May 2008

The first title for this blog was “Letters to the Line Between Fiction, Non-Fiction, Neither and Both.” Today it is called “A Common Listener.” One title falls somewhere between Rilke and the other Virginia Woolf. Maybe next time it will be a three letter abbreviation CGS.com for “Can’t Get Started.” Anyway, it is all an attempt to begin a stream of thoughts about some of the music from some of the Americas, mostly in the English language but not always.

Thinking it possible to go back seventy-five to one hundred or so years and become in our imagination one of the Ziegfeld Follies, or a singer or composer in Tin Pan Alley could be a fun thing, a funny thing. That such imaginations are only imaginations, that “becoming a Tin Pan Alley-ist”, performing decades old music and poetry as we play our own now is an illusion, is true. “Our own” here is now used for anything past Billie Holiday and the great divide in jazz past the black and the white. Very likely the Early Broadway-ist would find our pronunciation of their language unintelligible (Jeanne Lee): our idealized picture of what we might call the life in Tin Pan Alley would make them laugh. Still, the urge that demands we return to them (“we—Billie Holiday, Paul Bley, Ran Blake, Jeanne Lee, Hankus Netsky and the narrator here; “them”—Vernon Duke, Ira Gershwin, George Gershwin, Bob Hope, Eve Arden, Peter Solari,) is so strong and the haunting light-heartedness that blows through the old recordings (and films) are so tantalizing that we willingly run the risk of being laughed at, of being a fuddy-duddy, an old fart.

Rosa asked who was Vernon Duke since there was no link to his name that appeared in the last post’s title. And still not knowing the ropes or the dashboard or the wp content folder in the hosting server, the thought came that in order to get something up, go to Vernon and answer her kind curiosity. The history stretches all the way from Russia to Jordan Hall at the New England Conservatory in Boston, Massachusetts in the 1980s to somewhere near the South Pole in Brazil. (The local beer is called “Antartica.”)

The composer who wrote “April in Paris,” and “Taking a Chance on Love” is the same Vernon Duke of “I Can’t Get Started with You.” If the hope to get a plug-in for audio in the near future can be fulfilled, then we might fly around the world as common listeners.

Dear Rosa,

I was having some problems starting to write on this blog and Mieka Pauley  of the Cambridge Folk scene suggested that I take a look at Josh Joplin’s website which gave me an idea.  I am grateful to her and him for that.

And since you introduced yourself on Twitter (via Andrew Dubber’s New Music Strategies) and since you are in Hawaii and I am in Brazil and I would never have met you had there not been a computer, an internet and a Twitter, I decided to write this blog post to you.  I’m having some trouble getting started in the blogging medium I confess and it is your article, “Internet Privacy: An Evolution” that my mind keeps returning to as a point of how to go ahead.

Some of what I work on is at what we might call a brochure-style website named DAKINI MUSIC.  That would be step one in your list:  “1. Traditional website (need to hire a webmaster).”   So when I started to think how I could re-integrate what has been done at Dakini Music work with much older work I did as LIZ HAMILL , I decided to go to “Step 2:  Blog platform (actually do it myself).”  Somehow, I jumped up to “Step 6: Twitter” and then started following you.

So this post is an attempt to go back to Step 2.    Right now I am in the final stages of an audio production of the great Indian Buddhist philosopher, Shantideva’s, The Way of the Bodhisattva.  It is a thrilling project and the ten minute learning curve on WordPress for some has turned out to be something much larger for me.  The production is going well but really the only thing that has gone well on the blog is the Hello Dolly plug in which at the moment says, “I can tell, Dolly.”  Which is SO true!

You said,  “With a blog there would be less ‘firewalls’ and people I did not know would easily be able to reach out to me.  I liked the thought that there were those who would invite me into their lives for my aloha conversation; the thought that others would lurk in my life for unknown reasons terrified me.  What made me take the plunge was not that I came to terms with that; it was publishing my book, and realizing that my contact information would be now public domain anyway… maybe the internet would at least give me a bread crumb trail to knowing who both followers and lurkers were. ”

Fortunate for us that you had your book as an impetus.  I will try to follow your example with some songs and arrangements I did as someone who worked in the Avant Guarde Jazz scene at the New England Conservatory and the rich modern Folk Music community in New England. 

Wishing you all happinesses,

Liz