Apr 082014
 

IAN & ACCORDION

Today, yes, a little entertainment, a gorgeous music/text thing (with layers you can delve)  by my old friend Ian Bell (Ian’s father was my Grade 11 history teacher; his mother was a weaver and the village librarian). First of all, we have Ian’s lovely, comic lament “Signor  Farini,” a song about The Great Farini, a 19th-century (he lived till 1929) tightrope walker famous, among other things, for doing somersaults over Niagara Falls in 1860. But The Great Farini was really a man named Hunt, born in Lockport, New York, and Ian’s song is as much about the mystery of creation as it is about tightrope-walking and fame. It’s about having the courage to make oneself, to change, to gamble and risk, to take a chance in life. And beyond that (there’s more), Ian also offers an insightful and readable account of song-writing, the art itself.

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Signor Farini is one of a couple of songs I have written about my own unwillingness to throw myself headlong into the music business. This has mostly been for fairly uninteresting reasons having to do with my need to spend time with children and other loved ones.

Guillermo Farini was one of the 19th-century daredevils who made his name crossing the Niagara Gorge on a tight-wire, but who then went on to a distinguished career in British circuses and theatres – developing the human cannonball act and inventing the folding theatre seat, before becoming an African explorer who sought lost civilizations in the Kalahari, and eventually returning to Canada to write a best-selling book on how to grow begonias. (I’m not making any of this up – in fact, I’ve left quite a lot out)

I first heard about Farini in an interview on CBC Radio. Peter Gzowski was talking to author/playwright Shane Peacock about a play he had written about the daredevil. I loved the whole story. Most of all I loved the idea that “The Great Farini” was in fact a guy named Bill Hunt, from Port Hope Ontario.

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Shane talked on the radio about a Farini Festival that had been staged in Port Hope, to which the organizers had invited not only descendants of Farini, but descendants of the man who had held the rope for him. I thought this was very Canadian, and decided that if there was ever going to be a song about Farini it should be from the rope-holder’s point of view. Not wanting to get too hung up on what Canadian director/playwright Paul Thompson calls “historical resonance” I wrote the song – and then I read the biography.

After I wrote and recorded the song, Shane called me up to tell me how much he liked it. He was particularly taken with the line “Walking on air with the greatest of ease – a tangle of barn swallows sharing the breeze”, and he told me a story about the time his play was performed at Fourth Line Theatre, an outdoor venue in Millbrook, Ontario. Every night at dusk, when the tightrope walker stepped off the roof of the barn, the swallows who lived inside would make one last foray into the evening air and buzz “Farini” as he traversed the wire. “How did you know to put that in?” he asked me. “Sorry Shane”, I had to tell him. “I just made it up”.

The actual making of this song started with the chorus, which I believe I carried around inside my head for a few weeks before anything else manifested itself. Then the rest popped out one day.

I never consciously choose a rhyme scheme for songs before I start writing them. Usually the first verse pours out in a rush and then gets a chorus attached to it. Once it does, I consider the rhyme scheme and meter to have been set and that’s that. I always do my very best to stick with it. It can become challenging once I get further into the song – but that’s all part of the fun. This one turned out to be AABBBB for the verse and AABBB for the chorus. In another song, I wrote a first verse I really liked while driving somewhere. When I got home and wrote it down I was a little dismayed to find that it took 16 lines for the rhyme to resolve.

Maybe resolving a rhyme isn’t the usual term — I should explain. What I mean by resolving, is completing the entire pattern of the rhyming lines in a unit of the song, (like a verse) so that you’ve brought the reader/listener back to the beginning of the rhyme cycle, and you’re ready to launch into whatever’s coming next (like another verse — or a chorus).

I’m generally of the opinion that a song shouldn’t need more than three verses, a chorus and a bridge. There are plenty of exceptions to this rule (even in my catalogue) but this isn’t one of them.

A bridge can be a useful thing. Some people call it “the middle eight” and it’s part of a song that is neither verse nor chorus and usually only comes up once somewhere in the middle of the song. Paul McCartney is really good at bridges. It not only creates a bit of musical interest, but also provides a platform for lyrical ideas that might not be an obvious part of whatever narrative agenda the verses may be. It’s a good place for asides or other editorializing. In Farini the bridge comes after the second chorus.

I like creating little word movies which I hope will will be screening in my listeners’ heads, and with any luck may include some interesting surprises as they spool out. I think I’m usually copping ideas from the filmmakers who made an impression on me in my long-ago hipster youth; people like Fellini and Bergman – mostly Fellini I think.

In Farini I tried to make this happen right off the top, where we begin with a pastoral daybreak scene on the old family farm and by the last line of the verse somebody is stepping off the barn roof.

I’ve always secretly wanted to hear Leonard Cohen or Marianne Faithfull sing this song.

—Ian Bell

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You can read all about Farini in Shane Peacock’s book The Great Farini – The High Wire Life of William Hunt. The song is part of the album Signor Farini and Other Adventures and can be downloaded from CD Baby.

Ian Bell is a traditional folk musician and singer-songwriter who also worked for many years as a curator in a number of Ontario museums. he has recorded several CDs of Canadian traditional music as well as his own compositions. He lives in Paris Ontario. www.ianbellmusic.ca

Apr 072013
 

McCabe phot (2)

For your Sunday morning delectation, over coffee and bagels or eggs and bacon or hominy and grits and the New York Times or the Sunday Star or the London Sunday Times, preferably while you’re still in bed, here is Marilyn McCabe singing Leconte de Lisle‘s “Les Roses d’Ispahan” put to music by Gabriel Fauré. Marilyn’s popular translation and performance pieces have a very special place at Numéro Cinq; she’s done a bunch and I have to say it’s a treat I keep returning to, just to switch onto NC, find Marilyn and shut my eyes listening to her voice. So I’ve collected all her the contributions onto one page to make this easier for readers. Just click on her name in this paragraph to be taken to The Marilyn McCabe NC Archive Page. For each of these pieces, Marilyn also provides a deft translation of the original poem.

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In keeping with the West’s long love affair with the idea of the East, Leconte de Lisle (1818-1894) invokes the mystery and seduction of Iran, its aromas and flora. He plays with formal constructions, limiting himself to four end words in French poetry’s traditional alexandrine or twelve-syllable lines.  When he put the poem to music, Gabriel Fauré dropped two of the original stanzas, but breathed something into the lines that the text does not quite offer. Translator/traitor indeed, my pale rendering into English fails the poem’s romance. The original’s oo’s and oi’s naturally purse the lips to a murmur, toward a kiss.

Marilyn McCabe

Leconte de Lisle

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Click on the PLAY arrow and listen to Marilyn McCabe.

Les Roses d’Ispahan

Les roses d’Ispahan dans leur gaîne de mousse,
Les jasmines de Moussoul, les fleurs de l’oranger
Ont un parfum moins frais, ont une odeur moins douce,
O blanche Leïla! que ton souffle léger.

Ta lèvre est de corail, et ton rire léger
Sonne mieux que l’eau vive et d’une voix plus douce,
Mieux que le vent joyeux qui berce l’oranger,
Mieux que l’oiseau qui chante au bord d’un nid de mousse.

O Leïlah, depuis que de leur vol léger
Tous les baisers ont fui de ta lèvre si douce,
Il n’est plus de parfum dans le pale oranger,
Ni de céleste arôme aux roses dans leur mousse.

Oh que ton jeune amour, ce papillon léger,
Revienne vers mon coeur d’une aile prompte et douce,
Et qu’il parfume encore la fleur de l’oranger,
Les roses d’Ispahan dans leur gaîne de mousse.

—Leconte de Lisle

 

The Roses of Ispahan

The roses of Ispahan, their sheath of moss,
the jasmines of Moussoul, their orange blossoms,
send forth a perfume less fresh, a scent less soft,
O pale Leila, than your breath, so light.

Your lips are of coral and your light
filled laugh more lovely than swift water, your voice more soft;
more joyful than the wind that shivers the orange blossoms,
than the bird that sings beside its nest of moss.

O Leilah, since all the kisses have fled light-
ly your lips, there is no soft
perfume in the pale orange blossoms,
nor scent of roses in their moss.

Oh, that it would return on light
wings, your love, that butterfly, quick and soft,
and perfume again rise from the orange blossoms,
the roses in their sheath of moss.

—Translation & Performance by Marilyn McCabe

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Marilyn McCabe’s poem “On Hearing the Call to Prayer Over the Marcellus Shale on Easter Morning” was awarded A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Orlando Prize, fall 2012, and is forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review. Her book of poetry Perpetual Motion was published by The Word Works in 2012 as the winner of the Hilary Tham Capitol Collection contest.

 

 

 

Jun 252011
 

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Another Numéro Cinq first: This time Marilyn McCabe sings and translates a poem by the turn-of-the-century French poet Guillaume Apollinaire but not simultaneously. Marilyn is an old friend (we last ran into each other helping to pour concrete at a friend’s house in Porter Corners, NY, a couple of weeks ago), a poet, translator and essayist who has already appeared twice on NC. But now you get to hear her sing! It’s a treat, eerie and beautiful.

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It became something of a tradition for French composers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to set lyric poems by their poetry contemporaries to mélodies for solo voice and piano. Inspired by the poetry of the likes of Verlaine and Baudelaire, composers from Berlioz to Saint-Saens created these musical settings, attempting to “translate,” in a way, the lyric into a musical format that created a form greater than the two elements.

I’m preparing a concert of some these art songs, and as part of my preparation, I’m doing translations of the poems. Here is a funny little poem by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) set to music by Francis Poulenc (1899-1963).

—Marilyn McCabe

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L’hotel by Guillaume Apollinaire, Music by Poulenc

Performed (& Translated) by Marilyn McCabe

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Click the button to play Marilyn McCabe singing “L’hotel.”

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L’hotel

Ma chambre a la forme d’une cage,
Le soleil passe son bras par la fenêtre.
Mais moi qui veux fumer pour faire des mirages,
J’allume au feu du jour ma cigarette,
Je ne veux pas travailler — je veux fumer.

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The Hotel

My room is like a cage.
The sun hangs its arms through the bars.
But I, I want to smoke,
to curl shapes in the air;
I light my cigarette
on the day’s fire.
I do not want to work —
I want to smoke.

—Guillaume Apollinaire, translated by Marilyn McCabe

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Marilyn McCabe’s poetry chapbook Rugged Means of Grace is due out from Finishing Line Press any minute now. Her poetry has appeared in magazines such as Painted Bride Quarterly, Nimrod, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Numéro Cinq. Her recent collaborative poetry chapbook with Elaine Handley and Mary Sanders Shartle won the Adirondack Center for Writing’s Best Poetry Book award for 2010. A Marilyn McCabe essay appeared in Hunger Mountain. She took classical voice lessons for ten years and performs classical or jazz concerts whenever the mood strikes.