Ordinary Elephant: "Once Upon A Time"

At first glance, and even more at first hearing, this acoustic folk-ish duo might make you think of Gillian Welch ("a two-person band named Gillian Welch," according to Gillian Welch the person). And you would be quite right. The comparison is apt and, more importantly, not an over-reach. I'm pretty much in love with this song, the first track on the most recent of their three albums.

They are a husband-and-wife team, Pete and Crystal Damore. The Louisiana-looking setting of the video is not a pose, as they live there, and Crystal at least is from there. Their work is very rooted in place and people. You can read more about them and hear more music at their web site. They write and sing--I think she is the major songwriting voice, at least lyrically, and obviously the vocal center--about the things which seem ordinary but have profound significance. That sort of thing is often and fairly said of various songwriters and poets, but some do it much more powerfully than others. 

"We always tell people we named ourselves Ordinary Elephant because there’s no such thing as an ordinary elephant." And the implication is that everything is an elephant--nothing is really ordinary if you look at it right.

I heard them Saturday night, at the suggestion and in the company of my friend Stu, in a very small venue called The People's Room of Mobile. And it was great: a very small audience--I wish for the sake of the owner and the performers that it been somewhat larger--crystal-clear sound at a nice listenable volume, beautiful music from gifted artists with no show-biz airs or gimmicks, just great music and almost intimate talk about the music and the experiences behind it. There were several songs in the set that struck me, on a single hearing, as on a par with "Once Upon A Time," which I had listened to online a few times before the show.

Normally I experience a slight revulsion for anything called "The People's...." It has associations ranging from the ridiculous, as in the once-famous People's Park in Berkeley CA, to the evil, as in People's Republic of China. Apparently The People's Room was originally called The Listening Room, but was threatened with lawsuit by a Nashville place with the same name. Or so I read somewhere a day or two ago, though I can't find the link now.

But I detected no sign at all that the owner has totalitarian ambitions, unless you count the fact that he's pretty adamant that the place is a listening room. Not a drinking or eating or talking or dancing or looking at your phone room, though they will provide you with a beer or a Coke or a bottle of water. Wine, too, maybe?

I even bought a t-shirt.

Ordinary Elephant

Thanks to Stu for the photo. 

I'm not a great fan of the banjo, especially of the frantic bluegrass style, but I like the way Pete uses it, playing mostly single-note lines that made a nice bright contrast to Crystal's mellow guitar. He also plays an instrument that looks like a small arch-top guitar with eight strings, doubled as in a mandolin, which he says is called an octave mandolin.


"That's a duh"

Ok, this is not a post about books or music, which is what I said at the beginning of this year that I would stick to. But it's not very far removed: it's about developments in language, English in particular. This is something I notice a lot, mainly when it's a development that irritates me, such as the decline in the use of transitive verbs, or horrible mis-usages such as the current damage being done to the word "iconic." I could think of others but I'd just as soon not. 

Amit Majmudar, writing in the April 2024 issue of The New Criterion (that's a link but it may be subscriber-only) says something which alarmed me a bit. 

A rule of thumb in linguistics gives any language a thousand years. At that point, linguistic drift will have made the mother language nearly incomprehensible to its descendants. That drift is inexorable, a feature of language itself, in spite of the best efforts of an Académie française or a priestly caste. That average lifespan, a millennium in the sun, accounts for slower and faster rates of change.....

We read Shakespeare a century before the midway point of our drifting, shifting language’s lifespan. These four-hundred-year-old plays, by this time next century, will be only half-intelligible even to the few who make time for them.

Or, to look at it another way: five or six hundred years from now there may well be no such thing as a "native speaker" of anything that would be recognizable to us in conversation as English. English as we know it, which is already significantly different from English as Shakespeare knew it, will be a dead language. In the year 1000 AD, no Italian, or few, outside the Church would have been able to carry on a conversation with a Roman of 1 AD, though the Italian might not have been aware that his language was no longer that of his ancestors. Or, conversely, that it ever had been. And even churchmen probably had much of the pronunciation wrong. 

Well, that's a gloomy thought. That Shakespeare's poetry would have to be translated for everyone except specialists would be a massive loss to the world. Of course it's already a loss to the billions today who can't read English, either at all or well enough to read poetry and grasp that it is poetry. But one way or another it's almost certain to happen, whether or not the expected timetable is followed.

In spite of that fatalism, I was oddly, though only slightly, cheered the other day when someone in the comments section on National Review's web site wrote the words which are the title of this post. In case the meaning isn't obvious--it was clear in context--it means "That's obvious."

Consider the history which made that statement possible and comprehensible. First came the association of the vocalization, not really a word, "duh" with mentally handicapped people: an inarticulate response signifying incomprehension. Then it became, for people of normal intelligence, an ironic way of saying "what you just said is so obvious that a mentally incompetent person would grasp it." (Notice, by the way, that I am deliberately avoiding the use of the older and cruder words for that condition that are now considered unacceptable in polite use.)

"Football is a dangerous game."

"Well, duh!"

For a while it was usually a two-syllable thing: "duh-uh," with the first syllable stressed and a bit higher pitched than the second. It wasn't really a word, just an interjection, like "hey." Or like "well" as I just used it. 

It also has a role as a form of mockery, frequently self-mockery, meaning "you [or I] just said or did something stupid." "I was looking everywhere for my keys and they're right there on the counter. Duh." 

And now, if that instance at NR is not a solitary quirk, it is being used as a noun. Perhaps it will stick, and make it through the centuries, so that 500 years from now one philosopher will say to another something along the lines of "Your premise is a duh, but your conclusion does not follow."

What I like about this is that it's entirely a spontaneous development, driven by people using language that comes naturally, with a creativity that comes naturally, and always involving constant change. Part of what makes some of the trends which annoy me so objectionable is that they come out of commercial or journalistic practice which is manufactured in a sense that "duh" was not. They occur in language that is deliberately composed for some utilitarian purpose, and therefore ought to involve some minimal degree of skill, but instead is the work of people who are attempting to sound more literate than they actually are but are indifferent to or ignorant of standards. 

And then there's the academy, now filled with people who are deliberately trying to force language into some unnatural shape to accommodate their ideology. Oozing out into the rest of the world, that effort is responsible for a TV journalist saying "The interviewer wasn’t themselves--he was rude...." (That also was from National Review, quoting the journalist.)

To use another word that's been reshaped by popular speech: that's gross.

I had written most of the above when it occurred to me to check with the dictionary makers. Sure enough, they have recognized "duh" as an interjection. Nounhood may or may not eventually follow.


Respighi: The Pines of Rome

I will admit, somewhat defiantly, that I sometimes consciously operate on prejudice, especially with regard to the arts, and more especially with regard to music. It's generally not pure prejudice; I usually have at least some reason for supposing that my opinion of this can reasonably, or at least not unreasonably, be extended to that, which resembles it, or seems to be of the same species. One of these prejudices is against recordings of classical music which have words like "gala" or "festival" in the title. If the cover includes a picture of fireworks, it's worse. If the title includes an exclamation mark, it's much worse.

The germ of justification for this prejudice is that I think such recordings are likely to be fluff--a collection of brief and showy works of superficial appeal but small substance, yoked together for precisely those reasons. Or perhaps the pieces are more worthwhile than that, but are mere pieces in the other sense, appealing parts of significant works pulled out of their context and yoked to others similarly extracted.

(This is what I think about collections of opera arias, especially. On the one hand, I'm not an especially avid listener of opera, and it's true that certain arias are the tastiest parts of a work which might not be of the greatest interest without them. So as a matter of taste I'm not really averse to the practice. It's a bit like making a best-of album from the work of a group which has a relatively small amount of material that you really like. On the other hand, I feel some sense of duty to the composer to at least give him the opportunity to show me the aria in its dramatic context.)

And I think that broad prejudice is at the root of a more specific prejudice, which I realize I've had for a long time without noticing it, against the popular works of Ottorino Respighi. I believe, though I don't have any specific instance, that I've seen his name on recordings of that sort. Or perhaps not--perhaps it's only that one of his frequently played and recorded works is "Festivals of Rome." Now that I think about it, I notice that I also have a mild prejudice against program music, music intended to depict some scene or event, even though Smetana's "The Moldau" is such a piece and was one of the first works of classical music that really excited me. (Another was Schonberg's "Pierrot Lunaire." That pairing says a lot about my musical taste.) Program music tends either not to work at all--i.e. the thing depicted would probably never have occurred to you if you hadn't been told--or to work too well, seeming contrived and gimmicky.

Prejudice is not necessarily a bad thing. Most people are prejudiced against snakes, because a few species are deadly. I am prejudiced against Great Danes, and strongly prejudiced against two Great Danes together, having been quietly but seriously threatened by a pair of them. And knowing of a case where a pair of them killed a foolish harmless little dog that crawled under a fence into their yard to say hello.

But one ought not to take prejudice so far as, for instance, to kill on sight any snake which happens to cross one's path. And most prejudices should remain open to exceptions and even the possibility of abandonment. 

I was not thinking of any of that a few weeks ago when I was looking for a relatively short, relatively light piece of music to listen to late one night, and "Pines of Rome" caught my eye. I think I noticed it because it happens to be the first piece in that collection of 104 MP3 tracks of Eugene Ormandy's conducting, "The Original Jacket Collection," which was offered on Amazon some years ago for the absurdly low price of $9.99. But it only took one hearing to dispel my prejudice and win me over completely.

"Pines of Rome" is a delightful work. Yes, it is fairly light, but it isn't cotton candy. Nor does it have that sort of stiffness or heaviness that I sometimes feel in the work of German composers when they try to be light. It's fresh and vivid, and leaves no sense that the composer wants it to be either more or less than it is, like a woman who doesn't seem to be making an effort to be charming but who simply is charming--and whether the latter is the product of greater artifice, who knows? (I said "a woman," because the word "charming" doesn't generally occur to me in relation to men. But of course it does to women.) At any rate, this is a charming work, and I've enjoyed it several times since that first hearing, more each time. Not everything has to be profound, complex, and intense. There's a place for straightforward, not-overly-demanding music that simply gives pleasure.

The program is really quite elaborate, as this explication at Wikipedia shows. I can't imagine most of that occurring to a listener, even one who knows the places depicted in the four sections: pines of the Villa Borghese, the catacombs, the Janiculum, and the Appian Way. I've never seen them and in fact was not even sure what the first and third were until I looked them up. Still, in a broad way the titles are suggestive and not intrusive. If the first one put any image at all into my mind, it was of a clear day with a fresh breeze. The second suggests no picture, just a somber atmosphere. The third is peaceful and, if you didn't envision some natural scene, the song of the nightingale would make it clear that you were meant to. The fourth title is maybe the most successful as a directive to the listener. The music is meant to depict not just the ancient road itself but the passage of ancient Roman legions upon it, and it's certainly martial enough.

I'm looking forward to hearing the other two works in this set, "Fountains of Rome" and "Festivals of Rome," though this one seems to be the most popular. 

Ormandy-Respighi

This is the original jacket. It does not appeal to me. It stirs that prejudice I mentioned. It looks a little festive and includes the word "festivals."