“Bread crumbs”(perhaps how you got here)

For January, 2010

This fall I had a revelation. It should not have been a revelation. I should have known ... But I didn’t.

Once I had a friend who was a passionate admirer of Edith Piaf. There was between us two a certain latent hostility, which kept me from doing more than nodding politely (when I was in the mood to be agreeable) or making snotty comments about people that sound like they’re gargling while singing.

Much later, in the days when new tape cassettes were being sold four for a dollar, at a truck stop somewhere in the Southwest, I happened on a cassette that had several of Piaf’s most famous works on it. A few more years passed before I played this music. I found that I enjoyed it, although I surely did not experience a revelation.

More years passed. Then, this fall, here in Wickenburg we had a performance one evening by the American Ballet Theatres ABT II (second company), one for younger dancers. This performance was accompanied (as all too many ballets are in these impoverished times) by recorded music. The evening began with a piece called “Barbara”. The opening was provided by the short song, “Au bois de Saint Amand”.

This song made me sit up and take notice. I have, in my declining years, learned a good deal about music and I know many works (not as a performer, but as a hearer). I could not identify a single work in my knowledge that was like this.

So I looked up “Barbara” on the Web, finding (only to my very slender surprise) that there was a great deal of interest in her music, even more than ten years after her death (1997). From there I went on to explore “Barbara radio” on Last.fm. An entire universe opened before me - one that I should have accepted joyfully some forty years ago. Nevertheless, better late than never, or at least so I tell myself.

Fans of modern French popular music will feel not the slightest surprise that someone has discovered this vast and rich panorama of wonderful music.

But there is something slightly disturbing here: I, who knew well a great deal of French classical music (from the Baroque era, for example, I have always loved French and English music more than German and Italian) was basically ignorant of a beautiful stream of creativity. And there is a lesson here: the French have always been somewhat snobbish about their culture, even about their language. When I was in junior high school, at the time when we had to choose a foreign language to learn, I chose Latin rather than French mainly because I was already aware of the hostility that the French too freely expressed towards those that could not pronounce words correctly or use them correctly in sentences. I was, even then, aware that there was such a thing as the French Academy, whose pronouncements on vocabulary and grammar carry, to say the least, great weight.

The French have in no small measure built walls around their culture; to some extent these walls protect the heritage. But they protect in the same way that a greenhouse’s panes of glass protect the plants inside. French culture risks becoming a hothouse plant, beautiful but the mere kept creature of whoever governs the hothouse.

And there is more: in all times and places there is always a little tendency, a weed that grows well with even the slightest watering. This is the thorn-bush of separatism, or perhaps we should say ‘particularism’. Whenever someone says “we have to keep Christ in Christmas” or “we have to protect the purity of our faith” we are in this thicket, the tangle of ingrown tendrils that defend something against the outside.

It seems to me wrong to be so jealous, so defensive. When I was a child, most of the Jewish children in my class had Christmas trees at home (this is mentioned even in Joan Benny’s Sunday Nights At Seven: The Jack Benny Story, Warner Books, ISBN 0-446-51546-9, 1990). I suppose now that it’s well enough that Christians keep Christ’s birth in their thoughts, but by being so particularist they have built a wall, denying the enjoyment of the rich heritage of Christian culture to those that have other faiths. Such Christians have, in a sense, prepared the way for corresponding Islamic particularism.

These days I live in an area where English-speakers sometimes show the symptoms of nascent particularism; Arizona now has “English-only” laws. Such laws would be laughable but for the harm they inflict. And the harm is not to the speakers of Spanish or Navajo. It is to the speakers of English. Circling the wagons, building up the ramparts of defense, is always the strategy of death and defeat. There can never be linguistic or cultural purity - only the hothouse atmosphere of the paranoid few that look outward only when they have a loaded gun in their hands. Far healthier is openness, a friendly attitude towards those that are different; and it is precisely this attitude that has stood the English language in very good stead for a long, long time. English is not pure; there is not a single significant work in English without its peculiarities, its borrowings from other languages and cultures.

And, I think, English must never be pure. It’s a mongrel among languages, and the healthier for that.

Meanwhile, I revel in my recent (if all too late) discovery of the rich heritage of modern French popular music, a heritage that I should have discovered on my own, but remains “protected” by the refusal of its fans to spread the the message, to open up, to allow English translations.

Postscript: there are several wonderful Web sites devoted to Barbara; they are linked in the Wikipedia article on her. If the excellence of a singer’s work is to be judged by the quality of the Web sites devoted to her, then Barbara must have been a great, great figure. She richly merited the acclaim of the English-speaking world.

 All text on this page is the work of J W Durham and is licensed only under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Other licensing terms may be available. E-mail me