What I've Been Hearing Internally All Day

Our tour guide today on the bus tour was fantastic, full of anecdotes, and overall a humourous Scotsman. However, when we were returning from Loch Lomond, he told us about this song and sang a few renditions of it. The story surrounding the song goes a little like this: back in the 1750s, there was a lot of unrest due to the Jacobite Rebellions (rebellions in favor of Bonnie Prince Charlie, who was an 'heir' to the Scottish throne). The English had captured two Scottish Jacobites, and the law at the time was that one out of every two Jacobites captured would be put to death. That meant that one of these friends would die. The jailer for the evening gave them the choice to see who would live and who would die. Neither of the friends said a word, but one of them sat down and wrote this song.

There is a bit of dire symbolism in this poem. The 'high road' was supposed to be the road of the living, and the 'low road' was the road of the dead. The spirits of the dead could travel more quickly than the living, and so the friend who agreed to die for his friend would see Scotland, his home, too.

Or so goes the story according to the tour guide.

A Grace Note in the Stream of Things I

I am going to take a little grace note in the midst of living abroad and tell you about some really neat things that I want to share with people. These are things that I think people should know about, and instead of giving you a long list of things to look at, I'll be posting them every now and then in a series.

A Glass Half Empty (Original Song) - Pete Wylie

Note: I think I saw this kid at Folk Soc night at Edinburgh Uni during Fresher's Week... I was sitting near his foot.

I Bow to the Power of Folk Music

Last night, a Butler friend of mine, Emily, and I met up to go to FreshFest, which was supposed to be a huge array of performers and musicians showcasing their stuff, trying to get people excited to join their club at the club fair tomorrow. It worked well for about an hour, and it actually ended with the improve group I had wanted to see last night, but the tickets had been sold out – but it ended a t 9 p.m. when it was supposed to end at around midnight. Emily and I left and stood outside Pleasance, trying to decide what to do next. We consulted her handy Fresher’s Week orientation schedule, and there was folk music starting at 9 p.m. on 48a Pleasance. We found the correct door, marked “48a” in chalk on the side of the door. It was essentially what you would expect a university music festival to be: located somewhere really hard to find, but very amusing in its hard-to-findness.

For two hours, I sat on a wooden floor and listened as fiddlers, flutists, and guitarists strummed and made music. A lot of us were cramped together in a warm room with yellow-gold light. People struck up tunes, and other players would join in and try and follow along. If they didn’t know the tune, they would play notes to complement and harmonize.

There was something in that music. Any music, live, that you hear, you can feel pulsing within you. The beat seems to match the rhythm of your heart, and so something greater has come into being. There is a saying that when words fail, music speaks, and to me, last night, it spoke to something deeper and more ancient and more sophisticated than words. It invoked ancestral memories which I didn’t even know I had. I have only a few threads of ancestry coming from Scotland, but I was like I was remembering something, like the very blood in my veins was remembering what it was like to listen to this music, to be part of a folk music tradition that was enriched by people adding to songs and changing them and making them their own. To think of people sitting around a fire in their pittance-poor homes but clinging to and loving their traditions. It was like a glimpse into my own history, my past, my forebears.

I am now and forever will be a fan of folk music.

"Mormon Moment" - Pt. 1

For the last week, I was searching for my iPod. In my purse, in my backpack, in my room, at my desk at work. Nada. After the last couple of days, I finally just gave up and figured that I had accidentally left it somewhere or - heaven forbid - it had been stolen.

I am not one of those people who needs their MP3 players to breathe, and I think that people who listen to the music blasting at decibels I can hear across three seats of the Metro are rather crazy, but I like me some Chopin in the morning and Heroes del Silencio in the evening. On Thursday when I was coming back from La Latina really late at night, I missed my iPod. Earlier this evening when I was writing postcards, I missed my iPod and listening to the dulcet tones of Holst's "Planets" or my piano rendition of "If You Could Hie to Kolob."

I had sunk into a bit of a depression. That was three years' worth of music and a some really, really good Bollywood and Coldplay songs that I was going to have to replace. The iPod probably isn't even worth any monetary value because it's so old, so a curse upon the thief who took it from me!

This evening, the veil covering my eyes lifted.

I found my beautiful little iPod sticking out of a pocket in my purse. I had perused my purse multiple times before this, so you'll believe me when I did a double-take. It was like my slim, black, red earphone-wrapped iPod had magically appeared. I investigated more closely, and realized that for the last week my scripture-journal had been wedged in the same pocket - the iPod must have slipped between the pages.

I was so happy to find such a little thing, and I promptly fell down on my knees and offered a prayer of thanks to Heavenly Father for helping me find my iPod. It's an iPod for crying out loud, nothing special at all, but (in all seriousness) praise the Lord! He has helped me find something as inconsequential as music to ease my journeys to and from work and to enrich my life when I find myself alone.

It might also be a not-so-subtle hint that I should use my scripture journal more frequently than I have been wont to.

This may constitute the first in a series of "Mormon Moments." How long the series goes, I do not know, but I have at least one more post planned.

Beethoven in Plaza Mayor

On Thursday I went to a Beethoven concert in Plaza Mayor sponsored by Madrid's "Veranos en la Villa." The concert started at 10 p.m., and due to transportation issues I arrived at Sol right about the time the concert was supposed to start. The now-familiar street, Calle Mayor, was not as crowded as I expected, and there was not as much light as I remembered from earlier nocturnal excursions. I was alone, which made me glance around a little more warily than I would have had I been walking and chatting with a friend of mine.

The sounds of a symphony greeted me as I turned down the alley that leads to the Plaza, and there was a huge crowd of people standing around barriers, beyond which an even larger crowd was sitting. The symphony itself was in a gigantic box, and from my vantage point near one of the barriers, I could only see two of the violinists' right arms. No matter. The music was beautiful.

They played selections from Beethoven's sixth and seventh symphonies (I believe), and as the music played I saw story-scapes from Fantasia flit through my head: a young pegasus testing out its wings, centaurs celebrating summer, Zeus hurling thunderbolts. Then all of a sudden I was taken aback once again by the tones of his seventh symphony. Whenever I hear it, I inevitably think of The Fall, which is one of my favorite movies, and the images that correspond with that movie.

I was a bit disappointed because I saw the same images from the movie in my head, felt the same things I had felt before (admittedly they are pretty fantastic). But they weren't my own. I would rather I had exercised my creativity and supplied my own - which takes a bit more effort. I can make the paltry excuses that I was tired and didn't have the energy, that I had to keep minimal concentration not to fall over.

Truthfully, I kept getting distracted. In the Plaza's buildings, there were some people who were there that evening and opened their French doors to listen to the music: silhouettes leaned against the balconies or sat in chairs while light lit up the room behind them. I thought of how at that very moment, I was in one of the centres of Europe, that word us Americans say in hushed voices as land of sophistication, of history, of our imagined origins. Were I younger than I am now, all the cells in my body would have thrilled to even think of Beethoven, Plaza Mayor, night, lights, Madrid, all together. Nevertheless the music and the evening was very beautiful, but behind it all was the sordidness that comes with knowing how dirty the city can be, with knowing how the magic can fade if you stay in one place too long.

I have lived long enough that I can't imagine new things when I listen to music I've heard before - or I'm so out of practice with my imagination that I must put forth effort to use it.

Plaza Mayor