The Songs We Sing

or, how we understand traditional music’s importance.

woodland winter songs

Traditional Numbers

We usually sing old songs, the ones with such deep history that no-one remembers who made them up. Throughout many eras of life on these islands, such songs have just tagged along, a mysterious but comforting part of existence. The sun came up, and the songs were there. No barcode proclaimed their origins. They belonged to no-one, or to everyone, to families, and tribes, as well as individual singers. Like the cliffs, valleys, birds and rivers, like the days of the week and the buildings all around, they were undeniable monuments of the landscape.

Till song collectors wrote them down, early archivists like Cecil Sharp and Baring Gould, these old songs were just a background hum to the rhythms of everyday life, so obvious they were almost unnoticeable. Like the English Elm, they drew attention only when they started to disappear.

It’s these ‘traditional’ songs that we love to sing. We sing them unaccompanied, without electric amplification, in two-part harmonies. That’s just me and Ed, on some drizzly back-street, with our bags stashed in a doorway, crooning a plough-song when everyone’s gone home.

background

Instruments and amps are hard to walk with, and pure voice is the oldest way to make music, with the least possible boundaries between the performer and the listener. Before the industrial age, instruments were specialized tools, crafted at great expense, unavailable to most folks. Of course, it’s a great aspect of modern life, worth celebrating, that strange instruments can be ordered with a few clicks.

But singing songs will always be free for everyone, the common pursuit, and as such, these traditional songs have been the soundtrack for real life all over Britain, for countless generations.

It can be dangerous to call the songs ‘folk’. This little word brings unwanted knee-jerk associations – stale ale, a muddy finger in one ear, and the twang of ancient rebellion seething beneath unruly forests of beard. This is misleading, because slightly true. What is certain, is that good songs are good songs, and if they have survived for hundreds of years, well they’re even better. They are not just silly, or funny, nor are they all ‘ral-dee-fiddle-o’. They address key issues, whose relevance doesn’t fade: love and social taboo, murder, the abuse of power and the perils of ignorance, the rich/poor divide, social injustice, and all possible complications of sex, death and farming.

The word ‘traditional’ is also unsatisfying. Let us be clear, this word does not mean a thing dead and gone. It signifies something that’s been around for a long time, and still continues. Traditions link the past and the future, they live in the present (or else they’re called antiquities), and they bring meaning to our continued existence on these Islands of Britain.

Song Fruit

Songs, like fruit, are delicious, enjoyable and sweet in the flesh of them, healthsome for performer and listener alike. But fruit are not just made for the pleasure of their flesh; they have an agenda all of their own. For fruit contain seeds, from which all future fruit shall spring. It is the seeds, not the fruit, that make new life, ensuring growth.

Just so with singing: each time you take in a song, not just to consume it, but to receive in your fertile depths, you’ll be ensuring the seed of song may adapt and survive. You will be hosting it in new soils and conditions, to guarantee its journey onwards.

By re-interpreting, invigorating, and sharing song-traditions, in the only available context (the here and now), songs are refreshed, and reborn as a modern configuration of meaningful associations. Songs are repositories of complex DNA. They replicate and evolve with each new-grown expression, while simultaneously retaining their core identity as a storage point of culture, information, history and knowledge.

Each new engendering of a song is a natural and unintentional hybridization of the originally learned version. Depending on the soil in which it is grown (the singer’s proclivities, voice, and influences), a new (but fundamentally similar) variant of ‘the song’ is created, which (if successful) becomes ‘the song’ itself.

in Bradford on Avon

We can carry the comparison further (which doesn’t mean we should, but we shall), in saying that recorded songs are like chilled, frozen or juiced fruit, a once-living thing that has undergone a process of stabilizing, preserving or homogenizing. Transported far from their home soils, there is necessarily a slow steady loss of original flavour, character, and fertility.

For recorded music always involves money. Expensive studio processes, skilled people, marketing and packaging, need cash repayments. But money introduced to musical transmission brings a new focus, and creates a less naive, more complex societal procedure. In this light, songs and music profit from their unavailability, keeping them in controlled channels.

We are trying to say that a recorded musical event is very different, in many ways, to a live spontaneous song sung in a village pub, or at home, by a mother to her child. Technically, it is the same song, thus the same thing. But the motivations, processes and the actual results are all very different. It’s a bit like walking and driving a car – you could say they are both varieties of travel, only at different speeds. But they too are vastly different events, like a tree and a table.

The Orchard at Large

The basic premise we’re peddling is that humans are gardeners, custodians of land and culture. That’s what our species is here to do – take care of other things, and create beauty. We are all part of the cultural landscape, and if we wish for our song-gardens to grow, we need to care for the songs that choose us as hosts, by singing them as often, as well, and to as many people as possible.

Llandeiloes Singing

The best way to make a song grow is to lovingly introduce it into your musical garden. Overheard on some wind, the seed is taken, planted, propagated, protected, and enjoyed. Then we, and our children, can enjoy the fruit onwards. So, we’re saying, if you want more good fruit bushes to grow, you must reward a really wonderful berry by pooing it outside somewhere, in good soil, and fair light. Don’t just wash its seeds away in Thos. Crapper’s flushing devices.

If this sounds strange, well it is only recently anything but utterly normal, right across the metaphor. For most of human time, on hearing a brilliant song, we’d have gone off singing it to friends and family. But today, the ‘normal’ behaviour is to take music inwards, to consume more and more of it on headphones, on mp3 and radio, and very rarely to spread it by raw analogue song output. We instead replicate perfect digital simulacrum of the same song, in the same way, by the same artists, passing recordings about, each in separate silent spaces, each imagining we are really there and the song is sung for us.

This is disempowering, and boring. It makes us punters, the entertained, rather than creators of culture. People (folk) make music. It is not an elite game, but is common as brambles and free as breath. But in our culture of industrial music consumption, output is most usually a perfect replica of the original, copied on disks for listening, but not singing. Like a banana plantation, every tree is a clone of the next.

gig

Of course, it’s still great to get bananas in England, even though they must be paid for, and cannot be found wild or grown. But there is a quality in native wild things, in songs that have been sung through human throats for generations, over those downloaded onto mp3 players. Wild food is undoubtedly stronger and more potent than its deviant cousins, the domesticated foodstuffs of mass monoculture.

Supermarket food is enslaved food, which grows solely by the will and technology of human owners. Wild food grows by its own self-motivation, by its ancestral expertise, by the same means as the first of its kind. Against all odds, in spite of all difficulty, it lives and thrives.

Just so, the value of wild-song, those old songs sung by people around you, right in front of you, is much greater than hearing something recorded on the radio, all complicated and polished, solid in its form, and seedless. Wild Song is the fundamental and original magical technology of music, available for anyone to use and enjoy, when and where they like.

As such, songs become valuable and exciting things. Holding and singing them makes you the direct carrier of a core tradition, and puts the song’s future in your own hands. Anyone can take part – and everyone does. Just by learning and singing an old song, you join the huge number of people who previously sung and changed and upheld the song. It is like suddenly being part of a new hereditary clan, and being given a whole new set of ancestors, who stretch into the past and future.

welsh botanic garden entry

The Long Journey Somewhere

Who knows why songs, fruit, traditions and people take such long paths, through so many constantly adapting forms? Who knows why some songs become lodged inside certain skulls, while others bounce off unwanted? They fall on ears, to settle, grow, and form new adaptations, to encode and cause further generative releases. In other places, they leave only an indent, the memory of a feeling, and nothing more.

Who knows where the song goes? Who knows what motivates a tree to make fruit? Is it a blind robotic impulse to survive, or is there some destination waiting ahead, a strange attractor set in an irresistible future? To create such delicious fruit, such unique and refreshing flavours, seems to indicate a tree’s passion and intelligence. And the same is true of songs. They seem to have an internal intelligence, a clever survival method and a destiny being pursued. The life of a song is very long, an unknowable journey of cultural osmosis. Who knows what paths a song has taken, before it reaches you? And yet – it has arrived here, in your head this morning, on your tongue this afternoon, obeying an internal impulse all of its own.

Songs move in mysterious ways. A big showy performance might bounce right off, while a passer-by’s hummed melody can haunt for years. Songs operate on levels we do not fully understand. How many times have you been thinking of a lyric, only to hear someone else start to sing it? Being born into an unknowable past, by mysterious people whose stories we cannot know, traditional songs have followed the most miraculous of paths to reach us today.

We are just their stepping stones, evolutionary moments in their greater development and life-cycle. We are their vehicles, and they use to continue and spread themselves. And every song is travelling on its own journey, toward the right time and place, when the right person will sing them, to achieve exactly the right thing.

Frampton Court Songs

How this may happen, the awaited destiny of the songs we sing, is of course entirely conjectural. History doesn’t write such things down. But the cumulative steps of destiny, the entire series of happenings that have caused the song to get where it is today, defy chance and coincidence. Despite such long odds, every song has passed such a process, step-by-step, right through hundreds of lives throughout every living moment of history.

And perhaps it will be you, holding the song at its great moment of release. That little number you’ve sung while washing up with for the last 10 years, is maybe just waiting for you to sing it out, give it breath, release it, and let it do its work. It may then effect another’s mind, with its deep soul magic, to change the world we live in. This is not mystic cherry-chat, but a solid nod to the mechanistic ‘cause and effect’ of cultural influence. A lament about fishermen, sung in the ears of a future executive planning-officer, could make a serious difference to the reality of life for coastal communities. A song can definitely change the world.

Please, then, take seriously the eating of fruit, and the receiving of traditions, and songs. Take them in well. Share them. Do not just consume one and demand another. Ensure they are growing well in the wild, and in your garden, till such boundaries are overrun. Be grateful for the joys that the old songs will provide throughout your life, so freely and so merrily.

And do not forget, that you yourself are the expression of deeds done before, like the apples, like the songs. You are the outcome so far, of every season’s growth and death, every pain, hope, passion and disaster that has occurred before you. You are the purpose, the result, of everything that has come before. We all are. All of us, alive, the freshest fruit of evolution, and each of us singing in the good old future.

We look forward, and hope to see you there.

]]> http://www.awalkaroundbritain.com/knowledge/culture/arts/the-songs-we-sing/feed/ 0 http://www.awalkaroundbritain.com/knowledge/culture/arts/cartoon-cut-out-ed-and-will-2 http://www.awalkaroundbritain.com/knowledge/culture/arts/cartoon-cut-out-ed-and-will-2#comments Sun, 25 Jul 2010 20:01:06 +0000 admin http://www.awalkaroundbritain.com/knowledge/culture/arts/ A man from St. Austell once sent us a picture.

We were flattered, because it was of us, and it was very good.

To find out more, please read on…

This imago-weaver is called Trystan Mitchell, an illustrator of great skill and renown. His images grace all sorts of books, and he is (we believe) even writing his own Wooden Book. He sign-wrote the Rick Stein fish restaurant in Padstow, the Speaking Tree in Glasto, and is a remarkable source of meaningful coloured lines.

We say: Trystan is a sculptor in the medium of story. To understand this, grab a look-see round his webbles:

Red Bubble

Studio Bigfoot

Bigfoot Blanket Blog

Flickr

One of the more surprising good things Trystan did for us, was to create these cut-out paper models, depicting us cartoonly.

copyright Trystan Mitchell

They are part of his range of ‘Noggins‘, paper-toys and action figures. Trystan has made a whole society of these papery peoples. They can thrive in all sorts of scenarios, and with a little ventriloquy, they’ll sing too.

To download the instructions to make these cut-outs, press HERE. Trystan recommends that they are printed on medium-weight card.

We like such cartooning. It reminds us that our journeys represent simpler shapes and older symbols than we can see. It tells us that the archetypes we sometimes inhabit are not ours, that this rambling life is not our idea, that we’re just borrowing it awhile.

For other prompts in the art of the being alivehuman, keep looking at Trystam’s other works.

And to buy images of the good old future, the wayward past, and the rum denizens of all their borderlands, have a hunt around HERE.

Sincere respect to Trystan Mitchell.

Good luck. If you succeed, please send us a photo…

Press More for cut-outs

The Ed Noggin

page 1 of cut-out Ed

Page 2 of the Ed monster

Page 3 cut out Ed

page 4 of the Ed bot

The Will Noggin

page 1 cut-out Will

page 2 Will bot

Page 3 make a Will man

Page 4 Will cut-quick

.

Her on lond, a tale withoute lesinges:

.

Thre folk of man wandringe geten livinge,

.

Thre menes song singeth of haslewode,

.

Hem wend awei – the best of al manne fode.

.

Hem slepen al withouten hous or hom

.

For liken hem in wildernesse to rom.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Thomas Hardy – Tess of the D’Urbervilles

May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
The rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of his hand.

May green be the grass you walk on,
May blue be the skies above you,
May pure be the joys that surround you,
May true be the hearts that love you.

(Helen Frosch)

At first it was unwanted, because we always judge books by their approximate mass and size.

But the back cover blurb revealed it was written with the inspiration from the song “Tom of Bedlam”, a pre-Shakespearian English song which we have just learned.

So the book fitted into our plot, and came along.

This journal is a twisting ride through a mind’s madness, its self-aware out-of-placeness, it’s miraculous inability and rigourous intention to not be at ease. Albion Moonlight is a character who refuses to be anything other than his own most difficult self, he finds his zenith and his nadir, and any truth he uncovers he ruthlessly destroys by his curious and meticulous mind.

Reading this book is like a dose of bluebell root. It is mildly narcotic, and manufactures (uncovers?) a space in the brain that does not feel as though it should be there.

This book does not help promote restful sleep, even as part of a balanced intake. No, this is not easy-reading; it is a challenge to the percieved heart of things, a javelin in the mouth of easy rationalizing.
In small snippets, this book is amazing. But to trapise through it, is hard going, a bitter digestion. Its fairest blessing  came with the turning of the last page, when it was all over.

Like the end of a fever, one can look up again, and see that this world and Albion’s are not seamlessly entwined. There is relief.

Read on for quotes:

Here are quotes:

“The question is not: do we believe in God? but rather: does God believe in us? And the answer is: only an unbeliever could have created our image of God, and only a false God could be satisfied with it.”

“Man has been corrupted by his symbols. Language has killed his animal.”

“What are values? Is what happens in a grasshopper’s head a ‘value’?

“We believe in you. There is no danger. It is not getting dark. We love you.”

“My tree is a green tree. My father’s ghost sings in its branches’

“Do not liberate the poor: destroy them – and with them all the jackal-Stlains that feast on their hideous, shrunken bodies. How the Church and the false revolutionaries draw together: love the poor, for they are humble. I say hate the poor for the humility which keeps their faces pressed into the mud. The poor are the product of a false and cruel society; but they are also the corner-stone of that society.”

“The Son of Man – my son, and yours, not God’s; because we made God and we are Gods.”

“I believe that man is God. It is yourself that you must worship.”

“I get up angrily and cross to the dead clerk. “Got a match?” i say. I hald expect that he will give me one. Instead, with a beautiful, slow movement, he opens his eys and says: “I haven’t one. Will this do?” and as he reaches out his hand, a blast of hell-fire shoots out and burns off my eyebrows.”

“Women always watch your pimples when you try and talk as though your animal were as old and wise as theirs.”

“He made the word a knife.”

“In this world where only our organs are sane.”

“May you live to die in love and rest.”

“How kind you are to lie to me”

“None born kows the dark meaning in the fish’s eye.”

“We never admire a man; we admire our admiration for him”

“The ocean asks nothing of the rain”

“illusion is the suitcase in which we carry our proper hearts.”

“In future, men and women will write as though writing were their only dull tool – which is quite true.”

“Our only plight is that we are alive”

“The stupid say, “would that i had lived then”, but they mean: “it would be better to be dead now”

“It is clearly my duty to come just at the right time, saying exactly the right thing.”

“The spirit’s life is profoundly and organcally a part of the world’s. The mind borrows from the affairs of the greatest men, the colour and theme of the spirit derives from him who is most degraded and brutish on the whole earth. The mind can take flight into the world, because it is not purely of the world; the spirit cannot escape, because it is the world – it is, in fact, the only world which the mind can know.”

“We believe in men who have been pictured to us, but never in the men about us – and especially do not believe in ourselves.”

“in our cities we have tolerated noise and dirt that would sicken a half-witted ape.”

“We have pushed the nose of our culture into the shit of our self-interest.”

“Our artists have only one desire: and that is, that their works may not live. There is somehting old-fashioned and uncouth in writing for posterity. How can they send us cheques when we’re dead?”

“swiftly flies the arrow that has a heart to house in”

“young men share themselves; old men their houses”

“many people never live in all of themselves”

“no man who ever stood up to authorit but did so with a sense of guilt. How they have trapped us! That’s the secret of their power, for deep in us all is a sense that they must be right. How else account for the defensive attitude of political martyrs? Why do revolutionists make a case for themselves? through wht propulsion? Surely they know that the State will not recognize the truth in their plea, will not honour the arguments which they advance. Why is it not possible for one man to say to the State: there is no need for me to offer a defence – it is you who are on trial; what have you to say for yourself?”

“Men say we are American. Men say we are English, French, Dutch. That is a lie, There are only human beings. WE are not motor-cars or chunks of soap that we need labels.”

“the poem of her walk…the sprung rhythm of her swaying buttocks…what a pavillion of rapture”

“Great art must possess an absolute flaw at its very core; otherwise it would be an abuse of the imperishable frailty of all things that exist, and we could say with complete truth that the apple is the most beutiful object under the sun. Art must add to the mystery.”

“That which is not daring is nothing.”

“Very good hanging weather”

“Surely four is not two and two: there is no way of slipping the twos into each other so fast that you can get rid of that little ‘and’. But where di d we get the two? One (and) one? we tried that. There can only be one thing in the world. Each is its own part of all.”

“nothing quite happens like ramming a woman happens”

“without the despondancy of the garlic rose for the nun’s cat”

“without the nightmare as the rag is wiped the thighs along”

“without the boast of the cyclone to the butterfly and the wren”

“what gorgeous monkeys we are”

“and that intensity of wakefulness from which there is no recovery”

“the word is the thing the wind says to the dead”

“the word is the white candle at the foot of the throne”

“the word is the way something floats that cannot be seen”

“and a merry go-to-hell goodnight to all of you”

“The slaves have been sold to themselves”

“There is no poison so fatal as breath”

“There is no joy so profound as the just-dead’s”

“there is no desire but for the good. But there is no hatred but for the lie. But there is no spirit which all of us may not be housed in”

“So it is the duty of the artist:to discourage all traces of shame; to extend all boundaries; to establish problems; to ignore solutions; to omit nothing;l to contradict everything; to tinkle a warning when mankind strays; to wound deeper than the soldier; to heal this poor obstinate monkey once and for all; to laugh at every situation; to besiege all their cities; to follow every false track; to verify the irrational; to exaggerate all things; to inhabit everyone; to experience only experience; to deviate at every point; to offer no examples; to dismiss all support; to multiply all opinions; to masquerade as the author of every platitude; to expose himself to every ridicule; to contrive always to be caught with his pants down; to attach no importance whatsoever to his activity; to return always to the renewing stranger; to be treacherous when nothing is to be gained; to reel in an exquisite sobriety; to defend the unreal at the cost of his reason; to obey each outrageous impulse.”

“Night’s hair tickles the bright forehead of the city”

“There is no crisis in the banquet hall of the soul”

“Crush their toes with the jawbones of a sonnet”

“Girls. I thank you God for having made them. The pure fruit of all that is beautiful.”

“The great writer will heal the hurt where God’s hand pressed too hard in His zeal to make us more than animals”

“The hunter always has the face of the thing he tracks”

“The Guilt is God’s”

“The automorphistic cataclysm”

“Strong is the male for his lassie, strong to get and go to sleep”

“There is no darkness anywhere. There are only sick little men who have turned away from the light.”

And those are quotes.

Enjoy, please.

And consider reading the book yourself…