José Valverde at Amazon (23)

WHAT’VE YOU DONE, HARRY? QU’AS-TU FAIT, HARRY ?

A BILINGUAL EDITION IN OUR FOUNDING PAST

José VALVERDE, translation Jacques COULARDEAU

Even when fully written a play is still and always remains a project. Only its performance after working with the actors during the rehearsals brings out the proper music with its tempos and its colors, because for me theater is first of all a musical genre, a concerto whose instruments, the actors, are not defined beforehand. This assertion might surprise those who will note the play is very realistically inspired by unluckily real events. And nothing is final? Actors change but audiences do too, and the weather outside as seen in our inner time. A play only exists during the short length of time of the performance. Only those who would try to produce this “dramatic project”, the director and the actors could give a temporarily more final version of it with or without my active support. Another version exists in French with four extra characters, historical characters who are here referred to without being present (Please ask for it if interested).

The play takes place in the Oval Office at the White House, Washington, on August 6, 1945, that is on the day of the dropping of the first atom bomb on Japan. The names and official functions of the main characters are real but their declarations are entirely fictitious as imagined by the author, though quite believable. Major Patricia Hinsmith is entirely fictional.

La pièce se déroule dans le salon ovale de la Maison Blanche à Washington le 6 Août 1945, c'est-à-dire le jour du lancement de la première bombe atomique sur le Japon. Elle commence au moment de l’envol du B29 depuis l’ile américaine de Tinian avec la bombe dans sa soute.  Les noms et les fonctions officielles des principaux personnages sont authentiques mais leurs paroles sont de la pure imagination de l’auteur tout en étant vraisemblables. Le Major HINSMITH est imaginaire. Les évènements et les discussions qui ont eu lieu à la Maison Blanche sont à peu près connus mais ils se sont déroulés pendant au moins une semaine. J’ai souhaité contracté le temps, le lieu et l’action. De manière à donner aux évènements relatés authentiques la dimension d’une tragédie classique qui implique unité de lieu, unité de temps, unité d’action. Il s’agit de théâtre !

Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk; Amazon.fr; and all other Amazon stores. KDP Edition

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Print Length: 129 pages

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Publisher: Editions La Dondaine; 1st edition (July 10, 2014)

Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.

Language: French and English   

ASIN: B00LPP3C2M

PRICE:  US$10.05, EUR 7.39, ￥ 995, IndR 375.00, …

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FRANCESCO-CAVALLI-AMORE-INNAMORATO - 2015-10-26

Vous ne serez pas vraiment déçu par le CD. Deux sopranos extrêmement proches l’une de l’autre et une suite d’arias d’un compositeur  principal, Francesco Cavalli et quatre pièces de deux compositeurs supplémentaires.  Les voix sont parfaites mais tellement semblables qu’on ne les distingue plus et les arias étant coupés de leur contexte musical et dramatique apparaissent comme des exercices plus qu’ayant une dynamique qui les dépasse. Mais il n’y a aucune aspérité à laquelle se rattacher pour avoir une quelconque dynamique.

Si vous aimez les arias de sopranos totalement coupés de leur contexte vous serez très satisfaits car ici on touche à la perfection. On n’en approche pas. On l’atteint. Si vous préférez le dramatique, la dynamique tragique ou même amoureuse des opéras vous serez frustrés. Si vous aimez la diversité des voix vous serez frustrés à nouveau.

Mon opinion est donc mitigée.

Par contre le DVD qui atteint tout autant la perfection et qui est presque deux fois aussi long donne une rétrospective du travail de L’Arpeggiata depuis 15 ans. Là vous n’avez pas plus de construction dramatique et de dynamisme tragique puisque ce sont à nouveau des arias qui se succèdent. Mais vous avez deux éléments qui sortent avec fureur et puissance ;

D’une part la variété des voix car dans cette rétrospective de nombreuses voix sont associées, mises les unes après les autres. Je regretterai cependant que le luxueux livret n’en donne pas la liste. Mais soit dit en passant on a la photo des musiciens et des deux sopranos, mais ces photos ne sont pas identifiées : c’est comme un album de photos de famille Pour revenir au DVD on a tout au plus la liste des compositeurs et des titres, mais pas des chanteurs. Cela est frustrant car c’est bien gentil de donner ces indications sur l’écran mais si on veut simplement savoir, garder en mémoire qui chante quoi, il faut prendre des notes comme un journaliste au concert.

En plus, et là ce travail devient fascinant les genres sont absolument antagonistes, différents, conflictuant de musique traditionnelle à musique d’opéra, les genres, les tons, les colorations, les tempos, les rendus en un mot sont tous si différents que c’est un vrai enchantement même si les pièces isolées perdent leur dimension dramatique. Cela crée une dynamique qui ne montre pas vraiment le progrès de la formation car il y a longtemps qu’ils ont atteint la perfection et que leur progrès est dans l’ouverture à de nouveaux genres, de nouveaux styles. Et là le DVD, en images en plus, est de loin époustouflant.

Mais il semble surprenant que ce soit le DVD de bonus qui emporte mon enthousiasme, même si j’ai la plupart de ces enregistrements en CD. Il y a entre autres Jaroussky qui fait la fête en Amérique en ce moment, enfin presque puisqu’il tourne à Toulouse « Niobe, Regina di Teba » d'Agostino Steffani créé au Festival de Musique Ancienne de Boston il y a déjà quelque temps.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

https://www.academia.edu/1338943/A_CONTRADICTORY_BACKDROP_FOR_C.S._LEWIS_MARTYRDOM_VERSUS_EUGENISM

All Amazon reviews of CS Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles

and various adaptations for TV and the cinema

https://www.academia.edu/1445063/C.S._LEWIS_and_THE_CHRONICLES_OF_NARNIA_BBC_REWRITING_AND_ADAPTATIONS_RADIO_AND_TV

  

A CONTRADICTORY BACKDROP FOR C.S. LEWIS

MARTYRDOM VERSUS EUGENISM

I would like to say from the very start that I will only consider The Chronicles of Narnia in their seven volumes (1950-1956), and the four BBC adaptations. So I will not consider the various cinema adaptations and the other works by C.S. Lewis (1898-1963).The second thing I want to be very clear about is that I am not going to psychoanalyze neither the author nor The Chronicles. It would be interesting to do so from a certain point of view. This is not mine here.

I will concentrate on the political and ideological model that can be found in The Chronicles. But I want to be clear about one thing before starting. For me children’s literature is just as mature as any other form and type of literature and it deserves to be analyzed exactly the same way as any other fiction. We do not have to suspend our disbelief but as C.S. Lewis says himself: “You cannot know, you can only believe or not.”

And I have chosen to believe what C.S. Lewis tells us, no matter how creative and imaginative it may be. I will start with the background I have chosen, i.e. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) and H.G. Wells(1866-1946).T.S. Eliot, particularly in his play Murder in the Cathedral (1935) deals with the question of martyrdom when a church official is confronted to an attempt at limiting the church’s freedom from the state or any other institution.

This vision of martyrdom became a real backdrop for C.S. Lewis because of the play at the end of the 1930s in the Canterbury Festival, then the film at the beginning of the 1950s and finally the opera by Pizzetti in Italian and in German (for Karajan) at the beginning of the 1960s, too late for The Chronicles.

H.G. Wells defends a eugenic vision of the world and he is a backdrop for C.S. Lewis because of the vast and lasting success of his early novels like The Time Machine (1895) or The Invisible Man (1897) at the end of the 19^th century and beginning of the 20^th century and because of his commitment to eugenics all his life in many writings, in film with his 1936 Things to Come by Alexander Korda and William Cameron Menzies in which he envisaged the end of the world we know by a universal war in 1940 and the rebuilding of a truly human society.

The Time Machine was adapted a first time by George Pal in 1960, an adaptation that may have come across to C.S. Lewis though too late for The Chronicles. Of course the second adaptation by Simon Wells in 2002 does not have to be considered, though the great-grandson of the author corrects part of the eugenics of his great-grandfather.

DAMIEN GUILLON – ERIC BELLOCQ – JOHN DOWLAND – LOVE SONGS – 2009

This field of love songs, madrigals or other Renaissance forms in England is an enormous well arrayed and furnished jungle of archives and music pieces that have been explored all around and all along. The English, thanks to the university choirs have been able to continue with the century-old tradition of all male choirs and thus to cultivate and develop countertenors of all sorts since no women could take part and children were out at this level. The most famous English countertenor is Alfred Deller in the second half of the 20^th century. I remember hearing him in concert in 1964 or 65 in Bordeaux. Another world opened up then. And since then I had been opened by this rare new discovery.

Damien Guillon is the perfect countertenor for these songs that were never performed by castratos, at least they did not have to be since the countertenor tradition was very strong with Purcell himself one century later being a countertenor. Thanks god at times humanity is able to keep some old traditions that are kept not because they are traditions but because they are good, unforgettable, beautiful.

Shakespeare used and overused such voices since he could not have women on the stage. But the songs chosen here correspond very well to the main tradition of the 16^th and 17^th centuries in England. The six wives of Henry VIII, the successive changes from Catholicism to Anglicanism then back to Catholicism and finally back to Anglicanism soon to be replaced by Puritanism to finally go back to clean and clear Anglicanism with the Glorious Revolution that instated though the full ban for a while of all things and people Catholic. The secret passages in the great halls, mansions and family seats of the nobility were far from being forgotten and made useless to hide the clandestine catholic priests or the catholic members of the families. Today these secret passages are overused in series and films.

The tone of the songs here that are from more than one composer as announced on the sleeves are all very languorous and sad as if in that time love was always associated to drama and tragedy. It is true the theater of the time was full of such sad events, the killing and death of all members of all these doomed love affairs. Think of Ophelia and Juliet and their male lovers. That’s a choice but we must keep in mind that madrigals and other pieces that were not destined to go on a stage could be sung by women and thus have lighter themes, more danceful, joyful, pleasureful. But keep in mind there were then no women’s universities and women were hardly educated beyond basics and their early teenage. Look at Shakespeare again. Juliet was supposed to be married at fourteen at the latest and her education is never alluded to whereas Romeo and Mercutio, Tybalt and all the boys were officially students of some type or other.

Damien Guillon doubles up this very sad music of his, these songs of languor and unrequitedness with Eric Bellocq’s luth music that is just a lugubrious, funeral, tenebrous descent into the hell of all scales. It is marvelous, beautiful but we are dealing here with the beauty of introspective love that expects and waits for the coming of the main lover of all men, death of course, and yet that’s so ambiguous since Death is a male in the English and Germanic tradition. In other words Death, the lover of all men, is a castrating lover that leaves these men impotent, frigid, dead in one word.

The full unity of the music of this CD makes it exceptional. It is a dirge, a mortal and in some way morbid descent to the underworld of love, to the seventh hell of love’s pains and pangs. And you have to enjoy all that torture and suffering because that’s part of man’s fate, I mean the fate of all males, to suffer for the love they experience for the lady they will never be able to approach, touch, kiss or even look at except at a vast distance. I feel that in these troubled centuries in England the famous courteous love of the Middle Ages in the Arthurian tradition has turned somewhat sour and has become a Tenebrae à la Charpentier. “I sing, Fie fie on love, Fie fie on love, it is a foolish thing,” sings Damien Guillon in one of the more vivacious songs “A shepherd in a shade”. Even the poor lover of Cynthia can only tell that Cynthia is nothing but a nest for cuckoos, which leaves little to the lover himself.

The question about that art has to do with what is typical of England since 1215 and the Magna Carta. In 1215, and that had been going on for a long time in the form of a rivalry between nobility and church on one side and the king on the other side. It is the fiorst document in Europe that actually sets in writing some rights for some women and children, precisely widows and orphans in noble families. It is thus the beginning of a rather long quest and conquest of freedom for women and Elizabeth I played an enormous role along that long line, though the Stuarts and the Puritans will bring or try to bring many things down.

A perfect rendition of this period when the Canterbury Tales were forgotten and the sad side of things of love or anything else were cultivated. We seem to forget that in Shakespeare you always have some farcical at times farcical-looking scenes in the most tragic and dramatic situations, but at the same time we always had some tragic or tragic-looking scenes in the most farcical of all comedies. Ben Jonson as for that is a genius, how he brings the tragedy of Puritanism and of man’s vanity in simple joyful and lustful fests like “Bartholomew Fair” or “The Silent Woman,” the former with the hanging and quartering of some condemned bloke on the day before the Fair on the same ground, in the middle of the fair to start afterwards, and the latter with the pangs and dangers of gender orientation for the great pleasure of the audience and the full chastisement of the vain husband.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH – CAMIEN GUILLON – LE BANQUET CÉLESTE – STRASBOURG 2011

We will never end discovering the phenomenal possibilities of high-pitched male voices, be they countertenors, altos or male sopranos. This CD is typical at that level. Damien Guillon has the range of a mezzo soprano but with the male harmonics and he is easy and sounds full and warm in the lower range just as much as in the higher range, which I have always found kind of problematic with a female mezzo soprano.

But a countertenor has an extraordinary expressivity because he is a man and he can give to his voice some tones a woman wouldn’t be able to reach. In Cantata BMW 170 it is typical how the sadness of the sinner, the resignation and yet the desire to get over that fate of being a sinner like all men are trying to emerge from some kind of bleak tone meaning there might be no hope, no way out and yet in the end it reaches some faith, some hope in Jesus and in Jesus’ promise that he will be forgiven if he strives and tries hard to get over his sins. Damien Guillon very easily expresses this double dimension from resignation in the absence or impossibility of hope, and yet to that hope he finds in Jesus, in his faith, in his conviction that he will be saved in spite of being a human sinner. There is in this cantata such a feeling that after all we can only strive and have the best life we can but it is all in Jesus and in how we will be judged or deemed. There is nothing we can do about the end. Just resignation, striving and faith and there might be a way out. Damien Guillon just has the voice for this way of thinking and seeing life, a very protestant way indeed. Damien Guillon can even be poignant about it from time to time.

In Cantata BMW 35 we have a new chapter of that triple dilemma of man, both body and mind, confronted to God and God’s predestination of humanity, since he knows everything that was, that is and that will be, a God that reverberates in your soul. The opening Concerto is so strongly optimistic that we are there in full communion with the heavens and the angels of God. Dance we must, sing we must and believe we must. We are confronted to perfection, and the three levels of the organ are just all playing and singing in some kind of tempo unison. But the meaning of this cantata is in one Greek word directly imported from Jesus’ Aramaic preaching. “Ephphatha” he said, and “Be opened” he meant, the Greek form of an Aramaic word uttered by Christ when healing the man who was deaf and dumb. « Mark 7: 33-35: 33 After he took him aside, away from the crowd, Jesus put his fingers into the man's ears. Then he spit and touched the man's tongue. 34 He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him, ""Ephphatha!"" 35 At this, the man's ears were opened, his tongue was loosened and he began to speak plainly. » And this time the meaning is simple: faith is the belief that by letting God pour his light in us we will be saved, we will be spared the suffering of sinning; Deep hope, deep trust in God’s perfect creation and management of his creation and thus of us. Amazing enough Damien Guillon with his male countertenor voice expresses that feeling, that empathy with God, if we can imagine having any empathy with God, as if it came from deep in us, from the deepest and most somber side of our soul and mind. It is the pure child in us, the virginal boy in us that is speaking through Damien Guillon’s voice. We can only project ourselves in his voice, in his song, in his faith, in his belief and we are in touch with Jesus and God. We are saved. We can go out in the world and miracles will happen provided we remain opened by the call of Jesus.

The organ, a modern organ in Strasbourg’s Église Réformée du Bouclier, is pure in sound and rich in many effects. It is played in a modern building too a building that has no vault or domes, that has no Romanesque or even gothic architecture. It is plain, undecorated, with a very square volume with very vertical and horizontal lines, what I could call a perpendicular space. The sound of the organ is thus pure and clear but it has no resonance coming from the building. That makes the sound nearly cold, distant but it is very effective when three registers are competing to lead the whole piece. And I must say these organ pieces are perfect for it and Johann Sebastian Bach was an expert on that kind of work. He has three pitch levels, the lower pitch, the middle pitch and the higher pitch and in the Trio Sonata in D minor we have that constant competition and the possible alliance of two levels against the third one. But what more Bach plays on the tempos of the three registers. The lower one is slower, the middle one is just peaceful and quiet and the top one has the tendency to be fast and even energetically galloping or flying and dancing at high speed to some birdlike singing or music. This triple conversation is interesting indeed. Does it have a meaning? I am not sure but it does evoke emotions in the ears and heart of the listener. Each register moves in us some feelings and empathy as if we could hear the deep voice of our body, the serious voice of our mind and the mesmerizingly fast voices of our soul and angels. The body, the mind and heavens all in the same composition at the same time! This organ music is the full voice of man in its three dimensions and the result is never sure, never won before being fought for, strived for, gained with Jesus’ help and the conviction that we can be saved if we believe. I must say Maude Gratton, the organist, is quite convincingly able to play on these three levels, three voices, three beings in us and in the organ.

In Fantasia and Fugue in G minor the organ starts its triple game again and this time the three registers do not really try to find some unison. They are really trying to compete generally two against one, most of the time the lower register and the higher register are uniting against the middle one that fights quite hard to take over and take off. The music is absolutely beautiful but we have to understand it had a spiritual meaning for Johann Sebastian Bach, a spiritual meaning we maybe do not share any more. And yet let yourself be opened by this music to the deep spirituality in it and you will feel deep in you some pangs of body impulses with the lower register, some reasonable and sensible mental language telling you what you must do, what you must pacify in you, your impulses, to just have a human life, and yet the higher register will come back and will try to get you up into the air, into the sky, to heavens, with angels and miracles if you can follow their tempo and their speed. High up in these heavens you have the trance of Jesus revisited and fully received because you have been opened. And then you feel your impulses fighting to take over, your mind fighting to control them and your soul if you want fighting to get you off the ground, to get you in full supernatural meditation.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

TIM BURTON – FRANKENWEENIE – 2012

This is an absolute pastiche copied up from no matter how many films and books, you won’t be able to trace them all from Stephen King to Mary Shelly, to you know whom better than I.

But it is a festive big laughing competition against all basic beliefs of parents about the education of their darling children, especially when they, the parents, are at work and the children at home and the latter understood  myriads of years ago how to by-pass the “security” on the TV and computer. They are able hours on top of hours to view all the nasty shows they can find and imagine.

For them parents science like technology are dirty words and unbearable subjects that have to be kept away from the children’s ears and from the dinner table, when there is a family dinner, once every blue moon. For them parents a science fair, festival, competition, fest or carnival only has one aim and goal: to learn how to be badder than bad and produce both Viagra and ecstasy. You children know the type of pills your parents or you parents are buying on the Internet. Is it from Amazon or from Alibaba? Maybe only from the corner store, well the chap that is standing ,in front of the corner store. How old is he by the way?

This farce is absolutely successful and in black and white, or something close, which is better than you could have imagine. Don’t you play with electricity, Benjamin Franklin would say. You may burn your fingers and roast your tonsils. When I say your tonsils you know what I mean.

Of course the film has no depth whatsoever and does not pretend to have any. The only point is that it is funny ah ah and nothing else. Enjoy it and play with death as if it were your nightmare friend in the science class of your dear high school. And do not forget the science teacher is necessarily a bomb maker, a heroin refiner, a mental pervert, a serial killer and eventually a religious fundamentalist.

Have a good day with Walt Disney

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

 THE MAYAS-LANGUAGE & DICTIONARY-QUAI BRANLY MUSEUM & MUSIC

https://www.academia.edu/17222509/THE_MAYAS-LANGUAGE_and_DICTIONARY-QUAI_BRANLY_MUSEUM_and_MUSIC

1.  JOHN MONTGOMERY – DICTIONARY OF MAYA HIEROGLYPHS – 2002 - SECOND PRINTING 2006

2.  JOHN MONTGOMERY – HOW TO READ MAYA HIEROGLYPHS – 2002

3.  MUSEE DU QUAI BRANLY – MUSIQUES ET CHANTS – MAYAS – LES AMERINDIENS, PEUPLES MAYA, TOTOMAQUE, CORA – MEXIQUE – FREMEAUX ASSOCIES, 2014

4.  MUSÉE DU QUAI BRANLY – MAYAS, RÉVÉLATIONS D’UN TEMPS SANS FIN – 2014