Duelling dulcimers

For reasons unknown, I can no longer post a YouTube video in the usual way. I have to do back-flips and stuff (i. e. I can't browse, but already have to know the name of it in order to find it!). This however is worth any kerfuffle. I'm not a mountain music fan, but this stuff! Mountain dulcimer can be excruciating, like playing stretched wires (which I guess it is), but these two make it sound golden. She's a tad sedate and he's really groovin' (holding his instrument aslant as if it will soon tip right off his lap). But when they look at each other at the end. . . it's the sweetest moment.

I'm always digging around for the wacky 78 rpm recordings of my childhood, especially the Children's Record Guild collection, a sort of record-of-the-month club that mailed you a new recording for something like $2. We didn't subscribe to this, but were given a whole whack of recordings, 50 or 60 of them maybe, by someone whose kids must either have never played them, or were so careful they didn't even leave a scratch on them.

Within a couple of months, Davy Crockett sounded like, "king of the wild frontier. . .tier. . . tier. . . tier. . . tier" (etc.)  The background ambience soon resembled World War 3, but the records were well-loved and constantly played.

Some records represented the force-feeding of classical music, with Cinderella accompanied by music from Prokofiev's ballet and Midsummer Night's Dream by Mendelssohn's incidental music. This was all part of a general indoctrination I suffered through: almost everything I heard, saw, smelled or touched (or tasted?) had to be oriented towards "good" music. No other music (not even "that rock 'n roll music" I later came to love) existed in our tiny stifling universe.

Thus came various musical punishments: Victor Borge narrating some sort of swill about "Piccolo, Saxie and Company"; Rusty in Orchestraville, a morality tale about what happens to little boys who don't practice the piano; Willie, the Whale who Wanted to Sing at the Met (already covered in a previous post, so let's not go there again). And something about the history of the orchestra which, I remember, began with a smarmy narrator saying, "Well, well, well! Here is an orchesta!" And here I thought it was a cheese blintz.

It really was a narrowing education, not a broadening one. We should have known something about mountain music, about jazz and blues, but my father looked down on these renegade forms as if they didn't exist. I think it came from his background of dire poverty, his ignorance of any music except for the excruciatingly bad English music-hall stuff he grew up with. He was always terrified of being found out and even deliberately erased his Cockney accent on arriving in Canada.

I remember (and even found on YouTube once) a Children's Record Guild 78 rpm recording - might have been by the Weavers, in fact - of a song called Round and Round the Christmas Tree, which is the same tune as this dulcimer duet. I think of the fluidity of this kind of music, passed along by memory and never written down. The fact that Appalachian music has echoed through the generations with its integrity intact fascinates me. No Children's Record Guild required: they had memories then, and ears to hear.

Kiddie Records Weekly

http://www.kiddierecords.com/2006/archive/week_05.htm

Up on the Housetop, safe from pain

There's backstory to this, sort of. My new computer, wonder of wonders, is fucking up royal in so many ways that I want to scream and just leave the house, I mean permanently. I can't attach photos to emails, I can't edit photos, I can't send a link to anyone of a YouTube video or anything else without great arabesques involving "hyperlinks" and all sorts of shit I don't want to know about.

My old computer KNEW how to do all this stuff and never gave me a bit of trouble. It realized I did not need a whole bunch of fancy shit to get in the way of basic, clear, easy function. I could do everything I needed with one or two clicks.

I will never get that back. My husband and I are at the sizzling point because he lumbers over to my computer, fucks around with it for half an hour, then tells me he can't do anything and I'll just have to live with it the way it is.

I don't understand why, when I try to email someone a photo, it is embedded, HUGE, in the body of the email, in a form I am certain they do not want. I don't understand, furthermore, why I must be humiliated over and over and over again for being stupid.

I wasn't supposed to be stupid. I started out with great promise.I took Grade 3 and 4 in one year, then was put in a super-advanced Grade 5 class in which I learned exactly nothing, but had great fun giving the teacher a nervous breakdown.

I had a very high IQ and my reading skills were at high school level, and great things were expected of me. NONE of it came true, I mean none.

I don't know what it is. I was the youngest, and all the disappointments of the other three siblings (who were much older) were somehow heaped on my shoulders. I remember my Dad once saying in his usual drunken state that every one of us had let him down in innumerable ways, especially me because I was the only one left to clean up all the wreckage. I was his last, most desperate hope.

I don't know why, because all of my three siblings became very competent professional musicians and were supersmart.

Anyway, this has nothing to do with the video. I wandered in search of distraction, wondering if I could find a non-sticky/sugary version of a Christmas tune I like, Up on the Housetop. To be honest, I heard it on a commercial for Canadian Tire or something, played in a sparkly way with something like a banjo in the background.

This was the only non-sticky version I could find. I like the mellow tone of this dulcimer: some of them sound like garage doors opening (and don't get me started on the psaltery, a scream on strings). It has that relaxed banjo-y flavor to it. This isn't a professional player, but that's what I like about it: it's the sound of someone working on proficiency who obviously has musicality and plays with pleasure and enjoyment, the very thing that was forbidden to me while my Dad stood over me with a big stick.

I find myself deleting paragraphs these days, lots of them. I just can't put all that pain out there. Melancholy dogs me. This isn't the best time of year for me, though I love attending Christmas concerts with my grandchildren in them - could anything be more magical? - and some of the music, and looking at twinkly lights and things.

But, maybe because of my early experiences and all those failed expectations, life seems essentially melancholy and even tragic. I don't know how people walk around with smiles on their faces.