What a treat Viggo. I apologize for my misspelling. Your musical journey has been a rich one. May it continue so. Do you know the singing of the Russian Gypsy Nicolai Slichenko? He's a fabulous singer and he has relatives in Denmark. He is the head of the Romany Theater in Moscow. One of my students was related to him and she was the one who visited her family in Denmark. They came to New York and were very nice people. I enjoyed the visit. I treasure the recording of Slichenko that my student gifted me with.
I'm off to a ceremonial for one of our community members so I will be away until Monday. But look forward to reading you on my return. REH -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Viggo Andersen Sent: Saturday, August 04, 2012 11:23 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] It's always been Eastasia Hi Ray! I better write a separate list reply to you, because before I even knew that I would begin to be active on this list I wrote something on a cue in a post from you (I write all the time, that's why!) about our "potentials" as well as my relation to music. So in fact it's already written, but first my name, 2 g's V-i-g-g-o. That's OK, I think it was Lawry that also forgot one of those g's, and I've seen it before, but Vigo is something else, a city or town somewhere and who knows what else, maybe. It's an old Viking name meaning approximately Warrior. The word for that in Danish is "kriger", but my name means "krigsmand" (war man). A dictionary will offer you warrior for both, but in Danish it's still two different words. No matter, I've been a pacifist since 1968, and nevertheless I *am* a warrior in some sense of the word, and as fate would have it I have been running a list since 1998 called Workfare-Fight... well, of course I would one day be running a list about "fighting", it has to match my name! It wasn't even my own idea for a new name for the list, but even if it soon became too limiting a name for a list that was always intended by me for welfare issues in general I could never myself get used to anything else. Now, what I had been writing was about your mentioning in a post of "potential" - What's wrong with us human beings? It's not rocket science, as the saying goes. It's about basic needs. Who can't understand that, we all have them? Not the bareboned type only of getting fed, clothed, washed etc., but everything that really makes us human beings, talents, creativity, inventiveness - our potentials. I grew up with parents and a whole environment that was boring to the death, but I didn't know it until many years later, when I had become in charge of my own life as a young adult. From then on I simply could not tolerate to be with my parents for more than max. half an hour at a time. Then I needed to get home to my own home, ASAP! With parents and 3 siblings I've always been the exception in the family and in the whole rest of the environment too. As soon as I could manage to read I read books by the truckload. I wonder if that was because of a sense that there had to be more to life than what I was getting! A few years later the children's book selection wasn't enough for me anymore, so I walked into the library and asked if I could get a reader's ticket for the adult selection. The librarian was talking with another borrower, a man, and they both laughed, and then the librarian said to me, "No, you'll have to wait a few years more, my little friend"! Did they think my head would explode, if I read an adult book, what was their problem, and then they dared to laugh at me?? I want to go back in time to give them something to cry about and to tell them, "Who the hell did you think you were, you....!!" I could have accepted an explanation as to why it wasn't possible, but you don't laugh at a kid asking a question like that or dismiss him as a "little friend"! It's not as if I didn't know my own age! I have vague memories about music early on, but this was growing up with the never uttered assumptions that music was something that came out of the radio, that's it, and either you could play music or sing (not just untrained tra-la-la, but REALLY sing, which YOU know what is), or you could not, it was not something you needed to learn! Not even in school - proper singing techniques, playing and reading music - we learned nothing, zilch! We has song lessons singing old Danish songs, but learning nothing that we could not have read out loud instead! At age 13 my lifelong relation with music began with Tommy Steele, the British "pop star" of the time. At 14-15 my older sister moved out, I got her room for myself, then I wanted my own radio on the room, a sizeable tube radio otherwise only sold to adults, paid for with whatever paid work I could get 1-2 hours here and there - and then my first reel-to-reel tape recorder. 15 years old, 1960, I didn't know anybody else my age with their own radio and nobody at all with a tape recorder! My father had to be "harassed" about these things for some time, but he finally agreed, thank God. I loved that radio, I was in heaven, nothing I could receive could anybody keep away from me. Music, weird languages, radio amateurs on shortwave etc. Listening on the radio to 3 in the morning (!) with headphones I found classical music, and THEN it took off, like a rocket! 3-4 years later, 320 hours of classical music on tape from radio and from a few LPs! I borrowed LPs from the Japanese and Russian embassies here in Copenhagen. >From the latter the Russian 1949 recording of Boris Godunov with Golovanov, which I also now have on CD, and I also have the 1948 recording. From the Japanese an LP with music on the koto string instrument! From radio some Ravi Shankar, flamenco guitar, Greek and Irish folk, negro spirituals, jazz. That wasn't the tube radio anymore, it was recordings from an FM receiver. Need I say I still have those tapes. At some point a record player was added. After a few years with classical I began to find it harder to get any further with that genre, so it slowly changed to blues, folk and then rock. >From 1970 it was rocket speed again adding East European, British and Andes folk, cajun, bluegrass and also "comedy", spoken words resp. music, Finnish kantele and Swedish nyckelharpa music... If I can't anything else I can certainly explore and listen to music, and I have a relation to music like that of a musician, conductor or composer, even if I can't do any of it, so I don't seriously miss that I still can't play anything. It's obviously not a natural-born talent, but on the other hand, an environment like what I grew up with can kill off what might have been there, and what it could have become, and that thought still infuriates me. Let's say I've been revolting as best I could against everything I had grown up with. My own adult life was going to be completely opposite. TV set and VCRs around 1980 added "moving pictures" (not just movies) to my interests and from 1991 computers and all that. My music collection on harddisk is at 1600 hours. Not everything I have on tape and LP/CD, but selectively except the old classical recordings. That's everything, because it's a pain to find anything on the tapes, so better use the computers once and for all. Opera never caught my interest except for the 1949 Boris Godunov and Don Giovanni 1961, Giulini, but I do have many operas at my disposal now, so that I can start listening to one of them whenever time permits. Jazz on the other hand, no. Very little. Generally I simply don't "get" it, it can't interest me at all. The tape recordings from radio left me with numbers missing info, and I have spent so much time the last decade in order to complete them, but getting finished, not in this lifetime it seems! It's so slow now, I regularly search everything I can online and check 2 audio/music-id databases - nothing! About 100 numbers left, almost all of it instrumental, so no lyrics to help out with it. =========== What you say about that, Ray? I haven't read your reply to me thoroughly through yet, but did of course see your Danish references. Now, this former Israeli penpal of mine - for her birthday in 1968 I sent her an LP with Carl Nielsen's choir work "Fynsk forår" = "Fuen's Spring" in English or something like that. In 2010 I sent it to her Gmail mailbox, split up in 2 mp3 files because of a 25 MB Gmail limitation on attachments. It still hit her right smack in solar plexus! I sent many music files to her, but it was the only one, where I really got a reaction from her, "Wonderful! Superb! Magnificent!" etc. She's a classically trained pianist and music teacher, although I don't really know about her teaching music. She plays piano for ballet classes at a high school for talented kids. She didn't tell me anything about teaching music, not even giving piano lessons, although I know she has done that too many years ago. Viggo. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
