Tomorrow, Wednesday, June 16, stop what you’re doing at 10:30pm France time (4:30pm EDT, 1:30pm PDT, etc.) and turn on France Musique and listen to Couleurs du Monde. At some point during the show, they’re going to play Thibaut Frasnier’s, Alvaro Martinez’s, Fabrice Richaud’s, Gabriel Rigaux’s, and my arrangement of Algerian songs. Perhaps they will even announce our names, though this is far from certain. In case not, mine, Yelha Wurar, is the up-tempo, crowd-pleasing number that they’ll probably play at the end?
If you’d like to avoid any confusion with the France Musique site, go straight HERE.
One is this exploration of the New York City Subway.
Another is the French word décalage, which is about the most useful musical term I’ve come across in French. Means something like “shift” or “displacement,” along with “not-togetherness.” Heterophony, polyrhythm, imitation, you can pass it all off as décalage.
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I thought I posted this several weeks ago. Still relevant, though I should add Berthillon banana split sundaes to the list…
Last Friday, La Villette showed The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly at their no-longer-free outdoor film festival. There a lot of different ways I could go with this, but for the sake of concision, I’m going to zero in on Morricone. I was excited to see the movie because of its cinematic reputation, of course, but doubly so because of the score. I don’t think I’ve seen many Morricone-scored films - The Mission comes to mind, but that was back in middle school, on VHS - so I was curious to hear, as an adult and a relatively mature musician, how he approaches film scoring.
(I should mention that if you do not want to know what happens in the film, you shouldn’t follow after the break)
I have to say, I found the music altogether weird, which is to say, beyond the famous whistling motive, not altogether appropriate. (more…)
As for national-holiday-with-fireworks hallucinations, Matthew Guerrieri, eat your heart out.
Sitting on the Champs de mars, next to an Afro-Brazilian drumming group when over the PA comes the Barber Violin Concerto. Twice. Louder than you’ve ever heard it before.
Why?
(OK, also, the best speakers I’ll ever hear it on, and there’s some nice bass up in that piece, so why not?)
Plus, this year’s fireworks theme, after a quick nod to 400 years of Quebec? Pavarotti and Callas.
I don’t know what to think.
Natasha came and sat on my head this morning as I was trying to get up - because of the delay that the cat engendered (how can get out of bed if the cat is sitting on your head?), I got to listen to the radio-alarm longer than normal, nearly half-an-hour, actually. They, RTL, were doing a feature on a French singer, Bernard Lavilliers, and played a song called “On the Road Again” - entirely in French except the chorus. It’s very eighties, somewhere between Don Henley and Richard Marx, with lots of synthetic everything, though quite pretty nonetheless. It’s in a nice minor and nicely proportioned. The second chorus has a nifty Gainsbourg-ian (Gainsbourien) flourish, with women’s chorus backing up the melody in twisted harmonies.
(I’d like to embed the video from youtube, but I’m having some technical problems. For now, just head here)
But in my current dual roles as setter-of-French-text and teacher-of-English, what stood out to me was his setting of the English text. Spoken French lacks the inherent accents that we have in English. This is one of the reasons English is a so much more efficient language - the English “that thing” becomes, in spoken French, “ce truc-là” - the added word, là, providing the emphasis that in English would be provided by verbally accenting “that.”
What’s problematic with the song is that it is set as though it were French - without clear accentuation. (more…)
