Jottings of New York

I'm leaving New York. I haven't been leisurely blogging for the twenty-four hours I've been here; I've been too busy talking with my regular commenter John Cowan (6 hrs, finishing 2:30 AM—good to know I can still do that kind of thing, though jet lag helps), and my friend Genevieve (1 hr, and we had to be efficient about it—bon voyage à Angleterre!)

There have been past Jottings of New York, and I have been to New York several times before; this was a lightning visit, and I'll just quickly note the following:

• My dinner was around the corner from the Polish consulate, which had an improvised shrine to the dead president. That kind of improvised shrine is now common in the West, which doesn't have the institutionalised religious channels to commemorate death that it used to. I'm assuming you won't see that kind of improvised shrine in Greece, for example, because people until recently built actual shrines by the roadside, with icons and oil lamps.
  
• The restaurant was Asia de Cuba, and I'm impressed that it impressed Genevieve. It is fusion Chinese–Cuban. The fusion is organic and not self-consciously experimental as much fusion is (Chinese people did move to Cuba). The food was certainly worth the money: the Shanghai noodles were correct, the pork honeyed and melt-in-mouth, the kind Greeks exclaim "Turkish Delight!" over. Pity I can no longer put away the quantities I could.
  
• New York now, and always, strikes me with its urbanity: the dressed up young things talking over drinks or noodling with their Crackberries, jostling for drinks—this was familiar, this was how the world should be. I don't know that I would last if I actually lived here, but the switch-on, fashion-savvy, over-caffeinated New Yorker is a plane of experience to aspire to.
  
• That, and its no-prisoners, no-nonsense purposefulness, that comes of wedging a gajillion businesspeople in a couple of square km. My anecdote of choice when I used to live in California: after two years of toothy, insincerely grinned "Hey, how ya doin'" from random strangers in the street, I got to New York, where the random strangers would shove me out of the way as they went to where they had to be—and it was heaven. This time around, the contrast was the casual jaywalking, right in front of the cops, who after all have better things to do in NYC than prosecute jaywalkers. Genevieve tells me the cops get a "hey, how ya doin'" from the jaywalkers for their trouble.
  
  • I interrupt this transmission to thank the Qantas staff in Premium Economy for resolving my power supply issues to my laptop, and for the complimentary champers on top of it. The station to which I shall have been accustomed, indeed...
  
  
• There is a beauty to this subjugated, engineered, piled on landscape of towers of brick and concrete. My friend Jana, whose idea of beauty is the Central Australian desert, gets antsy when she comes here. I grin. And it's not all unrelieved gauche glass towers, like Brisbane is (or least would have been, if Joh had demolished everything he saught to). It's Art Deco sky-piecers Midtown, lots of more squat and humane brick uptown (because, as John informed me, the soil outside Midtown can only support so much weight), and plenty of trees still, welcoming and verdant and tamed. Like in DC.
  
• Coincidentally, when I got to my hotel at 2:30 AM, the History Channel was playing a show on reconstructing the pre-urban landscape of NYC. It was overwrought like all History Channel shows are—though at least this show didn't feature Hitler, as is the channel's default. But the reconstruction isn't that amazing a feat: we do have a British map, and pristine woodland still left on the northern tip of the island: unlike Greece, America gets that parks matter, and keeps them inviolable. Still, I wasn't expecting that Times Sq was originally a beaver pond.
  
• And a tree-strewn Manhattan with beavers and porpoises and just the occasional Amerindian wandering down what would become Broadway: that's not "a green paradise". Chill out, History Channel. It was a tree-strewn island with beavers and porpoises. I'm not saying all of North America should be terraformed and levelled and piled with buildings and packed with a gajillion businesspeople per square km; but I'm glad this bit was.
  
• The pile of buildings looks wondrous from New Jersey, and it was an excellent suggestion of Genevieve's to take the ferry across to see it. A giant's playblocks scattered into the sea.
  
• The gajillion people make NYC have microcultures, just like the hills it used to have would have made it have microclimates. This time I confined myself to Midtown–Upper West Side; but Upper West Side isn't Midtown, which isn't Chelsea, which isn't The Village, and you can see it. In Melbourne, none of my friends go any further south than St Kilda; so it's rare they visit Oakleigh. (Or even, by God, South Yarra—which is as New York urbane as Melbourne gets.) I take that as cowardly parochialism. Here at least, I don't begrudge the locals who never bother to venture north—or south—of 14th Street. Their Village is world enough; and so is the next one up.
  
• Thank you btw Genevieve for translating for me "Upper West Side = Malvern". And "they still think Asian fusion is exotic here, when we in Melbourne did that 15 years ago." It's good to have Rosetta Stones.
  
• And thank you John for a seminar I cannot summarise or reproduce, but which was as always rollicking good fun. The comparison between the clout in their homelands of the Greek and Jewish diasporas is not one that would have occurred to me; but it gave me the opportunity to lambast Greek morning TV host & pontificator Giorgos Papadakis once again, which is a good thing.
  • (Israel cares what the Jewish diaspora thinks, because that's where the money comes from. Greece remembers its diaspora when it's expedient to raise it to a nationalist frenzy over a National Issue; otherwise, they ignore them, and I'll never get over Papadakis' patronising tone when Greek-Americans rang in over the Iraq war, indignant about the Greek take on events. I'm not saying I wouldn't patronise them either. I'm saying that's dissing a whole lot of your fellow Grecophones, with unearned arrogance.)
  
  
• Oh, and I know about food servers saying "To have here or to go?": "To go?" is starting to displace "Have here or take away?" in Australia. (Or maybe that's just me.) But have people been saying "To go or to stay?" for a while? It was new to me, but not to Genevieve.

The green highways of Northern Virginia

I'm in a hotel in Northern Virginia this time, and am negotiating its large highways on foot; ten years ago, I was visiting a residence, and not really going anywhere much. So I had not been subjected to its large highways any way other than how God intended them to be encountered—out the car window.

So I'm warming less to the place than I had on previous visits; this is a work visit, and on the perfunctory side.

Still, especially around the grounds I am at, there is an delightsome orgy of green, of trees that are not threatening and peeling, but soothing and sensible. The gaps in the concrete in Irvine make it look like the scrubland is threateningly poised to take back over. The gaps in the concrete here make it look as if the forest has already staked out its niche, and is more at ease with its urban neighbours—more humane.

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At least, that's what it looks like from N. Beauregard; walking down S. King, it was as much a jumble of big buildings out of place as anywhere else.

US, so far

You'll have noticed even more extended radio silence than is usual for me on a trip overseas. I've spent three days in Irvine CA, and am now heading to DC, on a plane four hours delayed.

Which brings thoughts of decaying infrastructure. An unsustainably greened Orange County, with the same gargantuan buildings and brobdignanian freeways (just as I'd bemoaned here about Oracle HQ), a vista which will host tumbleweeds in my lifetime. Airline fleets with bits falling apart as I type. Western Civilisation, throwing out its books for PDFs, to leave behind neither.

Well, no, I'm not happy I'm missing my dinner out in DC, and my Monday has been killed in waiting lounges and overnarrow seats. I'm never happy to be anywhere near an American airport, and even less so an American domestic flight, whose desperate piling on of carry-on luggage is not a million miles away from the chickens and farm implements piled onto a bus in the Third World.

I had a great time of it nonetheless in Irvine, great enough to make a point of staying offline. Not because it is Irvine. I lived in Irvine for three years, and never reconciled to it, never got it or tried to. Irvine's hex on me has by now been broken, I don't have the feeling of dread and emptiness I used to (except when I contemplate its infrastructure); but I still find little in the landscape to detain me. Except the bookstore monopolies, though even those are starting to be shut down by the internets, and nudge towards eBooks.

But what detained me in Irvine was who was in it. I spent three days of chatting with old friends, and that was a glory. (Well, two and a half days chatting, and half a day photocopying references—another of my Luddite hangups.) The chatting wasn't consistently profound—I use chatting advisedly; but it wide-ranging, familiar, and lots of fun.

The kind of chat, I am not ashamed to admit, that led us to giggle for a quarter of an hour over this confluence of YouTube memes:

*Why* this confluence of memes is so knee-debilitatingly funny to my culture is a topic that deserves at least one post. (You can start here for an intelligent take on the Russian song, and some good comments taking it further—not least my own.)

The fate of a society that spends more time on Bread And Memes than infrastructure deserves another post, but I think it would get too depressing to write.

Greeks speaking the wrong language

The Mariupolitans are a distinct group of ethnic Greeks living in the Ukraine, who formerly lived in Crimea. Like I explained in the Other Place, a minority of Mariupolitans speak not Greek, but a variant of Crimean Tatar they call Greek: Urum.

They are not the only people who consider themselves Greek but speak a Turkic language. As the Wikipedia article notes, the Pontians of Tsalka in Georgia who speak Turkish are also called (Tsalka) Urums; and a large number of the refugees from the 1922 population exchange were Karamanlides, who spoke Karamanli Turkish (and wrote it in Greek characters). When the refugees of Salonica waxed sentimental about their football team PAOK, they didn't just say ο ΠΑΟΚ μας in Standard Greek. They also said τεμέτερον ΠΑΟΚ in Pontic—and bizim PAOK in Turkish. Nikolaos Contossopoulos is the foremost researcher on Cretan dialect of the 20th century; but his folk were Turkish-speakers. He concluded, he told me once, that Pontic has undergone syntactic influence from Turkish (an obvious but not necessarily a popular conclusion), because Pontic syntax sounded just like his elderly relatives trying to speak Greek.

Which goes to show something blindingly obvious, but lost in the modern East European process of nation-building: language is not the same as ethnicity (and neither is the same as nationality).

Turkic languages are the languages of Muslims, as far as everyone in the region is concerned, and a Christian speaking Turkic violates the easy dichotomies of nation-building. Which means that if Turkic-speakers internalise an ideology of being ethnically Greek—or indeed, of being Rum, Christian, as an ethnicity—then they won't take nationalist pride in speaking Turkic. They will see themselves as speaking the "wrong" language. That's not untenable in an Ottoman or Russian context: after all, the Turkic-speaking Greeks did continue speaking Turkic for centuries. But if they find themselves in a majority Greek-speaking context, they will be pressured to drop Turkic for Greek, and they won't have much of a motive not to.

And indeed, that's what happened with the Karamanlides in Greece. Greece was never well-disposed to minority languages to begin with, and the Turkish that used to be spoken by the refugees is barely mentioned in scholarship: it never became an emblem like Pontic, or even a bugbear like Macedonian Slavonic. It was quietly, and efficiently, dropped.

The Turkish of the Karamanlides passed unlamented—and unrecorded. Greek linguistics had its own priorities, being practiced after all by Greeks who saw the world in a particular way. Contossopoulos spent his career on someone else's dialect—which is after all what most linguists do; but working on his own family's dialect was not an option. Nor, I venture to say, would he have been dismayed that it was not.

Karamanlides speaking Turkish was a paradox to nationally-minded Greeks; Karamanlides dropping Turkish might seem a paradox to cosmopolitan-minded non-Greeks. The mother tongue, we assume by default, is the driver of identity and its rallying point and its emotional centre: how sad it must be to hate your own mother tongue.

And I admit to being troubled at the notion of hating one's mother tongue. Yet loving one's mother tongue, chosing to value it as identity, is as much a construct as valuing religion or culture, or what Greeks nebulously call ethnic consciousness, εθνική συνείδηση. It's innate to seek out one's own, but who one's own are is something learned, and acquired.

And engineered. The Christians of the Ottoman Empire had to be taught they were Bulgarians, or Greeks, or Macedonians, or Albanians. What the people of village X thought they were 500 years ago is different to what they thought they were 100 years ago, and often what they think they are now. And the change was often enough initiated, because someone from Athens or Sofia came to town, and told them so; or because the local landlord made a choice, and his villagers followed suit.

But the question of what people "really" are, of how their language or quirks or DNA contradict their current self-identification, is pointless. If for whatever reason the villagers of X or Y now consider themselves Greek, well, they're Greek; telling them a hundred years on they've been brainwashed means nothing. (The same goes for the search for Greeks in FYROM, it should be said: the Vlachs there in particular have changed their minds too.) Telling the Karamanlides they should have held on to a Turkish-speaking identity in Greece means even less. They suffered for being Christian in Turkey, they suffered for being aliens and speaking the wrong language when they fled to Greece: if they've come to hate their mother tongue, they aren't obligated to hold on to it for my linguistic edification.

That's problematic for me to say: the Karamanlides have had to jettison their linguistic heritage, because they were told to, and they found themselves in the coercive linguistic context of a monolingual nation-state. All Other Things being equal, maybe they shouldn't have had to make that choice. But All Other Things were not equal; and it's hard to know how much of an attachment they'd formed to Turkish while in Turkey. Love Of Mother Tongue, like everything else, is taught, and they wouldn't have found many such teachers.

And that's all terribly confused, because on the one hand I don't seek to be an apologist for nationalism, let alone to presume how the Karamanlides felt at the time; but on the other what the (former) speakers themselves now think should not be dismissed either. On the one hand, I can't get over the notion that hating your mother tongue is dysfunctional; on the other, it's as dysfunctional to expect Greeks in Greece to speak Turkish. The essentialism of nationalism—or at least, of unreflective, pitchfork-yielding nationalism, is not just hateful, it's counterproductive; and not just counterproductive, but obscuring. There's a reason linguists don't want to hear about the political dimensions behind what counts as a separate language: the flags get in the way of seeing the isoglosses.

Yet flags matter too, and "Nationalism Bad" is itself an unreflective stance. People are invested in their identities. No less genuinely so, because the identity is changeable, and engineerable. I responded negatively to the commenter at Sarantakos' who was happy that the Muslim Greeks had to leave Greece, because they had a family tradition of national fickleness, having converted in the first place. There was enough fickleness in the other direction, or alternating between the two, to make such atavistic purity tests contrary to the national interest—and not merely inhumane. Patriotism is not a matter of genetics, it is cultural, acquired, and contingent. That doesn't mean it's not real; and it doesn't mean either that the descendants of the Karamanlides are somehow lesser Greeks, or that their Greekness doesn't matter to them.

I got started on this post because I'm posting at The Other Place about the Urum. The Urum, like the Karamanlides, are Greeks Speaking The Wrong Language. As I'll explore there, they seem to have sensed in the '20s that they Spoke The Wrong Language: so they didn't pursue Ausbau like every other minority in the USSR did. That may be a pity and brainwashing; or it may be redressing an historical anomaly (as Pontus And The Left put it). But it was real. Now, there are signs at least some of them are taking pride in their language after all—with the support of the Greeks Speaking The Right Language. That's real too. Both groups are now turning into Ukrainians Speaking Neither Of The Above (Russian): the Greeks there, Greek-speaking and Tatar-speaking, now have different Otherness and different threats to their identity to deal with.

Will be Stateside next week

Things have continued to be odd around here, to the extent that I haven't given my tuthree readers adequate notice of this: on Friday, I'm going to the US for a week. I'm spending the weekend in Irvine; then I'm travelling to DC for the ADL Learning Content Registries and Repositories Summit (see my position paper, if you're that way inclined); then I'm spending 24 hours in New York.

Which may mean a blog post or two here, since I only seem to blog at opɯcɯlɯklɑr when I travel.

Also letting readers know that I've accepted an offer to work at the Australian National Data Service out at Monash in July, when my current contract with Link Affiliates expires. I was melancholy enough when I left the University of Melbourne for Monash the first time, in 2006. Since then, I've changed, Melbourne's changed, and Monash's changed. Or at least, I know more people at Monash, and it's a five minute drive away.

I still won't find buskers playing the Chaconne in Clayton, though.

Ioannis Kondylakis: How the village turned Christian

I've had an odd week, and as revenge against the elements, I've done a slightly odd thing.

It's Greek National Day, and Greek bloggers turn their thoughts to debates on nationalism. The Magnificent Nikos Sarantakos' Blog was no exception, and during the discussion that developed, I made a glancing mention of the Cretan Muslims, a topic I've already brought up on this blog. My reference was to the apparent conversion of some Cretan Muslims to Christianity in the 19th century; Nikos responded by pointing to a short story by Ioannis Kondylakis on his site, "How the village turned Christian" (although it does not refer to conversion, but to Muslims abandoning villages for the cities).

The story is cute in a way; it's not quite the multi-culti, Why Can't We All Get Along story that our century would look on with favour, but given the sentiments of its time and place, it does a nice little subversion of the old narratives. (And the figure of the wine-drinking bon vivant Muslim is familiar enough from Kazantzakis' Freedom and Death.) It turns out the village the story is set in, Modi, is the village Kondylakis was a schoolteacher in, at the end of the Ottoman Empire; but I wouldn't assume this is exactly newspaper reporting. Still, if you read it attentively, you can see the harassment payback being described.

I decided to translate it, and I decided to be slightly odd about it. The story is of its time and place, and I'm of mine, and I decided not to translate τούρκος and ρωμιός as "Turk" and "Greek". That's the dichotomy we know now, but the dichotomy in the Ottoman Empire was credal, and not ethnic as we now understand it: the Cretan Muslims spoke Greek, and translating τούρκος as "Turk" leads to the absurdity of "Turkish–Albanian" instead of "Muslim Albanian". (The insistence on calling Muslim Albanians Muslim had a simple reason: there were Christian Albanians too, and the common creed they shared with Greeks was more important than the common ethnicity they shared with the Muslims.) Kondylakis has his characters speak of "Romioi", but the narrator knows what they meant by that, and calls them "Christians". I've gone the next step, and called the Tourkoi "Muslims". (If that makes the story sound like it's set in Bosnia and not Crete, well, there's a reason for that.)

That's not the odd thing I've done. Maybe ideological, but not odd. The odd thing is, I wanted to render the occasional code switches into Turkish of the Muslims with some English equivalent: a language familiar to English-speakers, but clearly foreign.

So my Muslim Cretans lapse into French.

You don't approve, well, tant pis.

***

He had often heard from his father the story of why he had to sell up in Modi and move to the mountain village of Akaranou. The reason was "a Muslim—begging your pardon—and a pig—by your leave"; that's how he would speak to express his hatred of that Muslim in particular, and of Muslims in general. Modi back then was still a Muslim village. There were a few Christians, but they were humble lowlanders, "thirders"—that is to say, they cultivated Muslim farms against a percentage of the income. Serfs, almost. The only one who had some measure of human dignity and pride, because he had enough property not to have to work for the aghas, was his father Mikhalis Alefouzos. But precisely because he had an independent spirit, and his spine did not bend readily, he drew the dislike of Kerim Agha, the richest and most powerful Muslim in Modi, a fanatical and tyrannical man, who wanted Christians to feel that they lived only through the sufferance of the Muslims. For that reason, whenever Alefouzos passed him by and greeted him with a simple "Good evening, Kerim Agha", he'd shake his head and stare at him with a threatening glance, as he went on his way. One day, he said to another Muslim present:

"That man there, par Dieu, Alefouzos: he's a revolté; he dares look us in the eye, he's no soumis."

When the period of Egyptian rule brought some relief to the standing of Cretan Christians, Alefouzos was encouraged enough to commit an act of great daring. He bought a pig and fed him for the Christmas feast. A pig, in Modi! A pig in Kerim Agha's village, and right next to his villa! A pox on it! Qu'on foute sa mère, the infidèle!

The first squealing of the pig spread horror in the Muslim village, and the hair of many a Muslim stood on end. There was a council of the aghas at Kerim Agha's, and they decided the rebel Alefouzos should be expelled from the village or murdered. But before everything else, the pig had to be killed. This was intolerable. The past day, while Kerim Agha was smoking on his pipe in his courtyard, he saw its filthy snout poke through his half-closed courtyard door. A pox on it! Nique ton grand-père!

"One day, par Dieu, it'll come up to the mosque and bid us good day!" another agha said. "It pokes its way wherever it finds an opening, oink oink!"

"I must I kill, My Aghas, the cochon", said the Muslim-Albanian bulbashi, a kind of police sergeant, who represented all authority in the village. And he fully approved of the decisions taken in the meeting.

The following day, as he passed in front of Alefouzos' house, he drew his gun and killed the pig.

"Why you no tie up, Lady, the bête inside, pox on it, que Dieu le damne, but you let it poke among our feet?" he said to Alefouzos' wife, who had heard the gunshot and appeared worrying at the gate.

Alefouzos was stubborn, and in a week's time he brought another, bigger pig, from Platania.

"For God's sake, are you looking to get killed, Mikhalis?" one of the fellow Christians in the village asked him. "Don't get up their noses, they'll murder you!"

"They're not killing me", Alefouzos replied calmly. "The Janissaries' time is past."

But the time of the Janissaries was not as past as he supposed. The bulbashi killed the other pig too, now with the excuse that it up-ended his hookah pipe. And Alefouzos concluded that, if he kept insisting on buying pigs, he would be helping the Muslim Albanian at target practice.

But Karim Agha, who was livid, finally got his release one day, when he met Alefouzos in the street:

"What is this effronterie you're doing! Pigs, you infidèle, is that what you're bringing to the village!"

"It's no effronterie, Kerim Agha", Alefouzos said with a respectful but steady tone. "Our faith tells us to eat pork, begging your pardon…"

"Your faith! F… your faith!"

And at the same time he lifted up his pipe and struck it down at Alefouzos. But he avoided the strike and held the agha's hand.

"You raise your hand at me, dog-worshipper!" Kerim Agha cried and started hitting him rabidly. Other Muslims ran to him, and Alefouzos was soon led to his house, unconscious and blood-drenched. After a month, as he went out one night to feed his oxen, he was shot by parties unknown and wounded in the shoulder; he came close to dying, and was bed-ridden for a long time. Certain that the Muslims had decided to do him in, he was forced to sell up and seek refuge in the mountain village of Akaranou.

His son Stamatis had often heard this story from his father, and from childhood he built up in his soul hatred of Muslims, and of the Modians in particular, and he dreamed of vengeance. Kerim had died, old man Alefouzos had died too; let both of them fare well in the Netherworld, where they assuredly took their hatred with them. But just as Alefouzos had left a son behind, so had Kerim left behind a son, Arif Agha. The two of them would settle their families' accounts. But Arif was completely different to his father. A kindhearted man, who loved wine and entertainment, he was on good terms with Christians and Muslims, and split his time between Modi, where he had a wife and children, and Chania, where he had lovers and drinking buddies. His only care was to have fun and to borrow or sell, when his income was insufficient for his needs.

Stamatis had inherited his father's industriousness and his particular vindictiveness against the Muslims of Modi. He was of around the same age as Arif, a young man of thirty-five, of Herculean build, with a rough blond beard, and eyes full of spark and cunning.

One day the Modians suddenly discovered that Stamatis Alefouzos had bought back his father's property, and in a few days he settled in his father's house next to Arif's villa. One of the first things he did was to bring from Akaranou a sow with six or seven piglets, so noisy and incessantly moving, that you'd think the whole village was full of pigs. And indeed it was, for whichever Christian Modians didn't already have pigs bought some, and whoever had pigs tied up let them free to wander in the village and the surrounding farms, to visit the Muslim café, to enter Muslim courtyards to the houseladies' great distress and horror, and to destroy the aghas' vegetable gardens.

Now there was no more bulbashi, and the time of the Janissaries was so distant it was almost forgotten. Modi was turning from a Muslim into a Christian village, because during the latest rebellion many Muslims were killed or stayed back in Chania. The Muslims were succeeded by Christians from the mountain villages, following Stamatis' example and buying the farms the Muslims were selling. As he saw the Christian population of the village growing and the Muslim population falling, Stamatis exulted. And one day he said to Arif, with a mocking smile:

"Hey, Arif Agha, if only your père décédé was alive to see what has happened to the village!"

Arif frowned.

"And what has happened to the village?", he said in a choked voice.

"Why, it's turned Christian, I tell you! Look, look!"

And with a triumphant gesture he pointed to a herd of piglets going past, following their slow-moving mother. But Arif observed the piglets without spitting or swearing, as his father would have.

"If your père was alive," Stamatis added, "he'd be fit to burst."

But as he saw that Arif was not getting angry, but instead was saddened by his mockery, Stamatis' stubbornness abated. And he abandoned the act of vengeance he had planned long ago—to send Kerim Agha's son his best piglet as a present for Eid ul-Fitr.

But Stamatis' soul must never have rejoiced so much as on Christmas Eve, when Modi echoed with the sound of pigs being slaughtered. To bolster his rejoicing, he kept repeating, grinning from ear to ear as the saying goes:

"For the first time today I can see that Modi has turned Christian!"

And he always had the notion that, despite the apathy Arif displayed, he must have been devastated within. It was no small thing, to kill two pigs right in front of their door! But after a few days Arif, returning from Chania, stopped on horseback before Stamatis' door.

"Good evening, neighbour," he said to Stamatis as he appeared. "Bring me wine to drink as your guest. I'm in a good mood tonight."

Stamatis went to bring wine, but Arif stopped him.

"And something good to nibble on."

Then he learned down from the horse, and said quietly:

"A nice piece of… pork sausage."

Solage: Le basile

Le basile, like Pluseurs gens voy, counts as Ars Nova rather than Ars Subtilior, and there aren't the rhythmic games hallowed in Subtilior. The rhythms are still wackier than Pluseurs gens: there is enough syncopation across barlines to justify the Mensurstich notation, and there is confusion about whether voices are off by half a bar or not, which the score indicates with alternative barline arrows.

This rendering also doesn't sound quite as smooth, because of clashes in accidentals: the score needs more ficta accidentals than the source transcription shows, but I didn't want to take over with my own editing. And some of the jarring intervals look to be in the source, unrelated to accidentals.

I can't say Le basile has grabbed me in the way the Subtilior pieces have, or even Pluseurs gens: it's not as tight as the latter, and not as funky as the former. But the more musically cluey may think differently.

This piece has broken LilyPond, btw, even more than the previous ones: the combination of Mensurstich, changing metres, and syncopation across bars has proven too much for the software, although I haven't been able to replicate the error in a score snippet. So you'll see a couple of barlines within the staff that shouldn't be there—bar 2, for starters.

This is the last of the transcriptions in my friend Christina's Honours thesis. The other pieces definitely by Solage don't present the same rhythmic challenges; so she did not feel it necessary to retranscribe them from the four-square existing score published by Apel. That means I don't get to put Fumeux fume par fumée up; but Daniel Buxeda Rodriguez already has. I think the license allows me to put it up on YouTube as I have the others; I'm checking.

So, if you'll pardon a few wrong notes, and a synthesised French Horn, here is Solage's song on the basilisk:


The scores, midis and so forth are all linked to at my Solage page.

Solage: Pluseurs gens voy

With Pluseurs gens voy, we're backing away from the crazy of Ars Subtilior, going back to what the Ars Subtilior was a mutant offshoot of: the Ars Nova of Machaut. Accordingly, there is less weirdness about the notation in this ballade; the one exception is in the middle section, where the Cantus, and possibly the Tenor, are half a bar off from the Triplum and Countertenor, which in turn are half a bar off from the first section of the piece. This is noticeable, because it is punctuated by rests in the Cantus; but having the first beat of a bar as a rest does not presuppose metrical shift. So it doesn't sound implausible the way the Ars Subtilior shifts do.

Because Pluseurs gens voy is more musically conservative, it isn't as attention-grabbing as the preceding pieces. I don't even remember hearing it in the Gothic Voices recording—it sounded like the Machaut pieces they alternated with Solage's. But apart from what looks to be one complete blunder, it is a tight, smooth block of part-writing, the four voices interweaving at close range, without drawing undue attention to themselves—and not marking time between syncopations as obviously as in the Subtilior balldes. Now that the Cantus has a descant, and there is less rhythmic complexity to deal with, the two top voices are freed up to imitate each other.

(You'll hear the blunder btw: bar 18, the Cantus is c♯, the Countertenor is d. At least that's what my source transcription has.)

In all, it's a serious-sounding, earnest piece—though the lyrics are playful: "I see many people who clothe their thoughts in nice dress; one wears an embroidered cote, the other a villain lined in gray, they wear coats great and small—to each their own: a Jaquette is good enough for me." Where Jaquette was some member of the nobility or other.

Herewith then:

Solage: S'aincy estoit

This is the third of the Solage ballades, and the tricks of notation get worse and worse. We have one voice in a different metre than the other two (6/8 vs. 9/8, 3/4 vs. 2/2)—and not with the same measure length either; so the bars in the three voices coincide only every three or four bars. Of the two voices that do coincide, one is written twice as fast as the other (6/8 vs. 6/4). We have routine interruptions of bars by other bars, some interruptions running for a dozen bars. We have several runs of 2:3 duplets.

We have interruption a 3/2 bar interrupted by a 6/4 bar, and the next 6/4 bar interrupted by the completion of the first 3/2 bar:

We have a 6/8 bar interrupted halfway by 11 bars of 6/8; its completion is another half bar of 6/8, which is itself interrupted by a new bar, one eighth note in:

And Solage saves the best till last: the 9/4 cantus runs into... this:


Which is... well, I'm not sure what it is.

1		2		3		2		2		3		3		2		3		1		2		3		2		2		3		3		2		3		1		2		3		2		2		3		3		2		3
2		e2:		f3			a3			g4				f3			e3			e2		d4				d2		c2:		d4				2		f2		a2		g2		e2		f2:		e2		d6
group												group												group						group						group												group
																																						group

Um. OK.

And what does it sound like? Brassy and fanfaring—as befits its subject matter. (Yolanda Plumley has written on the politics of the song, extolling the Duke of Berry, including echos in its lyrics from other songs in his honour.) Each of the three metre changes sounds like a new landscape opening up before you. The bar interruptions are mostly mid-bar, and don't sound particularly untethered like Corps feminin's—at least until that passage I've tabulated above, which sounds stumbling, because of the alternation of eighth, dotted eighth, and quarter notes. As for the mismatch of metres, the music is slow-moving enough that that passes unnoticed—one of the particularities of Ars Subtilior that's more Gedanken than real.

Here it is; downloads as in the previous posts.

Solage: Corps femininin

Calextone has some polyrhythm going on, but the disruptions are localised—they resync after a couple of bars, and the metres are displaced by a beat or a third of a beat, which makes for some very pleasant syncopation. Calextone also has some interrupted half bars, but blink and you'll miss 'em: there's only a couple. So Calextone is a little complex in notation, and sounds recognisable to us.

Things with Corps feminin are different. The top voice is passionate and melismatic—and again, mostly well-behaved metrically. The one beat interruptions from Calextone show up again in the cantus, and syncopate it forward as well. But there are also a lot more interrupting half bars, in all voices; so the disruption of the beat in different voices is greater, and lasts longer. Just three bars in, in fact, you get a double interruption in the countertenor, vs. a single interruption in the tenor. Let me illustrate:

The cantus is going along with five melismatic bars of 6/8. The tenor does half a bar of 6/8—then switches to three bars of 3/4, and then finishes its initial bar of 6/8. I've inserted "1…" and "…2" to indicate these half bars; Christina had a bracket notation, but that was clashing with the bars used as ligatures, and the point of this notation is to make the original more accessible, not less.

The countertenor, like the tenor, does half a bar of 6/8—"1…", then switches to 3/4. After just one beat of 3/4—"(1…", it gets bored of that, and switches back to 6/8 for three bars. What undermines the double switch to our ears is, his three bars of 6/8 𝄾 𝅘𝅥 𝅘𝅥 𝅘𝅥𝅮 sound like syncopated 3/4 to us now; but switching metres was a way of doing syncopation back then anyway. After that, the countertenor has to sync back up with the other two voices. That means first finishing off the other two beats of his 3/4 bar—"…2 …3)", and then finishing off his original 6/8 bar—"…2"—one measure after the tenor finished his.

I don't know if graphics will make this any clearer, but:

C	1			2			1			2			1			2			1			2			1			2
Ct	1			1		1			2			1			2			1			2			2		3		2
T	1			1		2		3		1		2		3		1		2		3		2			1			2

Why on earth is Solage doing all this? Because he can, of course. And also because the notation made it easy. If you wanted to change from 6/8 to 3/4, all you had to do was change ink colour, from black to red. If it was that easy, and if you were in an experimental phase already, then of course you'd switch ink after one note, just to see what would happen.

And what does it sound like? Like I said, the cantus is impassioned, and its syncopations work. The other voices sound—well, random. They're too displaced to sound syncopated, so they just sound like they're from somewhere else. Not unpleasant, at times effective—but untethered.

The Taruskin Challenge bloggers have a great post on why music historians view the Ars Subtilior innovations with distaste, though in general they approve of innovation. Their take: historians are unsettled by old art that comes too close to contemporary art, and doesn't stay in its historical box. Historians don't like stuff that resists fitting into historical boxes to begin with. There is a lot to this: we can't make sense of music that sounds mediaeval, but is also more adventuresome than Richard Strauss—it disrupts our notion of lineal progress. We're frustrated because we don't see the progress leading somewhere; but where we expect 14th century progress to lead to is madrigals (or, as the Taruskin Challenge say more knowledgeably, John Dunstable before we get to the madrigals); not Stockhausen or Babbitt.

To be fair to ourselves, though, we're also frustrated by the things Solage does, because we can't hear them make any difference. What performance of Corps feminin will bring out the fact that the Countertenor has 6/8 interrupted by 3/4 interrupted by 6/8, and make sure the catch-up half-bars sound like the completions they are? Given that it's just an accompanying voice, what performance *should* bring it out? The syncopation will come through alright; but our ears are ears molded through the path that led away from Solage: can we hear the bar resumption business at all? For that matter, could Solage's audience hear it, as opposed to seeing it? Or to use a fairer example: the first bar of the cantus is in 6/8, the second in 3/4. There's supposed to be a world of difference between Dum-dee-dee Dum-dee-dee and Dum-dee Dum-dee Dum-dee. Can you hear it in the recordings that have ended up in YouTube?

Perhaps, but it's work to bring out the subtleties, even more work to hear them; and these guys are obscure. As the Taruskin Challenge puts it, "a new breed of composers—none of whom are known today outside of the academy". (And these are musicologists to whom Machaut and Dunstable are old hat.)

It's work to transcribe these guys too. I got quite lost in the line above, and that was not as bad as it got; by the second page, I was obligated to break a couple of lines mid-bar. Lilypond was valiantly avoiding it, but it was making its staves a soup of dots; the alternative of course has made its staves a rather thinner broth. The MIDI this time is a prog rock combo: guitar, flute and bass. The default instruments in GarageBand are embarrassing enough that I've forked out the money for the Symphony Jam Pack. So the arrangements from now on will still sound embarrassing, but embarrassing in different ways.

The PDF is available for download at my site, and also at IMSLP.