grouse

Ian Bostridge has a piece on Winterreise in the Guardian. I like Ian Bostridge, and what he says here is mostly fine, I guess, whatever, except leaning on this old stereotype is about as weak as talking about opera singers by their excessive weight:

"The simple classical delivery of a folk song by a “trained” voice may sound uptight and artificial to an audience used to hearing “Barbara Allen” or “O Waly Waly” in the nasal twang that has become associated with an “authentic” folk voice."

Since he doesn't bother to illustrate this notorious folk twang on Waly Waly (and seriously, dude, are those the best trad songs you could come up with, or just the only?), we'll do that for him:



Perhaps if he'd asked someone, they might have told him that the problem is with the word "simple". Also, I get the whole Schubert/Dylan thing, but doesn't it sort of add insult to injury to make the other pole of this argument the guy famous for lifting tunes off those nasally folk singer records and recording his own even more nasally versions of them without any attribution whatsoever?

Meanwhile, here's a couple of unskilled Leiermänner droning on and on with another irritating folksy tune.



Somebody once asked in an internet forum how a beggar could afford to own a hurdy-gurdy, given how complicated the instruments are in construction, and thus how expensive. I put the question to a guy who owned the most kick-ass instrument I ever heard -- a simple box design made in Hungary out of what appeared to be old barn siding -- and he thought for a moment and said "Long winters." There's unskilled, and there's unskilled.

I guess this article has annoyed me more than I thought. So in closing here's a video for Child Owlet made by seven-year-olds. Barbara Allen, pfffff. Weak.