Sometimes (you may have noticed) I am not totally enamoured of this job, but you also get moments which more than make up for it. Like playing them The Beatles and seeing their faces totally light up.*
Hard as it is to imagine, the Beatles are entirely new to them - we are talking about people who were born in 2000, 2001, and from Bangladeshi/Somali backgrounds. I showed them the cover of Meet the Beatles and there was not the smallest flicker of recognition of these famous faces.
Imagine hearing this music for the very first time. I was grateful to have this job today, because hearing it through their ears let me hear it again for the very first time.
* Though some of the boys were with Ian Macdonald's rather harsh appraisal of one of my favourite Beatles tunes. They said it was 'consciously artless' and criticised the 'metrical irregularities of the chorus' arpeggiated triads'. (Or that it was a 'baby's song', one or the other.)
About teaching and crying
1 day ago
15 comments:
"Consciously artless!" Gosh, they all sound clever!
I know which song you're talking about.
How utterly tragic is that?
Oh. I just noticed, you identified the song in the post title.
Shuffles away.
Wyndham - yes, spelling words this week are 'jejune' 'prolixity' and 'magniloquent'.
Tim - ah, but did you know it because you remembered the description, or because you recognised what he was describing?
I quite enjoyed it but expected less arpeggiated triads and more gossip about Jane Asher.
I'm a sad bastard who, after a couple of pints, can quite great wads of Revolution in the Head. I particularly like his vicious dissection of Lennon's lousy bass playing on The Long And Winding Road.
I can do the same sort of thing to Nigel Slater's description of mashed potatoes. But not Shakespeare, or anything that I might want to memorise.
I think the reason for its success is that (in retrospect) it was so obvious. Dozens of books had been published about the soap opera of their lives (eg Jane Asher); very little about the music.
I hope I've taken a few tips from MacDonald in my own book, the title of which I shan't be so vulgar as to mention again, since everyone has been so supportive already...
Always was one of my favourite tunes. Even when I was a boy! :D
If Here Comes The Sun's a baby's song, what's Yellow Submarine or Octopus's Garden?
I can't imagine hearing the Beatles for the first time, they're so woven into my own childhood.
We once sang Octopus' Garden when we were at school.
I quite like the metrical irregularities of the arpeggiated triads.
I can see how it might appeal to babies, but it doesn't follow that it should appeal only to them.
Yellow Submarine I quite like (ever since college when one of the music people would happily play songs like that, sing along, and stop mid-word to shout out the chord changes for you) but the rest of that album/soundtrack-thing is probably too childish to be baby-music.
One day. the teacher played us part of Holst's The Planets suite. My eyes lit up and I was hooked. As for the day I discovered the music of Turlough O'Carolan .... bugger The Beatles, O'Carolan rules :)
(Sorry, I've always considered The Beatles overrated)
Will that be 'Radiohead: Welcome to the Machine: Ok Computer and the Death of the Classic Album' that you mean then, Tim Footman? It was v good, just quite technical - like Paul MaCartney & John Lennon (only in this respect and not in the musical genius respect) I never learned how to read/write music and felt a bit of an ignoramus.
Rad, I know you to have great taste...
Geoff, Octopus' Garden, aaaaaargh... it is excruciating, only one degree above Maxwell's Silver Hammer. I know, me too - it was a very odd moment.
Billy - that counts as child cruelty in my book.
QE, what album is that then? That's a cryptic comment - too childish to be baby music, eh?
Llewtrah, I hadn't heard of Turlough O'Carolan, will check him out... The Beatles overrated? I've always thought they were underrated...
Turlough O'Carolan was an itinerant blind Irish harpist (proper brass strung harp that sound like carillons of bells, none of your gut-strung stuff). He was probably one of the last.
The first time I heard one of his tunes, it was as though someone had found a missing jigsaw piece of my life. or as though I'd come home. It just felt right.
We sang 'Penny Lane' at school, and I distinctly remember asking the teacher what "finger pie" was, being a genuinely ignorant 7 year old. He said it was just nonsense talk, but now I realise I was in fact singing something OBSCENE.
Love Revolution in the Head. One of my all time favourite bog books.
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