Anglophone Saxophones

The English-speaking world is anglophone because England (or Angle-land) is named after the Angles who invaded along with the Saxons when the ages were Very Dark Indeed. But what of the poor dear Saxons? Why didn't they get a phone?

Well, they sort of did. You see, the surname Sax or Saxe means Saxon, and does all across northwest Europe. So Adolphe Sax (1814-1894) must have come by a straight male line of descent from a Saxon. So when he patented the saxophone in 1846, the anglophone world was finally reunited with its etymological twin.

Anglophone and saxophone.

Discovering Disco

I sat in airport yesterday for an hour gongoozling a screen on which amazing facts were being put up for the edification of the delayed passengers. One of the amazing facts was that disco meant I learn in Latin. The idea, I think, was that this was amusing because it made a disco sound like a school.

The fact was technically true, but utterly misleading, in that there is no connection between the two words. However, buried at the bottom was a little gem of truth, because a disco is really a library.

The Italian for library is biblioteca, which means book collection. It therefore follows, as surely as night follows day, that the Italian for a record collection should be discoteca. It was the French who adapted this word into the more familiar discotheque, and it was the Americans who shortened it to disco. Then, because America is cool, disco got taken up by every country in the world. And so an Italian library became a universal nightclub.

It should also be noted that the Latin disco (learn) doesn't have anything to do with discover (dis-cover).

Literary Canonisation

Canon Félix Kir was one of those fellows sent to earth to make the rest of us feel inadequate. Not content with being a canon, he also fought with the resistance and managed to free five thousand prisoners of war. Not content with being a priest and a war hero, he decided to become mayor of Dijon. But Canon Felix Kir was not content with simply helping the souls of his flock, the bodies of prisoners of war, and the city of Dijon. Oh no. He had to make everybody in the whole damned world happier.

How do you do that?

By adding cassis to white wine, thus making a drink called a kir. If you do it with champagne (and I don't suggest you don't), it's a kir royal.

Excuse me for a moment....

That's better. Now where was I? Ah, yes. Greek carpenters.

Greek carpenters needed measuring rods to act as rulers. These were called kanons, so canon came to mean a rule or an accepted standard. For example, the Biblical canon, which is all the books conventionally included in the Bible; and the literary canon, which is the secular equivalent. Then there's the canon, or official list, of saints that you can enter if you are canonised. And there's the rule, or canon, of a religious order under which you can live and thus become a canon like Canon Kir.

Finally, you can compose music using complicated rules. For example you can take a single theme and then repeat it backwards, upside down, at half speed or at double speed. Then you try to make those repetitions work on top of each other. It's all terribly complicated, but if you follow the canon, you will write a canon.

Here's one by Bach with an excellent explanatory video.

The Nightingale Floor and the Empty Orchestra

I have never been to Japan, but imagine it to be a place of poetry, because their words are so beautiful. Japan itself is Chinese for sun rising, Nippon is Japanese for the same, and their language is filled with such word-pictures.

Take karaoke, which I once associated only with those who possess less shame than talent. Then I found that karaoke means empty orchestra and now I cannot hear those plaintive tuneless ululations without imagining the void among the violins, the emptiness filled only in remote repetitions.

And the empty orchestra of karaoke therefore relates to the empty hand of karate.

And manga, the darling of the spotted adolescent, seems pimpled by association until you find that manga means involuntary images, and that the term was popularised, if not coined, back in the 1814 by the great artist Hokusai, who painted the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, and the Great Wave Off Kanagawa.

Yet we have not, dear occidental (and maybe accidental) reader, imported Japan's most delectable phrase: the nightingale floor. A nightingale floor, or uguisubari, is the creaky floorboard that sings as you tread upon in your noctivagant wanderings. Before I had heard the phrase I would get all ratty and worried at the nocturnal noise I made fetching a glass of water or hunting owls. But now that I know that those creaks are the singing of wooden nightingales, they have become beautiful.

In Japan they would make such floors deliberately so that people could not tiptoe into a temple undetected. In England we have been making them accidentally for years, without ever using the proper name.

Preparing a post at the Inky Fool offices

Organic, Organised Organs

Organic food is food grown in a church organ. Organised crime is crime committed by organists.

Well, etymologically speaking.

Once upon a time, the ancient Greeks had the word organon which meant something you work with. An organon could be a tool, an implement, a musical instrument or a part of the body.

Originally, an organ was any musical instrument, but in the ninth century people decided that every church should have a pipe organ in it for, as Dryden put it, "What human voice can reach the sacred organ's praise?"

Slowly the pipe part got dropped and other instruments ceased to be organs (except the mouth organ, which, if you think about it, sounds a bit rude).

Organ continued to mean part of the body, hence the old joke:

Why did Bach have twenty children?


Because he had no stops on his organ.

Anyway, the body is beautifully and efficiently arranged (at least my body is). Each organ has a particular function. I have a hand to hold a glass, a mouth to drink with, a belly to fill, a liver to deal with the poison and so on and so forth. Heart, head, lungs, liver, kidney and colon each performs a particular task; and the result, dear reader, is the glory that is I.

So if you arrange a group of people and give each one a particular job, you are making them act together like the organs of a body. You are organising them.

Thus an organisation: something in which each person, like each organ of the body, has a particular task. And though that shift happened in the sixteenth century when everybody liked metaphors about the body politic, crime didn't get organised until 1929 in Chicago, which shows how lackadaisical most malefactors are.

A bunch of organs put together make up an organism, and things that are produced by organisms are therefore organic. In the twentieth century, when artificial fertilisers were strewn upon our not-green-enough fields, we started to refer to organic farming and thus organic food.

However, the church organ survives. If you add pipes to an instrument, you are organising it; and organ music can still be referred to as organic.

A reluctant organ donor

A Hymn To Sheila

Today, as all Australians must be aware, is Sheila's Day. That is because Sheila is merely the Irish equivalent of Cecilia, which is the female equivalent of Cecil, which ultimately derives from the Latin caecus, which meant blind.

Anyway, today is St Cecilia's day, and St Cecilia is the matron saint of music. Thus this day is devoted to the muses.

Sheila (as I like to call her) only obtained this honour through a misunderstanding. She was a martyr of some sort in the second or third centuries, and an early account of her death said that she was stifled by being locked in her bathroom which was then overheated with air from red hot pipes, or candentibus organis. This seems to have been misread as cantatibus organis, which meant she was stifled while the organ played.

Anyway, writing hymns to St Cecilia has been a standard poetical business for years. Poets must describe music, which is a lot harder than you think. You get some lovely lines, like these by Pope:

Till, by degrees, remote and small,
The strains decay,
And melt away,
In a dying, dying fall.

Or these from Auden:

O dear white children casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages,
So small beside their large confusing words,
So gay against the greater silences
Of dreadful things you did: O hang the head,
Impetuous child with the tremendous brain,

But the best are the closing lines of John Dryden's , which given his usual mediocrity is a miracle attributable only to the intervention of a saint.

So when the last and dreadful hour
This crumbling pageant shall devour,
The trumpet shall be heard on high,
The dead shall live, the living die,
And Music shall untune the sky.

And here is the whole Auden poem set to music by Benjamin Britten.



P.S. St Cecilia's body is, allegedly, in a church in Trastevere which I visited a couple of months ago. I would have knelt and prayed but somebody was playing the organ very, very badly, and it quite put me off.

Pariah States and Pariah Poets

Here is a picture of a parai. As you can tell, dear reader, a parai is a drum. Specifically, it is an ancient Tamil drum.

Like eggs, carpets, and the England football team, it is in the nature of a drum that it should be beaten. In the festivals of Kerala and of Tamil Nadu such drums are beaten by members of a particular tribe and so that tribe was named the Paraiyar.

The poor Paraiyar were considered to be unclean. The first mention of them in English comes from Samuel Purchas' Pilgrimes (1613) and reads:

The Pareas are of worse esteem.... reputed worse than the Divell.


In fact, the Paraiyar were considered to be beneath everybody except the washermen and the shoemakers (who were a load of cobblers*). So put upon and oppressed were the Paraiyar that, among the European invaders of India, they became a byword for outcasts. The Portuguese spelt the name Paria, and we, being British and fond of unnecessary 'H's called them Pariahs. Hence the word.

English has now acquired the phrase pariah state which is thrown hither and thither like a befaeced tennis ball. But in fact, no Pariah state exists. The Paraiyar are alive and well, but have neither independence nor autonomy.   


There was, though, a Pariah Poet. His name was Tiruvalluvar and he once wrote:

Call him not 'man' who makes display of useless words:
Call him but 'chaff of humankind.'

And:

The fool's intrusion in th'assembly of the wise
Is like one placing dirty feet upon a lovely couch.

I'm not sure that Tiruvallar and I would get along.

Well, I'd never do a thing like that.

*Cockney rhyming slang: cobblers' awls = balls.

Gamut

About two thousand years ago a perfectly respectable lady called Elizabeth became pregnant and her husband lost his voice. He stayed silent as a silo until the child was born. The child was called John and when John grew up he began telling people that they were naughty and chucking them in a river. Now, if you or I tried a stunt like that we'd be brought up by the police pretty sharpish. But John got away with it and, if you can believe it, was considered rather holy for all his attempted drownings. Chaps at the time called him John the Baptist.

Seven hundred years later somebody else lost his voice, or at least had a terribly sore throat. He was an Italian chap who went by the cumbersome moniker of Paul the Deacon so he wrote a verse prayer to John the Baptist that went thuslyly:

Ut queant laxis
   resonare fibris
Mira gestorum
  famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti
   labii reatum,
Sancte Iohannes.


[O let your sevants sing your wonders on,
With loosened voice and sinless lips, St John.]

Four hundred years later, somebody set this little poem to music. He wrote a pretty, climbing melody, in which each line started a note higher than the last, until with the words Sancte Iohannes it dropped again to the bottom.

So the first note was on the syllable Ut, the one above was on the Re in Resonare, then Mi in Mira, Fa, So, La...

The problem with Ut, though, is that it's a rather short syllable and difficult for a singer to hold. Try it. So it got changed to Do (perhaps for Dominus, but nobody's sure), and that gave do, re, mi, fa, so, la and, by extension, Si for Sancte Iohannes. Then somebody pointed out that there was already a So beginning with S and you couldn't rightly have two of them beginning with the same letter. So Si was changed it to Ti.

Do re mi fa so la ti do


Which is just a shortening of a hymn to John the Baptist. The shortening technique was invented by a fellow called Guido of Arezzo.

So poor Ut was consigned to history, or nearly. It sort of survives. You see the lowest note was also known as gamma, after the Greek letter. So the lowest note of the scale was once known as gamma or ut. Then a whole scale came to be known as gamma-ut. And that is why when you go through the whole scale, you still run through the gamut.

Which means that this explanatory video is a damned lie.



Julie Andrews singing the praise of John the Baptist