Musical Interlude Nos. 8 & 9 - Mockery and Mourning
The Emperor's Triumphal Mishmash March & An Elegy for Innocence Lost
LINER NOTES
I’ve been busy these past few months practicing law.
Focusing on work helps pay the bills. It also helps keep my mind off all the “stuff” that’s been going down in the world. But practicing law is bad precisely because it keeps my mind off all that “stuff.” Could it be that was the underlying purpose of “professional school” - to train lawyers, engineers, MBAs, techies and others to accept working exceptionally hard for those who can pay for their “services,” leaving them too fatigued and too distracted to deal with all the really important “stuff?”
Going ostrich is not an option. If I refuse to see, then I am an accomplice in the wrongdoings.
There are two songs in this upload. The first - The Emperor’s Triumphal Mishmash March - is a musical parody. I put it first because everyone’s lives are heavy enough. We need an occasional touch of humor to drag ourselves through the miasma.
The second song - An Elegy for Childhood Lost - is an entirely different offering: lyrical and sober - an expression of a personal awareness that, perhaps, we are all evolving through simultaneously. After you laugh off the first song, stick around for the more thoughtful composition of the second.
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Song #1: The Emperor’s Triumphal Mishmash March
At some time in your life, you probably listened to Giuseppi Verdi’s 1871 opera Aida. Or, you have been fortunate enough to have seen a live performance of Aida that pulled out all the stops. Long ago, as a kid growing up in Naples, Italy, I saw an outdoor performance of Aida complete with live elephants, camels and horse-drawn chariots. The animals had been borrowed from the local zoo. The Neapolitan audience, I remember, sang or hummed the libretto along with the chorus. That’s real folk music.
The plot of Aida is pure romantic schlock, of course, like a day-time TV soap opera with a cast of heavily costumed thousands set in the supposed heyday of pharaonic Egypt. But no matter how melodramatic the story, the music and the staging are breathtaking.
Verdi’s rendition of the triumphal march, “Gloria all’Egitto, ad Iside,” is one of the best known operatic extravaganzas. Verdi, hired to commemorate the opening of the Suez Canal, knew little about ancient Egypt. He did know music and show biz, however. He also knew something about the old Roman triumphs, those spectacular parades of victorious, egomaniacal emperors who would parade their conquests through Hadrian’s Triumphal Arch and before the Roman people.
We have a rather prickly president these days who fancies himself a Roman emperor and the world his imperial oyster. Oddly, the prickly man is also building a self-congratulatory Arc de Triomphe in Washington D.C. adjacent to the Arlington Memorial Bridge. Of course, I would not dare to criticize such a prick prickly person. If I did so, I might be prosecuted for lèse-majesté, burned at the stake for heresy, or gunned down like Minnesotans who dared to oppose imperial edicts.
No. It is better that I should dedicate a song to him. I have composed a faux Aida-like Gloria all’Trumpito. Imagine the parade led by the corpulent, gold-laureled and white toga-ed Emperor, carried in a golden litter shouldered by bare-foot Africans; fanned by cabinet level toadies waving palm fronds; preceded by scantily clad young dancing girls (imported from Epstein Island) tossing rose petals and dollar bills on Pennsylvania Avenue; followed by gamboling, muscle-bound soldiers riding camels and war elephants; Tech Bros and bejeweled billionaire real estate developers and Wall Street investors seated on their asses; and wagon-loads of loot from tariffs, pirated oil, rare earths, lithium, gold and other stolen lucre. Imagine the pageant of the American Emperor’s Triumph leading his train of “captured” heads of state from Venezuela, Iran, Syria, and Cuba, followed by long chain-gangs of shackled plebes from Somalia, China, Mexico, Palestine, Greenland, Canada and... yes, all of us malcontents and anti-imperialists who reside in the United States (until we are stripped of citizenship and deported to Mars, of course).
The Emperor’s Triumphal Mishmash March is, as the name suggests, a mishmash of sounds appropriate for a country that, at the level of its top parasitical class, has always had imperial yearnings. I composed this years ago and transferred it via MIDI to a laptop machine running Windows 3.1. That laptop, long ago, became a brick. But the computer cognoscente to whom I have long been married knew how to retrieve the old data and resurrect it. Using QTractor and Jack, she recovered the MIDI data and allowed me to re-purpose it for our humble musical mishmash.
I composed this on a Proteus E-Mu work station that I haven’t used in decades. Dust notwithstanding, it still works fine! There are four sampled layers - including an entire string ensemble, a synthesized bass and two different types of percussion - that I play on an electronic keyboard. The different layers were then played back on the E-Mu sampler/synthesizer. Ultimately, I piped everything back from the work station through an analog mixer and thence to the A/D card on my computer.
No artificial intelligence was used in this composition! Possibly no intelligence at all!
Enjoy!
Song # 2: An Elegy for Innocence Lost
Okay. Let’s take a deep breath and get serious.
I noticed this winter that people left their holiday lights out longer than usual. Deep into February, people still illuminated their roofs and yards with tiny strings of colorful LEDs as though to chase the darkness that seems not to end.
The darkness never ends. It seems to only get darker.
Everything that’s happening now used to happen in the shadows. Now, it’s all done in broad daylight.
In that sense, Mr. Trump is a godsend: he has stripped away the thin veneer of our own illusions and revealed us for what we really are, what we always have been.
Do I miss that young, innocent, blind and deaf me? Actually not. But it is painful to realize how long it takes for one to learn to see and to learn to hear.
I diverge from my Democratic friends who think that the current occupant of the White House is the root cause of our malaise. In my opinion, he is just the latest symptom of what ails us. Although an ill-mannered narcissistic boor and bully, Mr. Trump is only implementing policies that an entire class of elite parasites heartily, if quietly, endorse. Once the current occupant is tossed out, the next one will follow, more or less, the same paths, although in a smiley-faced kind of way.
We will be soothed and lulled back to sleep like babies.
These are some poignant lines at the conclusion of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz:
Wach sein, wach sein, es geht was vor in der Welt. Die Welt ist nicht aus Zucker gemacht. [* * *] Wir wissen, was wir wissen, wir habens teuer bezahlen müssen.
(Loosely translated into English:
“Pay attention, be aware. Something is happening in the World. The World is not made out of sugar. [* * *] We’ve learned something; we paid a stiff price to learn it.”)
And then there’s Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who wrote in 1947:
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Thus, An Elegy for Innocence Lost. If I do not know the precise way forward, I do know, more or less, which way the compass must point.
And I know which way it does not.
And if the darkness never ends, then you must keep walking forward. Unafraid of the dark. Going ostrich is not an option.
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I finger-picked An Elegy for Innocence Lost on my old Gibson SJ200 acoustic guitar. It’s a jumbo, so that deep, round sound is how you hear it in real time. I play DR Rare strings that, though painfully hard on the fingers, give me a clean resonance that I really like. I’ll suffer the raw fingertips for the sound these strings give me.
I composed the song in B minor. I recorded it with an internal Fishman pickup located under the saddle of the guitar. I sent the signal through a “Direct In” box to an analog Mackie 1202 mini-mixer. While playing, I monitored myself with a pair of Tannoy speakers connected to a Samson Servo-240 Studio Amplifier. The mixer and the amplifier are both plugged into a Juice Goose power conditioner. The analog signal was routed back from the Mackie mixer through a ground loop filter (to reduce the background hum) into the A/D card on my computer. The music was then digitally recorded in Audacity. Audacity’s software let me add a touch of reverb and a bit of echo for just a few bars.
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A nice “two-fer”: music and political commentary. Appreciate the detail that went into both.