped-down lyrics, so that’s what I’m using as the for this commentary. Even with the limited text used, though, there’s still a lot to say! (Betcha you couldn’t have guessed that one.) Bear in mind that a lot of commentary on any type of folk song is at least partly supposition and hypothesizing, as we don’t have access to the authors. We don’t even know their names.

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Parts of Vivaldi’s “Gloria” Sound Very Christmas-y. What Gives?

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The texts of the first two sections of Vivaldi’s Gloria are the words of the angels in their announcement of Christ’s birth, words that are sung repeatedly in Christmas music, either in Latin or English:

Gloria in excelsis Deo
Glory to God in the highest

Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.
And on earth peace to men of good will.

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Get to Know the Real Vivaldi

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Cariacture of Vivaldi; source Wikipedia

If you’ve been reading my essays for any length of time, you know that I’m kind of obsessed with the details of a composer’s life, or how a certain piece came to be written, or the meaning of the words in a song. Things can get pretty granular at times! So this essay is an attempt to get at the real Vivaldi, the man behind the wig, as it were. He’s a much more interesting—and complicated—figure than you may have thought. As you sing or listen to his glorious music, I hope you’ll be able to picture him going about his life and dealing with all its complications.

Let’s start with Vivaldi’s father, Giovanni Battista Vivaldi, a resident of Venice. We are told that he was a barber before becoming a professional violinist at St. Mark’s Basilica, a little factoid that raises all sorts of interesting questions: Did that post pay more than barbering? Was Mrs. Vivaldi on board with all this? (They ended up with nine children, so money was very definitely a factor in any employment decisions, as there doesn’t seem to be any hint that the Vivaldis were well off.) How exactly did Giovanni decide to make this rather drastic career change? In any case, sources agree that Antonio’s first violin teacher was his dad. Antonio must have been somewhat of a prodigy, because Giovanni took him around Venice to perform, but I don’t know exactly how this worked. Were they basically buskers? When I first read about this “touring,” I thought my sources were saying that Vivaldi had traveled around Europe à la the young Mozart, but then Giovanni wouldn’t have been around to play at the basilica. No, it was just a hometown thing, a side hustle.

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