How audio recordings saved the whales

photo: wikimedia.org

From the 12/26/2014 airing of All Things Considered: How in the 1960s recordings of whale songs were made inadvertently by a military researcher, who passed them to a biologist, who passed them to Judy Collins, who incorporated them into a song that helped launch Greenpeace.

Audio stream and transcript here.

Latest News from the Feejees - 9

photo by Bill Ebbesen

What's on Bruce's night stand?

Moby-Dick, of course! From an interview in yesterday's New York Times:

I just finished “Moby-Dick,” which scared me off for a long time due to the hype of its difficulty. I found it to be a beautiful boy’s adventure story and not that difficult to read. ...

Make sense who may.

M-D Opera -- on TV & at MDM18

Moby-Dick, the opera, will be broadcast on Boston's PBS station, WGBH, four times in the next week, as part of the Great Performances series. Check your local listings, as they say, but for Boson-area folks it's:

• Friday, Nov. 1, 9 PM, channel 2
• Saturday, Nov. 2, 2 AM, channel 44
• Sunday, Nov. 3, 1:30 PM, channel 2
• Monday, Nov. 4, 3 AM, channel 44

If you plan to attend the Marathon's kick-off lecture on Jan. 3 (2014), you'll want to check out this opera. The featured speaker will be its librettist, Gene Scheer.

The Symphony (and Cantata)

photo: Vancouver 125

As a film (and film score) buff, I eagerly followed up on Lemuel's discovery that Bernard Herrmann had written a Moby Dick cantata and sinfonietta.

For those less obsessed, Bernard Herrmann composed for some of the greatest films of the 20th century (Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Taxi Driver, ...), finding particular success writing for Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, ...).

Herrmann wrote two pieces inspired by M-D. The Sinfonietta, written for string orchestra in 1935-36, and the Cantata, written for male voices and orchestra in 1936-38. You can hear snippets of a CD by the Danish National Symphony Orchestra on this Amazon page. According to the liner notes:

The fondness which the composer held for Melville's Moby Dick [sic] dated from his boyhood. The novel was a childhood favourite and as a young man Herrmann's father had served on two whaling ships and was even shipwrecked on an island in the Bering Sea in 1892.

Apparently, Herrmann originally intended to write a M-D opera, and had discussed it with lyricist William Clark Harrington. Harrington was "a New England poet and manager of the CBS music library." Together they took trips to the novel's Massachusetts locations, searching for inspiration. In the end, the opera became the cantata, with "text selected and arranged from the novel" by Harrington. Interestingly, the canata is dedicated to Herrmann's friend, Charles Ives.

If you have any interest in M-D spin-offs and/or orchestral music, seek out this recording. It bears close listening. The Sinfonietta is the culmination of Herrmann's interest in Arnold Schoenberg (say the liner notes). The Cantata condenses the novel to 45 minutes, featuring solos by Ishmael, Ahab, Pip, Starbuck, and various generic "sailors."

One curiosity: You can hear in the Amazon clip for track 10, Ahab sings "...and hemp can only kill me." M-D devotees will realize this is a misquote of "...and hemp only can kill me." The libretto with the CD has the same error.

Now, the singer for this recording is British, a native English-speaker, David Wilson-Johnson. One might assume he would have recognized that "can only kill" doesn't make sense in this context. Either there was an error preparing the CD, or Herrmann & Harrington made the error. I'd bet the former. It's a question for the Bernard Herrmann Society. (Yes, there is one!)

[Whoa! I completely forgot that I blogged about this music back in 2011. Time to listen to Old & In The Way.]

Bernard Herrman's "Moby Dick" cantata

I just tuned in to "The Bernard Herrman Centenary Orgy" on Harvard University radio. (Harvard radio's "Orgies®" are a May and December tradition. Works of a particular composer, group, or genre are researched and presented "marathon-style.") They were in the middle of Herrman's Moby Dick, a cantata for male chorus, soloists, and orchestra, 1936-1938.

Turns out that, before his career as a composer of film scores (Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Taxi Driver, and many of Alfred Hitchcock's most-remembered films), Bernard was a "legit" composer, schooled at NYU and Julliard.

For M-D aficionados who appreciate "classical" music, this piece is well worth searching out. My suburban-Boston library consortium does not have it, and I doubt you'll find it "shared" online. You can listen to clips at Amazon.com. If you have an extra $55 in your M-D budget, you can score a used CD there.

Letter to the Editors, Part 1

Regular reader Ynot sent us the following missive, about a new song that appears to have been inspired in part by Moby-Dick:

Don't know if you've heard this or even know about it but Elton John and Leon Russell have a duet out called "Hey Ahab".  The lyrics are below.  On their own they don't do much for me although I've liked the bits of the song I've heard.


It's a constant struggle getting up that hill
There's a change of guard every day
When you're clinging onto a driftwood boat
You pray a great white whale might come your way

No freeway traffic in the frozen North
Just a chain link fence full of birds
And when the harpoon's loaded in the cannon bay
You'll be rolling through the pages lost for words

Hey Ahab can you tell me where
I can catch a ride out of here
Hey Ahab hoist that sail
You gotta stand up straight
When you ride that whale

In a crumbling city we were trapped for days
With a broken sun above the clouds
Caught like Jonah forty fathams down
And a sign on the wall saying, "Hope Allowed"

All the cryptic symbols carved on bone
A far cry from a tattooed rose
And when the boys in the rigging catch the wind

We'll all weigh anchor and it's westward ho

Hey Ahab can you tell me where
I can catch a ride out of here
Hey Ahab hoist that sail
You gotta stand up straight
When you ride that whale

Hey Ahab can you tell me where
I can catch a ride out of here
Hey Ahab hoist that sail
You gotta stand up straight
When you ride that whale