From the record Charles Mingus Presents C.M., recorded 20 October, 1960at Nola Penthouse Sound Studios, New York, with the wild Eric Dolphy on alto/bass clarinet, Danny Richmond on drums, and Ted Curson on trumpet.
Tag Archives: madness
fela kuti & egypt 80 – beasts of no nation
This post goes out to FIFA president Sepp Blatter and all the people aligning themselves with various national football teams in the bizarre competitive spectacle that is the FIFA World Cup.
Happening this time round in Brazil, FIFA bleeds yet another host country’s economy dry, with the willing help of its own government – systematic violence, neo-colonial parasitism. Last time it was South Africa’s turn, and the effects are still being felt here.
roky erickson – i know the hole in baby’s head
Roky Erickson’s haunting, autobiographical spoken-word piece, filmed at the Austin State Hospital in 1986. Shot by and courtesy of Douglas Mobley.
maria callas – mad scene from lucia di lammermoor (donizetti)
“The character of Lucia has become an icon in opera and beyond, an archetype of the constrained woman asserting herself in society. She reappears as a touchstone for such diverse later characters as Flaubert’s adulterous Madame Bovary and the repressed Englishwomen in the novels of E.M. Forster. The insanity that overtakes and destroys Lucia, depicted in opera’s most celebrated mad scene, has especially captured the public imagination. Donizetti’s handling of this fragile woman’s state of mind remains seductively beautiful, thoroughly compelling, and deeply disturbing. Madness as explored in this opera is not merely something that happens as a plot function: it is at once a personal tragedy, a political statement, and a healing ritual.” (Commentary from HERE)
Maria Callas performs “Il dolce suono mi colpì di sua voce”, the “Mad Scene” from the opera Lucia di Lammermoor by Gaetano Donizetti, recorded live in Florence in February 1953. Tullio Serafin conducted Callas, Giuseppe di Stefano, Tito Gobbi, Raffaele Arie, Valliano Natali, Maria Canali, Maggio Musical Fiorentino Orchestra & Maggio Musicale Fiorentino Chorus.
The discussion in the comments underneath the video is quite entertaining, especially if read in light of the Anne Carson essay I posted earlier. Continue reading
anne carson – the gender of sound
William Etty – “The Siren and Ulysses”, 1837.
Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public, in ancient as well as modern contexts. Consider how many female celebrities of classical mythology, literature and cult make themselves objectionable by the way they use their voice.
For example, there is the heart-chilling groan of the Gorgon, whose name is derived from a Sanskrit word, *garg meaning “a guttural animal howl that issues as a great wind from the back of the throat through a hugely distended mouth”. There are the Furies whose high-pitched and horrendous voices are compared by Aiskhylos to howling dogs or sounds of people being tortured in hell (Eumenides). There is the deadly voice of the Sirens and the dangerous ventriloquism of Helen (Odyssey) and the incredible babbling of Kassandra (Aiskhylos, Agamemnon) and the fearsome hullabaloo of Artemis as she charges through the woods (Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite). There is the seductive discourse of Aphrodite which is so concrete an aspect of her power that she can wear it on her belt as a physical object or lend it to other women (Iliad). There is the old woman of Eleusinian legend Iambe who shrieks obscenities and throws her skirt up over her head to expose her genitalia. There is the haunting garrulity of the nymph Echo (daughter of Iambe in Athenian legend) who is described by Sophokles as “the girl with no door on her mouth” (Philoktetes).
Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day. Its chief tactic is an ideological association of female sound with monstrosity, disorder and death.
— From “The Gender of Sound”, in Glass, Irony and God. New Directions, 1995: pp 120-121
The brilliant Anne Carson presents a history of the gendered voice, from Sophocles to Gertrude Stein. She outlines what is at stake in our assumptions around sound, questioning whether the concept of ‘self-control’ is a barrier to acknowledging other forms of human order, feeding into wider debates on social order, both past and present.
Read the whole essay HERE.
the raincoats – adventures close to home (1979)
Passion that shouts
Red with anger
I lost myself
Through alleys of mysteries
I went up and down
like a demented train
Don’t take it personal
I choose my own fate
I follow love
I follow hate
Searching for something
that makes hearts move
I found myself
But my best possession
walked into the shade
and threatened to drift away
Don’t take it personal
I choose my own fate
I follow love
I follow hate
For all of myself
I left you behind as if I could
possessed by Quixote’s dream
Went to fight dragons in the land of concrete
Don’t take it personal
I choose my own fate
I follow love
I follow hate
Rolling in pain
discovered what hurts
and tasted hell
infatuated by madness
I danced in flames
and drank in the depth of love
the moscow coup attempt – sprout and the bean
Cover of Joanna Newsom’s song “Sprout and the Bean”, with vocals by Vera Ostrova — sans the shrillness of the original and with a beautiful video — off a 2010 compilation album called Versions of Joanna.
“And as I said, I slept as though dead, dreaming seamless dreams of lead.
When you go away, I am big-boned and fey in the dust of the day, in the dirt of the day.”
fleurmach 