Here's something that I bet wasn't on your Christmas playlist: Carly and Lucy Simon, as the Simon Sisters, singing Lucy's setting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "Christmas Bells."
It's from a very unusual children's album first released in 1973. This is one that I did not have growing up, but when I was a child I once heard one of the songs on it, Lucy Simon's setting of William Blake's poem "The Lamb," at a neighbor's house, and never forgot its haunting, chant-like melody (unfortunately, there's no Youtube of it, but you can listen to an excerpt on Amazon), in spite of the fact that I never heard it again and didn't know whose song it was. Then one day last year the Daedalus Books catalogue came in the mail -- I'm a hopeless addict -- and I saw the Simon Sisters' re-released CD advertised in it, with a little blurb describing some of the songs, one of which was a setting of Blake's poem. Could this be the song? I took a chance and ordered the CD, and yes, it was.
The album is outstanding. Lucy, who wrote all the music, was long overshadowed by her younger sister, but would later gain recognition as the composer of the Broadway musical The Secret Garden. Although the songs on the album are arranged for the full gamut of instruments used in 1960s pop to suggest whimsy and the fantastical -- flute, organ, glockenspiel -- the squareness of the sisters' singing has a kind of rectitude to it -- indeed, almost an austere quality, echoed in this undated performance from the "Hootenanny" television show:
Aren't they beautiful, too? Their older sister, Joanna, was also a singer, a mezzo-soprano who had a moderately big career in opera (yes, that's what most big careers in opera look like -- I had never heard of her, either).
Everything about the Simon Sisters, from their singing to their dresses to the songs themselves, evokes a more innocent time, a kind of lost paradise that cannot ever have really existed.
Showing posts with label 1970s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1970s. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Monday, December 19, 2011
Advent, Loss, and Childhood Utopia
This Advent is a significant time of darkness for me because of my mother's sickening decline. Alex Haley noted that "every death is like the burning of a library," and it is absolutely true in the case of my once beautiful and vibrant mother, whom I have always, in my heart of hearts, somewhat superstitiously believed knew everything.
She still knows everything, but I can't ask her, and she can't tell me, because, though her fearsome intellectual capacity is undiminished, she is quickly losing her ability to speak.
I have found myself waxing painfully nostalgic for my 1970s childhood, which seems so much more idyllic to me than it really was in the desperate retrospect of impending loss. In the past few months, I have compulsively begun collecting the now-out-of-print books my mother used to teach us and do arts and crafts with us: this, for example, and this, and this. When I linger on the simple line drawings and black-and-white photographs in these books, a whole world comes rushing back to me: not just the world of my childhood, but the world of my mother's young adulthood -- a hopeful world, in which both children and their parents really believed that we could call down upon earth the New Jerusalem, and that we could do it through our quotidian work. When I think back to that childhood, why does it seem as if the sun was always shining?
I wish I could ask my mother how to do it now -- how to do life. How did she teach me, my brothers, and my sister -- as she did -- to love beauty, and then set us free to go and spend our lives striving to create it, to reveal it? (I am calling it a "setting free," but others might think of it as a wildly impractical neglect to help us out with a Plan B.) How did she accept the deprioritizing, the putting second or third or last, of her own impressive powers of creativity? I continue to struggle with my tangled-up vocation, and I wish my mother could help me. I go to see her every month, but I have not been good with phone calls, because it's virtually impossible to talk with her on the phone; I'm told I'm the only one who can understand her on the phone, but I think my abilities have been exaggerated. And yet I have heard it said over and over again that you have to talk to your parents while they're still alive, or rue it later.
She still knows everything, but I can't ask her, and she can't tell me, because, though her fearsome intellectual capacity is undiminished, she is quickly losing her ability to speak.
I have found myself waxing painfully nostalgic for my 1970s childhood, which seems so much more idyllic to me than it really was in the desperate retrospect of impending loss. In the past few months, I have compulsively begun collecting the now-out-of-print books my mother used to teach us and do arts and crafts with us: this, for example, and this, and this. When I linger on the simple line drawings and black-and-white photographs in these books, a whole world comes rushing back to me: not just the world of my childhood, but the world of my mother's young adulthood -- a hopeful world, in which both children and their parents really believed that we could call down upon earth the New Jerusalem, and that we could do it through our quotidian work. When I think back to that childhood, why does it seem as if the sun was always shining?
I wish I could ask my mother how to do it now -- how to do life. How did she teach me, my brothers, and my sister -- as she did -- to love beauty, and then set us free to go and spend our lives striving to create it, to reveal it? (I am calling it a "setting free," but others might think of it as a wildly impractical neglect to help us out with a Plan B.) How did she accept the deprioritizing, the putting second or third or last, of her own impressive powers of creativity? I continue to struggle with my tangled-up vocation, and I wish my mother could help me. I go to see her every month, but I have not been good with phone calls, because it's virtually impossible to talk with her on the phone; I'm told I'm the only one who can understand her on the phone, but I think my abilities have been exaggerated. And yet I have heard it said over and over again that you have to talk to your parents while they're still alive, or rue it later.
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