pnArt

Many decades ago, when we were kids, my Mom used to sing us a song -

It’s three o’clock in the morning / I looked upon the wall

The spiders and the fireflies / were playing base-a-ball

The score was 5 to 2 / The spiders were ahead

I got so darned excited / I jumped right out of bed

I could still remember the tune perfectly as I sang it to my wife last night.    So today I set out to learn more about this song.   Who sang it?  Who wrote it?    It turns out to be 20th century example of folk music.

Googling for the lyrics I found dozens of variations.   Sometimes it’s three o’clock, sometimes it’s four o’clock or five o’clock.    My mother must have sweetened up the lyrics for us kids, because I found no other examples of fireflies.   In most of the songs the insects involved were bedbugs and something else - roaches, beetles, cooties (i.e., lice),  or mosquitoes (often “’squitoes” or “skeeters” to keep the rhythm).    I only found one other example of getting excited and jumping out of bed.    In all the other ones an insect hits a home run and knocks the singer out of bed.    The setting in my mother’s version was unspecified but in many of the ones I Googled it was jail.  Other times it was a shack, barracks, a tent, or just a bed at home.   A typical example:

Oh, five o’clock in the morning / I looked up on the wall –
The roaches and the bedbugs / Were having a game of ball
Oh, the score was six to nothing / The roaches were ahead –
The bedbugs hit a home run / And knocked me out of bed

The origins of the song are hazy.    The earliest reference I found was 1934.   My mother was a child of the Depression so that timing is right.   The lines are often cited as part of a camp song, usually with the title “A Jolly Bum” or “The Bum’s Song”.   When sung by folk singers it’s sometimes part of a song called “Portland County Jail”.    I also found mutiple versions in songs about Army life.   Almost all the performers I saw named were so obscure they don’t even appear in Rhapsody, which has an impressively large database.    The one exception is that two sources claim that Bruce Springsteen sang it at the Bridge School Benefit Concert of 28 Oct 1995 at Shoreline Amphitheatre, Mountain View, CA, but I couldn’t locate a recording of this.

This website has a collection of some variations:  http://rolandanderson.se/bedbugs.php

And here’s a discussion of “Portland County Jail” by a group of folksingers:  http://www.mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=8265

All of the references I found only described the lyrics, not the music.   Locating the tune was interesting.  On Rhapsody I searched for “o’clock in the morning”.  I found dozens of “Three O’Clock in the Morning” references.   This looked promising.  I clicked on one, which turned out to be an instrumental, but the tune was exactly what my mother sang!    Farther down the Rhapsody list I saw a version by the Andrews Sisters with the Glenn Miller Band.   I played it.  It was a love song about dancing the night away -  nothing to do with bugs playing baseball - but it had the same melody.       I also spotted a version by B.B. King.    Blues and county jails often go together so I played that.  No luck -  just a lonely man missing his woman, but also lacking bugs and sports.  In the end I listened to every vocal I could find with a promising title, but I never found anyone actually singing it.

If anyone reading this can locate a recording of those lyrics actually being sung, I’d be interested in hearing it.  Thanks in advance.

Collaborative creation with strangers; borrowing bits of music and making something new;  adding your own ideas or verses to someone else’s work;  applying an old song to a new social or political situation – and not an intellectual property right to be seen.

Web 2.0?   Open source?   No - traditional folk music.

For centuries, long before there were record companies and the DMCA, this was how people made their music.   Folk music really was the “people’s music”, arising from their shared experiences and expressing their feelings and opinions.   The “same” song appeared in many guises, with new lyrics, different subject matter, or with changed endings.   Sometimes the sailor got the girl, sometimes he got hanged.  Sometimes Shenandoah was a Native American chief; sometimes Shenandoah was a river.  Change some lines and a protest song about the king’s taxes becomes a protest song about cruel mine bosses.  Change a few words and a windlass shanty becomes a logger’s shanty on the other side of the world.   Songs often referenced each other and the same stanzas would be borrowed and reappear in hundreds of different songs.

Traditional folk music is social history and one of the world’s finest interpreters of English folk music, Louis Killen, graced us at a Folk Song Society of Greater Boston house party in Brookline on June 11.

Killen, who’s 75, was born in northern England.   He lived in the US for several decades before recently returning to his native land.  He’s been a sailor and shipyard worker in both the US and UK and throughout it all he has gathered and recorded a vast collection of traditional music and he’s worked with Pete Seeger, Ewan MacColl, A.L. Lloyd, among many others.

Killen is best known for songs of the English miners, especially union and protest songs, and for sea shanties – sailors’ work songs used to establish a rhythm for hauling or other repetitive tasks.

The concert was wonderful.  Killen often sang unaccompanied, although on some songs he played a concertina.    The house party setting -  a Folk Song Society tradition -  made it seem much more like an informal gathering in a friend’s living room than a concert, even though there was a small admission fee.  Killen did his best to eschew many of the songs he’s best-known for, instead introducing us to some less well known material.   But he also sang some pieces we all knew and the room sang along.    Near the end of the evening both his voice and his memory started to give him trouble and this only served to remind me to treasure these moments with the old breed of folk singers.

And we had some special treats.   Another internationally-known folklorist, Norman Kennedy, from Aberdeen, Scotland, was in the room.   And he sang a long, fascinating, and very Scottish version of a song that I eventually recognized as a version of “Cruel Sister” (AKA “Binnorie” “Wind and the Rain”, “Two Sisters”, “Twa Sisters”)  but he was halfway through before I realized what it was.    And a member of the new generation of English folklorists, Sam Lee, from the English Folk Dance and Song Society, was also present and he, too, entertained us with his singing, offering new hope that this remarkable history written in music won’t be forgotten very soon.

As both an artist and buyer of art, few activities are more delightful to me than a good open studios or art walk.  Throw in live music and a nice June afternoon and I’m the happiest camper you ever met.

Sunday my wife and I attended the annual Beacon Hill Art Walk in Boston.  It had everything: art, music, sun, June.  Plus Porta-Potties -  no art event is complete without bathrooms.

In preparing for this blog entry I wanted to research similar events throughout New England.   But it’s impossible because there are so many of them!  

Boston alone hosts at least a dozen such events including this one along with open studios in the South End, Jamaica Plain, Fort Point, East Boston, and others throughout the calendar year.   In Cambridge, Somerville, Newton, Brookline, and on outward blossom countless more.   In Lowell we’ve had open studio and similar events for years, thanks to the efforts of some now defunct local arts magazines, artists’ groups such as the Arts League of Lowell and the Western Ave Studios, and various local civic organizations.

When my wife and I travel to Vermont and Maine in the summer and fall most years we seldom manage to get back home without spending some time at some local open studios we pass on the way.   This cottage industry seems to be growing so fast it makes Web 2.0 look pokey.

The Beacon Hill Art Walk has been going for 19 years.  It’s just on the Boston Side of the Salt and Pepper bridge over the Charles River.    The artwork, and the artists, are tucked into all the little alleys and courtyards and interior gardens that surprise and deflight visitors who, from a distance, only see solid brick residencies in that neighborhood.   And for artists who couldn’t claim a garden or courtyard for their work, tents and stalls were set up on sidewalks, in the Vilna Shul, and even under the elevated Red Line tracks.

The sheer artistic eclecticism of the Art Walk was amazing.  I think I saw every medium and style I’ve ever heard of, not to mention a few new ones.   The artists were all happy to describe their methods and techniques and I took notes in case I get the itch to try a few new things myself.    The quality was variable, but generally high.  Some of the artists were clearly professional and others were talented amateurs.    The prices were lower than what I would have expected at a show of this caliber.

One thing that sets the Beacon Hill Art Walk apart from others of its ilk is the music.   -  5 chamber ensembles - 2 string quartets, a string trio, a flute ensemble, and a string quintet.  Plus two klezmer bands, fiddle music, guitar music, Armenian music, Greek music, and native American flute!    This is due to the efforts of Ivy Turner, the Art Walk’s music coordinator and the very talented musicians who donate their time.   Musical art and visual art go together so well that I don’t know why all such events don’t do this.

Classical music in America has been getting grayer and grayer.     Although my wife and I are in our 50’s we sometimes feel like the youth brigade at traditional classical concerts in Greater Boston.   Audiences are moving away to retirement destinations, or just plain dying off and the old composers are not attracting enough young listeners.

The Boston Chamber Music Society, which we’ve subscribed to for many years, was recently forced to end its Friday evening concerts at Jordan Hall and fall back on a single Sunday evening concert at the Sanders Theater.   A few years ago, sensing their decline, the BCMS issued a questionnaire to their subscribers asking for advice.   My wife and I suggested expanding their program material to include more modern and living composers and composers from broader cultural traditions.

Apparently we were out-voted because the program didn’t change.  In the years we’ve attended their concerts we’ve heard every major piece written by Brahms, Dvořák, Beethoven, et al.   Many times.   The BCMS ensemble is second-to-none in their skill and command of this repertoire, and the music is beautiful, but really, enough is enough.

And yet . . . and yet, even as old listeners are dying off, young people are being drawn to the richness and subtlety of this music and are redrawing the map of the music to include the whole world.   The New England Conservatory and NPR produce a weekly radio program, From The Top, featuring jaw-dropping talent from teenagers across the US performing both traditional and contemporary classical music.   The host of the show, Christopher O’Riley, also gives solo piano concerts, and we attended one in West Palm Beach recently where he interspersed 19th century classical works with his own arrangements of songs by RadioHead.

And around the world small ensembles are gaining audiences and acclaim by widening the box.  One of our favorites is the Boston trio, Triple Helix who gave a marvelous concert recently in Groton featuring works by Shostakovich, Bright Sheng, and Piazzolla.

Last night we attended a concert by the Chameleon Arts Ensemble at the Goethe Institut in Boston.   The building is in a residential neighborhood on Beacon Street and the auditorium there is a long narrow hall apparently carved out of several living rooms or dining rooms in a row.  It features intricate rococo plaster reliefs on all the walls and ceilings, and the floor is flat so only the front rows have a good view.

And it was sweatingly hot.   But the reason why it was hot was because it was packed.   The seats were filled and more people were seated or standing on the sides or in the doorways.   And for the first time in years of classical concerts, my wife and I were among the older people in the room.  I never thought it would feel so good to feel old!

The concert was excellent and eclectic.   Starting with Schumann’s opus 73 fantasy, it included Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, the world premiere of Zhikr: Songs of Longing by Shirish Korde, (featuring soprano Elizabeth Keusch), Takemitsu’s Rain Spell, and Faure’s opus 45 piano quartet.

In terms of sheer technical virtuosity Chameleon is very good but not quite on the same plane as the BCMS.   But they make up for this by not being on the same plain as BCMS either -  the program and their performance of it was fresh, exciting and courageous.  On Spiegel im Spiegel, which has become a minor hit recently in the classical world, the instruments are left naked and exposed, especially the clarinet, so they have to be perfect.  Were they?  No, but somehow it didn’t matter and I was completely absorbed by the music.

The hit of the evening was the Korde, and the composer was there to receive the warm, enthusiastic response from the audience.   The piece uses 7 instrumentalists and a singer, and features extensive percussion plus a harp.   It’s a fresh and engaging work with African, Indian, and western flavors reflecting Korde’s own personal background.  When I got home I tried to find him on Rhapsody; I failed but any composer who makes me want to hear more has succeeded at something.

So classical music has a future after all, and I’ve found it in a long, hot, narrow room in Boston.

For non-classical music the streaming subscription services such as Rhapsody provide a rich source of content at a nearly adequate quality level. Recent improvements in the Sonos search tools make it easier than ever to search Rhapsody even without a computer booted, and almost every popular song I could ever want seems to be accessible. But I still relentlessly build up my own music library.

Why?

Four reasons:

Ownership I like to own my stuff. I don’t want my access to music to depend on my fleeting financial fortunes or decisions made in corporate meeting rooms or the success or failure of Rhapsody’s business model or the reliability of my network connections or whether all the unions between here and there are happy with their contracts. My own music on my own harddrive (with suitable backups, of course) is the key to sleeping well at night, and maybe even enjoying some bedtime music on my way to dreamland.

Portability I can listen to my own MP3’s anywhere I want - at work (where most companies don’t allow streaming), weeding in my garden, in my car on long drives, traveling overseas, or out for a run.

Searching/Tagging The MP3 tagging scheme seems to have been first designed by geeks with a degrees in musicology from the back of a matchbook, and it’s since mutated into more strains than the flu virus. But its sheer amorphousness and lack of definition makes it clay in my hands, and I’ve used the tags to create schemata that allow me to search, recognize and organize my music easily. All of this is lost when I have to rely on some third-party to notate the music I’m hearing.

Audio Quality Most music services stream at 128 kbps. While there are slight quality differences between formats – MP3, AAC, RealAudio - there is no format where 128 kbps is artifact-free for close listening. It’s fine for casual music doing chores around the house or background music for dinner, but listen closely with good headphones or earbbuds and at times you will have no doubt that it’s compressed My lossy-format standard is MP3, between 192 and 320 kbps VBR. By ripping the music myself I get to choose the codec and the parameters, and I get to adjust loudness and gapless settings as I see fit.

The vast majority of my music is transcoded from CD’s I own. This addresses all four of the issues above. In recent years I’ve been buying used CD’s, partly because they’re cheaper than new CD’s and partly to thumb my nose, within the bounds of the law, at a record-industry that remains in denial about what century this is. They don’t make a penny when I buy a used CD.   In even more recent years I’ve been buying MP3’s online from Rhapsody or Amazon, as their selection is finally starting to broaden to the point of practicality.

I have not been tempted to use P2P file sharing. I’ve been amazed at the rationalizations used by that crowd to convince themselves that what they’re doing is not wrong. It’s striking how an adolescent sense of entitlement can energize such creative thinking.  A few file sharers admit what they’re doing is illegal but try to ennoble it as a kind of civil disobedience for a greater cause.  I can accept a civil disobedience argument in support of a great moral struggle – say, ending Jim Crow or apartheid, or achieving colonial independence.   But civil disobedience in the cause of pampered American or European teenagers getting more free stuff is too much of a stretch.

We haven’t had any real rain in so long that whatever reserve of moisture the soil once had is gone. Every day I pour water directly from the hose, sans nozzle, onto the soil around my squash and tomatoes for a long time and the ground just drinks it in until it disappears. For awhile my plants perk up, but the next day they’re folded and limp again. I’m probably violating the local watering ordinance but what can I do? All the towns around here have tightened up -here we can water lawns 3 hours a day, every other day. Other towns have banned watering entirely.

The rest of my life has been dry, too - no new poems or paintings, no shoots scheduled - I miss my models - and at work I got a new computer before my Bermuda vacation and it still isn’t entirely configured! I went to work on Sunday of the long, Labor Day weekend to try to get some work done and got messages about missing libraries in our software development environment when I tried to build. I work for a Famous Huge International Corporation that You’ve Heard Of, and I cannot understand why even the simplest things are so long and complicated. At home I use essentially the same software development tools as at work and when I buy a new PC I’m up and running in a few hours.

My one big accomplishment in the last few days was finally launching my new music blog: Music4Peter. Music4Peter will cover all my musical interests - from concert reviews to technology to the music business, and unlike the little personal blog you’re reading now, I’m hoping to generate some real traffic on it.

One of my first entries was a review of the Bela Fleck and the Flecktones concert my wife and I attended in Lowell on Friday night. Outstanding. 

Today we went to Crane’s Beach in Ipswich and stayed there until the sun set, turning the sand and water into ever deeper shades of gold and orange. Afterwards we ate lobster at Woodman’s, a local establishment that for years has maintained legendary status among fried clam and lobster lovers. People drive in from surrounding states and stand in line for an hour for the privilege of eating there, but I don’t get it: my lobster tonight was good, but no better than what I could make at home by tossing one in a pot. The cole slaw was above average; the clam chowder was below average - milky, not creamy. Everything is served in cardboard and styrofoam containers under conditions I would generously characterize as Spartan.

But the worst thing about Woodman’s is its sheer chaos - you place your order and collect your soup and sides at one counter; the lobster is purchased in a separate transaction in a different spot and if you want a beer you buy that in a third place. And it has to be the right third place because if you want to eat upstairs you can’t buy the beer downstairs.  The stairs are on the outside of the building and you can’t take a beer outside in that town, so they have an upstairs bar and a downstairs one and big signs warning you about this. My wife and I bought our drinks downstairs took them upstairs and somehow managed to avoid arrest.  Assembling a meal at Woodman’s is like a Dungeons and Dragons game where you wander about a maze of twisty little passages collecting bits of treasure and avoiding danger. But the treasure at Woodman’s wasn’t valuable enough to make the quest worthwhile.

Last night at the FAWC Major Jackson gave an outstanding reading of his works -  funny, poignant, touching and rich and satisfying in its complexity.    His is a fascinating story and it was his interview on NPR’s Radio Open Source that prompted me to take this workshop.    Here is a link to Major Jackson’s website.

Our workshop continues.  Two of my poems have been read and critiqued - Poet Laureate and Just Stop It.   The former enjoyed limited benefit from the comments because of the problem I mentioned in the last entry - everyone went down a rat hole of what they thought I intended and made suggestions about how to do that thing better, but it wasn’t what I was trying to do!   In today’s reading of Just Stop It Major corralled the classroom swerve and I got outstanding and very useful feedback.

There are interesting questions raised by this problem.   At my company, where I work as a design engineer, we accept the idea that successful products are market-driven.   We begin every product with a detailed market analysis and as we discover more about what the customers want we alter our designs accordingly.    That’s the way to sell products.  I know artists who do the same thing - one fellow member of the Arts League of Lowell loves to paint nudes but seldom does so because there’s little market for them.   And I know at least one poet who pays minute attention to what the editors of her target journals are looking for - the better to get published.

But I proclaim that I’m the artist here and I want to write my poems and paint or photograph my subjects.  My goal in any class or workshop is to make my art, but learn to make it to a higher standard.    This position is hardly without controversy - going back at least to Pollock there has lately been a reluctance for visual artists to try to “control” their art but, instead, to allow it to emerge and develop a life of its own.  And in literary theory a similar development has arisen from hermeneutics as authors despair of controlling the meaning of their work - indeed, in some quarters even the effort to exercise control is seen as an expression of some sort of patriarchal or imperialistic hegemony.    No one in this class has suggested such impure motives but in general I’ve received pushback at many times in recent years when I seek to capture my own visions and call them mine.