Crafty Guitarists, Thankful Villages, A Fading Scream
Here’s a fascinating interview with the guitarist Robert Fripp that, among other things, explains Fripp’s curious approach to guitar tuning. As many of my readers will know, standard tuning for a guitar is, from lowest to highest, EADGBE (or, as some of us like to call it, “EminAdd4 tuning.”) Fripp’s New Standard Tuning goes CGDAEG, which to anyone used to playing in the old standard tuning — or for that matter any of the popular variations on it, like Drop-D (favored by Jimmy Page, among others) and DADGAD — is utterly senseless. But the senselessness, Fripp says, is not a bug but rather the chief feature of the his little invention:
So you could say that if you have guitarists coming to a guitar seminar for the first time — and one person has been playing for 20 years and is a professional guitar teacher and one has never played a guitar ever before — they will both be at the same point. There will be an equality. I could also say that this tuning makes it impossible to play any established riffs or licks — unless you set yourself to play them, and then you'd have to say, I am playing this riff because I wish to play this riff, not because it's my hand acting with a direction. It's not automatic.
I love this idea of being unable to default to any of the “established riffs or licks” that every guitar player knows — you can’t just throw something in because your hands instinctively go to that pattern. The only reason to play a particular sequence of notes is: you really want to.
A lovely ongoing project by the musician Darren Hayman: Thankful Villages:
A Thankful Village is a village where every soldier returned alive from World War 1. The term Thankful or Blessed Village was coined by Arthur Mee in his set of guidebooks, The King's England in the 1930s. Darren Hayman is visiting each of the 54 Thankful Villages and making a piece of music and a short film for every one focussing on village life. Some take the form of instrumentals inspired by location, some are interviews with village residents set to music, others are new songs with lyrics or found local traditional songs.
The songs only rarely deal directly with The Great War, Thankful Villages is a random device to choose small locations and explore aspects of community and history. The work is inspired, written and recorded in situ with some post-production added at home in London.
Most of the films are three or four minutes long, and they are by turns charming and haunting. My favorites are the ones in which Hayman’s music intertwines with local music, as in the visit to Toft, Cambridgeshire.
So Munch’s “The Scream” is fading — or rather, one version of it is. Perhaps it doesn’t matter so much. Auden once wrote about a certain kind of literary character,
All characters who are products of the mythopoeic imagination are instantaneously recognizable by the fact that their existence is not defined by their social and historical context; transfer them to another society or another age and their characters and behavior will remain unchanged. In consequence, once they have been created, they cease to be their author's characters and become the reader’s; he can continue their story for himself.
He gives as examples Sherlock Holmes, Falstaff, Don Quixote. We may be told that at some point they were children, but we don't believe it. In our hearts we know that the Don has always been lean and gangly, Falstaff fat, and Sherlock Holmes resident in Baker Street. The Scream is like that — a mythopoeic painting. Munch produced at least six versions of it, and others have made thousands more. It is translatable to sculpture, to t-shirts, to coffee-cups, and may take comic as well as tragic forms. Even if one version fades, its presence in our cultural imaginary won’t.
When the doctor said I’d likely die I thought of my father
telling me he’d learned to read a cancer look,
that some people had it before they had it, so to speak.
When the young guard demanded to unwrap the Snickers
I’d bought for my sister my father scoffed:
“All this energy expended on candy when you could take this can”
— he held her Coke up in front of our eyes — “and cut a throat.”
When my sister, chewing her chocolate with ravenous indifference,
paused and stared balefully off at the even more baleful brown
beyond the barbed wire, it did not occur to me
that it was inspiration. When I began writing these lines
it was not, to be sure, inspiration but desperation,
to be alive, to believe again in the love of God.
The love of God is not a thing one comprehends
but that by which — and only by which — one is comprehended.
It is like the child’s time of pre-reflective being,
and like that time, we learn it by its lack.
Flashes and fragments, flashes and fragments,
these images are not facets of some unknowable whole
but entire existences in themselves, like worlds
that under God’s gaze shear and shear and, impossibly, are:
untouching, entangled, sustained, free.
STATUS BOARD
- Work: In my Beyond Disenchantment class, we’re about to wrap up our time with Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines, and not a day too soon, for me or my students.
- Music: On Candlemas at my parish church, St. Alban’s, the choir sang a glorious motet I had never heard before: William McKie’s “We Wait for Thy Loving Kindness, O God”. It turns out that McKie wrote it for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten in 1947. The performance I link to would be perfect were it not for someone in the audience practicing projectile coughing, but I’m using it anyway because of the beautiful setting in Ely Cathedral, where, as it happens, my friend Jessica Martin is Canon Residentiary.
- Viewing: Light viewing recently: Tony Robinson’s Walking through History series.
- Food and Drink: I have never really liked the Negroni as much as I feel I should, so I am experimenting with variations that I might like better. Results so far: inconclusive.
