I mean, I think you're right in terms of placing re-singing within the folk tradition, and I know that voicing can make a huge difference. You mention Buffy St. Marie; I was already thinking of Joan Baez.
From whom I learned several Dylan songs before hearing them sung by actual Dylan and in several cases continue to prefer her versions, while we're on the subject. This conversation got "Farewell, Angelina" stuck in my head.
I think part of what caught me off guard about Jeff Buckley is that I came to him along a singer/songwriter path; it's like the reverse of folkies getting mad when Dylan started writing his own stuff and went electric.
Understood. For lack of a better term, this problem of reading protocols may also feed into your feelings about his Corpus Christi Carol—if he had been a classical countertenor, it would be an uncontroversial interpretation of the Britten arrangement except for swapping out the piano in the accompaniment, but on an album which features an actually individualized version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," you do expect it to offer something else.
In general, I don't think I've figured out what happens to aural/oral music traditions once recordings exist.
I think you still get chains of them, which I am unsystematically interested in, but linear inheritance goes completely out the window.
I'm also kind of chagrinned about how much stuff Britten wrote that I didn't necessarily know he wrote until way after I loved it. What a composer. Relatedly, would love to hear you sing Lyke-Wake Dirge sometime. That sounds perfect.
Thank you! May I ask what other Britten you found out after the fact?
Nina Simone is a whole other thing, because she said on many occasions that it made her angry when people imitated her interpretations of songs; she thought of it as plagiarism. I'm not sure whether I agree with her about that, but it's something I think of whenever I hear someone doing Nina Simone, including me singing along.
Which is rough because a person's only options for "Pirate Jenny" are Nina Simone or Lotte Lenya.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2024-10-08 02:08 am (UTC)From whom I learned several Dylan songs before hearing them sung by actual Dylan and in several cases continue to prefer her versions, while we're on the subject. This conversation got "Farewell, Angelina" stuck in my head.
I think part of what caught me off guard about Jeff Buckley is that I came to him along a singer/songwriter path; it's like the reverse of folkies getting mad when Dylan started writing his own stuff and went electric.
Understood. For lack of a better term, this problem of reading protocols may also feed into your feelings about his Corpus Christi Carol—if he had been a classical countertenor, it would be an uncontroversial interpretation of the Britten arrangement except for swapping out the piano in the accompaniment, but on an album which features an actually individualized version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," you do expect it to offer something else.
In general, I don't think I've figured out what happens to aural/oral music traditions once recordings exist.
I think you still get chains of them, which I am unsystematically interested in, but linear inheritance goes completely out the window.
I'm also kind of chagrinned about how much stuff Britten wrote that I didn't necessarily know he wrote until way after I loved it. What a composer. Relatedly, would love to hear you sing Lyke-Wake Dirge sometime. That sounds perfect.
Thank you! May I ask what other Britten you found out after the fact?
Nina Simone is a whole other thing, because she said on many occasions that it made her angry when people imitated her interpretations of songs; she thought of it as plagiarism. I'm not sure whether I agree with her about that, but it's something I think of whenever I hear someone doing Nina Simone, including me singing along.
Which is rough because a person's only options for "Pirate Jenny" are Nina Simone or Lotte Lenya.