ENCHANTED GLASS
OH GODS I ADORE DIANA WYNNE JONES.
Misleading blog entries notwithstanding* it’s been kind of a ratbag of a week** and today has been a real sod. The ME has mostly been winning anyway and today I have a stomach-ache too. I made it through my piano lesson this afternoon chiefly by virtue of taking my computer with me, calling up Finale and Poor Wolfgang and thrusting it/them under Oisin’s nose as proof that I’ve been doing something.*** I did not go to bell practise tonight. † So you know I feel like faecal matter.
I Facebooked about this the beginning of the week, I think, that I’ve been following writer links on frelling Twitter and getting myself in trouble. The results of that pursuit of trouble have started pouring in through the mail-slot in my door this week. Most of these are authors I don’t know†† but as I was racing past in pursuit of some other vampire or were-something or fairy tale I noticed that Diana Wynne Jones has a new one out so I ordered it too. Well, haven’t you? No one on this blog, I assume, needs to be told to read Diana Wynne Jones?
I do, however, have strict rules about DWJ, which include that I don’t read the last one till the next one comes out. Or anyway that I’m not allowed to read a new one the MOMENT it crashes through the mail-slot and whangs on the floor.††† But I’m having a bad week. I need comfort and cheer. So the hellhounds and I plus my shiny new copy of ENCHANTED GLASS retired to the sofa this evening‡. . . .OH GODS I ADORE DIANA WYNNE JONES. Do you even need to know what this one’s about? Andrew Hope teaches at a university, but when his magician grandfather dies, Andrew inherits not only his house but his field-of-care, which is a complicated enough business at best, but a good deal worse when it turns out that your ancestor some generations back got jiggery-pokeried into protecting an evil magician whose estate squats in what should be part of yours. And who probably has wicked plans for the boy who turns up on your doorstep saying that his gran, before she died, told him that if he got in trouble after she was no longer there to protect him, to ask your grandfather for help. And there are things after the boy, which are probably to do with your unsavoury neighbour. Oh, and did you know that it’s silly folklore about weres and the full moon? They don’t need the full moon to change, of course.
Only in Diana Wynne Jones do doorbells go pongle-pongle.
And now, if you’ll forgive me, I have about fifty pages left. . . .
* * *
* I don’t lie. But if there were a Tour de France or an Olympic Game in lying by omission, I’d be the one to beat. Ladbrokes would refuse to make book on me.
** Not that there haven’t been bright spots. Blondel was a bright spot. Cambridge minor was a bright spot, in spite of the audience on Wednesday. And this was a bright spot:
‘You have nothing to pay.’ Are there sweeter words in the language. I’m not sure even ‘your new box of Green & Black’s has come in’ is any sweeter.^ And the drawback to ‘you have just won £1,000,000,000 in the lottery’ is that you would almost immediately have to pay most of it back to HM Revenue. I even got a quite significant refund. I’m trying not to enjoy it too much however because I’m going to have to turn around and return it to them in a few months.^^ I would quite like to return it literally: rip it in half and send it back to them in an envelope. But HM Revenue has no sense of humour so I don’t suppose I will.
^ And ‘here is your exciting new book jacket/editor/marketing plan’ is far too terrifying to be sweet. Okay, ‘New York Times Best Seller’ is sweet. Hellhounds ate all their dinner without fuss is very sweet indeed. Sigh.
^^ And, speaking of taxes, there’s also the major bright spot that Obamacare did get through. It got through. It got through as a beat-up chopped-down staggering half blind version of itself but it got through. And I still pay taxes in America, so I get to say yaay if I want to. And I’m stopping myself from saying anything mmmmphgrtch provocative rrrrrrrmmmgggh. I hate, hate, hate politics, and they depress the hell out of me—the sixty-seven ring circus that passing this health care bill has been depresses the hell out of me—so I don’t really want to get into an argument about it. Acknowledge and keep moving.
*** I’d also been working on Evening Hymn and Fear No More but . . . this was not the Friday I’m going to tear down that barricade.
And the second part of Poor Wolfgang is trying to get away from me. I think I’ve come to the end of it so I can jump into the comparative safety of part three before Britten and Sondheim take me over.^ I’m aware of the Britten effect because he’s mostly been creeping up on me the last twenty years, since I moved to England; I’m still conscious of his influence. Sondheim has been such an essential fact of my life for so long it’s been quite a shock to pay attention this week, listening to him and his music on Radio Three and think, whoops, this is where that comes from. And I was tempted and I fell: I asked Oisin to see if he can do me any kind of deal on the complete score to Sweeney Todd, which I haven’t bought ere now because it costs a bomb.
^ And Messiaen, but Messiaen is still seriously beyond me. Like JS Bach. Golly, that man.
† Whiiiiiiine.
†† And one was bought on the title alone: Must Love Hellhounds.
http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/h/charlaine-harris/must-love-hellhounds.htm
Pity about the jacket. Jeez.
††† See, actually it’s a good thing that the floor beside the door is carpeted in All Stars. It softens the landing for anything coming through the mail-slot.
‡ And just to maintain the theme of Ratbag Week, after about an hour, there was a strange throbbing vibration between me and the back of the sofa and Darkness was trying to be sick. No, no, that’s my job! —So in a tangle of long legs and screaming all three of us fell off the sofa and I managed to drag poor Darkness not only to the edge of the carpet but to fold said edge back so that he could throw up on the nice washable bare floor. Which was fine as far as it went, but that then left me holding a piece of folded-back carpet with no way of keeping it folded back while I went for the paper towels, while the hellhounds wandered back to the sofa and looked at me expectantly.
Hellhounds and handbells
I have a new measurement of coordination.* You know the old rub your tummy and pat your head model? Piffle. Stroke a hellhound with one hand . . . how much can you do with the other one without cold wet nose and heavy leeeeaning suggesting that you’re not CONCENTRATING? I can get my shoes off one handed, which is a better trick than you think since I double-knot the laces, but getting my coat off without interrupting the flow, or briefly imprisoning contiguous hellhound in fallen raiment is difficult.** We are in another stretch*** of No, No Food for Us Hellhounds This Week, Thank You, Please Don’t Trouble† and presumably because they know this winds me up Chaos in particular wants an awful lot of reassurance.†† Therefore I’m developing my one-handed skills. Hey, I can get a London Review out of its plastic wrapper and unfold it, one-handed—with the other hand keeping up a steady hellhound-trancing stroke stroke stroke.†††
It’s all about handbells of course really.‡ That awful thing of trying to keep two complex patterns going in your mind at once and in accurate parallel.‡‡ Ow ow ow ow ow. ‡‡‡ I can feel pieces of my brain shearing off like a glacier calving. Although I wish I could figure out how to apply the pain of handbells to writing two books at a time.§ But even obsessive grind has its limits§§ and tonight I declared to my two partners in crime that I didn’t think I could learn Cambridge on handbells—which in theory has been my assignment for about the last month—at least not right now. Barring that there’s a way to earn a living at it and I could thus devote more precious brain energy to the problem. They acquiesced to my pitiable weakness with surprising grace.§§§ Now I only have to learn Kent instead.# Remind me how I got myself into this.##
* * *
* HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
** I don’t even try it when I’m wearing my real black leather fake pilot’s jacket. It weighs a TON. Descending from a height it could do a tender hellhound damage.
*** siiiiiiigh
† Since We Won’t Eat It Anyway
†† What about me? Who reassures me? Peter has suggested that this current paroxysm may be caused by the change in the weather—spring does seem to be arriving at last, with mouldy, slug-encouraging rain as opposed to the icy January stuff. I suppose that’s reassuring.
††† Occasionally he’ll purr. It’s not the standard happy-dog-moan although it’s more of a mmmmm than a rrrrrr. Darkness is the moaner. Darkness is the voluptuary. Being stroked is being stroooooooked to Darkness; for Chaos it’s reassurance. But it’s interesting—to the bedevilled and maddened human at least—Darkness is also the one who easily learnt to pick up each of his forefeet—briskly and high—to have his harness put on. Darkness would have learnt the Spanish Walk—which was the plan for a while two-plus years ago—no problem. Chaos still doesn’t get it about picking his feet up for his harness. ARRRRRRGH. I keep resisting calling him stupid because . . . he’s not stupid. He’s the one, for example, figured out that the sound of my computer closing down means WALKIES—so I’d better not close my computer down and then decide to do some filing.^ Southdowner, a long time ago now, asked me what I realised was a very perceptive question: Is he aware of his body? No. He’s not. He lives there, but he doesn’t inhabit. Darkness inhabits. Chaos’ body is a means to an end: streaking over the landscape, say, or broadsiding Darkness.^^ I suspect this lack of inhabitation is also why he’s an even worse eater than Darkness—and why picking his feet up for his harness to be put on remains a mystery to him.
^ This isn’t hard. I never decide to do my filing.
^^ I have this really really good thing going at the moment. After they’ve circled the globe two or three times at top speed and are starting to slow down to visibility by mere human eyes again, Chaos starts thumping Darkness because this is Chaos’ idea of a good time. Darkness then rushes up to me and says, Please put me back on lead! Pleeeeeease! —Because they aren’t allowed to fight on lead. They can fight over something like a stick, but sheer battering and pounding is not allowed. And Chaos, despite his thuggishness, is a very sweet-natured hellhound, so at this point he says oh, well, and waits to have his lead put back on too. I don’t know how long this will last. If Chaos ever grows out of wanting brutishness and mayhem I may have a problem. I’m sure Darkness would like to linger in contemplation over Very Dead Things if he weren’t barbarically interrupted.
‡ Niall would be the first to agree. Also the last. Also most of the middle.
‡‡ Note that in fact you’re not supposed to. You’re supposed to learn to read the frellers in blocks, or boxes is the correct term. Niall has wasted a certain amount of time trying to teach me this. But I had a profound One More Thing reaction^ and I subsequently discovered that a lot of quite good handbell ringers ring by the two individual lines of tower bell patterns and I think I’m stuck with it now.^^
^ No, no! Not one more thing!
^^ Whew.
‡‡‡ Last night at Ditherington we were frelling heaving. I’ve never seen so many people in one small ringing chamber. This was slightly off-putting—especially because Wild Robert had specially imported Vicky and made sure Niall was coming because he wanted to put a Cambridge band together . . . for me. Which was extremely nice of him. But as it happened we had five people who could ring Cambridge, me—and 1,000,000 beginners. All watching. I’d retreated to the stairway and was trying to hammer the hideous Cambridge front work^ into my resistant brain—I generally know roughly where I am in the rest of the pattern—while the beginners rang beginner things, and when Wild Robert took me by the ear and dragged me back inside . . . there were all these eyes. Ranks and ranks of eyes. This is why I hate ground floor rings! People tend to loiter to watch! I don’t expect a frelling audience practise night at Ditherington (which has a nice shut-in ringing chamber on the first floor)!
We got through it. You don’t not get through things with Wild Robert around. And at the end the audience clapped. I want to go hooooooooome. I’ve changed my mind about singing back row in a chorus some day. Live audiences! Aaaaugh!
^ Which goes: dodge, lead, dodge, seconds, lead, dodge, seconds, dodge, lead, seconds, dodge, lead, dodge . . . The second seconds is where you turn around and go back out the way you came, but . . . jeez . . .
§ People who aren’t even method handbell ringers manage to write two books at the same time. . . .
§§ Which in my case probably also includes writing two books at once. I’d be happy to write only one if it would write. We’re back to the plastic teaspoon at the granite^ rockface again. Sigh. I can see the shape of the eventual Colossa of Rhodes staring out at me, but the plastic teaspoon is not ideal for the job.
^ Marble would be grander, but I’m a Maine girl. I think in granite.
§§§ Colin has been ringing fifty years. Niall has been ringing twenty. I have been ringing five. Give me a frelling break.
# http://www.guildfordguild.org.uk/assets/applets/Kent_Minor_Crib_Sheet.pdf
## And yes, ‘this’ includes hellhounds.
Guest post by B-Twin
Peonies, Roses & Hedges.
“You haven’t heard of Sunnymeade?” My friend expressed shock.
Sadly, I hadn’t.
She explained that it was a private garden that was opened to the public only two or three weekends a year. Then she described clematis beyond compare, a huge array of plants and amazing garden ‘rooms’.
I have a soft spot for English and European style gardens – partly because they seem so lush to my water-deprived Australian gardening eyes. Also, they have age on their side. They’re old enough to have structure and if gardens as an entity can have roots then they have them – so to speak. And while many of our Australian plants are pretty and all of that, most native-based gardens tend to not be on the, shall we say, spectacular side of the scale (I’ll admit to having a ‘thing’ for roses too^).
Not long after the conversation with my friend I noticed a small Public Notice in our local newspaper. An Open Day at Sunnymeade! My curiosity won, I decided to grab the opportunity and so travelled along dusty, winding hill country roads through pine plantations and natural bush land to see this garden for myself.
My friend was right. (She usually is.)
Upon arrival I proceeded to be absolutely gob-smacked. As it turned out I remained that way for the entire visit. It’s a good thing I didn’t have a companion who required conversation.
Come further in....
Going from ‘room’ to ‘room’ and seeing the different themes, structures and plants I really found awe-inspiring. And the varieties! Not just one sort of clematis or rose or poppy. Dozens. I saw blooms I had to look twice at and check the foliage to be really sure what they were! It was the type of diversity you expect to see at City Botanical Gardens not in a private garden. And the work that had gone into the structures blew me away. Columns, faux ruins, tiled water garden, faux castle-like buildings and more. (I’m a total sucker for stone and the depth that it can give a garden is tremendous.)
Stone walls and roses.
The weather was a little threatening that day but the rain held off. By the time I left I was desperate to try clematis one day – and to go back.
O Clematis!
It turned out not very long at all between visits. The very next day I dragged my mother along to see this wonder as well. Her gardening heart went all pitter-patter just like mine had. Hers had an added pitter-patter because she is an artist as well as a gardener and she just happens to paint a lot of flowers.
The range of poppies is amazing.
Speaking of roses.... Rosa "Wedding Day"
The garden though, like most, is a constant Work in Progress. Part of the fun in visiting each year is to see what is new! So far I have been back three years in a row. Gardening-wise these have been challenging years with declining rainfall and very hot dry summers. It’s amazing what you can do though in a garden…
Hornbeam hedges with windows...
Did I mention that all these structures are made with local stone and by one man? Yup, the owner/gardener does it all (admittedly his parents help him with the weeding and such). And he was originally a chef.
Enter in through the Moon Gate...
Set in country higher up than my farm, the folks at Sunnymeade can take advantage of slightly cooler summers – and colder winters. Of interest to me is that despite the altitude difference the soils are still fairly similar to ours here due to the granite base. (Very handy for when you want rocks and boulders in the garden!) Also, they changed a bare paddock into a series of hedged rooms in around 20 years. Our garden here is still so new that it lacks infrastructure in the way of large trees or shrubs. I long for the day I can plant wind sensitive plants and not have them burnt and shredded by a howling gale. A garden like Sunnymeade is an inspiration that this can be achieved sooner rather than later.
And this is all on sloping site! Hope for our garden yet.
There are several ideas I have now started to transpose to my garden – one being MORE ROSES. ;-) With the help of a few tall poles there are quite a pillar roses in place.^^ And there are plans afoot to make a Moon Gate and secret garden. Although the hornbeam hedges are superb they are a little higher in maintenance then I would like so we are sticking to Buddleja due to its drought tolerance. The fact we (and the butterflies) love the fragrance is a bonus. The Clematis have started to appear in my garden also – once I made a couple of makeshift climbing frames for them – pleasing the bees no end.
One of my clematis on a homemade trellis (no flowers)
Sunnymeade have several Open Weekends throughout the year. So, if you ever have the chance to visit this part of Victoria, Australia then I highly recommend it! (Their website is www.sunnymeade.com.au)
Isn't that colour divine??
PS. The garden was featured on the Australian ‘Better Homes and Gardens’ TV show in February this year. If you are in Australia you can check out the footage on the show’s website.
—
^ Yeah yeah… understatement I know.
^^ I recall Robin being aghast at some of my original rose choices for the pillars. It is possible that the phrase “ARE YOU INSANE???” came up. She had me all worried about the world-domination tendencies of Mme Alfred Carriere when it turns out I perhaps should have been more concerned with Aimee Vibert… (6 FEET IN 6 MONTHS!)*
* I did suggest you ask local growers how things do in Australia. My Mme Alfred is thirty feet in five years. My Aimee Vibert is six feet in three years. –ed.
Blondel, con’t
It’s been streaming rain again and the mud on the fields has got deeper quicker than I was expecting.* I tweeted about this earlier: I put a clean pair of jeans on this morning—so that I could visit Blondel in his beige-carpeted** house without shedding any countryside and making whoever does the hoovering hate me***—and the hellhounds promptly discovered the best stick in the universe!!!, half-buried in sticky Hampshire clay, and insisted on my enjoying it with them. Sigh. I don’t suppose Blondel really counts the pawprints.
I have not, of course, spent nearly as much time on my singing this week as I planned to. But I’ve certainly spent time. I’m also working on three different songs—Purcell’s Evening Hymn and the two Finzis, Fear No More and Lover and His Lass. I spent the most time on the Evening Hymn because Blondel gave it to me as I disappeared into the PEGASUS page proofs and I’ve never offered it even as much focus and attention as I am capable of giving a singing piece. Gah. But I’ve now sung those frelling twiddles† till I (foolishly) thought I knew them reasonably well. Not, I have to say, greatly assisted by Purcell’s apparent laissez-faire attitude toward number of beats in a bar: cheez louise he chooses a frelling time signature like 3/2 and then starts chucking extra quavers/eighth notes in when he feels like it. Maybe we’re not supposed to notice? Cheez. But that turns out to be (Blondel says) what the teeny weeny notes above the staff are: editorial remarks about how to get around creative irregularities. Okay, that’ll help me this week.
I don’t know why I’m in such a good mood. It was pretty bad. Blondel was very sympathetic††, saying that the piano is actually doing rather dramatic things in its quiet subversive way, and that I am far from the first person who has found that the accompaniment pulls them off their own line.††† Accompaniment! HA! The piano is your adversary, your rival! And yeah. I lost. Sigh. I can’t do the twiddles with it going, nanny nanny boo boo sucks sucks sucks! The twiddles are way too alarming all by themselves.
So I have to do it some more this week and go in better armed next week.‡ It felt positively soothing after the Battle of the Twiddles to revert to some Finzi—which I can’t sing either, but you might say I can not sing it less. It turns out that Blondel had sung Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun for his intersing at Canterbury/etc, which boggles my mind—I suppose that level of familiarity makes it easier to teach, but how can he stand listening to someone bungle it the way I bungle it?? Teachers are amazing beings.‡‡
But I do know why I’m in a good mood in spite of all this. Remember I told you last week I sang one or two notes that were not absolutely terrible? I sang a few more today. Blondel is somehow managing to generate something almost resembling a voice out of . . . mud and hellhound hair. And metaphor. I don’t in the least understand the process; most of the things he says to me make no rational sense whatsoever; to the extent that it’s anything, it’s me trying to copy whatever it is that he’s doing, since he always illustrates. And he can clearly hear‡‡‡ what I’m doing because his latest insane metaphor always addresses whatever I’m doing . . . uh . . . least well. But I sang G sharp today. Dido’s Lament here I come.
And because life is like that . . . when I finally gave up waiting for it to stop raining this evening and took hellhounds out for a sprint, we charged back to the cottage from the mews, and I turned the radio on while I blotted sopping hellhounds, because I always turn the radio on, and . . . a very familiar intro began to roll out of the speaker and . . . it was Purcell’s Evening Hymn. Hellhounds had to hang around unblotted while I froze in place and listened. It really is the most glorious thing. And I’m learning to sing it.§
* * *
* Thus I found out that my old emerald-green All Stars are no longer waterproof on the bits that are supposed to be covered by rubber.^ There’s a certain amount you can do about holes in the bottom with waterproof liners, but when they start cracking around the edges you’ve kind of had it.
^ Speaking of All Stars, my Blondies are still arranged fetchingly in their (open) box and . . . lying on the little table beside the piano. Peter asked me in a mild, long-suffering manner how long I was planning on leaving them there. They’re art, I said. It’s an installation. Oh, said Peter, still mildly. I looked away before I had to see him rolling his eyes.
I was actually planning on wearing them to my voice lesson today. Inspirationally. But get them WET? Are you KIDDING?
** And hellhound-free. They have a small, polite cat who occasionally wanders in to give a demonstration on how something should be sung. I think the general drift is: tuna tuna tuna tuna tuna, my dish is eeeeeeeeeempty. TUUUUUNA.
*** I wish more urgently than usual to be on my best behaviour since the Future Remains in Doubt—I don’t want to contribute even the weight of a hellhound hair tipping him toward leaving. His second intersing for the Coventry/York/Westminster job is next Tuesday—and he has it on Good Authority that the short list is very short indeed: himself and one other. He and his wife—let’s call her Jasmine^—are going up this weekend for her to admire the festoons of picturesque tourists dangling from every original gas lamp. Jasmine! You’re not impressed! Remember there’s no garden! Think of that nice little clematis twining up your doorframe in Mauncester^^, and the patio out back^^^! Think of the lack of tourists here! —Barring the occasional Lost and Miserable who turned right at the statue of Titus Oates the Perjurer instead of left. And the sporadic tides of dreamy Americans who think everything is quaint because it’s England.+
^ I don’t think Blondel had a wife, did he? Or she’s not in any of the more obvious stories. But Jasmine sounds like the kind of name Blondel might have married.
^^ With which I am good friends. We commune while I wait for Blondel to fetch the parking permit. It is covered in big fat buds right now. We agreed that we do not want any more night frosts.
^^^ where you do not want to sit if your husband is teaching a voice lesson because his studio faces that way. . . .
+ Yep. I was one of those. In my heart of hearts, still am, when I’m not cursing the moron in the SUV who just cut in front of me, or the latest rise in the council tax, or the cellophane tape, which the British (apparently) cannot make to save their lives. Fortunately there appears to be an excellent trade agreement with 3M.
† We do not use the c-word^
^ Relax, will you? Coloratura
†† Thinking to himself, at Coventry/York/Westminster I’m going to screen ’em before I agree to take any students.
††† Possibly my most vivid memory of being a member of various choirs many, many years ago is the diabolical way that the other voices try to confuse you. You remember my current goal of back row of the chorus in some amateur theatrical^? The middle of the back row of the chorus, with people singing the same thing as me on either side. And we’d better not have to move around much either.
^ some day, which is to say not now
‡ larynxed? —What I should really do is take it to Oisin on Friday. But then I’d have to . . . sing! Where he could . . . hear me!
‡‡ And it still amuses the hell out of me^ that at twenty-seven Blondel is a kind, patient, sympathetic, perceptive teacher . . . while at fifty-seven I’m a cantankerous cow who panics every time she remembers that one of the aspects of Deputy Ringing Master is that if I am ever stuck with running a practise some day I will have to teach our beginners
^ Well, not entirely out of me. I am the hellgoddess, after all
‡‡‡ Poor man
§ Although you might want to make that “sing”
Stephen Sondheim
This really is going to be Short Monday because I’ve just spent the last two hours* cruising the web for Sondheim music clips. Of which there are lots, but very few of them are anything I’m looking for**—and furthermore way too many of them are students practising for their vocal finals and . . . not all of them are going to pass.
Everybody knows who Stephen Sondheim is, right? http://sondheimsociety.webs.com/aboutstephensondheim.htm I feel that not knowing who Stephen Sondheim is would be like not knowing who Bill Gates or the Queen of England or Elvis Presley is. You may not approve*** but they’re monuments of the age.
It’s Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday today. I haven’t been keeping track or anything; I only know it because I’m a Composer of the Week junkie† and this week it’s Stephen Sondheim http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00rjycs. I know I’ve ranted and bayed to you about the absolute supremacy of Sweeney Todd over . . . everything. There was an era of my life when Sweeney was the permanent soundtrack to . . . well, everything. And I saw it at all by chance; my then boss at Little, Brown†† was a musical-theatre freak and I eventually got curious. Also this was the era when I was spending all my disposable income on concert series—I felt myself to be a country girl with a lot of catching-up to do and I’ve never been very social: Hang out? Why would I want to hang out? So I went to concerts—and when the latest Stephen Sondheim came to Boston I decided to give it a go. Wow. Wow. WOW.††† Suddenly I thought musical theatre was great.
I don’t agree with a lot of this‡ but it’s an interesting and thoughtful overview: http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/03/22/stephen-sondheims-80th-birthday/ One of the ways I diverge from standard Sondheim worship is that I think Company is . . . kind of a snore. Oh, gods, more neurotic frelling New Yorkers.‡‡ Snoooooore. But I love Not Getting Married Today, and it’s an example of just how mind-bogglingly brilliant Sondheim is as a lyricist.‡‡‡ And that in terms of patter songs he makes W S Gilbert look like he wasn’t trying. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iiz8nql5ps And do watch the Weekend in the Country clip (from the Macleans article) too, which is an example of the delight of both his ensemble work and what the article-writer means about his ability to move the story along in the music.
Very Happy Birthday, Mr Sondheim.
* * *
* Since I got back from bell ringing. Colin’s tower. They were actually glad to see me, because I made six. We rang Cambridge, which needs six ringers. Colin allowed us small panting breaks between assaults on our campanological Eiger. In another hundred years I’ll be able to ring it. Probably. Tonight my education was further expanded and developed by the fact that everybody but Colin went wrong at some point or another. The fact that they didn’t always take me with them proves I’m learning something.
** There are at least 1,000,000,000 versions of Send in the Clowns out there, which I think remains his one Top of the Pops type hit. Note that if Send in the Clowns is not a big favourite of yours this does not necessarily mean you will never be a Sondheim fan. One of the many, many things he is terrific at is jerking his audience around with stuff they’re not expecting—some of his most conventionally beautiful melodies^ mean something else entirely in the context of their original show. Oisin, who doesn’t know Sweeney Todd,^^ had the music to Greenfinch and Linnet Bird lying on his piano stand last week. One of his students is singing it for one of those grade-test doohickeys they have over here^^^ and he was raving about what a beautiful song it is. Well, yes, it is . . . but see the show. Yeep. The one that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up however is Not While I’m Around, a conventional-sounding love song which is also from Sweeney, and is sung by the rather dim assistant at Mrs Lovett’s pie shop, who has a major crush on Mrs Lovett. Sweeney’s evil deeds are about to catch up with him, and the dim assistant is comforting Mrs Lovett that nothing bad can happen to her ‘Not While I’m Around’. Mrs Lovett is—I think this hardly counts as a spoiler—another homicidal lunatic, and if he knows what’s good for him, he’ll get out of there fast.
I don’t myself much like Send in the Clowns (or Not While I’m Around) all by itself but it works a treat in context.
^ If you can ever say ‘conventional’ about Sondheim with a straight face.
^^ Sweeney Todd: greatest musical work of the twentieth century. I’m not going to argue with you so don’t bother. And I’ve already told you I hated the film. Hated.
^^^ http://www.abrsm.org/?page=exams/gradedMusicExams/latestSyllabuses.html
*** That would be three out of three . . . but I approve of Sondheim.
† http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tnxf
†† http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little,_Brown_and_Company Oh gods they publish Twilight. . . . Speaking of books Pollyanna cannot control me about, I may have to have a rant about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which, like Twilight, really really really bothers me for the not-very-subliminal message it’s putting out.
††† Note that the travelling show had George Hearn as Sweeney, not Len Cariou. Len Cariou is fine, and I wore through I think two copies of the original Broadway cast on LP^ before I got it—I assume permanently—on CD. But I liked George better. I managed to see Len once live in New York but George, to me, always had an even darker, madder, more powerful edge.
^ I know. You keep forgetting how old I am.
‡ A Little Priest is not too long.
‡‡ I am so not a fan of Another Hundred People. Let ’em get back on the train and go back to Peoria.
‡‡‡ Everybody here knows he wrote the lyrics to West Side Story, yes?