Veronica Swift: Home is an extension of oneself

After the concert…

Beatrice: Really enjoyed it.  Your voice, your onstage energy, and the threading stories between songs.

Veronica: Thank you. A show isn’t just a sequence of songs. It’s a narrative arc. 

Beatrice: As a linguist, I liked your storytelling. The way you spoke about “home” as an extension of the self, and then contrasted that with the trauma of losing your house.

Veronica: There have been setbacks, certainly. But I think they’ve helped me grow, both as a person and as an artist. So, you’re a linguist? We’re cousins. Singers and linguists both live and thrive through language.

Beatrice: You seem to stretch language beyond its usual limits. Like with scatting.

Veronica: I try to. Sometimes words aren’t enough, or they get in the way. Improvisation with band members, it’s a kind of conversation beyond language. Maybe that’s where the truest parts of the story live.

Home is an extension of oneself

__________

Voice-over

A concert we often wonder where the songs come from. What they mean to the singer. Especially if it was the singer who wrote the song. What relations are between the members of the band. 

You can never go back (2)

Conversation continued…

Antonio: I always thought “Forget us and don’t come and see me” was cruel. Like he was pushing Toto away.
Mariella: Birds push chicks out nests. He was freeing him. So the boy could fly.
Antonio: Maybe I need someone to push me. So I can fly.
Mariella: Then jump. A book. Your legacy.
Antonio: Like writing down my memories of the old cinemas? 
Mariella: Exactly. The velvet seats, sticky floors. Your experiences as a projectionist. Written and drawn. That’s a legacy.
Antonio: I was thinking of cinema music.
Mariella: How about starting with Morricone in the Paradiso scene. The music doesn’t cling; it releases. It rises like a sigh that turns into a blessing. Once you think less nostalgically you become one who can never go back.

_________
Voice-over
Ennio, a recent documentary about Morricone, was a reminder of how good he was at writing a melody to match the emotion of a scene. His music isn’t background, it’s the emotional grammar of the scene. And in this scene he circled back, like nostalgia resurfacing, and rising unexpectedly, like an opportunity coming up just when it seemed doors were closing. A genius at turning words into music.

I do humbly wish thee a right merry birthday...

An Elizabethan birthday…

Huzzah, to all those whose day of birth is this. May thy years be many and fortunes fair! Let this day be filled with laughter, and accompanied by cheery songs like “Now is the Month of Maying”. Rompish games like charades, goblets raised to the roof, marshmallows toasted to the stars, the path paved with puns as we binge-watch the comedies of life. 
__________
Voice-over
The madrigal may not be March but May is near enough. And although the King's Singers are modernly attired their origins are close.

76 Trombones

One fine morning…

Antonio (singing): 76 trombones led the big parade

With a hundred ten cornets close at hand.

They were followed by rows and rows

Of the finest virtuosos

The cream of every famous band…

Ariana: What’s THAT all about?

Antonio: A song about trombones we used to sing at morning school assemblies. 

Ariana: And the significance?

Antonio: I’m 76 today.

Ariana: Congratulations. For the birthday. Not sure about the singing.

_________

Voice-over

Seventy-six trombones came from the 1957 show The Music Man by Meredith Willson. Judy Garland’s later rendition of the song is on YouTube.

Riches to rags

Loss and resilience…

Haruki: So what happened was that Masayoshi mortgaged his house and his business to support his son’s software enterprise. But the son lost it all so at the end of his life Masayoshi lost his business and ended up losing his house too. Nothing left.

Kazuo: Makes estate planning easy, I guess. Nothing in the will for family to squabble over.

川の流れのように

Haruki: Families squabble over remaining money in unfair wills. But if one family member wasted the family fortune, the family social fabric is just as torn. 

Kazuo: Resentment against the prodigal son, so to speak.

Haruki: In Masayoshi’s case it was property that was lost. But I was at a concert the other night. Lady in some pain came on and sang. Smiled all the way through. Nice voice. Heard later she has advanced cancer but wants to perform to the end. Just like Misora Hibari. About the same age too, early fifties.

_________

Voice-over

Losing property is frustrating but having your life cut short is something you can’t get back.

Forty Years On...

Recalling…

Turn to p7: "40 Years On"

Edward: In school assemblies we’d sing a song every morning. Conducted by the music teacher, Mr Larsen.

Osbert: And the songs?

Edward: Oh very British. Very colonial. Occasionally musical.

Osbert: For example?

Edward: Well “Forty years on.” I still remember the words.

Osbert: Sing it.

Edward: (sings) Forty years on when afar and asunder,

Parted are those who are singing today.

When we look back and forgetfully wonder,

What we were like in our work and our play.

Osbert: My, what a memory.

Edward: Scary part is I can sing these old songs but can’t recall yesterday.

_______

Voice-over

Forty Years On written by Bowen and Farmer in 1872 at Harrow School recalls a tramping group which morphed into a rugby team. “Follow up, follow up, follow up.” With the tramp of twenty-two men became With the tramp of 30 true men.

An Online Easter

A digital Easter…

.

Susan: How was Easter for you this year?

.

Maria: Well, we elderly and vulnerable were not supposed to go out.

.

Susan: You missed church?

.

Maria: Saw some great entertainment online instead. Jesus Christ Superstar.

.

Susan: Andrew Lloyd Webber?

.

Maria: Stunning cast. Superb cinematography. Only accessible for 48 hours. But then today guess who sang in the Milano Duomo? With no audience?

.

Susan: Andrea Bocelli?

.

Maria: A little older, a little thinner, but still he's Bocelli. Intercuts of empty streets of Milano, Paris, London and NY echoing him singing in the deserted duomo; nice production!

___________

Voice-over

Shopping online, education online, great entertainment online. The virus is a black swan heralding disruption in society as we know it.

...

Hamamatsu: One thing lead to another...

A visit to a piano factory…

.

Guy: Iyeyasu lived for 17 years in the castle. There was a lot of water around, one plant which survived the annual floods was cotton.

.

Louise: So a textile industry began?

.

Shodo Yukawa: Weaving

Guy: Looms were built which required carpenters, along came Yamaha who built organs needing pedals like those on the looms, then the pianos which needed properly dried timber from nearby forests. The curved sides on grand pianos are laminated of a dozen layers and clamped into curved molds.

.

Louise: But there was technology too.

.

Guy: In the 30s a flying school was founded, planes needed propellers, strongest if constructed from laminated timber like the layers of wood in grand pianos, but metal propellors were better and that technology lead to metal musical instrument.

.

1887 Fashion

Louise: Like hammering out trumpets and bugles? From cotton to carpentry, from pianos to propellors.

.

Guy: One thing lead to another.

___________

Voice-over

One thing leads to another… meaning not filling in a lot detail about how events were linked. Maybe there were multiple causes. Wheels within wheels. Maybe there was a need to keep the narrative uncomplicated. Simple and straightforward.

...

A lapsed Episcopalian relents

Christmas… 🍒🌲

.

Catherine: I’m going up to the church to hear carol singing.

.

Noëline: Carol who?

.

Catherine: Carol the song, not the singer. Carol singing. Come on.

.

Noëline: But I’m an Episcopalian, and a lapsed one at that.

.

Catherine: Just for once a year. Take bread and wine, the vicar won’t mind. He encourages multidenominationalism. He has to nowadays with a shrinking congregation. Numbers dwindling as they are.

Origins of uplift

.

Noëline: Hmm. Carols always struck me as rather dirge-like. But maybe seeing the inside of a church would uplift the spirit a bit.

_________

Voice-over

Perhaps the origin of carols as pagan songs sung while dancing around stones influence some people like Noëline to regard carols as a less exciting music genre. As this pagan music was adopted by Christians their fortunes waxed (Francis of Assisi’s Nativity Plays, 1223), waned and went underground under the Puritans in 1640, then were resurrected in the Victorian period when Sandys and Gilbert began collecting them.

...