Column by George Sibley
Music – January 2006 – Colorado Central Magazine
HERE WE ARE in the dark days of the year. Our boys are slogging on in Iraq; the price of heating fuel is going up as fast as the temperature is going down; the Colorado legislature is slouching toward Denver with the far left and far right already trying to undermine continuation of last year’s bipartisanship; the national debt has just gone past eight trillion in acceleration mode–and every time I try to get my brain in gear, it spins out into a sappy love song.
My problem: the Gunnison Arts Center chorus is singing a long complex arrangement of Cole Porter songs. I’m almost embarrassed to admit it here in the manly West, but singing has been part of my life for a long time.
In college I sang in the Heinz Chapel Choir at the University of Pittsburgh, a full-robe affair, which mostly made me feel like an imposter, so un-Christian was most of the rest of my college life. The spirit of it for me was æsthetic rather than religious; it was a smallish chapel, imported from somewhere in France, stone by stone, by the family that made 57 varieties of store-bought wiener adornment popular in America. And the hanging lights–usually unnecessary in the blue and ruby of the three-story stained-glass windows– were either swaying, just slightly, in time with whatever Bach or Brahms or Schubert we were singing, or my vision was still a little wavery from whatever had gone on the Saturday night before.
After college, I continued to sing when and where I could find a chorus that would let me in, which meant Denver one summer (which led to a performance of a massive Berlioz “Te Deum” at the Aspen Music Festival–I got in because it needed quantity as well as quality); and the Fort Collins’ Larimer Chorale for a couple of years; and Gunnison’s College-Community Choir. I count the experience of singing Brahm’s “German Requiem,” Handel’s “Messiah,” and Carl Orff’s “Carmina Burana” as three of the ten greatest experiences of my life. Which may sound like an impoverished life to you, but not to me.
But — Cole Porter? This chorus is a new kind of singing for me, mostly show tunes. It’s a small chorus under the direction of a wonderful woman who taught in the public schools for a long time, and therefore knows how to get the most out of people who have pretty small buckets for carrying tunes and a hard time counting to two if it’s four notes. But — Cole Porter?
The music is wonderful. I wake up in the middle of the night with “From this moment on” verberating in my mind (because it’s too early for reverberation). I go to class humming “Let’s do it.” I amble home in the gleaming (Gunnison’s five o’clock five-below-zero sherbet-sky version of “the gloaming”) to the slow lovely rhythm of “The still of the night” and almost freeze up — until I deliberately switch into “Blow Gabriel blow” to keep my blood from turning into molasses. It’s beautiful music.
But the words! Good grief. Along the spectrum of life’s meaning, the words Porter set to this beautiful music run the full gamut from adolescent sex-yearning through adolescent sex-realizing to adolescent love, which is about a millimeter on the meterstick of human experience. “From this moment on/ you and I, babe/ we’ll be ridin’ high, babe/ Every care is gone, from this moment on.” “And that’s why birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. Let’s do it, let’s fall in love.” Et cetera.
I WOULD PROBABLY FIND this less onerous if these songs had come out of some society that had achieved such just and stable socioeconomic institutions that everyone had the leisure to spend a lot of time pursuing idyllic love, or at least good sex. But Porter was writing these songs–this drivel set to heavenly music–in the 1920s and 1930s, and he ascended to his heights of superficiality in the depths of the Great Depression.
A fourth of all Americans were unemployed; factories were shutting down for lack of demand; banks were bankrupt; the farmers couldn’t afford seed to plant–and America’s great composers, Cole Porter, the Gershwins and the others who were supposedly singing the American song, were singing “We’re all alone, no chaperone can get our number, the world’s in slumber, let’s misbehave…”
By total coincidence, driving back from an afternoon skiing up above Crested Butte recently (Porter in my mind), I heard the story on KBUT/NPR of the man who wrote what might have been the only socially relevant song of the Depression Era: Yip Harburg, who wrote the lyrics to “Brother, can you spare a dime?” This is a great song– combining good minor-key music with lyrics that address the angry confusion of the times:
They used to tell me I was building a dream
And so I followed the mob.
When there was earth to plow or guns to bear,
I was always there, right on the job.
They used to tell me I was building a dream
With peace and glory ahead —
Why should I be standing in line,
just waiting for bread?
Once I built a railroad, I made it run,
Made it race against time.
Once I built a railroad, now it’s done —
Brother, can you spare a dime?
The Internet being what it is, you can Google up the whole song.
Harburg was an interesting guy. He was a boyhood friend of Ira Gershwin, who wrote insipid lyrics for his brother George’s wonderful music (a feat Porter accomplished alone). But Harburg had a harder edge. His greatest works were the music for “The Wizard of Oz”–which, believe it or not, was originally a Populist parable (who is that behind the curtain?)–and “Finian’s Rainbow,” an entertaining musical about racism in the South. His musical efforts got him blacklisted in Hollywood in the 1950s, but he kept writing music on into the 1970s, and lived a good life at least as happy as Porter, who despite his wealth struggled a lot with the challenges of bisexuality and depression.
BUT IT CAME DOWN to what America wanted to hear–or maybe, to a growing extent, what Americans were persuaded they wanted to hear; and through the Great Depression, as today, that was pure and simple escapism. The lifestyles of the rich and famous. Even FDR didn’t want “Brother, can you spare a dime?” played on the radio, but “True love” was fine.
And when I think back on the things I’ve always loved to sing–“The Messiah,” “The German Requiem”–they’re really just “pie in the sky” of a different sort, but the same basic escapism. Except for “Carmina Burana”–hard-driving sex drugs and rock-and-roll before that was cool. That was Carl Orff writing in 1930s Germany–a setting for songs written by malcontents a thousand years earlier in another Dark Age:
Seething inside with boiling rage,
In bitterness I talk to myself.
Made of matter, risen from dust,
I am like a leaf tossed in play by the winds.
So what is music? Life, or an escape from life? Escape to life? “Somewhere, over the rainbow” (Harburg). Well, I’ve been here before; I know I’ll get over it. The concerts are this weekend; then the wonderful music and inane words will gradually fade, and I’ll be back to normal next month. Hang on. Meanwhile, “I’ve got you (bum bum) under my skin….”
George Sibley sings, writes, and teaches in Gunnison, where he professes at Western State College.
