(pic via)

last night i was looping a track- its not my usual sort of thing (even if it is somewhat traditional behaviour).

its led me to thinking about language and music and the inherent pre-babel power of music’s ability to communicate which its quite quite easy to forget as an english speaking, english girl with fairly english speaking tastes.

a friend of mine from the states commented when she arrived at my flat late one night to find me watching sex and the city (yep, i’m that sort of cliche too) and having just finished a frazier marathon weekend that she’d heard how ubiquitous us tv was around the world but not appreciated it.

and then i realised its practically all i watch. not that i watch that much tv but short of some apposite channel four news coverage and the occasional foray into grand designs or… if i’m feeling particularly home-y location, location, location or at the other end of the scale - sports, its the wire or arrested development. reruns of twin peaks or freaks and geeks or entourage or the sopranos. so it’s no wonder that i know the words to the oscar meyer wiener song without really knowing what an oscar meyer wiener is, that i could tell you the brand names for a whole bunch of american sodas i’ve never tasted, that i can run off a fair old list of us presidents and name several state capitals; its all been absorbed through tv and film and music. damn, even i find myself wishing they were all california girls, or being in a new york frame of mind or heading to galveston.

so when i meet a girl from venezuela whose english is impeccable and she tells me she mostly picked it up from watching beverly hills 90210 it makes so much sense. lots of my education came out of the same source - only it was the cultural flotsam & jetsam i clung onto and thankfully not the valley girl rising inflection.

which brings me back to my point, i was listening to mozart’s ave verum last night as i lay on my bed and read about moodymann and none of that was weird. and i kept hitting repeat because despite the fact my schoolgirl latin gets me by just fine with fading inscriptions in museums and working out word roots in spelling bees (ho, there goes another cultural phenomenon i’ve appropriated) i’ve never had an ear for it and all i can hear is the music; the swell of voices and the passion; the love and tenderness; the relief, joy and reverence which were written in 1791, in latin and still give me shivers today. and it doesn’t matter that its not glitchy or guitary or dubbed out. it’s not an issue that the bpm rate is way down and it’s not had a vocoder anywhere near it and it certainly doesn’t matter that it sounds better in latin because it still makes perfect sense.

i don’t know what recording this is from, in fact i can’t tell you anything about it except that when you least suspect it, it might well speak your language.

mozart - ave verum