Friday, April 23, 2010


Here are the program notes and translations for Saturday's show. And a picture of the guitar I'll be playing.

For us the guitar is a marker of direct, honest communication and non-elitist, even working class usage. 'I'll get out my guitar and play/just like yesterday/and get down on my knees and pray/we don't get fooled again.' wrote Pete Townshend. Even if the prosody worked, if he had written 'I'll sit down at my piano and play…' the meaning would have been different. For the aspiring and wealthy American of the mid-19th century however, the guitar had not yet acquired the meaning we attach to it. For them the guitar was associated with the classical guitarists of the European capitals of culture: Giuliani, Sor and Carulli. The guitar for them was a marker of civility and gentility and they demonstrated to themselves that they were just as cultured as those in the European capitals by consuming arrangements of art music and opera composed in those cities. But the burgeoning bourgeois culture of the antebellum United States was the one that left us the ballads of Stephen Foster, and unsurprisingly, some of the opera arias we present are adapted to that taste: compare the arrangement of the Barcarolle from Hérold's opera Marie (Batelier dit Lisette) to the sentimental Irish ballad Sweet Jessie was Young and Simple. There must have been a market for more bravura performances, though; who would have thought the aria Ah, non giunge from Bellini's La Sonnambula (in its English translation Ah, Don't Mingle) would have been suitable for performance in the parlor with the diminutive parlor guitar replacing the orchestra? The aria was arranged for every medium, including piano, violin and slightly later, classical banjo (sic).


P.T. Barnum (his famous circus has web presence now) brought one of Europe's most famous singers to North America in 1850. With the soprano Jenny Lind and the violinist Ole Bull, Barnum became a cultural tycoon as well as all the other kinds. Lind's success (she even performed at Toronto's St. Lawrence Hall) meant that the tag 'from the repertoire of Jenny Lind' ensured additional sales. Repertoire celebrating her was often arranged for and with guitar for those with aspirations to high culture, but without yet the means to acquire that most bourgeois of instruments, the piano.


The guitar's presence in Latin American music will be less surprising to us. Afro Latin rhythms first moved into the high art repertoire via the theatre. Many Spanish and Portuguese plays featured a stock black character, often a guitar player and often a figure of fun. One such character is told to give up his seat for a white man, but minutes later, after a performance of guitar music, gets his seat back so as to honour to the 'black orpheus.' Native Americans, too had an influence on this repertoire, participating in music making in church and vice-royal courts.


Latin American music was soon being exported back to Europe, as we hear in the songs printed in the Colleccion General and to North America with guitarists such as Delores Nevares de Goni, who taught in New York, toured both North and South America and was famous enough to have had a model of guitar named after her by C.F. Martin and Co. by the 1840s.


And where was Canada in all this? Unfortunately, we have not been able to discover what was being sung to the guitars which Martin shipped into Canada in the mid-1800s. Accomplished players left the country for the US in the last years of that century one becoming instructor of guitar at the illustrious Boston Conservatory. The National Library of Canada lists one single guitar song sheet published in Toronto and that lies in the British Library. More research needs to be done to find out whether our own parlours were as guitar friendly as those of our American cousins.


Batelier dit Lisette

Boatman, said Lisette, I wish to cross the water,

But I am too poor to pay for the boat.

Colin said to the beauty, come, come always.

And sail the vessel that bears my love.


I am going to my father, said Lisette to Colin

Well, do you think, my dear, he will grant me your hand?

Ah! replied the beauty, never stop trying.

And sail the vessel that bears my love.


After his marriage, always in his boat,

Colin was the wisest of the husbands in the hamlet;

He always repeated his faithful song,

"And sail the vessel that bears my love."


Ganinha, minha Ganinha

Ganinha my Ganinha

Ganinha my Lady

Ay la la, my heart,

To love is not worth it.


Se fores ao fim do mundo

If you go to the end of the world

I will have to go there to fetch you

Where ever you are

I cannot be without you


Por desabafar saudedes

To relieve the longing

That my heart suffers

When night falls to the mortals

I begin to sigh.


Os me deixas que tu das

The cold shoulders you give

When people touch you are so cute

I've never seen such in other girls


How I like, little lady, to tease you

When I see that you are angry with me


You get so agitated -

That satisfies me no end

And if I tell you to go


I once again imprison you

It is only to see

the cold shoulder that you give.


Homens errados e loucos

Wrong and crazy men

In what love you wrap yourself.

Of the enjoyable freedom

You remember very little.

Freedom, nothing more.

El Consejo

The Advice

Mistaken is she who brags of defeating her affection,

Because blind and cowardly Love never listens to reason.

And thus, pretty girls, flee the occasion because the little Cupid is always a traitor,

Showing his inhumane, hidden tyranny and if we search for him he distances himself quickly.

Don't trust who tells you I want your heart, since sometimes the tales are weapons that win with treason.

And thus...

Being cautious is what matters in early passion,

Since the whole world is lies, tricks and seductions.

And thus...

Pan de Jarabe

The Syrup Bread

I was your first love and now you don't let yourself be seen.

That this happens in the world to her who knows how to love.

Within your sight, my lord, I was joyful, I was happy,

But absent from your side, I didn't want to live any more.

The memory your image of calms, in part, my pain,

And the tender vows make me thankful for the illusion.

El Vejuquito

This new little tune of Veracruz has come

And it is brought by a little black girl,

Who sings it beautifully, Tai rai etc.

Behold it yourself, how nice it is. Tai rai rai etc.

They call it the Vejuquito,

And with this softness, numbs the senses.

A little Indian girl in her garden was picking flowers

And a little Indian boy was watching her and sings his love.

Tai rai rai etc.

A little Indian boy was telling her tenderly of his discomfort

“For your life, Soapile, dance for me the totaconiche.”

Tai rai etc.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010



Here are the Tunes we're planning to play on Saturday. The program notes are half written.


Mid 19th Century US Songs

Columbia Gem of the ocean Thomas á Becket (fl. mid 19th c.) arr. Fr. Blancjour

Batelier dit Lisette Ferdinand Herold (1791-1833) arr. Le Meignen


Anonymous Late 18th Century Modinhas from Brazil

Ganinha, minha ganinha

Por desabafar saudedes


Guitar pieces from 18th Century Brazil

Chacaras 1o Tom de Arbeau – Paracumbe 7o Tom – Minuete


Anonymous Late 18th Century Modinhas from Brazil

Se fores ao fim do mundo

Os me deixas que tu das

Homens errados e loucos


Guitar pieces from 18th by Santiago de Murcia

Allegro – Grabe – Allegro

Minuet

Triste di Jorge


Intermission


Songs from Coleccion General de Canciones Españolas y Americanas (1810-30)

El consejo – Modiña Brasileña

El pan jarabe – Cancion y Baile de Nueva España

El Vejuquito – Cancion de Nueva España


Mid 19th Century US Songs

Sweet Jessie was young and SimpleSamuel Lover (1797-1868) arr. M. Blancjour

Scotch tune arranged from Czerny E.H. Frey

Ah, Don’t Mingle One Human Feeling Vincenzo Bellini (1801-1835) arr. Meignen


From the Repertoire of Jenny Lind

Child of the Regiment Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) arr. Saverio Farina

Jenny Lind Polka arr. F.T. Strawinski

Prima Donna Waltz Louis Antoine Jullien (1812-1860) arr. Justin Holland

Jenny Lind’s Celebrated Bird Song M. Taubert arr. M. Zorer