Phamished

Yesterday I stumbled upon an article on the on-line NY times where some “experts” provided links to their favorite clips of music, 5 minutes or less. Most of them were mod-ern stuff, with the stressed “melodies” and winning combination of ear-rending screeches and numbing repetition that comes with music aimed at others in on the game they’re playing.  John Cage’s 4’33”  (four and a half minutes of silence — in three movements, of course) was a fitting finale, composed (I presume) after a day of listening to all those other modern pieces.  (You can listen to my even-better 4’34” by clicking right here.

(Remember to set the timer on your watch first.)

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I hope you enjoyed my musical homage to John Cage. I am working on securing the copyright for this masterpiece,  at least for the last second, which is the original part.

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I am sorry to inform you my favorites among the dozen or so samples in the NY Times articles are throwback, low-brow standards like Beethoven, Ravel, Stravinsky, Strauss.  I pined for some Mozart and Bach, which were missing.

But for some reason I was most drawn this time to Wagner. One expert had picked Isolde’s — hmmm, is it always an aria when one person is singing in opera? I think we just plumbed the depth of my knowledge of classical music. Anyway, it’s from Tristan und Isolde, and it’s called “Liebestod.”  (You have to scroll all the way to the bottom, just above Yuval Sharon’s apology for not giving you a link to 4’33”.)

The music is familiar but since (1) the singing is in German, and (2) it’s opera so you’d be lucky to understand it if it was in English, I have never understood what is going on.  So I looked up the lyrics in translation.  I still didn’t really understand, so I found a commentary: Tristan has died. Isolde is contemplating his body when she sees him come back to life, and begins hearing beautiful music. Her friends can neither see the resurrection, nor hear the music. In the end she succumbs to the  hallucination and dies in a state of utter bliss.

Kind of like the Wolverines, up until Tommy Pham came along.

seht iht, Freunde?			See it Friend?
Seht ihr’s nicht? 			Don’t you see?
Immerlichter, wie er leuchtet		Ever lighter, how he’'s shining
Sternumstrahlet hoch sich hebt?		Borne on high amongst the stars?
Seht ihrs nicht?			Don’t you see?