"¡Yao!": Encountering Q-Pop

After reading this article on BBC Mundo by Alejandro Millán Valencia a few weeks back, I’ve had the pleasure of encountering the musical artist LENIN, stage name of Lenin Tamayo, the 23-year-old Peruvian singer who is at the forefront of Q-Pop (Quechua Pop). Having embraced K-Pop (Korean Pop) as a source of camaraderie as a marginalized youth in school, he now combines that genre’s sounds and aesthetics with Peruvian elements rooted in traditional, indigenous Andean culture: clothing, dance, customs, and the Quechua language.

Photo Source: https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/peruvian-singer-aims-to-introduce-q-pop-/7231045.html

According to a 2021 AP News article by Franklin Briceño, the Quechuan language lies at the center of long-standing tensions in Peru that have social, economic, and ethnic ramifications. Quechua had once been the lingua franca of the Incan Empire, but following Spanish colonization it became heavily discriminated against, outlawed in the 1780s following an indigenous uprising and intensely villainized during the atrocious civil war that began in the 1980s.* This prejudice has persisted and intensified to the point at which today Peruvian Quechua speakers have internalized “linguistic shame,” a mechanism that Ingrid Piller states is directly linked to the normalization and acceptance of oppression.** For this reason, LENIN’s macaronic songs, featuring lyrics in both Quechua and Spanish are a significant expression of cultural identity, a counterargument to the current state of the language and culture which celebrates love and fun, self-expression and cultural roots.

The song ¿IMAYNATA? hits a lot of these themes. The verses in Spanish drip with swagger and self-confidence, declaring in a declamatory style, “I live without fear of walking / Only love and freedom,” and “I tell you in Spanish, in Quechua, or in English / the language doesn’t matter one way or the other” (translations are mine or Google Translate). The pre-chorus in Quechua, however, is a slow build in a higher vocal register, resonating with a gnawing doubt, “What are you looking at / When your heart is dead?” The chorus, still in Quechua, has few words, all confidence, answering the question “¿Imaynata? [How do you do it?]” with syncopated exclamations of “¡Yoa!” and “¡Walk!” weaved through a somewhat pirate-esque riff.***

Valencia’s BBC article includes an interview in which Lenin expresses some of his views on singing in Spanish versus Quechua. He says that a language like Spanish is full of innuendo and double meanings, offering more room for hypocrisy. Quechua, on the other hand, has less equivocation and is more direct in the way that it connects the speaker to the world. In Lenin’s view, this means that a Quechua speaker has first-hand contact with emotions and nature. This comes across in the song KUTIMUNI which contrasts distorted, mechanistic, or anxious sections in Spanish with sudden shifts to luminous and tranquil parts in Quechua where one can almost hear the whisper of birdsong.

Photo Source: https://www.behance.net/gallery/144071069/Inca-Kola-Murales

Perhaps the most summational demonstration of the message of indigenous cultural revival and celebration is the song INTIRAYMI (which happens to be my childen’s absolute favorite to sing with and dance to). The title translates to “Sun God Festival” and is in reference to an Incan festival that celebrated the winter solstice, which has since been revived in several South American contexts. Lenin taps into the joy of this festival with a rousing Spanish/Quechua chorus: “It’s Inti Raymi / Let’s go dance / It’s Inti Raymi / Let’s go dance / Because the night is young / Everyone sing / Because life is one / It’s a festival!” His music video goes further with images of the sun / Inti, the offering of sacred cocoa leaves, performances of the ancient scissor dance mixed with modern break dancing, Aya Huma masks, a mural by Adriana Hiromi and Jade Rivera in the Barranco district of Lima that declares “Hagamos un Perú que nos dé gusto [Let’s make a Peru that gives us pleasure]”, and a crowd of young and excited people celebrating in the streets.

I’m still discovering the riches of LENIN’s music and especially look forward to exploring it with my children who can’t seem to get enough… Cuando Estoy Aquí and AMARULLAQTA deserve a listen. It also has me wondering about genre hybridity and minority languages. While a conservative approach to the matter of music + minority language tends to stick to strictly traditional styles, futuristic approaches consider how old and new might be combined to create something thrillingly alive. While some genres seem to require linguistic conformity to English, others seem well suited to and even encouraging of linguistic variety. Afterall, the genre of K-Pop (Korea) interacts not only with Q-Pop (Quechua), but also J-Pop (Japan), C-Pop (China), and T-Pop (Thailand). And heavy metal’s proclivity for sub-genrification and theatricality provides lots of room for linguistic variation; Swiss folk-metal band Eluveitie sings some of their songs in Gaulish, a nostalgically dark / darkly nostalgic act of cultural revivification. Perhaps there are other ways that hybrid genres can encourage singers in minority languages to imagine a future where, to quote LENIN’s song INTIRAYMI, “the sun comes every moment ever closer.”

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*Briceño’s article mentions an interesting incident in which Peruvian Prime Minister Guido Bellido delivered a speech to Congress in Quechua, prompting some strong reactions from those in power who largely could not understand him. Translated, his message was equally stinging: “We have suffered for five hundred years. We walked slowly through hills and snowy peaks to arrive here in Congress, and have our voice heard… It’s time to change. It’s time for all of our country’s residents to look at each other as equals, without discrimination.”

** This pattern of dehumanization is all too common in historical narratives of colonizers attempting to erase the culture of the colonized, often through linguistic shame taught to children in (often forced) school settings: Scottish Gaelic in the UK, Tahitian in French Polynesia, all Native American languages in North America, Spanish in California, etc.

***This is the song that instantly became a favorite of my kids as the chorus is very easy to sing and has such a sweet groove. Plus the Quechua word for “walk” is “puriy,” which we initially mistook for “booty,” and who wouldn’t want to shout that out while driving in the car as an elementary school kid?

The Child and the Book Conference: The Magic of Sound

Kicking off a rather full spring / summer of academic conferences, I attended a The Child and the Book conference May 15 through 17 in Podgorica, Montenegro.

Conference

This was my very first experience with The Child and the Book, an international conference launched in 2004 that provides a forum for the exchange of scholarly research on all things pertaining to children’s and young adult’s literatures. While I enjoy hearing talks on all manner of subjects, as a musicologist in children’s literature conferences I normally have to do a fair amount of sleuthing in order to find presentations that deal, however obliquely, with music. Not so this time, as the theme was The Magic of Sound: Children’s Literature and Music. I had the pleasure of experiencing a wide range of papers on things as diverse as the many musical afterlives of Lewis Carrol’s “Jabberwocky”, musicalizations of masculinities in Disney’s Hercules, analyses of the ear-worm song “What does the Fox say?”, childism in Javanese children’s songs, film adaptations of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, a close analysis of Fosse’s picturebook The Fiddler Girl, post-WWII pedagogical texts with fanciful illustrations that mirror (and are meant to teach) sheet music notation, gendered power dynamics in Disney ballroom dance scenes, and the sonic significances of Milton’s Paradise Lost. My own presentation “Casting the Spell: Musicalizing Fairytales and Märchenfrauen in Imaginative Children’s Music” took a look at the overlap in social and aesthetic significance between domestic piano music and literary fairytales, using examples of works by Renaud de Vilbac, Genady Osipovich Karganov, and Hans Huber. It was particularly fun to use a quotation by the indomitable scholar Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and then to chat with her about it afterwards! They also have a great early scholars collective called the Grow Reading Group that did a thoughtful and interesting session that connected academics navigating academia in the beginning stages of their careers.

One of my favorite presentations – “Female Fury in Picturebooks” by Rosalyn Borst – drew a line between the emotional expressivity of punk rock Riot Grrrl music and the Dutch picturebook Sofia en de Leeuw by Pelaez-Vargas, posing questions regarding the limits placed upon emotions, particularly “negative” ones like fury, when it comes to adolescent girls. This talk inspired me to consider whether music exists that offer young children (boys and girls) an opportunity to express their anger, not merely manage it or negate it. In my own research, publishers carefully controlled nineteenth-century piano character pieces to establish appropriate social and moral boundaries in instrumental music that might otherwise give children license for raw emotion; a piece that could be understood as “angry-sounding” due to its key, rhythms, dynamics, etc. would need to be specified through a descriptive title like “The Tempest” or “The Naughty Boy”. Outright naming and expressing fury does not appear to be a theme of children’s music today. Though one avenue seems hopeful: heavy metal music for children is absolutely a thing! A group like Hevisaurus from Finland has a lot of potential for releasing the child’s roar. Can you think of any songs for children that give vent to anger through the lyrics and/or music?

The crowning event took place on the final night of the conference in a crowded downtown bar. There we came face to face with the magic of sound itself as conference organizer and superhuman Svetlana Kalezic Radonjic mounted a stage with her rock band and sang for about four hours without a break. There’s nothing like a late-night rave to shatter your image of academics as boring and stuffy pedants. Dance moves were seen that cannot be unseen! It was an unbelievable amount of fun!

Locale

Another first for me was traveling to the Balkans. I stayed in a hotel called Carine in the middle of town, just around the corner from a wide space called Independence Square and the conference venue, the National library Radosav Ljumović. Although it rained quite a lot during my stay, I took time to explore the city of Podgorica on foot, particularly noting the unkempt, green wildness of nature, which contrasted strikingly with both murals and graffiti. In fact, “contrasts” seems a fitting word for the city’s kaleidoscopic sights as it transitioned almost seamlessly from fifteenth-century Ottoman alleys to Soviet brutalist apartment buildings, and from flowing rivers lined by lush forests to seedy pawn shops. At one point I saw within a single glance a combination of make-shift (aka sketch) carnival rides set up in a parking lot, the eccentric stone towers of an orthodox church, and the distopic shapes of Blok 5. Upon closer inspection of the church, the Orthodox Temple of Christ's Resurrection, I saw the beginning of a wedding taking place, as well as a group of local musicians ready to celebrate afterward with a drum and various brass instruments. The hotel included a generous breakfast – scrambled eggs, cheeses, meats, olives, salads, coffee – and I am now obsessed with a particular type of white cheese that I’ll have to seek out at the European Market here in Rocklin. I ate lunches and dinners out with colleagues from the conference and tried French fries with mayonnaise at the encouragement of a Belgian friend. I won’t lie… I kind of liked it.

I saw more of Montenegro on a cultural excursion planned for the morning following the conference. (Yes, the morning after our late-night rager. Thank goodness things were on “Balkan time” aka “15-20 minutes late” and I made it to the bus!) With the sun finally shining we made our way through the hills to the city of Budva on the coast. As we arrived I was pleasantly reminded of Santa Barbara in the coastal plants, animals, weather, and landscape. We dismounted the bus at a dock and boarded a large boat that took us out to the Adriatic Sea, dazzling us with stunning views of the wooded coastline dotted with stone chapels. It was during this voyage that I took about thirty minutes to carefully debone a fish for my lunch and had my first taste of bambus, a traditional and dubious mixture of red wine with Coca-Cola. I didn’t hate it… We landed at a fortress-port-city called Kotor, which is home to literally hundreds of (well cared for) stray cats, as well as the wonderfully winding cobbled streets of an old city that I adore. Here from the sea the mountains shoot up steeply into the cloudy sky (like Santa Barbara), and perched high above the town sits Kotor Fortress, accessible by a marathon of stairs, which, unfortunately, I didn’t have time to explore this trip. By chance I did run into a street vendor playing a sweet Dorian melody on a frula or wooden flute with the fipple hole on the bottom, resulting in a purchase that has augmented my personal woodwind collection.

International travel always includes adventures in language and I had some great encounters both en route and in Montenegro. I did some research before the trip and found out that the political and ethnic complexities of the Balkan region is in many ways reflected in the generic boundaries of various languages. Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are all basically mutually intelligible languages, although to some the symbolic differences are more important than the linguistic similarities. As you might expect, Montenegrin is the official language of Montenegro (but only since 2008), however I found many more resources on Serbian online, so that’s what I worked on. Around town I was able to give greetings, ask for directions, order coffee, and inquire whether I could pay with a credit card. The most fun I had was with Ljubo, the genial man who ran the breakfast at the hotel; we chatted together about Podgorica, food, language learning, the weather, and California. I also talked a bit with two managers of a bookstore (who assured me that “srpski” and “crnagorski” are the same language) where I found a Serbian version of Hari Poter. It turns out that the Serbian word for Muggles is Normalca [normals]. On the trip back to the western hemisphere, I hung out with a Canadian friend from Norway and chatted a bit in German with the scholarly expert on lying and deception, Jörg Meibauer. I also thoroughly enjoyed watching the 2020 animated children’s film “Wolfwalkers” with music by Bruno Coulais on the lengthy flight home.

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Wonderful trip! The conference was rich with musical ideas and I truly loved reconnecting with old friends and making new ones. I’d love to go back to the Balkans again some time (Svetlana said to give her a call) and see more of the countryside. Doviđenja! See you next time in Rouen, France!

Giving and Taking with Ukrainian Ethnic-Chaos

In the Winter and Spring of this year, I was teaching two overlapping classes: “Survey of World Music” at Westmont College, and “Introduction to Music Studies: Music and Society” at UCSB. Then the Russian-Ukrainian War broke out, and despite the analysis by Kurzgesagt Labs that war at a national scale is no longer in fashion, this one seems full-blown, atrocious, and persistent. In response, I developed some lectures and projects for my courses that considered the intersections of music and culture to contextualize the current conflict. In my deep dive of Ukrainian history and music – which included some fascinating topics such as guilds of blind bandura and lira players (kozbars and lirnyks); nationalistic-minded, bourgeois folklorists such as Mykola Lysenko and their cultural agendas; Soviet power struggles over the arts and their own cultural agendas; and Project Polyphony’s contemporary recording of polyphonic singing (gurtoyoe penie) – the most wonderful thing to come out of it all was the band DakhaBrakha.

Image credit

DakhaBrakha means “give and take” and is a musical quartet featuring Marko Halanevych, Iryna Kovalenko, Olena Tsybulska, and Nina Garenetska. According to their website, the group seeks to create “a trans-national sound rooted in Ukrainian culture,” expressing a musical and performative character that is at once theatrical, eclectic, and powerful. They see themselves as cultural ambassadors, both for the international community, as well as fellow Ukrainians who continue to search for a unifying national identity. They call their musical genre “ethnic-chaos,” a perfectly apt name, given the melange of instruments and uncompromising hybridity of their pieces. The backbone of their instrumental sound consists of a cello (played by Nina in a unique tuning and originally bought at an antique shop) and drums (played by Olena). Vocally they typically contrast the voice of Marko (which runs the gamut from gravelly throat singing to Bobby McFerrin-esque falsetto) with the core three-part gurtoyne penie polyphony of Iryna, Olena, and Nina (all three have backgrounds in ethnomusicology and have done field work). But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Each song is somehow its own entity. Here are a few that stand out to me.

Sho z-pod duba: This piece is a gem! Nina’s pizzicato cello groove is joined by Olena and Iryna on the drums and then Marko adds syncopated jabs on a saxophone (on album recording) or accordion (in live concert recordings). The music stops and Marko lets out sort of call to attention in scat: “Boppy boppy bibala doppy!” (It is this feature which has my kids requesting that we listen to the “Boppy boppy” song.) The groove continues, now with the three women singing the words to a folk song called “From Under the Oak”. It cryptically tells the story of Ivanko who leads his horse to water but cannot get it to drink. In frustration he beats the animal, only to have a Balaam’s donkey situation in which the horse pleads for mercy. As enigmatic as the words are, the overall vibe of the music is consistently upbeat, jaunty, and energetic, returning to the “Boppy boppy” exclamation and bursting with percussive riffs. Perhaps the horse knows better than Ivanko and has its own source of water and happiness?

Kolyskova: A lullaby called “Oh dear cat” opens this piece. The words have the quality of a folk riddle, casting images of a cat, a cradle, a child, the colors gold and white, and always the question of whether one “has enough”. The song is rendered simply and intimately. Recorded sounds of a crying infant are added to the mix, as well as a slowly rocking piano riff in the bass register before Marko sings English words in his falsetto range, weaving a tapestry of a silvery moon just out of reach and fragments of “there’s a time for everything” from Ecclesiastes. Nina’s cello enters with a melody while scintillating piano strikes echo from the upper register like nighttime stars. More lullaby lyrics arrive adorned in a different, more wide-ranging melody and sung with a slightly more urgent vocal quality. These lyrics, while still soothing, confess the care-giver’s fear, expressing the worry caused by caring for children in the midst of the precariousness of poverty. Seemingly out of nowhere another far-off voice begins, putting words to what had previously been an instrumental, pentatonic countermelody, but now energized with a bouncy vocal style that puts me in mind of Chinese folk song. All these elements weave in and out of each other, ending with the crying baby and solo lullaby.

Vanyusha: Beginning nightmarishly with an atmospheric combination of harshly whispered maledictions, a raw sustained synth tone reminiscent of a piercing headache, and menacing glissandi on the amplified cello, this piece eventually finds its feet with a rather urgent cello groove overlaid with a darabuka rhythm that sounds like a cantering horse. Iryna’s vocal line has a monotone or restrained quality, although the agitation begins to mount through a dramatic rendering of the words. The lyrics tell of a man named Vanyusha whose cruel mother wrote to him telling him that his wife Kateryna had wastefully squandered all of his possessions while he was away. He comes home and beheads her, only to realize that his mother had lied. He then beheads his mother. Following Iryna’s solo rendition, the ballad is repeated as the tempo increases, this time with Olena singing a strident countermelody and, eventually, Nina wailing a descant over the top. This brutal piece fades away into the same frightening mist with which it began.

Oy za lisochkom: “Behind the wood” starts in sepia as it were, the folksong sung a cappella as though recorded on the field in the early 1900s and played back on a crackling LP. An accordion with a tango-ish quality and drums establish the groove as two contrasting melodies — women with a poignantly soaring one, and Marko with a jumpy, declamatory one — take turns. The cello has a rhapsodic quality here, sustaining long notes and indulging in ornamentation, putting me in mind of Kayhan Kalhor playing the kamancheh. The piece ends with a sudden spike of energy, the drums working double time, the accordion punching out tone clusters, and the cello going off the rails with sounds reminiscent of a chicken being plucked.

Image credit

Last week Jess and I had the very great pleasure of hearing DakhaBrakha live in Sonoma. Already loving the music, it was incredibly powerful to see the performers in the flesh, to experience their impressive light and visual display, and to hear them speak about their belief in a free Ukraine. For an encore they played Baby, one of the all-time favorites of my son for its wicked harmonica sections. “Baby, show me your love…” Hopefully we can catch them again when they come back to the Bay Area next year.

Listen to My Trumpet by Mo Willems: Emotion, Communication, and Relationship

As a parent of young children, it has been a pleasure to fall into the picture books of Mo Willems over the past few years. (As a family we made a tradition of eating pizza on Friday nights during COVID quarantine while watching his HBO special “Mo Willems and the Storytime All-Stars Present: Don’t Let the Pigeon Do Storytime!” (2020). Must have seen it about thirty times!) His works deftly and often poignantly explore the wide range and wild variability of human emotion, whether his subjects are frogs, squirrels, geese, dinosaurs, or (occasionally) humans. Rather than pigeon-hole (pun intended) emotions into strict ethical categories, he incorporates them within a relational narrative in which characters practice inter- and intrapersonal communication, giving voice to the richness of emotional experience.

Listen to my Trumpet!

by Mo Willems

Hyperion Books for Children (2012)

Picture: The Elephant & Piggie series (2006–16) chronicles the varied adventures of best friends Gerald the Elephant and Piggie the Pig in twenty-five books. Willems depicts all the characters in these stories in a simple style, replete with circles and ovals, lines and angles, bold outlines and solid colors. Usually appearing on a blank, white page, these characters have a sketch-book immediacy and simplicity, a characteristic that Willems uses to intentionally invite children to participate as co-creators, especially in activity books such as “We Are in an ART-ivity Book!” (2017) and Kennedy Center “Lunch Doodles” on YouTube (2020). Remarkably, the simplicity of these drawings provides the canvas upon which to depict astounding emotional details through facial expressions, body gestures, motion lines, written sound effects, and the size and style of font in the text boxes. On every page, every character is part of the emotional narrative, expressing and reacting to real-time events. “Listen to My Trumpet!” includes only Piggie and Gerald, as well as a golden trumpet and a wooden, three-legged stool. Piggie’s love of her gleaming trumpet is made clear by her ebullient face, quivering excitement, and the loving hug she bestows upon the instrument.

Text: There is no narrator throughout the Elephant & Piggie books, which are driven by monologues or, more often, dialogues. As each character talks, their words appear in a specifically colored speech bubble like a cartoon strip (gray for Gerald, pink for Piggie, etc.). Many pages contain no talking at all, allowing the illustrations to move the story forward, whether the characters dejectedly walk off the page, romp joyfully in the rain, blush with awkwardness, or simmer with jealousy. Willems takes his time, devoting a large number of pages to the moment-by-moment unfolding of the story. In “Listen to My Trumpet!” the dialogue of the two friends begins with generous amounts of exclamation points as Piggie enjoins Gerald to listen to her give a trumpet recital. As the noisiness of her performance crescendos, Gerald increasingly expresses himself through thought bubbles as his feelings of tension and discomfort increase.

Music: The moment that Piggie begins to play her trumpet, Willems gives it voice in the form of brash, orange text bubbles, shaped with sharp edges like fiery explosions, and connected by jagged, lightning bolt shaped lines. Using an enormous, thick, black font that looks as though the letters are being shocked by an electric eel, he presents the clamorous tones of the trumpet through onomatopoeic syllables. Willems’ imaginative “voicing” of the trumpet has a wonderful playfulness to it (reading it out loud to children is a blast!) and puts me in mind of a sort of overlap between the scat vocables of Ella Fitzgerald and the trumpet improvisations of Wynton Marsalis.

“LISTEN TO MY TRUMPET!” Copyright © 2012 by Mo Willems. First published by Hyperion Books for Children, a division of Disney Publishing. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Gerald’s reaction to the sound of the trumpet is one of discomfort, a feeling only intensified by Piggie’s continued excitement and belief that her performance is going well. Contrarily, Gerald privately thinks “That is not music” and compares the sound of Piggie’s trumpet to his Aunt Molly with a cold. What’s more, the sheer force of the trumpet’s sound has the ability to physically knock Gerald around, pitching him repeatedly off of his stool and eventually tossing him like a leaf in the wind during Piggie’s “big finish”, a scene as hilarious and overblown as the comedy short “Overly Competitive Trumpeters” by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele.

“LISTEN TO MY TRUMPET!” Copyright © 2012 by Mo Willems. First published by Hyperion Books for Children, a division of Disney Publishing. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

This sort of physical buffeting is a common occurrence in the Elephant & Piggie series, however usually the roles are reversed. Gerald, who occasionally displays a rather choleric, irritable disposition, expresses himself through outbursts of emotion and, given his larger size and elephantine resonance, Piggie more often than not is bodily tossed about by Gerald’s powerful sighs, cries, exclamations, and sneezes. Significantly, their friendship withstands such storms, mainly because they give each other the benefit of the doubt and take time to move through uncomfortable emotions towards what is actually being communicated between friends.

But now wielding her trumpet, Piggie turns the tables, inundating Gerald with wave upon wave of powerful sound. Yet, as she makes clear before, during, and after her performance, the forcefulness of her playing is expressive of joy, of wanting to share something special with her best friend. It is this that causes Gerald the most consternation, especially when Piggie presses him for his honest feedback. After demurring several times, complimenting her on the shininess and loudness of her instrument, Gerald chooses to tell the truth, stating, “That was not music… Sorry…”. As explored in my post on “The Arrival” by Shaun Tan, noise is the critical category in which Gerald places this sonic experience; it is all loudness and power, confusing and chaotic, with none of the clarity, beauty, or tunefulness that he expects of musical performance. In fact it is more akin to the trumpeting of a sick elephant… which is closer to what Piggie was aiming at in the first place: “You think I am trying to make music?” she says. “I am trying to speak elephant! I want to be like you.” Her aim was never to make sounds that one would characterize as music, but rather to use an instrument to speak the language of her friend.

“LISTEN TO MY TRUMPET!” Copyright © 2012 by Mo Willems. First published by Hyperion Books for Children, a division of Disney Publishing. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

“Listen to My Trumpet!” hangs upon a simple generic miscommunication. Piggie completely disregarded the rules of “correct” trumpet playing from the start, and it is only by working honestly through a variety of powerful emotions (joy, nervousness, fear, confusion, worry, and shock, to name a few) that they discover the richness, the “musicality” of their relationship. Both characters had to figure out how to “listen” and to be willing to co-create new rules for the interpretation of sounds. How is the concept of “listening to music” overly prescriptive, moving too quickly to judgement at the expense of relationship and communication? How could the concept of “music” allow us to discover new ways of “listening” that provide a forum for truly hearing one another?

The Sleepers Shall Rise

This last academic year I have had the personal and professional pleasure of working with Dr. Grey Brothers as the accompanist for Choral Union, the freshman choral group he founded and directs at Westmont College. Years back as an undergrad, Grey was my choir director, voice teacher, and musicology professor, and this year he retires from Westmont to (presumably) spend more time with his impressive collection of berets. In honor of my friendship with Grey and in commemoration of his time at Westmont, I composed a piece entitled “The Sleepers Shall Rise” for Choral Union, which was premiered at the Vocal Chamber Concert in April.

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Lyrics

George MacDonald

For the text of “The Sleepers Shall Rise” I used a four-stanza poem by Scottish poet and mystic George MacDonald (1824-1905):

Illustration by Arthur Hughes of the elder Princess Irene at her spinning wheel for the 1908 edition of The Princess and Curdie.

“The stars are spinning their threads,
And the clouds are the dust that flies,
And the suns are weaving them up
For the time when the sleepers shall rise.

The ocean in music rolls,
And gems are turning to eyes,
And the trees are gathering souls
For the day when the sleepers shall rise.

The weepers are learning to smile,
And laughter to glean the sighs;
Burn and bury the care and guile,
For the day when the sleepers shall rise.

Oh, the dews and the moths and the daisy red,
The larks and the glimmers and flows!
The lilies and sparrows and daily bread,
And the something that nobody knows!”

— George MacDonald (1883)

This enigmatic poem appears within MacDonald’s children’s fantasy novel The Princess and Curdie (1883), the sequel to The Princess and the Goblin (1870-72). In Chapter 8 “Curdie’s Mission", the young protagonist, a miner boy named Curdie, makes his way to the highest tower of a castle which he knows to be the workroom of the elder Princess Irene, an uncanny and mysterious “wise woman” character who has summoned him. (MacDonald has a penchant for these powerful yet unsettling female figures, from the good fairies of his fairy tales to the Wise Woman of The Double Story (1875) and the title character of At the Back of the North Wind (1868-71).) Curdie finds her at a spinning wheel, which flashes with light as it turns, impressing upon Curdie through its rhythmic movement a soul-stirring, emotional transcendence that he struggles to make sense of.

“Then the lady began to sing, and her wheel spun an accompaniment to her song, and the music of the wheel was like the music of an Aeolian harp blown upon by the wind that bloweth where it listeth. Oh, the sweet sounds of that spinning wheel! Now they were gold, now silver, now grass, now palm trees, now ancient cities, now rubies, now mountain brooks, now peacock’s feathers, now clouds, now snowdrops, and now mid-sea islands. But for the voice that sang through it all, about that I have no words to tell. It would make you weep if I were able to tell you what that was like, it was so beautiful and true and lovely. But this is something like the words of its song...”

Highly influenced by German Romanticism, MacDonald writes in a way that is simultaneously overwhelming, musical, childlike, and even alienating. The first stanza uses metaphors of spinning and weaving – a folk culture activity with enormous symbolic capital in Romanticism – and metaphorically connects them to the shifting, spinning, swirling phenomena of stars, clouds, and suns. The spiritual import and mysteriousness of nature continues into the second stanza as MacDonald anthropomorphizes the ocean, gems, and trees who are in the process of developing, growing, evolving. Actually it is unclear whether it is the natural world that is “becoming” or whether Curdie is merely becoming more aware of something that has been there all along. In the third stanza, MacDonald the preacher comes to the fore by focusing the processes of growth within the human soul, with a nod to the restorative Psalm 126:5 (“Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy”), and a characteristic emphasis on the holiness of laughter. In these first three stanzas, the final line speaks of the time or day “when the sleepers shall rise”, which reminds me of one of the central themes in MacDonald’s last major work of fiction, Lilith (1895). In the final stanza the poem erupts into a childlike list of objects; while it appears almost nonsensical, it can be interpreted as vitally meaningful, suggesting deep connections in a series of evocative images. The poem remains open-ended to the end, replacing the last line about waking from sleep with a “something that nobody knows”. (This reminds me of German poet Friedrich Klopstock’s Das Rosenband (1752) which states “I felt it well, and knew it not” [Ich fühlt' es wohl, und wußt' es nicht.]). As the narrator of Curdie and the Princess states, the words of the poem are a pale reflection of the deeply affective experience that Curdie is having in the presence of Princess Irene, and their literal meaning is almost ancillary to the expression of their power.

My Additional Stanza

My setting of “The Sleepers Shall Rise” includes an additional stanza inserted between MacDonald’s third and fourth verses, which I wrote myself:

“In the rainbow’s nest lies the key of gold
To the land of the shadows grey.
Oh, dear brothers, oh sisters, love is the whole
For those who believe and obey.”

I sought to match MacDonald’s elusivity, in part by stitching together several themes from his other writings. The reference to the “rainbow’s nest”, the “key of gold”, and the “land of the shadows” come from one of my all-time favorite MacDonald fairy tales, The Golden Key (1867), which begins with the simple lines: “There was a boy who used to sit in the twilight and listen to his great-aunt's stories. She told him that if he could reach the place where the end of the rainbow stands he would find there a golden key.” From this simple beginning, MacDonald sends two child protagonists into a dazzling world of mystical symbolism that moves beyond time and space.

The line “love is the whole” was lifted from the first line of Love is Home (1855), a five-stanza poem which rhapsodically addresses Love, finding it everywhere, particularly the diversity of nature and the longings of the human heart. The first stanza begins, “Love is the part, and love is the whole; / Love is the robe, and love is the pall; / Ruler of heart and brain and soul, / Love is the lord and the slave of all!” Again, we see MacDonald’s penchant for uniting dichotomies: part-whole, life (“robe”)-death (“pall”), heart-brain-soul, lord-slave.

Lastly, for MacDonald the concept of “believe and obey” was vitally important, though perhaps easily misconstrued. In many ways they signal his view that true maturity or progress necessitated a return to the simplicity of childhood, to a state of being that merely believed in the reality of a loving God and that merely obeyed whatever “still, small voice” prompted actions that brings that love to space and time. Such an idea crops up often in his children’s fantasies and pseudo-autobiographical novels, and is presented on the one hand scathingly in his Unspoken Sermons (1885), especially “The Truth in Jesus” from Series Two, and on the other hand in a disarmingly elementary dialogue in the poem Willie’s Dilemma (1855).

Illustration “Foamless Sea of Shadows” by Ruth Sanderson from 2016 edition of MacDonald’s The Golden Key.

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Music

Folklike Tune

I wanted the music to have a face-value simplicity to it, but in a way that leaves the door open to mystery and suggestibility. Each verse therefore makes use of a lullaby-like tune in 6/8, which appears with subtle variations each verse. For all the MacDonald stanzas the tune is in the Dorian mode, minor and with a rather Pirates of the Caribbean-esque lowered seventh, but shining with unexpectedly bright major IV chords like flashes of light glancing off of Princess Irene’s spinning wheel. It is at the penultimate verse (of which I wrote the poetry) that the mood of the piece changes, as though a key has been turned and the rainbow is shining with new, never before seen colors. Here I use the warmer Mixolydian mode, nestling the melody in the altos before fragmenting with staggered entrances at the words “Love is the whole”. The final verse shifts back to Dorian, but now modulated up a whole step and delivered in a more pressing and rhapsodic manner.

Spinning Wheel

The image of Princess Irene using her spinning wheel as an accompaniment to her singing provided inspiration for my conception of the collaborative piano part. There is a rich history of pianistic depictions of spinning wheels, such as Franz Schubert’s 1814 Lied “Gretchen am Spinnrade”, Albert Ellmenreich’s pedagogical standby “Spinnliedchen” (ca. 1863), and Scottish composer Erik Chisholm’s “Spinning Song” from his 1944 collection of preludes “At the Edge of the Great World”. At the onset I imagined the wheel oscillating as if in slow motion, drone-like open fifths rocking slowly between the right and left hands. The writing becomes more dynamic in subsequent verses, with rolling eighth-note arpeggiations in the second verse, and dizzying sixteenth-note filigree in the third. In the fourth (Mixolydian) verse the piano shifts from spinning motion to static blocks: pillars of sound that take Ossian-like strides to new vistas. The final verse returns to the energy of a spinning wheel in full force, the open fifths of the beginning now “power chords” that pound out the “something that nobody knows”.

Gaelic Waulking Song

I have a deep appreciation for folk musics, and decided to intersperse my music with a Scottish Gaelic song entitled Mhòrag ' s na horo gheallaidh [vo:rag sna horo ʝauLɪ]. (Here is a performance by Clannad. Note the variations in words.) This is a waulking song, a work song typically performed by groups of women who sang it while sitting in a circle beating and rotating newly woven tweed against a table to shrink it and make it waterproof. I saw the song as a fruitful connection to MacDonald’s Scottish provenance and complimenting the symbolism of Princess Irene at the spinning wheel as another example of music and storytelling through pre-industrial, female labor. In general waulking songs are highly rhythmic so as to coordinate the movements of the workers, feature vocables such as “horo” or “him ò”, and are sung in Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic) with solo verses and group refrains. The lyrics of Mhòrag as they have been written down are enigmatic, describing cattle herding, lamenting separated lovers, and possibly signaling an encoded reference to Prince Charles during the Jacobite Uprising. For this composition I used only the refrain – or sèist – working off of a 1998 edition from a collection by Deborah L. White. The melody appears between verses in “The Sleepers Shall Rise”, coalescing from fragments in the piano to a stirring choral rendition after verse three.

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It was a joy to create this piece, and to work with Grey and Choral Union to bring it to life! I uploaded a full performance of the piece from the Vocal Chamber Concert to my musicking page. Enjoy!

The Arrival by Shaun Tan: Musical Walls and Bridges

Attending the 2019 Congress of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature was an utterly amazing experience. Both Stockholm itself and the Congress located in Norra Latin—a historic high school now turned conference center in Norrmalm—offered me a continuous deluge of warm collegial camaraderie, stunning urban and riverside views beneath an overcast sky, scholarship that advocates for the marginalized in all its forms—and coffee, lots and lots of coffee… There were so many things about the trip that offered me a chance to feel at home. Yet, of course, I wasn’t home, and the trip also constantly reminded me of my foreignness, from pedestrian-car interactions (no stop signs!) to prices in krona, and from the sight of cathedrals and cobblestones and the letter “å” to the unremitting child-consciousness of Swedish culture. This is why for my first post-Stockholm post, I decided to explore a children’s book that deals more intensely with the concept of foreignness.

The Arrival

by Shaun Tan

Hodder Children’s Books (2006)

Text: None! This is what one might call a wordless graphic novel, each page filled with pictures in various orientations. I had heard of this book before, though never read it, and then it came up in a keynote presentation on the second day. While browsing a book display during one of our frequent fika coffee breaks, I saw the recognizable cover picture accompanied by a single unexpected word, “Ankomsten”, the Swedish translation of “The Arrival”. For a moment I felt like the quizzical man on the cover, staring at a little alien creature, considering the odd mixture of familiar and unfamiliar that a foreign word can conjure.

Picture: The pictures are arresting, powerful, and intricate, rendered in muted tones and depicting a fantasy/futuristic setting that nevertheless references turn of the century America, specifically the experiences of immigrants passing through Ellis Island. The basic idea behind the book is that there is a man who leaves his family and travels to an entirely new metropolis, a place where absolutely everything is unfamiliar, strange, and foreign. He—and we as readers—struggle to make sense of this new place as the character seeks food, shelter, work, and above all human connection. Gradually and with the help of kind people he comes to understand the ways and codes of this place, reminding me of a George MacDonald quote from Lillith: “The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home.” It is a timely, challenging, and moving book, important for children and adults alike to engage with.

Music: This book entrenches readers in the complex and painful process of learning, specifically of learning to navigate through and within an unfamiliar culture. Music, as an expression and carrier of culture, appears twice in the book and vividly communicates this shift from confusion to understanding. The first picture below depicts the arriving man’s first encounter with this new world. 

The man is confused at this point in the story, and we are thrust with him into the middle of an alien world. The invasive protocols of immigration services, the goings-on of bustling people in the streets, the appearance and behaviors of new animals, everything is overwhelming to his senses. The street musicians appear ominous: rendered in very dark hues with dower faces and surrounded by rat-like birds, the otherworldliness of the instruments they play—which include a space-age violin and an accordion with a serpentine tuba bell—is palpable. The concept of “noise” is useful here, as is an oft quoted definition by Anna Tsing: noise is the “awkward, unequal, unstable creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (Tsing 2004, 1). The oddity of the picture and the imagined music—some of which seems to be visibly shooting up out of the tuba bell into the sky—is meant to create a wall of noise. Unsettled by difference, the man has no opportunity to come to grips with its discomfiting significance.

[Aside: Tan’s imagined world of organological difference is actually remarkably similar to our own world. Modern western culture has a very limited notion of what instruments are “normal”, and in the margins of time and space lie instruments that display the human capacity for imaginative music- and/or noise-making. Below: A) a French piano accordion from 1880s on display in MIM Phoenix, B) John Matthias Augustus Stroh’s mechanically amplified Stroh violin invented in 1899, C) Adolph Sax’s trombone à pistons from 1876 on display in MIM Brussels, E) a ca. 1900 harp-guitar by Cesare Candi of Genoa, and F) Linda Manzer’s 42-string Pikasso guitar of 1984.]

The next musical encounter in The Arrival offers fresh possibilities for the newcomer on his journey towards musical and cultural understanding. After befriending a family and learning their own traumatic story, he is invited to dinner. Shared food, conversation, and laughter lead to an after-dinner musical concert, and a new relationship to this culture’s music. We see each member of the family happily contributing to this delightful Hausmusik experience. The father plays a miniature version of the street musician’s trumpet accordion, the mother plays a turnip-shaped ocarina with glowing orb of musical warmth, and the son sings—with his Pokémon lizard!—while strumming on a four-stringed circular guitar reminiscent of a Chinese ruan. 

The newcomer’s relationship with this family offers him a bridge toward understanding the meanings of music in this foreign place. Within the safety of a warm domestic setting he is able to draw near enough and to sit still long enough to listen with open ears and to ask questions of the performers in order to approach understand. Tan’s two images of music in The Arrival illustrate the contextuality of whether we interpret something as noise or as music. Relationship opens the door.

Du Iz Tak? by Carson Ellis: Satie and Time

I’m starting a new series of posts dedicated to exploring references to and uses of music within children’s literature, specifically picture books. Music functions richly within the intermedial dynamics of picture books, which Perry Nodelman describes as an art form demanding constant alteration between two modes of communication—visual and textual— and “as a result of these unusual features, [they] have unique rhythms, unique conventions of shape and structure, a unique body of narrative techniques” (Nodelman, 1988, viii). Adding music to this unique textual and visual genre provides yet another mode of communication, which both compliments and complicates an already wonderful genre. Let us begin!

Du Is Tak?

by Carson Ellis

Candlewick Press (2016)

Picture: This is a visually gorgeous picture book. Ellis frames up an insect-sized scene of an old log, and lingers there for the entirety of the book while seasons shift, adventures ensue, life is lived. The passage and cyclicality of time are of foremost importance: a single green plant provides the dapperly dressed invertebrate characters with many opportunities to experience the gamut of life’s emotions (puzzlement, excitement, leisure, horror, joy, letting go); a flamboyant caterpillar disappears into a cocoon in the first pages, metamorphosing near the end, and is followed by a second caterpillar at the close; and shifting seasons bring about changes to the foliage and landscape, most dramatically in the cleansing blankness of a winter’s snow.

Text: Ellis pairs these pictures with a delightfully innovative conlang (constructed language) of her own devising. (It appears to be nominally Germanic in syntax and phonology.) Readers are invited to speak “nonsense words” that are given meaning by the pictures. This technique highlights the nonverbal (shall I say “musical”?) power of communication through such things as gesture, intonation, addressee, and context.

Music: The bulk of the action happens in scenes of daylight. Yet three panels present us with a nocturnal version of the world: muted and dark colors, a starry night sky, and an absence of all characters apart from a single grasshopper perched upon a branch of the log directly over the caterpillar’s cocoon. In his [four] arms he holds a violin, which he plays introspectively, head bowed, eyes closed. Ellis employs a common technique: a string of musical notes emanates from the instrument and into the air. Remarkably, the notation symbols are not random (most examples are!). In the first two night scenes Ellis uses an eight-note rhythmic pattern made up of grace notes, eighth notes, quarter notes, and half notes that then repeats. Additionally, she provides a general melodic contour that gives enough information to show us that the notes are a quotation of a real piece of music: Gnossienne No. 1 by Erik Satie.

The second night scene with grasshopper and Gnossienne No. 1.

Erik Satie (1866–1925) was a French composer who was influential for his avant-garde experiments that modernistically challenged musical tradition and expectations. (He wrote minimalist background music which he termed musique d’ameublement (“furniture music”), included cheeky/ironic/impossible/overly dramatic narrations (in-score texts) in his music, and took as his programmatic subjects such things as the social lives and adventures of sea cucumbers.) Satie constructed his own cryptic term “Gnossienne” in three (perhaps seven?) compositions that share several generic characteristics: slow tempos, no barlines (known as “free time”), unconventional forms/melodies/harmonies, and strange in-score texts.

In the first two night scenes, Ellis’ grasshopper plays the opening theme of Gnossienne No. 1. I find the music hovering, yet heavy, improvisatory, as though playing with and reacting to half-remembered fragments. Follow along to a recording with sheet music performed by Klara Kormendi.

1. The third night scene directly follows the second. In the face of the decaying flower, we witness the dramatic release of the transformed caterpillar, which bursts out of its cocoon as a dancing moth. Eyes closed, she is the introspective one now, absorbed in the soaring exuberance of her dance. The grasshopper is on his feet, leaning forward eagerly, eyes wide and fixed upon this wonderful sight. He continues to play, but his tune has changed to match the sweeping gestures of the moth: twenty-five eighth-notes concluded by a dotted quarter note.

The third night scene with grasshopper/moth and Gnossienne No. 3.

Again, Ellis quotes Satie, this time Gnossienne No. 3. The third theme (fragment?) of this piece builds up momentum in a cascading sort of way, and bears the mysterious in-score text “Munissez-vous de clairvoyance” (“Acquire clairvoyance”). The grasshopper seems to be in the process of “seeing clearly”, standing as it were upon the overlap between life and death, gazing at the resurrected Muse, reifying the power of the moment with music that is both free of time and full of repetition. Listen to the performance by Daniel Versano starting at 0:35.

Ellis masterfully communicates through the richness of the picture book genre. Her static frame allows us to notice fine details and dwell upon growth and decay, life and death. Her invented language prompts us to find significance within/beyond/despite words. Music is hidden in this picture book, frozen as a string of symbols leaping from a grasshopper’s violin, yet the quotations of Satie’s haunting compositions, once deciphered, invite us to imagine unheard melodies that bind together memories, emotions, and meanings in new ways. May we all have eyes to see clearly and the courage to play our song in all of life’s seasons.

Hallå, Sverige!

This summer the Roys will be saying “Hallå, Sverige!”—pronounced [haˈloː sværjɛ], we will have to practice!—as we travel to Sweden. I submitted a panel proposal to the International Research Society for Children’s Literature (IRSCL) 2019 Congress and it was accepted! I and two other musicologists who are doing pioneering work on music and childhood/children will give papers on the theme of “The Sounding and Silencing of Musical Childhoods;” more on that soon!

Princess Tuvstarr in the Field (1913) by Swedish illustator John Bauer.

I am getting more and more excited about this trip, not just because the IRSCL will undoubtedly be an amazing experience, but because I know very little about Sweden and it gives me a wonderful opportunity to delve into its music, language, literature, and myths. By far the most compelling thing I have found recently is Rosenbergs Sjua (Rosenberg’s Seven), a musical ensemble comprised of four female vocalists and a string quartet. Their second album, R7 (1999) consists of arrangements of Swedish folk songs that are singularly riveting and haunting.

Vocal Polyphony

The driving force behind Rosenbergs Sjua is Susanne Rosenberg: singer, composer, musicologist, and professor in the Royal College of Music, Stockholm. Her arrangements for R7 reflect her mastery of an eclectic variety of singing styles ranging from Swedish folk to Baroque to jazz, as the singers create amazing textures ranging from playful to epic to lyrical. The sixth track “Pris Vare Gud”—a nineteenth-century hymn text written by Johan Olof Wallin—begins with a layering of an improvisatory motif that creates a sort of drone for the mournful melody. Alternately track two “Min Bröllopsdag” alternates between tight harmonies in homorhythm and polyphonic scatting.

Kulning

Another sound that adds a certain northern wildness to R7 is kulning, a vocal technique practiced since ancient times in Scandinavia—primarily by women—as a means for calling livestock in from their grazing pastures in the mountains. Different melodic shapes and timbral colors echo and clash with high-pitched intensity throughout track seven “Jorid Lockrop” and offer a visceral example of female vocal power. This is apparently the function of kulning in Karin Rehnqvist’s composition for two singers and percussion, Puksånger/Lockrop (1989), which Rosenberg premiered. (The link in the recording is not professional, but the rawness speaks for itself.)

Fiddling/Riffing

The string section of R7 simply rocks! In addition to several instrumental dance tracks (four “Artos Julpolska” and thirteen “Nattöga”) which feature a wealth of idiomatic ornamentation, many of the songs are grounded in heavy, syncopated riffs worthy of a metal band. Listen to the first track “Leja Tjänstepiga” or the epic tenth “Balladen Om Liten Karin”. (The whole effect reminds me of the amazing instrumental arrangements of folk songs by the Danish String Quartet in their Woodworks (2014) album.) The contrast between voice and string in R7 —both equally strident at times—has a sort of hi-fi brutality that I prefer when it comes to modern arrangements of folk music.

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Your suggestions for further reading/listening as we look forward to Sweden are welcome! Ha det så bra!

Holiday Blessing: Samin Nosrat, Good Tidings, and "Feuch"

The holidays are here, and with them are all the familiar sights, sounds, smells, and tastes. Between last weekend’s pre-Thanksgiving hosted lunch with my parents (lemon chicken, roasted potatoes, green beans, cranberry relish, herb rolls, and pumpkin pie), the bags of aromatic delectables from Apple Hill sitting here on the counter (fritters, donuts, and Fujis), and Jess and Kathy brainstorming potential dessert and vegetable options online (I believe a pumpkin pie à la Zoe Bakes is in the works), I’m feeling the love. Because I’m off from work this week, my mind seems particularly open, and I made a wonderful connection about three seemingly unconnected things.

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Samin Nosrat

Jess and I have been enjoying Berkeley-based chef Samin Nosrat immensely. Jess has her cookbook, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, on the shelf (which strives for a freeing sense of wabi-sabi through Wendy MacNaughton’s hand-drawn illustrations), and the Netflix documentary of the same name provided a beautiful, inspiring, and informative investigation of her four foundational cooking concepts. She contends that mastering salt, fat, acid, and heat is not merely a matter of following a recipe, but part of a larger practice of learning to hone and trust your senses.

Samin Nosrat cooking while smiling! Yum!

An interview she gave on Discourse entitled “Engaging the Senses” extend this idea into her philosophy of cooking, in which she sees the kitchen as a place where all people can be welcome because everyone can use their senses.

I think it’s about engaging the senses. That’s something my cooking really focuses on: using your senses to become a better cook. Cooking really does engage all of your senses — at least, good cooking does — but for the most part, I feel like I’ve spent the last fifteen years honing, above all, my senses of taste and smell. —S.N.

Because everyone has the capacity to improve their senses, Samin contends that anyone can cook. This viewpoint transforms the kitchen from something potentially shameful to a place where humanization and amateurism invite participation from all. I love this idea and see many parallels to the ways that I understand musicology, language learning directing choirs…

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Good Tidings

My Providence School choirs are in full Christmas music tilt. I’ve taken the traditional “Nine Lessons and Carols” service that has been done in the past and changed it to allow for more instrumentalists and different choral repertoire. I’m calling it “Come to the Cradle: A Service of Lessons and Carols”, and the great majority of the music focuses on various aspects of the postpartum manger, especially the visitation of the shepherds.

Christina Saj, Shepherd

This had me reading through the second chapter of Luke for inspiration; if you’re familiar with Linus’ King James monologue from the Peanut’s Christmas Special, one scene goes something like this:

8 And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.

9 And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.

10 And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

However, I tend to read the Bible in different translations, especially non-English ones; I find that this sort of alienated reading is a practice that breathes new life into old stories in humbling and challenging ways. As I read through Luke 2:9-11 in my Scottish Gaelic translation, a certain word popped out at me…

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“Feuch”

The Gàidhlig translation that I own, Am Bìoball Gàidhlig 1992, is written in a somewhat archaic style (both ABG and KJV begin almost every sentence with the word “and”/“agus”), and the imperative verb “feuch” (pronounced IPA: [fiax]) pops up twice in that section of Luke 2, corresponding to the KJV “lo” and “behold” that I underlined above. I looked the word up in the LearnGaelic Dictionary and found that it is particularly rich in meanings:

1 feel! (test by feeling)
2 taste! (test by tasting)
3 try, attempt!
4 test!
5 behold, look, lo!
6 reconnoitre!
7 rummage!

The spirit of this word extends far beyond the observational (and archaic) sense that I get from “lo” and “behold”. “Feuch” is dynamic! It involves the senses of touch, taste, and sight; it is messy and exploratory; and it implies a learning curve without any actual guarantee of success.

An illustration by Scottish-born artist Jessie Marion King (1875–1949) from the book The Fisherman and His Soul.

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The angel commands the shepherds to “feuch”, to engage deeply and bodily with the good news of the Savior’s arrival, pushing the boundaries of the known and hoped for. Luke the narrator challenges his readers to “feuch”, to rummage and reconnoitre through their minds to understand the palpable intensity of a supernatural encounter that entered reality from seemingly nowhere. And Samin reminds us to “feach”, to seek our way towards a sensitivity to the smells and sounds of cooking and the human connection that such an activity brings.

This holiday, may we all be present to what is immanent, simple things, true things.

Gaelic Advent Treats

My thanks to Daily Gaelic - Gàidhlig Gach Latha for a little season's cheer this year in the form of an emailed virtual advent calendar. There's something thoroughly enjoyable about an advent calendar, about the anticipation, the mystery, the big reveal. It's about unwrapping a present.

Edinburgh, Scotland gripped in the icy embrace of Cailleach Bhèara, the Hag of Winter!

[Cue pivot chord modulation]

Orthography can be a bit like unwrapping a present. (See what I did there? :)) And sometimes that present seems to have been bound together with layers and layers of duct tape! The relationship between written letters and spoken sounds is not always straightforward even in English, and the rules of the game in other languages has the ability to cause quite a bit of consternation. Scottish Gaelic is notoriously baffling to the neophyte, owing largely to the fact that 18 letters are used to make some 60+ sounds (depending on how you count).

I found the  particular Gaelic advent gift particularly challenging and therefore all the more satisfying after unwrapping; I opened the virtual door to find these words: "Teóclaid teth". Here was my process in unwrapping just the first word.
 

1. The "t" is next to a slender vowel "e" which means that it is pronounced like "tch" [tʃʰ].
2. Because there's an accent over the "ó" the "e" is silent and we get a nice long "o" sound [o:].
3. The "c" is hard [kʰ].
4. The "l" is beleaguered by broad vowels on either side "ó...a" so it is technically a velarized alveolar lateral approximant, aka a sort of throaty "l" [ɫ] like in "Allah".
5. The "a" is silent as it's only there to satisfactorily surround the "l" with broad vowels.
6. As the vowel of an unstressed syllable, the "i" is a short, humble, little "i" like in "fish".
7. The "d" is next to a slender vowel "i" which means that it is pronounced like the end of "fridge" [ʤ].

Put that all together and you get something like this [tʃʰo: kʰɫiʤ] or (since IPA tends to be just as confusing as Gaelic) approximately "tcho-klidge".

Now repeat it a few times.

"tcho-klidge"

"tcho-klidge"

"tcho-klidge"

...

Still need a hint? Look at this picture:

Photo credit: me. My wife enjoying a cup of Hot...

Chocolate!

Add "teth" ([tʃʰɛ:] or "tcheh") to the end and you've got "teóclaid teth" or "hot chocolate". I think there's something so satisfying about deciphering this mystery word. I found myself immersed in the raw musicality of the Gaelic language, riding the waves of half-understood orthographic rules, and found myself surprised by the recognition of the familiar in the midst of the strange.

In the midst of an all-too familiar holiday season, perhaps we could remember to accept the traditional as well as the unexpected. And we could have more hot cocoa! :)

The Music of Language: Gaelic Summer

Summer is for many things—for getting much needed rest, for enjoying the sun, for catching up on all the reading that has been put off, and for rediscovering one's hobbies. One of the passions that I will be pouring myself into during the coming months is language learning, specifically investing some time into my old friend Scottish Gaelic or Gàidhlig.

I've been attracted to Gàidhlig for a long time. I'm sure it has a lot to do with learning to play the tin whistle in elementary school and watching Braveheart in junior high. There was just something about the look of the words, the melodious guttural sounds, the familiar and unfamiliar patterns and structures. I can remember eagerly scouring the internet in my father's home office for lists of phrases and vocabulary, dutifully drilling myself on grammatical constructions with James MacLaren's Beginner's Gaelic (1923) during lunch breaks as a sales associate at Border's Books, and struggling through Prof. Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh's complex phonological analyses at Fuaimean na Gàidhlig.

Credit: Joe Fox, A82 Bi-lingual Scottish Gaelic English Road Sign Scotland Uk
Link.

As enjoyable and useful as these endeavors were, the approaches all suffered from the same drawback: they all took reading and writing as their starting point. For Gàidhlig this poses a particular challenge due to the complex and seemingly enigmatic relationship between the way the language is written and the way it is spoken. As I learned, I would continually find myself put in the frustrating position of either learning to speak phrases or words incorrectly, or of tiptoeing through a dense thicket of IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) rules. It would begin to feel less and less like learning a vibrant language, and more like doing calculus or pitch-class-set analysis. There had to be another way!

I think I've found another way.

I've written previous posts about a language learning technique called "shadowing". It involves immersing yourself in a language's sounds in real time, internalizing its vocal patterns, rhythmic cadences, and phrase structures. Shadowing is essentially about the music of language; at its base level it allows you to engage with the raw sounds of a language freed from the distractions of writing, semantics and grammar. This is not to say that those aspects of the language are unimportant, but rather that the initial focus upon the musical characteristics of music engages your brain in a unique and powerful manner. It's a way of establishing a strong foundation upon which the rest of the language can confidently stand.

Here is my summer plan:

• I am shadowing with Litir Beag, a podcast by Roddy MacIean on BBC Alba, the Gàidhlig language branch of the BBC. These "little letters" are for intermediate learners and Roddy specifically speaks the words slowly and clearly—ideal for shadowing! I do not read the Litir Beag transcripts, nor do I read the English translations—not yet. This stage is all about engaging with the sounds. Already I have noticed two interesting developments:
  • I can match sounds with much more accuracy and fluency in Gàidhlig than in a language which I know much better. Shadowing in German, for instance, is more overwhelming because my mind not only listens to sounds while speaking them back, but additionally keeps busy parsing grammatical functions, imagining written text, and visualizing descriptive or narrative meaning.
  • I can begin to intuit meaning through musical and contextual patterns in the recordings. Strings of numbers or dates have their own particular sound and cadence. Also phrases such as "he said" or "she said" stand out loud and clear because of the way Roddy performs the narrative dialogues.
• I have just begun to shadow to another program on BBC Alba, Beag air Bheag, an educational website. Geared towards absolute beginners, this program takes you "bit by bit" through graded lessons, each unit ending with a conversational dialogue that sums up all the main points of the chapter. Again, I am avoiding reading the transcripts and the translations for the time being. The back-and-forth format of these simple dialogues allow me to intuit conversational characteristics such as questions, answers, frustration, incredulity, and affirmation.
• The next stage in my plan involves carefully introducing the transcripts and translations to my sound world. The music of the language and the sounds that I've already internalized should continually act as the foundation. As I slowly look through Litir Beag and Beag air Bheag texts, I hope to continually say, "Oh! That's how you spell it and that's what it means!" and not "Oh! That's how you pronounce it!" There should be little to no renegotiation of the spoken sounds, though some tricky ones (such as the hurriedly spoken definite articles "an" and "am") which were unclear in the recordings can now be solidified. The point is that the writing should further illuminate and give definition to the sounds that I already know, not visa versa. 
• This method should result in the following improvements and opportunities by the end of the summer:
  • I will have spoken a lot of Gàidhlig sounds, continually intuiting its musical patterns, cadences, and rhythms.
  • I will have a better chance of understanding the writing system and its correspondence to the sounds. Now the two can work in tandem rather than in tension and I can begin to read books with confidence.
  • I will have enjoyed myself, succeeding at doing something difficult that I love!
• Perhaps by next summer I could be in the position to actually speak Gàidhlig with living people. It would be somewhat challenging given and sparsity of Highland villages in Southern California. :) But who knows? Skype has opened up the doors to exciting new communication opportunities, and institutions like Sabhal Mòr Ostaig and Colaisde na Gàidhlig provide plenty of pedagogical resources both through distance learning and on-site visits.

Credit: Steve Greaves, Scottish Highlands
Link.

I am very excited about this plan and think that it will prove very helpful. By engaging directly with the sounds, I will have more confidence as I move into the more theoretical and structural aspects of the language. Let me know if these ideas are inspirational, confusing, or if you have other techniques that work for you. Bottom line, I am enjoying myself and my summer. I hope you do too!

Operation Trilingual: 22 Week Assessment

It has been 22 weeks since I first began my Operation Trilingual Language Learning System. As outlined in my previous post, I planned on dividing my time between different types of Input and Output to create a perpetuum mobile of linguistic beauty. Now that some time has passed I need to take stock of what has been accomplished and decide whether or not my efforts are pushing me in the direction I want to go.

I recorded my progress on the following chart:

I'm voracious! And color coordinated.

The green column shows the date in weekly groups.
The red section charts German activity and the blue French.
For each day I wrote what type of Activity (Narrative Input, Culling Input, Output), what Material was used (text, audio, flashcard program, etc.), Duration of time spent on that activity, and any special Notes.

That's how it worked; here's how I assess the journey:

• Accomplishments
  • Daily Incentive: I didn't like having to write N/A and 0hrs for a given day. Kept up my work in both languages daily.
    • Highest weekly total: 16hrs 22mins
    • Lowest weekly total: 1hr 33mins
  • Lots of Narrative Input: By far the easiest Activity, I have made my way through a healthy helping of audio books of C.S. Lewis' Prinz Kaspian (finished) and Der Reise auf der Morgenröte (in progress) in German, reading German translations of stories by Hans Christian Andersen, and reading French, literary fairy tales by the Comtesse d'Aulnoy. Yum!
  • Academic Culling Input: in addition to passing my French language test for UCSB, I had to put in some time to translate foreign documents and articles for my classes and papers. One source included reading a German keyboard treatise from the early 1700s written in a very difficult to read fraktur script.
  • Exciting Output: I got the chance to have a lengthy conversation with a German speaker, exchange friendly emails with a Swiss pianist in German, and send some Facebook messages to a French friend.
  • Free Speak Output Focus: Sometimes it's hard to decide what to yak about. Aaron's Sentence Expansion Drill and Sentence Transformation Drill are excellent to warm up a language's rules and rhythms.

I see these accomplishments as a MAJOR VICTORY given the insanely busy life of the PhD graduate student. It probably wouldn't be an understatement to say that 80% of my Input was done on the bus to or from school and the other 20% in bed while trying to calm down and go to sleep after a busy day.

But the system still requires some revamping:

• Short on Goals: My way of tracking progress works as a documentation of what I've done, but does not challenge me to meet self-imposed goals. The "do something every day" mandate has been great to keep up the momentum, but now I think it's best to give myself some specific goals I can aim for:
  • Not enough Output: Going forward, I'm going to try to have Output, probably in the form of writing, at least 3 times a week in each language. Perhaps I can make it a running story that I continue to enlarge, or I can rewrite sentences from my Culling Input with verb tense transformation. I'll have to experiment to figure out what works best, but definitely increasing the Output.
  • I need to go to the German restaurant (Brummis) and the French restaurant (Pacific Crêpes) in a few months to keep up the waiter-chatting inspiration.
• Interesting vs. Useful Materials
  • I've made sure to read or listen to Materials that I enjoy. Thus the great wealth of fairy tales. This has been excellent for my enjoyment, but a little light on the vocabulary that is most helpful in conversation or reading academic documents. Perhaps a little sprinkling of those types would be beneficial. The former may mean more shadowing to podcasts and the latter more Wikipedia articles on composers or musical terminology.
  • (I just got an audio book of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter à l'école des sorciers for Christmas!)

With the new year starting today, I think I'm in a pretty good place as far as my desire to be trilingual. I had wanted to start adding Russian, but I need to wait on that for a while as I take the time to set and meet these goals, especially the Output. Close the loop!

My best to everyone in the coming year on all your linguistic adventures. Keep the fire going!

Operation: Trilingual

A few weeks ago I had my second language learning coaching session with The Everyday Language Learner's Aaron Myers, a birthday present generously given to me by my family. During our first session we talked about directed and motivated ways of breaking through with German, but now I am at the point where I must say "bon jour" to an old friend: français. This will be the fourth time that I've set out to learn French, a language with which I've had an on-again-off-again relationship since elementary school. Back then, I was intrigued by the luxuriant sounds of the language and inspired by my ancestry to francophone Canada. Today I continue to delight in the sounds and the heritage, with the addition of UCSB requiring it for Musicology, the possibility of my PhD work focusing on the 1800s, and close familial co-learning: my brother lives in Europe and speaks it, my sister will eventually move to Ottawa and should speak it, and my wife wants to speak it.

So my question for Aaron was how to resurrect French while maintaining German. It can be done. One must be organized, inspired, and willing to repeatedly assess whether or not they are working in the direction they want. With help from Aaron, my ESL trained sister, and LucidChart here's what I came up with to help me make this work (click on it to make it bigger):

It looks a bit like something you'd find in biology class on cell walls... and I'm ok with that.

Here's how it works:

     Input: Language comes at you, flies like a ninja into your ears or eyes! I see two different types of input.

          The first (A) I call Narrative/Music. This is when you immerse or inundate yourself in listening or reading, not really stopping to look up words or checking grammar, just getting with the flow of the story and noticing the cadence of the sounds. (It's what babies do for a good three years.) Because you're not stopping, you develop contextual skills (that intonation sounded like a question, these people must be angry with each other, etc.) to help piece together what you don't get the first time. I'm not at the stage where I can just listen to German radio or watch a French documentary. That would be drowning, not inundating. For me, that means using materials I know pretty well in my mother tongue, using my prior knowledge to fill in the blanks and enjoying the story which I can anticipate and enjoy from a different perspective. At this point, my German listening consists of C.S. Lewis' Narnia series in audiobook form (I'm just starting book 2, Prinz Kaspian von Narnia) and reading consists of short Wikipedia.de articles on composers. I have not figured out yet what I want to do in French, though the audiobook Harry Potter et l'école des sorciers and Perrault's Contes de la mère l'Oye are definite possibilities. I've written a bit about contextual reading in this post on parallel texts.

          The second type of Input (B) I call Word Culling. The Narnia books are a very good level for me; I'm getting about 80% of the words and can fill in the rest with prior knowledge. The 20% I'm not totally sure about becomes an extremely manageable stockpile of words that I can focus on: isolate them, look them up, put them on a flashcard system (I use Anki) and be sure to catch them when I review a chapter or reread an article. I love the bite-sized-ness of this system because it has a high level of exposure, high level of story/enjoyment, and a low level of flipping through a dictionary. But the best way to review these words I've found is...

     Output: You have to dish it out! This is the hard part for me, especially with the horrible dance that some languages produce: is that noun feminine? what sort of preposition is that? is the verb a verb of motion? what's the adjective ending? Here's what I'm working on: I take the words that I've culled from Input B (notice the arrow) and I use them as my wordlist to write or speak. If I just learned the word for "accompaniment" I write a short paragraph about what it's like being an accompanist who accompanies with an accompaniment... Perhaps I send it in to Lang-8 and get some feedback on how that's going. Or I have what I like to call Free Speaking in which I improvise sentences out loud, usually about what I'm doing or have done or will do: Numi, we are walking on the street; I ride my motorcycle to work and the clouds are cold and wet, etc. It feels pretty silly, but it is the only way I will improve in output. You've got to babystep before you can laufen. When you use these culled words this way they morph from flashcard words you didn't know to speech acts that are linked to specific places, situations, and contexts. I'll never forget that in German you pretty much always need to use an adjective when you say the word "wind" (cold, chilly, humid, scorching, etc); according to an editor at Lang-8, it's just funny without it. Then I use this knowledge to better understand my Input (notice the other arrow), catching it when I review sections that I've culled, and catching it faster when I encounter it during other narrative/musical moments.

So that's my method. I'm pretty happy about the diagram and how it reinforces itself. It's like a perpetual motion machine of glorious language learning awesomeness! Let me know if this idea is helpful, what materials you see yourself using in Input, or ways it could be better!

Tchüß!

Salut!

Danke, Lang-8

Today I felt enough self-rejuvenation to rekindle the language learning flame that was ignited back in March when I talked to Aaron Meyers from The Everyday Language Learner. One of my assignments was to cultivate a habit of writing in German — and for that, Lang-8 is a pretty nice resource. As I manned the small circulation music library at the Music Academy of the West (quite a soporific affair) I wrote out and submitted a modest essay outlining my duties. In about five hours I got back a corrected version complete with encouragement! Here 'tis auf Deutsch and in English for your Wednesday evening enjoyment:

That's me in the blue hat and red stockings: standard Music Academy of the West garb.

Ein Tag in der Musikbibliothek

Heute arbeite ich in der Musikbibliothek in der Westmusikakademie in Santa Barbara, Kalifornien. Im Sommer veranstalten sie musikalischen Unterricht für mehrere Studenten, die aus der Ferne kommen. Auch wenn es in der Bibliothek ruhig ist, habe ich so viel zu tun! Wenn ich ankomme, setzte ich mich auf einen Stuhl neben einer Auskunft mit Computer, Telefon und Papierkorb. Danach mache ich meine Hausaufgaben. Ich lese zum Beispiel Propps "Morphologie des Märchen" oder schreibe mein musikalischer Artikel. Wenn das Telefon klingelt, dann muss ich den Anruf entgegennehmen und "Hallo, Bibliothek" sagen. Falls ein Student oder Lehrer herein kommt, erklingt ein leiser Alarm und dann muss ich Fragen beantworten, Bücher oder Notenblätter finden oder die Gegenstände mit dem Computer ausbuchen. Aber jetzt weiß ich nur, dass ich nicht schlafen darf!

A Day in the Music Library

Today I am working in the music library in the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, California. In the summer they offer musical instruction for many students who come from all over. Even though the library is peaceful I have so much to do! [Not sure how to express sarcasm in German yet.] When I arrive I sit myself in a chair behind a service desk with computer, telephone, and waste paper basket. Then I do my homework. I read, for example, Propp's "Morphology of the Fairy Tale" or write my music article. When the telephone rings [it did... once] then I take the call and say "Hello, library." If a student or teacher comes in, a little bell rings and then I answer questions, find books or sheet music, or check out materials with the computer. But now I just know that I can't fall asleep!

Two Observations on Plato, Aristotle, and Harry Potter

I'm taking a Dramatic Theory seminar through the Theater Department this quarter. In addition to the outrageously comfortable conference room chairs and meeting a new group of colleagues, Dr. David King has us wandering through an etymology-strewn, philosophy-riddled history/mind/soul-scape including the Caves of Lascaux, Nietzsche, Horace, Ruth Padel, Benjamin, and so many others. We have one session a week, almost three hours long, after which my sluggish mind, waterlogged with knowledge and hopefully a little wisdom, wants nothing more than to go home and read Harry Potter out loud (lautlesen) as my wife makes dinner. Yet, you can't really halt rumination, and here are two small connections that cropped up:

Aristotle and Plato from Raphael's School of Athens probably deep in conversation about why Harry decided to wear the horcrux around his neck rather than put it in the mokeskin pouch around his neck. 

1. The word mimesis is outrageously difficult to define. It can imply imitation, or representation, but also ideas like copy, translation, invention, illusion, or lie. It's often used in dramatic theory to talk about the theater as a crossroads of reality and fantasy, not only in terms of whether or not the plot is historically accurate or realistically feasible, but whether or not one thinks of the actor as actor or as character, the prop or the object. At one point Plato, who has an extremely complicated view of theater, uses mimetic in conjunction with the word diagetic to talk about ways of delivering a text. A diagetic delivery involves simple reading of the text, word for word, in your own natural voice; to read in a mimetic manner means giving different characters different voices. Essentially the former is Madeline L'Engle in her audiobook for A Wrinkle in Time (quite monotone), and the latter is Jim Dale reading the Rowling's Harry Potter series or Phillip Schulmann reciting C.S. Lewis' Narnia books (inflected, character-full voices galore). While one is not necessarily better than the other, I am definitely of the mimetic cast, a trait I inherited from my father's inspired readings of Verne, Lewis, and Twain when I was a child. In my mind, it's simply a lot more fun! However, Plato adds an aspect to mimesis that has some of that ancient world magic to it: the mimetic reader, as they invoke the voice of the character they are portraying, will actually, in a way, become that character and even feel what that character feels. A powerful idea! What do you give of yourself when you enter into a part? What might you receive? I caught myself thinking of this as I spoke Voldemort's "high, cold voice" and in a way count myself thankful that I got through it alright.
2. A smaller observation stems from the intensely etymological exegesis of Dr. King. Two words: splanchnon and peripateia. The first, dealt with extensively in a reading we did by Padel, is regularly translated as stomach or guts. For the ancient Greeks this is the place of emotions, of black fear, of the touching point between mortality and the divine. (Next time you get stressed and feel your stomach clench, that's your splanchnon ringing with the sound of eternity!) The second word, peripateia, is dealt with by Aristotle when he's laying out the proper disposition of a theatrical plot. It involves the moment of a plot's change of direction or reversal or twist, and constitutes an extremely important, catharsis-rich moment in a performance. After reading the Poetics and basking in the import of these two ideas, my eye was quick to pick up on a passing, but perhaps pivotal moment in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: literally, Harry's "stomach turned over!" There it is! His splanchnon peripateia-ed! Blammo! ... (This is when Jessica shrugs her shoulders and allows me a moment of intellectual nerding-out, before we continue the thrilling saga and and she resumes crafting our dinner (which will soon end up right in my splanchnon!!!!))

Here's to the beginning of Week 6. Cheers!

Reading Parallel Texts

Lately I've found a wealth of encouragement from this Every Day Language Learner post, Language Learning Tip: Using Parallel Texts. I have several books of this type, mostly German (Grimm Märchen, poetry anthologies and collections by Goethe and Rilke), but also a Gàidhlig collection of folk tales and Robert Henryson's The Testament of Cresseid in Middle Scots. Moreover the internet is chalk full of ways to synthesize the concept. In the past, when faced with an intimidating swath of foreign language, I've taken the machete-through-the-jungle approach, with minimal glances at my mother-tongue translation, convinced that the effort of immersion should be assuaged by English as little as possible.

Anne Anderson's princess from The Golden Bird doesn't judge a book by its cover.

According to Aaron's post, this is not the best way to go about it. He suggests first reading a portion of the text (as much as a single sentence to a whole chapter) in your native language, gaining an understanding of its meaning, and only then taking on a chunk of the target language. This way you spend little if no time looking up individual vocabulary words and have much more contextual or narrative meaning to assign. It also helps clear up idiomatic difficulties and generally keeps you going further longer. This concept has already been at work when I've read sections of the Bible, Harry Potter, or any of the Narnia stories because of my background knowledge.

Since reading this article, in addition to feeling good about being placed in the "Intermediate" category, I've barreled through no less than four Grimm stories with an extremely high comprehension and retention. I've discovered that this method is much more difficult with poetry given the high level of abstraction and grammatical anomalies (although my dreams seem to be haunted by Klopstock's Das Rosenband). My greatest joy has now been to read Friedrich Motte Fouqué's Undine in English, a fairy tale greatly admired by George MacDonald. I had bought the little yellow copy of the story in German while in Leipzig last year, but have always felt as if I should be much further along in vocabulary before I stumbled through it. Now, having read it once over in my mother tongue, to great satisfaction and joy, I am well equipped to take a stab at it in the original. I hope to use this same idea to get through my languishing copies of stories by Kafka, Ende's Neverending Story, and Goethe's Young Werther.

Happy reading!

The Art of Shadowing

I truly love foreign languages. Ever since I was little I have been attracted by the mystery of different linguistic cultures, the sounds, the shapes and configurations of letters, the similarities and differences, the shadowy but inviting veil between confusion and illumination. I think my first experiences with foreign language came from Bible stories, worlds filled with lengthy lists of mysterious names and cities and rivers, and finding my own name among its pages certainly confirmed my place and invited my participation in a life of language learning. You cannot get far in literature or music without coming across a linguistic frontier, and I simply find them delightful and stirring.

Up until this point my language interests have lacked a certain focus. I have never become "fluent" by any technical or personal standard and most forays into a given study have been more in the area of the hobby. (Not that this is bad! I wouldn't give up a moment of learning the Greek alphabet with my brother in elementary school or learning French by casette in junior high. Those experiences have made me who I am today.) This post explores the paradigm shift that I am experiencing in my linguistic study, an exciting change that promises to enrich and focus my already eager passion.

Lava Gull (1991) by Alan Gouk.

It all starts with the blog world. Seriously, type "second language acquisition blog" in Google or click on one of the language blog links to the left. There is a whole world of people who love nothing better then exploring great ways to learn languages. I particularly appreciate the combination of opinion, study, and outright encouragement I find in blogs like The Mezzofanti Guild, EDLL, and polyglossic. It's best to stay positive.

Here are the things I've been doing to stay positive. My language at this point is German: the tongue of my maternal ancestors (Bachmans und Luckensmeyers), the language of Vogelweide, Luther, Bach, Goethe, and Schoenberg, and the one in which every musicologist needs to be proficient. Growing up my learning tools have consisted of learning grammar, some vocabulary, and maybe trying to memorize a song or poem. Very solitary, very inefficient, and ultimately discouraging. In 2009-10 I took a year of German at a community college, an extremely uplifting environment that got me enough chops to start reading fairy tales by the Grimm Brothers. Personally, I suggest all these things and would add to them the following unique and exciting technique that I've recently gotten into: shadowing. (Disclaimer: I'm not an expert, just enthusiastic.)

Shadowing goes something like this. Remember when you were in, say, third grade and you thought it would be awesome to "show off your cognitive erudition" (also known as "annoy people") by repeating whatever anyone else says as they're saying it. It's word piggybacking. If you did not ever do that as a child, perhaps you have had it done to you, or maybe you've heard the echo effect in the second verse of Britten's This Little Babe from A Ceremony of Carols. The object is to listen and mimic, immediately, almost simultaneously, the foreign words you are hearing. Additionally one can shadow more effectively by saying the sounds as loudly and clearly as possible and by pacing briskly. That last part is a little awkward at first, but is intended to challenge your brain to multitask and therefore get the language into the "automatic" section of your mind. Interested? Confused? More description here.

Duchamp Descending a Staircase by Du-u-cha-ha-m-mp-p himself.

This is how I do it. I subscribe to podcasts from www.SlowGerman.com a series of talks by Annik Rubens of Münich. I listen to half-minute intervals on my iPod with earbuds, saying the sounds as she says them, while pacing back and forth on my porch, repeating until I feel as though I am matching the sounds and inflections of her voice. Later I will read the text and put together more of the meaning that I wasn't able to glean from just listening. The benefits of this process after a month are:

• I am exercising my listening skills, something you can't really do by just reading, but something you don't want to leave until the last minute if you actually expect to have a back-and-forth conversation with a native. Identifying words without reading is very difficult for me, sort of like musical dictation, but that probably means its worth doing.
• I am ingesting the "music" of German. Even if I don't know the exact meaning I can generally identify clauses, verbs, nouns, prepositional phrases, etc. I can especially hear the double-verb sentence endings (...fahren wollen). These forms and sentence chunks become ear-worms that play repeatedly in my head.
• Afterwards I can babble in German, funny little sentences. Huge boost to the confidence, feeling things roll off your tongue, even if they roll without complete control. With the forms in my head it's just a matter of learning some more vocabulary and brushing up on grammar, mostly genders and adjective inflection. 

If you want something to revitalize and challenge your language learning experience, I would suggest trying out shadowing. It is truly exhilarating (SlowGerman.com is not quite as slow as you might think and sometimes it feels like getting chased by a pack of wolves to keep up) and quite satisfying to glean meaning from repeated listenings without the help of a text.

This is often how it feels to do shadowing, although the consequences of slipping are not nearly as tragic.

Children of the Sun

Yesterday I read online that the word Spokane means “Children of the Sun.” I thought to myself, “That’s amazing! What a cool city name!” In our visit to the town last weekend I we were challenged and graciously corrected by the locals in the exact or disputed pronunciation of such streets and parks as Manito and Tekoa. This sets my mind a’ thinkin’ and before you know it I’m deep in a linguistic and cultural tangent. And here we are, 24 hours later with a little blurb on Npoqínišcn or Spokane Salishan, the language of the Native Americans of the Spokane area.

Photograph of man wearing traditional Salish dress by unknown photographer.

I know very, very little about Native American languages: Paiute Code Talkers of WWII, Kostner in Dances with Wolves, a few words of “the language of the Aztecs” via my brother. My brother also imparted upon me a sense of the difficulty of these languages grammatically, phonetically, and the writing system.

Information on this language is frightfully scarce. The closest I could find to a tutorial is a small Language Program site set up by the Spokane Tribe of Indians. It has sound files, phrases, the alphabet, some songs, and a terrifying tale of a frog and a snake in which the frog ends very badly despite his insistent “Hoy, hoy, hoy, hoys!” This isn’t a language that you’ll find a Teach Yourself… version of. Apparently it is spoken by only about 50 people, that out of a 1,000 total ethnic population in the year 2000. Extremely sad. I was pretty bummed out about that today.

Chiefs witnessing the completion of Colville Dam in 1941 (source).

Still we do what we can and celebrate what will all be gathered up by loving hands someday. Sarah G. Thomason has written a very didactic paper that summarizes the challenging characteristics of this language group. Challenging is a rather loose term. Maybe horrifically Herculean. Or sadly Sisyphus-ian. Here are just a few of the linguistic characteristics:

A. Tons o’ consonants:

          1. Ejectives (or glottalic egressives): some sort of explosive, coughing “k”

          2. Lateral obstruents (or voiceless alveolar lateral fricative): a breathy “l” with a dash of “w”

          3. Voiced velar fricatives: think hard, gargly Gaelic “gh”

          4. Voiceless glottal stop: just what it sounds like

          5. And a phyrangeal approximant: choking

B. Consonant clusters:

          1. Take for example the simple word for “thank you”: lemlmtš

          2. Or “Where is the store?”: čen ɬuˀ sntumistn?

C. Oh yeah, and it’s written in American phonetic notation with all manner of crazy phonological import

D. Grammatical issues:
          1. Agglutination: prefixes, suffixes, and infixes that make one word say a sentence

          2. Some sort debatable nounlessness

          3. Loose word order

As you can see it’s quite baffling. There’s nothing like looking into the world of Npoqínišcn or Old Irish to make you appreciate the relative simplicity of German or French. Check out that Spokane Language Program site and hear the native speakers. It’s quite amazing.

With that I’m off to memorize my key phrase of the day: “I’m going to Spokane!”:

čiq xʷuy č’ sƛ̕etkʷ!