No Talent, Please!

Two weeks ago I played with both my little bands at the Tsjoch festival. Tsjoch is a festival organised by a society called the Frisian Society of Folk Musicians. That sounds like a society with a restricted membership - one would expect that, in order to become a member, one has to prove one's Frisianness (last name ending on -sma or -stra; fluent in Frisian; living in a Frisian village; hating Groningen) as well as one's musicianship (playing in tune, rhythmic, with articulation, with expression, et cetera et cetera et cetera - the usual list  basically aimed at ruling out as musicians the Sex Pistols, Tom Waits and your neighbour singing in the choir of the local operetta society). Or maybe one has to prove one's Frisian musicanship - singing songs in Frisian accompanying oneself on the Noardske Balke.

Metaphorical Singing

Two weeks ago I visited the American  'past, present and upcoming' music festival Take Root. As usual, it was a pleasure to be there. On four stages, a variety of bands and singers presented themselves. The festival seems to get louder every year - more rock bands, less folk and country; more Fenders, Gibsons and Rickenbackers, less fiddles and banjos - I actually heard the first banjo in the last act, and no fiddle at all all evening.

Musicking in Haren's Project X

So here I am, the day after the night before, sitting and typing. The kids were up early, and I went to bed late - we had to be sure that the riots which were part of the nonsensical Project X in Haren would not come our way. They didn't; instead of moving a couple of hundred meters to our front door, they moved a couple of hundred meters the other direction to centre village, making carefully sure that in the process  hundreds of inhabitants were sent into absolute fright and disgust and hundreds of thousands of community euros were wasted.

Astonishment

In order to describe the astonishment I often feel the following quote, from a book I would recommend to anyone apart from those who think religion is, like history, bunk:

Singing for the community

In an earlier entry I reflected on the concept of the `acoustic community': a community that is defined by the fact that it shares hearing the same sounds. The church bell outlining community borders, was the idea. And I wrote: `A house can be seen as a means of constructing the family as an acoustic community: the walls of the house keep the family sounds inside and the sounds of the world outside, thus making a difference in “our” sounds and “their” sounds'.

I was reminded of that idea when we were camping with the family in Denmark. Huge tent, little fridge, beds - the camping experience was rather limited compared to earlier camping experiences in the Pyrénées at 2000 metres in a little tent. But so it goes: you get older, kids come in, and gradually trampolines and indoor swimming pools replace mountain treks and nature's silence as the necessities of life.

Rob Bijlsma, Honey Buzzards and Music

I am reading the book "My Birds of Prey" ("Mijn roofvogels") by Rob Bijlsma. Rob Bijlsma is famous in our family - I tell the children stories about his adventures with birds of prey (especially honey buzzards - Dutch: Wespendief), hunters, foresters and his famous friend Theunis Piersma who knows Everything About the Knot (Dutch: Kanoetstrandloper). How surprised they were to learn that Rob Bijlsma as well as Theunis Piersma were not inventions of my mind but actually existing persons, who indeed know everything about honey buzzards and knots, respectively. Add to that that Bijlsma is photographed usually while sitting in the top of a tree, looking like a sorcerer or wizard with his long hair, and you can imagine their fascination.


Bijlsma's book is a great book. Bijlsma is a born researcher with the tendency to start adding up or subtracting anything he stumbles across and wants to know more about: the number of wasps per summer, the number of mice in his garden, the growth per day of young honey buzzards; if he falls out of a tree he can't resist to figure out with which speed he touched the ground, given his weight, the height of the tree and gravity in general (about 50 km/hr, it turns out to be). The nice thing is that he counts and describes, but resists the tendency of much researchers to interpret correlations as causal correlations, basically because he knows by experience that nature is far more complex than you think it is - actually he warns that when a correlation seems causal you almost certainly may dismiss the possibility of causality.


I wrote earlier on music and birds, quoting the reverend Gilbert White writing about the tonality of the hooting of owls. Bijlsma is not that kind of man, but music occasionally figures in his book. Fittingly, he mentions John Lee Hooker with Alan `Blind Owl' Wilson as well as Jefferson Airplane's 'High Flyin' Bird'. But the nicest quote on music is his explanation of why the honey buzzard reminds him of Lou Reed: he once took care of a young honey buzzard of which he was sure it was a male, until it turned out to be female: "he was a she" (`Take a Walk on the Wild Side'). And he ends with the notice that even the sound to make contact with a honey buzzard fits the song: "doo do do do do doo do do".


Rob Bijlsma. Mijn roofvogels. Amsterdam: Atlas, 2012. 

I Love You, and Wittgenstein

`I love you', said the man.
`But why?` asked the woman.
`I can't tell you. I just simply love you', said the man.
If you ask people which music they really like, or even love, they often come up with an answer but find it hard to explain why. 

Mind you: I am not talking about the question which music they think is good.