Some more about Rudolphus

First a little background:

Some days ago, my friend Kevin Edelvang, organ grinder at St Stephen’s Church in Copenhagen, sent me a funny little text that started with “Reno erat Rudolphus”. I thought it might be fun to find a Gregorian hymn melody that would fit the metre, and slip the song in at some church occasion during Christmas season.

I browsed around a little but I couldn’t find anything that I was satisfied with, so I decided to write my own melody instead.

I then typeset the melody nicely to make it look like a page from a Gregorian chant book (using the excellent Gregorio software), then sang it a couple of times in a multitrack recording with lots of cathedral reverb, and sent the files to Kevin. He then passed them on to some church musician friends, who passed them on again, and the whole thing exploded.

I put the “manuscript” page up here at the blog, the sound file on soundcloud and eventually a video version on youtube, and in four days there were 50,000+ hits. Quite good for a couple of hours fooling around a Sunday evening.

The melody that came out of this little exercise, is actually quite interesting, if I may say so myself.

  • The Phrygian mode. Of course it is a Phrygian melody! Although the modern Rudolph melody is blatantly chordally conceived, the third mode skeleton e-g-a-c’ with the frequent turns to the neighbours of the outer notes (e-d and e-f, and c’d’/cb) actually accomodates for all those tones and melodic outlines that would never have occurred in plainchant.
  • Most problematic in this respect is the sequence-like relationship between the first two phrases (“Reno…” and “Si quando…”), and the very un-gregorian tritone leap between b and f between those phrases. Luckily, this could be masked by using standard melodic formulas.
  • These are actually the only places where I had to actively mask the melody; for the rest, it was enough to fill in leaps add cadential formulas here and there.
  • I made one mistake, which was completely unnecessary: the second phrase (“Si quando…”) should have ended on the low e and not, like the fourth phrase, on c’. This was in fact the one aspect of the chant tune that annoyed me: the repetitiveness of the phrase endings. Ironically, this would have been avoided completely had I just used the correct melody. The corrected version will appear soon in an internet near you.
  • I wanted to strike a balance between letting the melody be heard clearly and giving it a convincingly Gregorian melodic style. When even renowned chant scholars were fooled – and when I myself while recording it would forget which melody I was “really” singing – I take that as evidence that it works well as a Gregorian tune.
  • That said – apart from a few ornaments, just about every tone in the melody comes directly from the original, as can be seen from this version (with the second phrase corrected and some more textual emendations), in modern notation and with the melody notes marked in red:

 

Reno erat Rudolphus, modern notation with melody tones marked in red
Reno erat Rudolphus, modern notation with melody tones marked in red

Lastly, a few words about the text. The “textus receptus” that Kevin initially sent me has been floating around on the internet without attribution for a long time. But in a comment to the song, I was told that the translation was made by Claes Tande, catholic priest in Norway. I contacted him, but although he did remember having had something to do with the text, he would not claim authorship. Rather, it had something to do with a student expedition back in the eighties from Rome to Istanbul in a Norwegian owned Peugeot 404 1968 model Sherman Tank, where the writing possibly involved some priest candidates from Louisiana and Texas, and where Tande did some language checking.

Reno erat Rudolphus

Here’s a Christmas song that I wrote 800 years ago:

(use this link if the fancy media bar above doesn’t work, or if you want to download an mp3)

Here’s a more elaborate explanation of what is going on in the song.

And here’s the sheet music to go with it, in a slightly modernized version (and with some changes in the lyrics in relation to the recorded version):

reno-full-2

Ten points – or more! – and eternal Christmas cheer, to you if you get the joke.

Here’s a pdf file, ready to print: Reno erat Rudolphus

En strategi om religion og fornuft

This is a post about islam. Or maybe not – it’s mostly about the value of having a society that is based on secular, rational principles. It’s in Danish, because it relates to a discussion that was going on in Denmark over the summer.

Hvorfor er det nu, at det for medier og politikere er så vigtigt at få svar på om muslimske ledere tager afstand fra stening eller ej?

Og omvendt: hvorfor er det, at muslimske ledere har så svært ved at svare: »Ja, jeg tager afstand fra stening«, men altid synes at måtte pakke svaret ind i formuleringer som holder en flugtvej åben, eller beholder en usikkerhed om hvorvidt man egentlig mener hvad man siger?

Jeg vil skitsere et muligt svar på dette, og foreslå en strategi.

»Tage afstand fra« eller »ikke arbejde for«

Nu senest gælder det Imran Shah, talsmand for Det Islamiske Trossamfund (DIT), som i forbindelse med Inger Støjbergs sommerspin præciserer Trossamfundets standpunkt i forhold til sager som stening, homoseksuelle og tvangsægteskaber.

Mht. stening udtaler Trossamfundet: »vi mener ikke, at stening er relevant på nogen måde i dag i Danmark, Europa eller noget andet land. At det ikke er relevant inkluderer også, at DIT ikke plæderer for det, arbejder for eller ønsker det indført, hverken nu eller i en eller anden rent hypotetisk situation.«

Tilsyneladende er det en meget stærk udmelding: ikke relevant, ikke ønsket i nogen som helst hypotetisk situation. Hvem kan dog se noget problematisk i det?

Men når Politikens journalist Jesper Vangkilde stiller spørgsmålet: »Tager I afstand fra stening? Finder I stening forkert? Mener I at stening er en forkastelig ting?« glider talsmanden af, gang på gang, på en måde som er så lidt overbevisende at kun Lars Løkke kan gøre ham det efter.

Og så er det, at man som læser og tilhører bliver mistænksom. Hvorfor vil du ikke svare direkte på spørgsmålet? Hvad er det ved formuleringerne »tage afstand fra« og »finde forkert og forkastelig« som bare ikke bruges om stening?

Og omvendt: hvordan adskiller disse formuleringer sig fra dem, der bruges i stedet: »ikke relevant«, »vil ikke arbejde for«, »ikke plædere for«?

Negativt eller ikke-positivt

Forskellen er egentlig ret tydelig: det første sæt formuleringer karakteriserer selve foreteelsen stening som værende noget der skal undgås og bekæmpes; det andet afslører ingen holdning til stening over hovedet, men siger kun at det ikke er en vej man kan tænke sig at gå.

Det er med andre ord forskellen mellem stening som noget negativt eller som noget ikke-positivt, dvs. potentielt neutralt.

Når det åbenbart er så vigtigt for DIT at fastholde den forskel, kan man ikke undgå at tænke, at der må findes underliggende motiver, ikke udtalte årsager.

En sådan årsag kunne for eksempel være, at Muhammed, ifølge hadith, ved flere lejligheder har anbefalet eller beordret stening af ægteskabsbrydere. Hvis man altså placerer stening på den negative side, hvordan undgår man så at også Profeten havner dér, om så bare med en lilletå?

En anden mulig årsag kunne være, at den udstrakte støtte, de hårde straffe i sharia-lovgivningen nyder i befolkningen i de muslimske lande (82% i Ægypten og Pakistan, 70% i Jordan, 42% i Indonesien, og så meget som 16% i Tyrkiet), gør det nødvendigt for muslimske ledere i Danmark at træde varsomt for ikke at støde sine egne fra sig. Frederik Stjernfelt fremholder i en kronik i Politiken, at »det synes at være et mindretal af muslimske indvandrere i Vesten, der … hylder forskellige islamistiske synspunkter«, men at det er et relativt stort mindretal, på 15–50%.

Eller det kunne være at man, hvis man indtager et moralsk eller etisk standpunkt til stening baseret på nogle bestemte principper for hvordan handlinger skal vurderes, og derefter bedømmer stening som værende uforenligt med disse principper, implicit kommer til at sætte dem højere end de principper, en straffemetode som stening hviler på. Med andre ord: ved at tage afstand fra stening kommer man implicit til at sige, at der findes bedre måder at organisere samfundet på end dem, der foreskrives i koran og hadith.

Religion eller fornuft

Her er vi måske ved problemets kerne, og ved grunden til, at spørgsmålet om holdningen til stening ikke kun er et tomt ritual som muslimer, der vil ytre sig i vesten, skal igennem »før den egentlige dialog kan gå i gang,« som Mohamed Ali, Landsformand for Muslimer i Dialog, udtrykker det. Det kommer nemlig til at handle om hvilken af to uforenlige ideologier man tilslutter sig i forhold til hvordan vi – som samfund – skal sætte rammerne for hvorledes vi – som individer – handler i forhold til hinanden.

Med andre ord: Hvad vejer tungest: religion eller fornuft?

I Europa har vi en tusindårig tradition for en adskillelse mellem den verdslige og den åndelige magt, og vi har – specielt i den Lutherske del af Europa – en 500 år lang udvikling i ryggen, hvor det gradvist er blevet mere og mere accepteret, at religion hører privatlivet, åndslivet til, mens politik, lov og ret, filosofi og ideologi baseres på rationelle principper; at »politik skal være sagligt informeret via uafhængige vidensinstitutioner og ikke kan føres på baggrund af religiøse hypoteser alene«, som Stjernfelt udtrykker det i sin kronik.

Dette er ikke en tilfældig udvikling i Vesten. Det er en villet og ønsket udvikling, som man har kæmpet for at opnå, og som skal etableres på ny og fra grunden af hver gang et nyt individ indlemmes i fællesskabet.

I et homogent samfund uden dramatiske indslag af migration sker dette nærmest automatisk fra fødslen af: man lærer de grundlæggende handlemønstre på samme måde som man lærer sproget. Når der ind i et sådant samfund pludselig kommer en relativt stor mængde individer, som ikke nødvendigvis har samme automatiske forhold til disse mønstre, opstår der af dette en forvirring.

For DF og deres støtter fremstår denne forvirring som en trussel. Så får vi værdikamp og grænsefetichisme som resultat. En mere konstruktiv måde at møde forvirringen på ville måske være at bruge den som anledning til refleksion: hvad er disse værdier egentlig, og hvorfor er det egentlig at der skal kamp til? Hvor føres denne kamp, og mod hvem eller hvad, og med hvilke midler?

Subjektiv menneskelighed eller objektiv danskhed

Et muligt svar er, at religionernes traditionelle tilgang lider under den ulykkelige dobbelt-omstændighed, at de er nedfældet af mennesker under nogle bestemte forudsætninger, men fremstilles som om de var over-menneskelige svar eller påbud givet af et eller andet guddommeligt væsen, og derfor befinder sig hinsides refleksion eller kritik baseret på menneskelig erfaring her og nu.

Dertil: at de institutioner vi i løbet af de sidste mange sekler har udviklet – demokrati, menneskerettigheder, den fri, offentlige debat – er gode nok til at bære ansvaret for individets velfærd i fællesskabet, og at de gør dette på en måde som mindst er ligeværdig med men generelt bedre end hvad en moral, der bygger på forestillingen om en guddom hinsides fornuften, formår. De sociale videnskaber, sprogfilosofien, poetikken, osv. giver os tilsammen værktøjer til at forklare alle de dilemmaer og præcisere de paradokser som religionerne traditionelt har forvaltet, og desuden lukke op for nye spørgsmål og sammenhænge som religionerne ikke har kunnet stille.

Det eneste den rationelle tilgang afholder sig fra at udtale sig om, er dogmer, dvs. trossatser, som holdes for sande uanset hvad erfaringen tilsiger, samt sådant som mennesket ikke kan have erfaringsbaseret kundskab om, fx livet efter døden.

Et sådant system adskiller sig fra det religiøse ved at være transparent og fleksibelt. Der findes ingen steder hvor vi må sige: her til kan vi se, men ikke længere. Der findes ingen uransagelige veje – de hører Gud til. Og ingen af de principper der kommer frem i det sekulære system er hugget i sten. De er alle åbne for forandring, hvis kollektivet kommer frem til at det er bedst.

Desværre har et andet svar fået lov til at dominere: at disse værdier er selvfølgelige, fx ved at være danske, sådan forstået at alle som har del i »det danske« på mystisk vis besidder dem. Dermed har man omvendt også sagt, at man ikke kan have del i »det danske« uden at besidde dem. Efter denne model kan man aldrig blive dansker, man kan aldrig lære det, fordi rigtige danskere er det med selvfølgelighed.

Dette er i omrids DFs ideologi, og det er en religiøs ideologi: en selvfølgelig danskhed er i denne sammenhæng en objektiv danskhed, dvs. en danskhed som eksisterer uafhængig af de konkrete omstændigheder den optræder i, og som hellere ikke kan efterprøves. Men når man tilskriver noget en objektiv eksistens uden at der findes spor af det i den fysiske erfaring, så er man netop ovre i et område man med fordel kan kalde religiøst.

Og religiøse dogmer er et dårligt fundament for dialog, i særdeleshed med andre religiøse dogmer med modstridende fundament.

Så bliver budskabet til DF: I bliver sgu nødt til at finde jer et bedre fundament at bygge jeres værdier på – for sådan som I præsenterer dem, hviler de på lige så skrøbelig, dogmatisk grund som den islamisme I kritiserer.

Men lige så tydeligt bliver budskabet til den anden side: Hvis I forventer jer, at mennesker i den danske offentlighed skal handle efter principper som kun giver mening i forhold til et eller andet religiøst dogme, så vil I blive skuffet.

Problemerne med det undvigende svar

De undvigende svar på spørgsmålet om stening bliver et problem, fordi man ved at glide af på spørgsmålet skaber en mistanke om at man holder noget tilbage.

Det slår ud i to retninger.

For det første skaber man en usikkerhed omkring sig selv i al almindelighed. Hvad er det, han ikke vil sige? Er der andet, han ikke har sagt? Har han ført mig bag lyset også på områder, jeg troede vi havde et fællesskab omkring? Osv. Mistænksomheden er langt fra altid rationel, men de mekanismer, der ligger bag ved er reelle nok.

For det andet giver man det indtryk, at man at man faktisk har noget at skjule. Måske er DIT slet ikke villig til at acceptere, at religionen forpasses til privatsfæren? Måske er der faktisk en større del end man vil indrømme af det muslimske mindretal i Danmark, der deler det overvældende ægyptiske flertals opfattelse og faktisk slet ikke tager afstand fra stening, men til og med går ind for det? Måske gælder det også for talsmændene selv: at selv om de ikke vil arbejde for at indføre stening i Danmark, så har de det måske hellere ikke så godt med tanken om, at religiøse dogmer intet skulle have med vores lovgivning at gøre?

En strategi

Jeg skal ikke udtale mig om hvilke intern-muslimske agendaer man forholder sig til når man går rundt om spørgsmål om stening og homoseksuelle som katten om den varme grød. Men jeg vil hævde, at overfor den danske offentlighed gør man sig selv en bjørnetjeneste.

Den strategi jeg vil foreslå i stedet, er nem nok, og den findes i to varianter: luk diskussionen i stedet for at holde den åben, så er der ikke mere at komme efter.

Eller åbn den der, hvor den hører hjemme, så spiller den ikke over og skader frugtbare diskussioner andre steder.

Sig ikke: »Vi mener ikke stening er relevant, vi vil ikke arbejde for det.« Sig i stedet: »Ja, vi tager afstand fra det.« Klart, tydeligt, og på en sådan måde at svaret bruger samme ord som spørgsmålet.

Skulle det blive nødvendig at gøre en præcisering, kan det sagtens gøres bagefter, uden at det rokker ved svarets tydelighed i forhold til spørgsmålet. Det kunne for eksempel være at man vil præcisere, at det entydige svar man lige har givet, nok gælder entydigt om hvordan vi bør organisere vores liv her og nu (hvilket er hvad spørgsmålet handler om), men at det ikke betyder, at man betragter alle, der nogensinde har deltaget i eller anbefalet stening (fx Muhammed) som umoralske bæster. Jeg tror, jeg kan garantere, at både Politikens journalist og alle andre debattører er flintrende ligeglade med hvad Muhammed har gjort eller ikke. De/vi vil kun vide at vi kan stole på jer – at det skrøbelige projekt, som det er at bygge og opretholde en sekulær civilisation baseret på distribution af magt og ansvar til samtlige medlemmer af fællesskabet, ikke kommer unødvendigt til skade.

Skulle det i stedet være sådan at man egentlig ikke tager afstand fra stening eller mere generelt fra religiøs indflydelse på civil lovgivning, så lyder strategien i stedet:

Sig ikke: »Vi mener ikke stening er relevant, vi vil ikke arbejde for det.« Sig i stedet: »Nej, vi tager ikke afstand fra det.« Klart, tydeligt, og på en sådan måde at svaret bruger samme ord som spørgsmålet.

Og så kan svaret for eksempel fortsætte: »vi tager ikke afstand fra det som princip, fordi det har guddommelig basis, og det har vi som mennesker ikke kraft eller ret til at rokke ved.« Eller: »…, fordi det er integreret i et system hvor vi også har dette og dette, som mere end vejer op for den grusomhed en stening selvfølgelig indebærer.«

Så er det i hvert fald på bordet, og kan den reelle dialog begynde, så alle ved, hvad vi har at forholde os til. Hvis I mener, at et samfund baseret på islams retstradition vil være bedre for os alle, end et samfund baseret på verdslige oplysningsprincipper, så sig det, giv os argumenter, ikke kun i praksis, men også i handling.

Men er dette det alternativ der bliver gældende når det ærlige svar er afgivet, skal man forvente kamp. Så betyder »dialog« ikke kun at du siger dit, jeg siger mit, og så går vi begge hjem til vort. Så handler »værdikampen« ikke om danskhed og traditioner (de er, hvilket alle traditionsforskere ved, meget omskiftelige), eller om at en ægte dansker skal spise flæskesteg, men om at man skal kunne acceptere og være glad for at leve i et samfund der styres efter sekulære principper. At der ligger en værdi i dette. At det er noget godt. At det har større værdi end de kendte alternativer –også end de alternativer som siges at stamme fra en gammel bog, som en eller anden Gud har dikteret.

Hvordan kampen udkæmpes, med hvilke midler, er op til begge parter. Det ligger i den rationelt baserede vestlige civilisations natur, at fornuftige argumenter har en central plads. Men den forudsætter et fælles fundament for samtalen. Gud befinder sig per definition hinsides fornuften. Påberåber man Gud i samtale om straffemetoder, har man fjernet sig fra dette fælles fundament, og så er muligheden for en konstruktiv dialog også borte.

Abdul Wahid Pedersen udtalte i sin tid, netop i forbindelse med stening: »hvor forfærdelig strafformen end er, så er den givet af Gud selv, og det er derfor ikke op til mennesker at ændre den.«

Jo, det ér! Det er lige præcis det, det er.

Det princip der gælder i den europæiske civilisation, er, at det netop er op til menneskerne at ordne sine forhold selv, og ændre på ting man finder uhensigtsmæssige.

I den grad en værdikamp er nødvendig, skulle den gerne føres som en kamp imod den ansvarsfraskrivelse, det til syvende og sidst er at lægge skylden for menneskelig grusomhed på Gud. Kom det først på plads, skulle der nok også blive plads til halal-kød på samtlige sygehuse, uden at nogen ville brokke sig.

“This Machine . . . “

This Machine Kills Fascists
This Machine Kills Fascists

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Obama, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.”

... and this machine doesn't
… and this machine doesn’t

The quote isn’t originally about Obama, although every single part of the statement can be found, explicitly or indirectly, in the government’s defense in the Snowden/NSA scandal.

Replace “Obama” with “Hitler”, and you have the original. It’s from Milton Mayer’s classic They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, and the words are those of a university colleague of the author, explaining “the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people.”

Oh well, maybe the USA isn’t a fascist state after all. We’ll see what happens with the Congress vote about Syria.

Some indices to keep an eye on:

  • The manipulation of democatic institutions by a relatively small group of people in power.
  • The level of secrecy, including the passing of secret laws to be used by secret courts.
  • The close ties between governmental and corporative interests with huge economic resources. As Mussolini put it: “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”
  • The use of police force and judiciary persecution to stifle opposition and critical investigation, e.g. the prosecution of Barrett Brown, Chelsea Manning, and — not yet consummated — Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden.
  • The percentage of GNP spent on military and police.
  • The skilled use of Orwellian Doublespeak.

“What’s good is bad, what’s bad is good”: What I failed to mention about Another Self Portrait

There is one thing that I didn’t mention in my review of Another Self Portrait: that these songs are not masterpieces that redefine the history of popular music. In my review, I have downplayed the possible negative aspects. So just to make it clear:The album starts with three songs where Dylan’s guitar is painfully out of tune (thankfully, it gets better, but that sequencing would get you kicked out of album-sequencing class if I were the teacher); many of the songs are not quite well rehearsed or even known — even by Dylan, not to mention poor Bromberg (guitar) and Kooper (piano) who struggle heroically but not always successfully to follow Dylan’s eccentricities and to layer some musical substance over them; Dylan’s vocal inflections are interesting, and most of the time convincing, but he balances dangerously close to the thin line where the listener’s constant fear of a deadly crash overshadows the thrill of the balancing act.

The artist at work

In short, there’s plenty here to be annoyed about, should one be so inclined.

So why am I not? Why have I, in a review of the early incarnation of possibly the worst album in Dylan’s catalogue, not made a single negative remark about it?

Stressors

It’s all about stress. Stressors, rather.

Nassim Taleb, American-Lebanese scholar living in New York, gives a possible clue. It’s hidden in a recent Freakonomics podcast about why, among the most successful people in all the richest countries of the world, there is always someone from Lebanon.

He says:

The idea that anything natural, anything organic, anything biological up to a point reacts a lot better to stressors than without. So in other words, now for example, I’m talking to you now on this [telephone] line. If the line has some noise on it, a little bit of mess here and there,  then the listeners will grasp the message a lot better and remember it longer. A little bit of adversity, a little bit of strain, of stress, results in a little more performance on anything.You switch from what Daniel Kahneman calls system one to system two. One system where you’re passive and not making an effort to an effortful one. And that switch takes place via a stressor.

Dylan’s infamous voice is such a stressor — even here, where the iconic raspiness is replaced with a mellow country-croon. But what little stress the voice itself can contribute, is abundantly amplified by the way he uses his voice: His quirky singing. His rhythms, which sometimes are limping, other times just give the impression of being so. His out-of-tune guitar.

Bob Dylan – the Lebanon of Rock’n’Roll

I don’t mean by this to say that Dylan’s music is equivalent to the trials of emigrants from a small country ridden with civil war, but I find the comparison interesting: that a little bit of strain heightens one’s attention in general.

At least the parallel struck me: what Taleb describes — concerning the Lebanese people, but also in general — seemed to correspond well with how I hear a track like “Pretty Saro”. I’m generally allergic to mistuned guitars. So naturally, I cringed when I heard the start of the song for the first time. But I can’t remember having noticed it when the song ended. What I did notice was a narrative. I had been drawn into the song, the lyric universe, the whole musical and textual edifice.

It can work this way because the other elements of the performance are good. But just like with Lebanon, there are situations where the stress becomes destructive. One is when the stressor drowns out the message entirely. The misery of a civil war may have made the inhabitants of Lebanon more focused, as Taleb argues, but there is a limit. If the whole country is bombed to pieces, progress is a long way away.

And it is not the case that a really bad performance gets the message through really well.

The other situation is the Chinese water torture kind of stressor: when the listener gets more focused on waiting for the next slip than on what happens between the slips. The performance can be as good as it gets — it doesn’t matter, if focus isn’t on it. That’s the point of the “balancing act” metaphor above.

I have this experience occasionally, most often with classical musicians: a wrong note here and there doesn’t necessarily matter, but if the flow is broken — and it doesn’t take more than a moment for that to happen — the listener has to be brought back into the flow again. His trust must be regained. And if it happens repeatedly, chances are that the flow goes on without him.

The nightmare: stress-free music

The idea of a slight stressor as something that stimulates experience does not become less interesting if one consider the opposite: the stress-free music. Be it elevator muzak, slick pop, or the most perfect orchestral sound a recording studio can muster: the more effort one makes to remove the mess, the strain, the stress, the more it also flows effortlessly — right through to the other side, without leaving a trace.

A world without stressors (yeah, sure)

Am I grateful for the mistuned guitar? Not at all. Dylan has so many stressors in store that this particular one, I could have done without. But if there is one thing that I’m grateful of, in my relationship with Dylan, it is that he has never gone down the road to perfection.

Another Self Portrait — a review in sonata form

Self Portrait
Self Portrait
Another Self Portrait
Another Self Portrait

Slow intro, setting the theme

One reviewer of this latest release in the Bootleg Series asks: “Remember the first time you heard Blonde On Blonde, or John Wesley Harding?” He is somehow implying that Another Self Portrait is the same kind of experience, having to do somehow with reinvention, recreation.

Well, what can I say? Yes, I remember very well.

When I first heard Blonde on Blonde, I had already read so much about the album and how great it was, that my first reaction was: “Oh Was THAT it?” I didn’t think it was a bad album by any means, but I was definitely underwhelmed. Compared to Highway 61 Revisited, for example the first album I ever bought, before my expectations had been contaminated by public opinions Blonde on Blonde seemed to be a light-weighter.

As for John Wesley Harding, I just didn’t like it, mostly because of the title track, but that’s another story.

HWY61, however. And Freewheelin’. And BOTT. And GAIBTY. And TOOM. And Planet Waves. And New Morning. etc. Those are albums that struck me. Not because they complied with any notion of Dylan recreating himself (maybe they did, maybe they didn’t), but because they combine immediacy of expression with conscious attention to musical detail.

And even though Another Self Portrait pales to most of these albums, it does have some really bright moments – including, perhaps most importantly, the long “moment” that stretches from June 1966 to, say the 1974 tour with the Band.

The Artist as Creator: What’s Great About Another Self Portrait

And what’s striking about the songs on Another Self Portrait is precisely the immediacy of expression that I mentioned. The new tracks from the Self Portrait sessions are perhaps the most exquisite examples in Dylan’s entire catalogue of one of his most spectacular abilities, which with unironic bathos can be called: to blow life into dead clay.

His ability to take a simple tune, twothree banal chords, and a cliché-filled text, and make you feel that you’re listening to the most important thing anyone has ever told you, and to make you love the people that he’s creating, right before your eyes and in this case even using borrowed words; this ability is demonstrated to its fullest extent in the ”throwaways” from the Self Portrait sessions.

To Play in Prose

This is not Dylan the storyteller. Nor is it Dylan the interpreter or Dylan the truth-teller (or Dylan the genius, the Bard, the Voice, etc.). I’ve been searching for a phrase to describe that particular aspect of Dylan’s art for a very long time, and ASP has given me a decisive clue. It’s Dylan the inflector, Dylan the variator, Dylan the prose musician.

A song is a strange construction. Part fixed structure, part fluid language, part ineffable mental images, part sensory enjoyment. On all these points, the interpretation can vary from the loose to the fixed. Hearing a song can sometimes be like watching someone solve a sudoku or read from a do-it-yourself handbook – other times, it’s like hearing someone mumble in their sleep. And sometimes the performer hits the soft spot between rigid pattern and loose boundlessness.

There is nothing magical about this soft spot. We all hit it, all the time – because that’s how language works. Any communicating human being is so skilled in this wondrous art, that we don’t even think about it. But it’s really amazing, how good we are at detecting and interpreting even the slightest inflections in the tone of a voice when we’re talking. And how little it takes for us to detect any interruption of the free flow of spoken sound. That’s what good actors are good at: either to make us forget that everything they say comes out of the rigid framework of a manuscript, or to make us disregard that fact or even turn the rigid boundary that we perceive, e.g. in a poetry recital, into an advantage, by drawing attention to its character of not being ordinary language, despite appearances.

This is what Dylan does in Pretty Saro and in Annie’s Going to Sing Her Song, in Thirsty Boots or in These Hands. We are aware, of course, that this is not just a person talking freely to us – there is a melody, a fixed metre, rhymes, etc., all fairly obvious giveaways – but through small variations and inflections, imprecisions and oversights, we are led to forget this, without even noticing.

Take These Hands as an example: the first strums and words are so square and inflexible that it’s almost parodic the way he sings ”gentleman”, for example, sounds almost tongue-in-cheek. He seems to exaggerate the corny character of the song, holds it up in the listener’s face as if to say: ”Yes, I know it’s a corny song.” And by that admission, the issue is out of the way.

Jump a couple of minutes in, and it’s a completely different song. It happens through tiny little details, which are futile to describe in analytic detail: the slightly off-key ”people have power”, the downward figure on ”grieve”, the three or four different ways he fingers the G chord and how he never plays the same figure the same way twice, the little vocal ornaments that resemble both the pitch-variations that occur in ordinary speech and, well, little vocal ornaments – that kind of things. Sometimes there’s an expressive purpose behind them, but it’s just as much a way to create fluidity and variation – the same kind of ”purposeless” variation that we use when we speak (as opposed to when we recite a sonnet).

I’ve described this almost as if it were a conscious thing that Dylan does. I don’t believe it is — on the contrary, its effect depends on the technique and style to be entirely automatic, effortless.

That’s why we can endure four minutes of Dylan strumming slowly to a simple chord sequence we’ve heard a million times before: he plays prose, and by playing prose, he overcomes the obstacle to direct communication that the artfulness of a song – even the most artless song – brings with it.

Self Portrait redeemed, then, or what?

With the new songs as a key, the songs that did end up on Self Portrait open up as well, once they are stripped of the stale coating of overdubs reeking of commercial record industry that the original Self Portrait is dripping with.

So, does this mean that Self Portrait itself, in perspective and in context, wasn’t such a bad album after all?

Well, I hate to break this to you: if for some reason you’ve always loved Self Portrait, and you see Another Self Portrait as confirmation that you’ve been right all along, despite what people like Greil Marcus (“What’s this shit?”) and myself have said … then no, you were wrong then and you’re still wrong: Another Self Portrait does not redeem Self Portrait as an album.

What’s great about this collection is not that it proves Greil Marcus wrong (it doesn’t), nor that every single track on it is a cherishable gem from a genius (it isn’t), but that it adds to the perception of an artist in development. It allows us a more nuanced picture of the project (or less pompously: the development) that Self Portrait is a witness of.

This means two things in particular. One: the fascinating merge of delta blues, rock, and country that is evident on House Carpenter, but also on the entire Isle of Wight show. In addition to the stylistic developments he goes through, it also involves a reshuffling of fixed and fluid elements in a melody (more on this in a later post).

Two: an artist willing to go into development when he was standing on top of the world. The album, together with all the outtakes, demonstrates that he wanted to get to something great, perhaps even (but nobody knew, not even himself) greater than what he had already accomplished. Even at the cost of pissing off a lot of fans. Even at the cost of abandoning, yet again, a well-tried recipe for success (and there is no doubt that Dylan has always kept an eye on the bottom line).

But when a father-of-four who probably hasn’t had a full night’s sleep in four years goes into a studio and fools around with some oldies, that may be a sign of an urge for greatness, but not necessarily of greatness per se.

Self-annihilation: What’s not so great about Self Portrait

Thanks to Another Self Portrait, we can now ask the correct question to Self Portrait. Not “What is this shit?” but “Who on earth thought this album was a good idea?!”

This question can actually mean two very different things, both of which, in each their way, are central to the failure of Self Portrait: ”Who on earth had the idea that THAT could be a Dylan album in 1970?”, and ”Whose brilliant idea was it to add slick orchestral arrangements to rough and intimate demos?”

Many commentators have compared Self Portrait to the two acoustic cover albums from the early ’90s, Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong. The comparison is apt, not only because of the similar character of the songs that are on these albums, but also concerning the singing and playing style, the way to use the musical an textual language in order to create a ”prose” feeling, that I have indicated above (and, incidentally, also in my review of World Gone Wrong).

Productions like these could work in 1992, when we had just come out of the dreadful 80s and everybody was longing for the Golden Age of acoustic Dylan. They can also work today, when we have a better view of the process in general – we know what happened next, both the Rolling Thunder Revue, the Never Ending Tour, and everything in between. We have the Basement Tapes and the Harrison and Cash sessions. We’ve heard the hotel room clips from Eat the Document, which prove that Dylan was using the mellow crooner voice already in 1966.

But in 1970? Even after John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, the general audience would have been unprepared for a World Gone Wrong-like album. Imagine the best possible version of Self Portrait, containing the best recordings, presented in all their low-key and bare glory — I find it very difficult to see how even such a hypothetical album would have found an audience in 1970.

That’s the first point, which may be of a mostly a commercial character.

The second point takes it from there: What’s apparent from the tracks on Another Self Portrait is that whatever he’s up to, his project is not commercial: he’s not out there to sell us something – no used cars, no snake oil, no “the first joint is free” enhanced escapism – he’s just having a good time with some friends, playing songs that he likes – or perhaps just enjoying a couple of days away from five screaming kids back home.

Whatever the reason, the stew that he mixes depends entirely on the prose-like looseness that the small combo can provide; where Dylan spontaneously can say: ”Let’s just take this one” and start singing ”Little Sadie” with little or no preparation for his co-musicians, who just have to do their best to tag along, to add a lick here and a wrong chord there, and thereby create all the uneven edges that give the final recordings surface and character.

But this is precisely where the released Self Portrait fails capitally: to add overdubs to these tracks is like trying to mix oil and water.

An orchestral arrangement requires everything that the original tracks don’t have: precision, regularity, focus on the musical element.

That’s also one of the things the Nashville musicians Charlie McCoy and Ken Buttrey, who did some of the overdubs, have complained about: Dylan just sent a tape to Nashville for them to add some tracks to, and ”the tempos didn’t really hold together real well, and he wasn’t real steady with the guitar […] he wasn’t even there.”

And that’s the main problem with the original Self Portrait: it sounds, well, as if someone has added a lot of overdubs to a simple tape. The regularity that the overdubs impose on the final mix makes the original tracks seem unfocused and untight rather than loose and leisurely, prosey. In other words: the very thing that we can now perceive as the greatness of the originals, is annihilated and contradicted by the overdubs.

These hands and Thirsty Boots are to Another Self Portrait what Belle Isle and Days of ’49 fail to be to Self Portrait. The former illustrate that “conscious attention to musical detail”, which I started by calling the other leg of what makes a great Dylan album; the latter are proofs that this attention has been neglected, somewhere in the process that ended up with Self Portrait. Thanks to Another Self Portrait, the attention can now return to where it belongs.

The Obligatory “Another Self Portrait — First Reactions” post

Another Self Portrait

I thought I’d make the “First Reactions” post short and sweet:

1. Time passes slowly #1 & 2 are definitely keepers.

2. The new piano version of Spanish Is The Loving Tongue is nice too, but nowhere near the circulating solo piano version. It’s a step in the direction of its consummate cousin, but it comes nowhere near it on any scale.

3.  does not redeem (“What’s this shit?”) as an album, but the new tracks do add to a more nuanced picture of the project (or less pompously: the development) that Self Portrait is a witness of.

4. The Isle of Wight concert is the first and probably the most radical re-invention Dylan has made in his entire career. Going electric was nothing in comparison.

5. Who will be the first to find the source from which Dylan has stolen the cover image? A flickr account? An underrated b/w photographer from the 30s? A Barnes & Nobles commercial delivered to the tour bus in Stirling Castle during the 2003 2001 tour?

More to come. Tabs too.

Another Self Portrait

Just a quick note to say that I’m looking forward to the release of the Bootleg Series vol. 10, Another Self Portrait, which will highlight the very interesting period around 1970, seeing the controversial releases of Self Portrait and New Morning.

Since I consider this to be one of the two, perhaps three most interesting periods in Dylan’s career (the others being the gospel years and the early 90s) (not that I don’t like the early and mid 60s), while at the same time having previously sided with those who said: “What’s this shit?” about Self Portrait when it came out, I’m especially looking forward to setting thing straight concerning why I consider SP a bad album.

Which I do.

And for the right reasons.

Stay tuned!

My Fault (a punk song)

Tom Lehrer once said: “If you can’t communicate, the least you can do is shut up!”

I’ve been living by that adage: if I don’t think what I have to say will make any difference, then why say it?

I don’t have an expressive urge, and history is filled with great art, made and transmitted by people who did have that urge and who did know what to do with it.

I fool around, though. Here’s a song, and this is the story:

A friend of mine was a character, not exactly centre stage but perhaps a little to the side, on the Danish punk scene in the early 80s. After several years of doing other things, she suddenly found out she wanted to make some music again. We met up and worked out a song from her translation of a poem by the Danish punk icon, Michael Strunge. The result wasn’t exactly punk, but it wasn’t exactly not punk either.

In the process, I happened to dig out a collection of poems by the Norwegian punk poet, Gene Dalby, from my bookshelf. The result wasn’t exactly a translation, but it wasn’t exactly not a translation either.

 

D   Em9/b C9
All my    fault, It was 
D   Em9/b C9
all my    fault
D        Em9/b  C9
Spoke to you in keywords. 
D      Em9/b C9
Choice be-   tween
F                    G
crossword and jigsaw puzzle.
G7                   A7/add6
crossword and jigsaw puzzle.
          D  Em9/b   C9
I thought jigsaw was out.
   D  Em9/b   C9
My fault.
       D  Em9/b   C9
all my fault.

F                 
 You felt your way 
G
 I was insensitive
    F
You gave me your all  
           G
it gave me nothing
     Am7       G/b       C     C#m7-5 Dm7    G7
Your words are shrapnels under mental finger nails

G                    A7
Someone has run a plow through your pretty head
    G                   A7
and planted hatred like mad.
      D      /c#          /b    /a
But I didn't come to reap bitterness               
   G             /f#       Em7  A7
or duck from the bricks of theory 
         D    Em9/b C9
that you hurl at    me 

D       Em9/b  C9
I don't give a damn 

F                     G7 
 if you replace your emotional life
     F               G7
with doctrines and vibrators.
G                        A7
 You're trying to commit suicide with aspirin.
G                       A7
  That's never going to work.
Am                 G/b        C             Bbmaj7
 It's like playing Russian roulette with an unloaded gun.
E7                 D/a     Em9   C9/g
 Let me lend you a knife.

D/a     Em9   C9/g

   D/a          Em9    C9/g
My heartbeat is just a recoil.
   D/a          Em9    C9/g
From a gun in the cellar of an empty house.
   Bb           F               Gm7      C7
In front of the house there's a fountain.
    Bbmaj7
And sometimes 
    C7
the wind comes
    F            A7         Dm     D7
and tears at the fountain's veil
          Gm7
and blows droplets 
                 C7 
on to the cellar window
Db7
droplets too small 
   Bbm
to look like tears at all
         Gm7-5   E7/g#      A
but they still remind me of something.

D            Em9/b C9
I just came  by to tell you
     D       Em9/b   C9
that you can keep my bulletproof vest 
Bbmaj7  C7         D/      Em9/b  C9
I don't need it anymore.

D/a     Em9   C9/g

   D/a          Em9    C9/g
My heartbeat is just a recoil.
D/a    Em9       C9/g
I will never get used to it.
D/a Em9 C9/g
But I   keep on 
D/a Em9 C9/g
shooting.

D/a     Em9   C9/g
D/a     Em9   C9/g
D/a     Em9   C9/g
D/a     Em9   C9/g


=========================
Chords
=========================
D       xx0232         D/a       x00232
Em9/b   x2x032         Em9       020032 
C9      x3x030         C9/g      332330
A7/add6 x02022
C#m7-5  x42000
Bbmaj7  x13231
Db7     x4342x
Bbm     x13321
Gm7-5   3x332x
E7/g#   422100