NPR Night Dispatches
The other day while gleefully typing the praises of NPR, I (luckily for you) forgot to uncontrollably and unreasonably and excessively whine about one aspect of the experience. Unluckily for you, I just remembered it:
The problem occurs when you are lying atop your bed like a delightful angel (this always describes me perfectly) and something totally awesome comes on. And then you fall asleep before they tell you what it is. A variation on that theme is when you do manage to hold out until the announcer announces it, but find on waking that you’ve forgotten the composer, or the piece, or the whole thing. Kind of like all those other stupendous money-making/world-saving ideas you have in bed but can’t be arsed to get up and write down.
Like, the other night there was some Classical piece (capital C Classical, like, Mozart or someone) which had a theme really similar to a bit of the Shosty Invasion theme from the 7th symphony. I wanted to do a not-in-bed comparison, but can’t bloody remember either the composer or the piece. I think it had a clarinet in it, so that narrows it down to about 13,576 pieces.
Sometimes this saves me, which is yet another reason NPR rocks my socks. It has complete listings for Classical Music Through the Night, so if I can remember about what time the radio was on, or maybe the previous item on the playlist, the anonymous performance can be fingered.
That’s what just happened with the fifth one of these
The third doth rage: and roughly brayth
Because of my desire for a more ascetic life, I can listen to NPR again.
Last week, in a fit of panic at having too much crap cluttering my room I whipped out the old hatchet and scalpel. As — depressingly — always happens, this resulted in piles of dustbin bags full of crap being chucked out and/or donated to charity. It also resulted in a bit of room rearrangement, which led to a cascade of phosphorylations, which led to my radio getting moved back to where the power cord can reach a plug socket
I had forgotten how nice it is to fall asleep to NPRs Classical Music Through the Night. I find that focusing on the melodies helps me to avoid thinking about stress-dream rich material, like lab-work, or programming, or saving the planet. I turn off the lights and lay on top of my duvet (a proper English style one, not that pale American imitation) until I start losing track of the music, and getting cold. Then I fumble the off switch on the remote and get under the covers, and seem to fall asleep very quickly.
The only problem is when something really good which I haven’t heard before comes on. Then I want to force myself to stay awake long enough to find out what it is.
This is what I heard last night:
It’s been AGES since I heard this (it’s the Tallis Fantasia by Ralph V-W for those of you who didn’t click on play) and I don’t remember liking it that much. This time it yanked my listening muscles right out of their sockets. I only caught the last couple of minutes, so it’s really the Tallis melody which caught my attention, and not the Fantasia.
Tallis was around a looong time ago, in the 1500s — way earlier then any music I’ve gotten into. The particular melody which RVW used was the third of a series of nine tunes that Tallis wrote for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter, whatever one of those is. The descriptions of the tunes are absolutely frickin’ stunning:
The first is meeke: devout to see,
The second is sad: in maiesty,
The third doth rage: and roughly brayth,
The fourth doth fawne: and flattry playth,
The fyfth deligth: and laugheth the more,
The sixth bewayleth: it weepeth full sore,
The seventh tredeth stout: in froward race,
The eighth goeth milde: in modest pace.
Isn’t that beautiful?
Underwhelming Magnetism
A few days ago I renewed my lapsed membership to my local NPR station, WSKG. I frickin’ love public broadcasting. It almost makes up for the lack of the BBC in my life, almost. Naturally, one of the completely overwhelmingly exciting (well, perhaps exaggerating just slightly here) parts of donating — aside from that warm, fuzzy, altruistic sensation — is the “free” gift. Last year I received this totally kick-arse mug:
If you can’t quite make it out, it’s all of the major composers’ signatures on it. It’s the perfect receptacle for sleepytime tea or IPAs (I think that mugs are ideal for beer consumption) two of my top beverages. It even came with an instruction sheet pointing out which name belonged to which composer for some of the more scribbly ones (Shosty, looking at you). Imagine my disappointment and cries of heartfelt anguish when I chose the car magnet and received this:
Which a brief poll of two people has confirmed as being the ugliest car magnet in the entire world. Enormous rainbow colored fiber-optic cables emitted from the globe does not particularly suggest classical music to my mind. It suggests something I am never going to put on my car. It’s my own stupid fault, I should have done the really noble thing and told them to not send me anything so that they can use all of my money for useful stuff such as, say, broadcasting. We all like our souvenirs, though. Next time I’ll go for the pocketknife.