ben's interweb

[Ed: this is a typical Ben piece...]
Ben - I need to apologise to your favourite tutor, Dr Ben Fairbairn, for having mis-spelt his name as Fairburn, when his name has a bairn in it...
...which took me to Bonny at Morn.  This is a song that Kelsey taught us  - arranged by herself.  It is a Northumbrian tune and song, and it has the verse:

We're all laid idle wi' keeping the bairn,
The lad he will not work and the lass will not learn

and the word bairn brings the song up in my mind...why?  I don't know, but it is a lovely song which has lots of juicy other aspects to it. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EQ7AAi7DF4
[Ed: When I saw the video attached to this I burst into tears (yet again...happens a dozen times a day) at the sight of a pregnant woman...many will know why this vision dissolved me in regret.]
So, looking for youtube versions of this to share (this one has the right sound to it, but I prefer the song to continue without the breaks between each line) I see that this song - which is in a good Geordie dialect, worthy of my Northumbrian trip when I was 19 - has been cannonised (if that is the right term):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdWvgDJc3os
which is sort of interesting.  I don't feel a great affinity for the classical rendering, but (is it true that?) if it weren't for the interest of some classical music wallahs, maybe we would have lost some of our traditional folk tunes?  This is probably a question for my maiden cousins, Joan and Rosalind...at some point I will ask them: I am due to go up to Lancashire to walk along the Leeds Liverpool and the Rochdale Canals in search of a the feeling from my grandmother's (your great grandmother, Ben) her bargee heritage...

[Ed: So, I have wandered around a bit, but just to finish by apologising directly to Dr Ben for getting his name wrong...
...and to ask him if we could go on to share his (and Ben's) Snark references in the next offering on Ben's Interweb?]

Kerenza ha yeghes da!

Andrew
x

Bonny at Morn - audio

Hi Andrew, Please put this on Ben's Interweb. Joza x

My Rambling response to 'Bonny in the Morn' [also see Penrose's Universe in 'Playing Games and Maths']

The 'Bonny in the morn' song - very beautiful, I never hear it before, very very beautiful. Benjamin Britten version did not make it for me, something already made and beautiful, best left alone by composers perhaps.

But there was beautiful classical music and singing in the first week of this years Proms, the 'Verdi Requiem' and Purcell 'Dido and Aeneas', both talk of death, perhaps the promise of rebirth, like the Penrose universe ?

The Verdi so powerful it seems to allow the promise of anything.

The Purcell with the beautiful lament:

"When I am laid in earth remember me but forget my fate"

A lament that I know well from a wonderful rendition of it by the great opera singer Jessie Norman.
It brings me to remember a story about Jessie Norman at Covent Garden.

My friend Angela Lear was studying piano at the Royal Academy at the time, she told me that she had gone to the opera and sat near the stage intent on listening to the singers when she heard the sound of an instrument that she could not identify she looked towards the the orchestra pit to see which instrument the sound came from but could not identify it, the sound continued, all singers on stage were silent, then a magnificent woman of African decent walked from the wings to centre stage her voice still holding that pure rising sound.  The singer was Jessie Norman she had begun that magical note while still in the wings.

When years later I saw her at the Albert Hall she was almost at the end of her career, I remember the stillness of this woman as she sailed silently onto the stage, her huge bodily presence like a great gallon parting the way through the members of the orchestra until she came to the front of the stage.

She was born in the United States in racist Southern Georgia which then was still then separatist.
I heard her tell in an interview that as a child she had been taken to a department store by her mother and that she had drank from a water cooler that had written on it 'Coloured Water Fountain' she told her mother that she had been disapointed to find the water that came out of it did not have colours of the rainbow for she had belived that 'Coloured Water Fountain' had meant that the water would be of many colours.

African decent opera singers and interviews brings to mind the Jamaican born Willard White,

In an interview Willard White talked about a young man in Jamaica who was a cripple and how as a child walking to and from school he had watched this young man balancing himself on a piece of board mounted on small wheels, his thin body on the board leaning forward as he raced around from the road and in and out of the small shops and bars, and of how he admired the independence and overwhelming joy and spirit of this young man and how it had an impact on his own life.

As coincidence in life happens I too as a child had watched and admired the young man he described, it was always on a road where my mother would drive her small van to the piece of land in the foothills where she employed Mr Rennals and his wife to grow flowers which she would then would take and make into funeral wreaths, wedding bouquets and the like, I often travelled with her in the back of the van and knew that the young man on his wheeled board would almost always be on this road. I never spoke about him to my mother or anyone else but I always looked to see if he was there with the excitement of a child for I felt what Willard White felt when seeing him, this young man had a joy of freedom, he was expert at wheeling his board, at flipping it at the right time to send himself and it up and into the small shops and bars, he found friends and life there, he was proud of his skill, he moved faster than any that walked around him, he would speed along sometime seemly on two wheels sometime four, turn in a circle, half a circle, whenever he wanted, using his arms and hands and what small mobility he had in his legs.

Many, many years later when living in London was when I heard Willard White being interviewed it was just before then that I had come to know of him, that he was an opera singer and that he had been born in Jamaica, I had gone to see him in the role of Blue Beard at the London Coliseum, by then he was already a huge name in Opera. In the interview he said that he had thought of the young man and his wheeled board many times and the thought of him had given him courage in his own life and work. I do not know if Willard White stayed in Jamaica long enough before leaving for his music studies to feel the disappointment that I did when one day when I saw what happened next to the young man.

I can only imagine that some people had not see the young man's homemade board on wheels as a good thing, one day as I looked for him and I saw him sitting in a large heavy metal wheelchair, he sat on his own in a shop his head down, no movement in his body, the wheelchair seem to isolate him, I imagined that he would not be able to move it freely, his legs had lost the small mobility that the board gave them and looked withered within the chair. As a child I looked at him with shock and always remember that image of him with great sadness and feeling of his loss. I never saw him again. I understand that giving him a wheelchair would be seen as helping him, no more being near the ground at a lower height than others around him, but I can only hope that he found a way to escape the constraints and that he again found freedom, perhaps in a new way.

I never saw Ben on his skateboard but believe that he would have reached out and that he and and this young man would have become friends.