(program)
Candide Recording, printed in the USA
Erik Satie (1866-1925)
Selected songs
Pianists: Frank Glazer & Richard Deas
Mezzo-soprano: Elaine Bonazzi
Violin: Millard Taylor
Songs:
Upshaw (In The Month of June)
up Shaw St., on a pair of never-ending legs,
pedal on freshly-tuned pedal—perhaps at
Curbside, or Sweet Pete’s, the list runs endless around here
—down the brief slope that relieves the northbound
trek off College street.
in the rearview mirror,
june is a whirring obelisk.
and so i followed, on instinct as obvious as
the A-frames in front of Tostado Cafe. i read
in some snobbish book that the true emblem
of aristocracy is to be found in the limbs. not
in the fineries of fance and priss, but in the generations
of effort required for so subtle a combination
of strong and supple. that was last june,
and i still have the freeze-frame of the right hand turn she made,
then the gentle glide down the declivity. then my silent
guffaw, humming the inaugural four notes of Satie’s ‘Je Te Veux’.
and so i followed, down the incline
to Dewson St. on a slower single-speed with an old-dutch handlebar—
all year long the owner-cum-chef had been vying to add it to the gallery
of similarly-dutch bikes dangling like carcasses from the ceiling
of Tostados, above the miniature jars of Nutella, neat piles of alfajores,
and the display Remington typewriter from the 20’s
—but what’s the rush? what’s ever is the rush?
she’ll always by making that right hand turn up Shaw St.
that it happened once, it happens forever. a endless steady stream of toned calves,
waist-high black shorts, and spindly road bikes charging up that hill;
totems of a new, albeit inadvertent, aristocracy.
that it happened once, it happens forever. i can only bare witness,
standing by the corner in front of Tostados, with a song in my head.
what does it matter if i, too, went up Shaw, pedalling faster to get ahead,
get a word in—a good bike deserves an even better basket and so on
—the traffic light at Harbord are slow enough for a brief back and
forth.
what does it matter if, instead, i went into Tostados
for an alfajero (they really are the most ephemeral things to come out of an oven).
the argument for more bike lanes in Toronto
has been entirely misguided. what do safety and carbon
emissions matter compared to a good conversation on
two wheels? i don’t remember passing Bloor St., but Barton
made a brief appearance and Pendrith was furious that
I turned down yet another opportunity to wave goodbye.
(if you can’t shoot your shot on Essex, then why bother at all?)
You and I we incarnate something: eternity is as much a thing
that counts on and on, endlessly, as it is one thing with
infinitely small parts. that it happened once, it happens forever.
everything that can happen within this one whole has already happened.
the same returns again and again, eternally. there is nothing left but
to bear witness, to remember, to call it June and set it to music.
‘In The Month of June’ by Laurits Andersen (1899)
to take the path up Shaw—or not—to take the hand,
or not…it’s all the same. to love, and to bite into an
alfajore with the same devotion, that is all there is to do.
Sometimes the best are just for goodbyes: some things are
of course only meant for a brief epic.
so it began with one song —Ghada Ghanem’s soprano
washing over me as i make the right
turn on to Essex, the sibilant s’s of her ‘tristesse’ slapping against the shores
of my inner ear—and ends with another song:
a couple paltry lines from ‘Harvest
Moon’ in the inaugural hours of July,
put the whole affair to rest.
i’d like to find time this week to give in and add
to that menagerie of carcasses: as a token to a summer past,
to one man’s perseverance despite the ravages of a global
pandemic on his small but honest alfajore-enterprise, to
the small slice of eternity that we swallow every time we pocket a memory,
to, above all, those rare moments that we heed the tried
and true hand of instinct.
(song of the week: ‘Homesickness’ — Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou)
only in the music of Andrew Bird do i hear the same yearning as that of Emahoy, an Ethiopian composer who, for reasons unknown, declined a scholarship to London’s Royal Academy of Music to become a nun. trained in the western classical tradition, but inspired by the ancient modal chants of and Orthodox church, Emahoy’s style surpasses the temptation to describe her as ‘Ethiopian Chopin’. there’s something in her piano riffs and incongruent phrasing that lies deeper than any particular musical tradition, a longing that seems suggest there isn’t world enough to fill. ‘
Where is it that fills this deepness I feel’ asks a song from Sibylle Baier’s 2006 album, Colour Green, published the same year that a compilation of Emahoy’s compositions was published (Ethiopiques), which features ‘Homesickness’. both albums were unearthed decades after they were initially dreamed up by their female composers. both were authored by women who, at the height of their creative output in the middle of the previous century, opted instead for a private life away from composing and recording; Baier in a quiet family life in America and Emahoy in an Ethopian monastery where she still resides today.
Throwback to: Year 2: Week47 / Year 1: Week47
Click here for the full 2019/2020 roster of composers