What Kind of Music Makes You?

There's a pivotal scene in Woody Allen's Manhattan where he reels off the things he couldn't live without into a tape recorder. Although you might argue with some of them, it's difficult to defend anyone who says they could live without the voice of Frank Sinatra. 

I really only have two loves, reading and music. I tried to make a quick list. I realise how useless these lists are (and the longer, the more useless, I have found). Perhaps, however, such a list might help me find a core interest.

Musicians and composers Irving Berlin Johnny Mercer George Gershwin (especially Porgy & Bess) Bessie Smith Pink Floyd (with and without Syd Barrett, but not without Roger Waters) The Beatles Joe Meek Tom Waits Bob Dylan (any period) Louis Armstrong Music hall legends (Sam Mayo, Ronald Frankau, Talbot O'Farrell) Tchaikovsky Aaron Copland Mabel Mercer Noel Coward Stephen Sondheim	Poets Philip Larkin John Keats Wallace Stevens Ted Hughes Sylvia Plath Carol Ann Duffy W.H. Auden
Novelists Martin Amis Armistead Maupin Margaret Atwood Ian McEwan Milan Kundera Saul Bellow John Updike Henry Green Flann O'Brien Albert Camus	Assorted (Critics, humorists, non-fiction writers, short story writers) V.S. Pritchett Richard Rorty St. Augustine S.J. Perelman Martin Heidegger Whitney Balliett Thomas Nagel

If you are a regular reader of this site, has a similar list of interests brought you here? Are there things I should be getting into that my Amazon recommendations have missed?

Finnegans Wake (James Joyce) - Siobhan McKenna and Cyril Cusack (1959)

I’m going to do something which betrays the philistine in me and post up two extracts from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, recorded nearly thirty years after they were written. Philistine because I must admit I haven’t read the book, but these recordings are quite captivating in themselves, as is the link to Joyce reading from Anna Livia Plurabelle.

The cover of Nino Frank’s translation of Anna Livia Plurabelle (1938)

Shakespeare And All That Jazz - Cleo Laine (arr. John Dankworth) (1964)

Rather late for a Dankworth tribute. Let's call it a Cleo Laine tribute instead. Or a Shakespeare tribute.

Some of this is sort of kooky, some of it as inscrutably off-the-wall as the cover. Of the tracks posted here, I'd only heard It Was A Lover and His Lass before, sung by Al Bowlly.

A Portrait of William Shakespeare - John Gielgud and George Rylands (1969)

Gielgud reads from the sonnets and plays, while Rylands reads biographical and other writings to provide context.

01a - Shakespeare's England

01b - Five English Kings

02a - Shakespeare the Man (Self Confession - The Sonnets)

02b - Through Other's Eyes (Greene, Chettle, etc.)

02c - Shakespeare's Farewell

There's a responsive studio audience, which gives what are essentially a number of monologues (albeit with the variety of two speakers) some atmosphere.

I get the impression that Gielgud reads the royal parts and the sonnets with especial relish!

Listened to as a whole, it's a great night out at the theatre in the hands of two excellent actors.

Countdown to Burns Night - IV - To A Mousie

To A Mousie - Ian Gilmour

The Star O'Robbie Burns - The Five Smith Brothers

Countdown to Burns Night - III - Tam O'Shanter

Tam O'Shanter - Meta Forrest

From the review from the January edition of Gramophone magazine, 1956:

Countdown to Burns Night - II - The Learig

The Learig - Margaret Fraser.

Countdown to Burns Night - I - Comin' Thru the Rye

For my countdown to Burns night I'm posting, as promised a long time ago, some more highlights from the Saltire Music Group's album An Evening With Robert Burns.(I first posted a track from the album back in April of last year.)

Although though I think Burns is an underrated poet, it's the performances here which I think are particularly compelling and deserve not just one night, but at least a night each to be fully enjoyed!

First up, Comin' Thru the Rye - Margaret Fraser.

Readings from Thomas Hardy

Hardy is a poet whose ambiguities will live on (if that isn't already a tautology), so these readings, lively they may be, are unlikely to stop me wondering how Hardy would have read them...

Will that ever-elusive recording of Hardy reading (by the law of averages there must be one, even if it isn't mentioned in the Life) turn up one day?

Gary Watson is the reader for this album of recordings made for the Open University.

Philip Larkin

"Poets reading from their work. Discuss."

I hate to silence this discussion before it has begun, but here's my side of the argument: There is one poet who is right on the money where reading from their own work is concerned.

From this little distance it is clear that Larkin is one of the greatest of the poets that rose to prominence after the first glitzy, well-travelled wave of the Moderns. There's no doubt that his Englishness, often derided, is an integral part of his poetry (and of his life), but it certainly does not contain it.

Larkin fanatics will be keen to point out to you the metaphysical undercurrent that almost always reaches out to the reader in the final stanza of a poem. They're right: his poems are anything but parochial. As Larkin himself wrote in his poem I Remember, I Remember: "Nothing, like something, happens anywhere."

To hear him read is to hear the peculiar footfalls of a thinking voice. Quite extraordinary.

Mp3s of some of his readings follow the jump...

A Junior Anthology of English Verse - 1959 (3)

The last instalment, beginning and ending in nonsense verse and treading more classical territory inbetween.

Mathilda, Who Told Lies and Was Burned to Death - Hilaire Belloc (Lally Bowers)

Orpheus with his Lute - John Fletcher (Pauline Letts)

The General Elliott - Robert Graves (V.C.C.-B.)

The splendour falls on castle walls - Lord Tennyson (V.C.C.-B.)

You Are Old, Father William - Lewis Carroll (V.C. Clinton-Badderley)

A Junior Anthology of English Verse - 1959 (2)

Some excellent poems that every schoolboy ought to know, but that I had never even come across until I really started reading beyond my college textbooks. I like the Herrick particularly, but then All's that End's Well is a nice surprise, and the rhythmic qualities of the Browning poem are the sort of thing most people think poetry is all about.

The Lady of Shalott - Lord Tennyson (Michael Hordern)



To Daffodils - Herrick (Pauline Letts)

All's Well that Ends Well - Anon (John Laurie)

How they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix - Robert Browning (Cecil Day Lewis)


(Hear an 1889 phonograph recording in which Browning recites - or tries to - his poem at the Poetry Archive.)

A Junior Anthology of English Verse - 1959 (1)

OK - so I got it for a snip at £4.99.

What's great about this album is the poems do work (as, arguably, good poetry should) read aloud.

The full title of the album is A Junior Anthology of English Verse - Part II (Jupiter) 1959.

The reader of the poem's name is in brackets.

Night Mail - Auden (John Laurie)

Forefathers - Edmund Blunden (Carleton Hobbs)

Jock of Haseldean - Sir Walter Scott (John Laurie)

Sam - Walter de la Mare (V.c)

I'm posting this one in three parts, so check out parts II and III in the next week or so.

John Gielgud: Shakespeare’s The Ages of Man

The Ages of Man album was directly inspired by the success of Gielgud's Ages of Man tour, in which he - in the eyes of many of his contemporaries - showed how the language of Shakespeare should be spoken. (They were talking about meaning, not pronunciation.)

We listen now not so much for this or the putative journey (it's actually rather a rag-bag, a story Shakespeare would have told far better), but for the instrumental quality of Gielgud's voice, its recherché musicality.

01 - Youth
02 - Manhood
03 - Old Age