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Chris Lydon’s interview this week on Radio Open Source is with composer Yehudi Wyner. It’s a fascinating hour spent with an American “classical” composer  – he spends time discussing his influences, the way he approaches composition  and deconstructs some of his works on the piano.

Image: Boston Globe

As with many 20th century American composers, Wyner is open to the influence of “popular” forms on his work – particularly gospel and jazz. But as Stravinksy and Ives did with ragtime and marching band tunes, Wyner’s compositions refract these sources through his own personal tonal lens.

Wyner has been writing music since since his childhood in the 1920s, so he’s learned a thing or two about how creativity happens. I particularly liked his description of the compositional act – and the responsibility that comes with inspiration:

“When you stumble on these thickets of interesting material, you’re confronted with the most terrifying task of all, which is somehow living up  to it, continuing it, recognising not only that nugget is of value, but that nugget is of no meaning unless it’s in a proper context, unless it’s really enveloped in understanding and development.”

Wyner’s insight could apply to all creative acts – writing, painting, creating a business, raising a child. Most of us only experience very short and occasional moments of true inspiration. The real work of creativity is how we put context and create flow around these small original ideas.

I commend this conversation to you – the music is wonderful, the conversations surrounding it are enlightening, and Wyner’s critique of contemporary popular music is penetrating without being bigoted.

Thelonius Monk Quartet in Paris, 1969, playing “I Mean You“. Charlie Rouse on tenor is particularly strong on this performance: melodic and concise, never overpowering Monk’s composition. He reminds me a little of Dewey Redman… in fact, it would’ve been awesome to hear Redman play with the Monk Quartet!

Thelonius Monk (pn), Charlie Rouse (ts), Nate Hygellund (b), Paris Wright (d)
Salle Pleyel, Paris: 15th December 1969

About ten years ago when I first lived in France, my friend Yann lent me a lot of his collection bandes dessinées, or BD. Of course I’d grown up with Astérix and Tintin (and even Lucky Luke) in English, and had even read most of these in French, but there were gaping holes in my knowledge.

It’s hard for anglo-saxons to fully comprehend the importance of BD in francophone culture until you’ve lived in France or Belgium. It’s a multi-million Euro industry, and there are many masterpieces that will never (and probably could never) cross the linguistic and cultural divide into English.

By far my favourite of the series I borrowed from Yann was Le Génie des Alpages by F’Murr. The series of 14 albums recounts the lives of a flock of sheep, their shepherd and sheepdog in the French Alps (apparently the pastures of the Drôme département.)

A simple description makes Le Génie des Alpages sound like a French version of Footroot Flats. But the alpine setting is just a backdrop for a neverending series of absurdist comedy, surreal sight-gags and loopy stories that barely make sense even to the hard-core fan.

The shepherd, Athanase Perceval, is most notable for his endless wardrobe of colourful pullovers. He is barely able to control his flock, who run off to the local bar (La Buvette des Cimes) at any opportunity, stage bowdlerised versions of plays by Corneille or pole-vault from one hillside to the next. The sheep are ostensibly led by Romuald the black ram, whose vanity knows few boundaries.

The Dog, (who has no name), is a novelist and inventor and generally spends more time philosophising than looking after the sheep.

Of course, none of this is really translatable, and it’s almost impossible to explain (even in French) why these books are so much fun. Everything in the Alpages is flexible, fluid and bends to the whims of F’Murr’s imagination. Even the landscape itself is impermanent: best illustrated by the episode in which a bear shows Athanase how to rearrange the countryside by flapping it up and down:

The shepherd and his flock receive visits from hapless tourists, foolhardy aviators, a sphinx, various mythological deities, a bus that suspends itself in mid-air between the 8th to the 13th album, and F’Murr fills the frames with all the usual wildlife of the mountains: snakes, marmots, bears, ladybugs, foxes, wolves, elephants, talking letterboxes, whales and extraterrestrials.

In short, life in the mountains is exhausting, and never dull. No wonder the sheep head off to the pub at the end of the day.

Finally I got out of town today: I caught the RER C to the end of the line at Dourdan, and then (with the help of an IGN carte de randonnée) walked across the fields to Saint-Chéron: 14 kilometres of sunshine, snow and open space.

I love winter days like this.

Mixed tracks in the snow

The pylons had cold feet

The bees seemed to be asleep…

A wonderful day to be out beneath a big sky!

Garrison Keillor – The News from Lake Wobegon, February 4th 2010

This is radio at its best: Garrison Keillor delivers one of the wittiest homilies on 1 Corinthians 13 that you’ll ever hear. Well worth 14 minutes of your life.

As usual, Keillor tells his story with the sort of humour that is only found in small towns in rural Minnesota. This was performed at the Prairie Home Companion show last week that was cinecast in HD nationwide across America.

The News from Lake Wobegon is available as a weekly podcast.

Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon feels and looks like a return to an earlier era of European cinema. From a visual and narrative standpoint, the film recalls the work of Bergman and Tarkovsky in the 1960s and 1970s, and much of its power comes from its recourse techniques of these masters.

The use of black and white,  the juxtaposition of claustrophobic interiors against the vast open plains of northern Europe and the fine-grained focus on characters faces are a  hommage to Sven Nykvist, the cinematographer for many of Bergman’s films and for the last act of Tarkovsky’s career (The Sacrifice, 1986). Indeed, Haneke’s cameraman Christian Berger studied Nykvist’s work in preparation for filming The White Ribbon.

While it could be argued that Tarkovsky and Bergman used film to explore psychological or spiritual themes, The White Ribbon is by contrast a tale of sociology and politics.

To take just one example, the severe Protestant pastors in Bergman’s works serve to lay bare the impossibility of belief in God, whereas in The White Ribbon, the pastor (alongside the village baron and the doctor) is portrayed as the agent of a sick society where absolute truths are used to dominate through fear.

Haneke has been quite explicit about the message of his film. He claims it as an exploration of the origins of terrorism in all its forms. Haneke’s village of Eichwald is haunted by repression, abuse and violence of all imaginable varieties. It’s matrix of sadism, deliberate and unintentional, in which children and adults alike are victims and participants.

Ostensibly The White Ribbon is a film about Germany. By setting this story in 1913 and 1914, the viewer knows that the children in this film are the generation who will, as adults, oversee the rise of Nazism twenty years later. Just as the feudalism of Eichwald dissolves in paroxysms of fear and recrimination, so the seeds are sown for new forms of control and repression that will follow.

Hannah Arendt invented the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe how easily violence and tyranny can become a commonplace among men. With The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke has provided us a sharply-focused (and, yes, beautiful) vision of Arendt’s words come to life.

John Dankworth passed away on Saturday. Here’s a recent performance of his arrangement of Duke Ellington’s It Don’t Mean a Thing, still going strong at 81 at the 2008 North Sea Jazz Festival, and only hung up his saxophone in December.

This clip epitomises a lot of what Dankworth’s music meant to me – his close partnership with his wife Cleo Laine (one of the great voices of the 20th Century), his penchant for tight, witty ensemble writing, and his consistent ability to connect with a wide audience well beyond the regular jazz public.