My long term project-recording old vinyl LP's (old enough to be called "long playing") keeps me in contact with music I have either grown up with or have known for 20 or more years. Old Beatles records still have life in them; recently I listened again to Rubber Soul from my old monaural LP (for those who have no idea what that is, there was a time when music was not recorded in "stereo," something we take for granted). The Lennon-McCartney songs still sound well (the lyrics seem to seek rhyme over sense; they don't reach too far) but more interesting are George Harrison's songs. Think for Yourself stretches lyrically and musically, at least to my ears. I suppose I like his more introverted and reflective personality and his tendency to reach beyond the moment in his life. He never really carried an entire album on his own, but somehow he always has something unique to say.
Then there is Graceland by Paul Simon. Simon has always looked for new ways to create music. He brought a great gift to music by featuring other musicians who worked in other genres of music. Cajun musicians, African musicians, jazz musicians, gospel musicians-he would work around their music and incorporate what they were doing with his own musical concepts. He had done it before Graceland, but this was a major project and done on larger scale. By now the music is well known. At the time it was fresh and opened new sound worlds, certainly for me. The township music of South Africa was totally new to me and many others. Ladysmith Black Mambazo, now famous, were a Western discovery. The lyricism of Simon's music blended with that music and produced appealing melodies and harmonies. Throughout the album the rhythms come from world music, the songs themselves are influenced by world music and the whole project seems like an international music festival. This fusion of musical styles is as old as music itself. Sometimes it's more intentional and Simon's album is one of those moments. But early Christian chant derived from Jewish chant, Bach and other Germans of his time learned from and borrowed Italian music, Brahms studied the polyphony of the Renaissance, and jazz is rooted in African, Latin American and sacred American music. Joplin rags, as one example, use hymn-like harmonies to undergird the syncopation. 20th century European music broadened its influences to include Balinese gamelan (Debussy), not to mention Indian rhythms and even birdsong (Messiaen). It's a pretty exhaustive list if all were included. Simon did it in a new way and in a new genre.
I also recently recorded Wagner's Parsifal (with von Karajan conducting) and find it beautiful, pretentious and exhausting. It's hard not to be drawn in to this music, yet it also repulses. It's like a musical tsunami. You see it coming, you run as fast as you can and it overwhelms you in the end. Some people just don't live close enough to be affected, I guess. I once allowed myself to be baptized with Wagner's Ring cycle in a week long performance of the four operas. That was about enough. It was Romanticism on steroids. I have a hard time not feeling a good deal of megolomania in Wagner's music. His music seems to want to overwhelm everything around it, just devour it, like music with a personality disorder. I can't seem to ignore it but I want it to go away. I suppose it fits the story of his life, a history of using others for his own artistic ends. He is the artist as god-like, mating irresponsibly with humankind and producing semi-divine progeny. By the way, my Wagnerian baptism didn't take. I keep him around but I won't be visiting often. He won't leave the house.
