tulip-beak in my garden, sometime last week.These are spring-songs -- not explicitly, but they do carry something very springlike in them. Go & listen, I have put them on yousendit & they are lovely.
Petite Suite: V. Bagpipes -- Béla Bartók (Bartók plays Bartók)
Lovely piano runs, birds hurrying about in the spring. It's all jaunty & has that loping sort of urgency that all Eastern European dances have. (His whole Petite Suite is dances, Ukrainian & Wallachian & whirling.) & I really love this recording of Bartók playing his own pieces, all crackly & gentle. Nagyon szép!
Transliterator -- DeVotchKa (A Mad & Faithful Telling)
More glorious keyboard, jumpy & running around with string-sweeps... it is a brilliant song & I am in love. However, because I am a linguistic dork, this line sticks out & pokes me: You better mean what you say /why don't you say what you mean / I never get anywhere / I get the space in between. It seems to me the narrator is really talking about the process of translation here, not transliteration -- the former deals more with meanings lost in those gaps & gulfs between subjects... whereas transliteration is the switching of alphabets, & doesn't deal so much with semantic fields. However, I don't care, because the song, his voice, makes me rather euphoric, & his use of the word really takes nothing away from that feeling.
2 comments:
Omnireply!
I like Bartók playing a minute of Bartók. I like the other song, too, on first spin – the nod-along keyboard runs, the chagrined vocals. I like your anti-apathy push. I like your take on veg*ism and how it plays across cultures. I like spelling and saying borshch. I like the beet-poem. I like the word victuals. I like the directive taste often.
thank you for your like-ings!
(that is not a word, but that's okay)
also, borshch is one of my favourite words of all, too...
yay!
& i like 'victuals' too. it sounds so... wholesome. there's also 'comestibles' which is fun to say, but it seems a little more pretentious.
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