by Richard Todd
The world of music seems to be carved into a number of domains, one might almost say denominations, whose adherents tend not often to stray from the fold. Even those who appreciate more than one kind of music seldom find the different types interchangeable or even miscible.
For example, I am very fond of (and ignorant about) jazz. But it doesn't fulfill the same need in my life as does classical music, nor have I often heard successful attempts at mixing the two.
Still, even if most of us can immediately recognize the worlds of classical, jazz, rock and country music, to name but four, and prefer to stay well within them, there are a few musicians who like to work right on the boundaries. And sometimes those boundaries are fuzzier than you might imagine.
The Catalonian composer Marcel Casellas has undertaken a genre-bending, or perhaps genre-blending project in his delightful song cycle Eròtic-Giust (l'empreinte digitale ED 13102). You probably haven't heard many song cycles in Catalan, and you have certainly never heard anything quite like this. As the title suggests, these are not the kinds of songs you sang in Sunday school.
The music is played with style and gusto by an ensemble called Casellas Sextet Folk. The sextet consists of vocalist Eva Trulla(grave)s along with violin, clarinet, guitar, bass and percussion. Although I can't claim to be familiar with the current traditions of Catalonian folk performance, the renditions on this CD seem to have a sense of inner life and natural authority to them.
The vocals are recorded with the extreme close miking one associates with pop, but the music itself has more of the coherent complexity of good jazz, while the texts are more poetically sophisticated than one normally finds in either pop or what the record companies call "folk."
But is the music erotic? The short answer is yes, though in quite a different way from most of the music we've been considering. It is full of vital rhythms and the music has lots of life-affirming colour and cheer that are certainly compatible with the erotic impulse. So the atmosphere created, if not specifically erotic, creates an atmosphere congenial Eros. Still, because of the relative brevity and simplicity of the songs, there is no opportunity to build sexual tension in the manner of Tristan or the Tallis Fantasia. Aside from a few grunts, sensuous sighs and a few raunchy instrumental effects in the song With a Patch of Night on Your Lips, it is the words contribute the lascivious feeling to these songs.
The texts are by a variety of poets. Most of them seem excellent, as far as one can tell through the filter of the printed translation. Some are merely suggestive, others contain a few sexually explicit phrases; all are tasteful, at least as Clean Sheets readers reckon such things.
Whoever rendered the texts into English must have had a poor opinion of the sexual awareness of us anglophones. After a line like, "Let me drink the living water in your garden," it was considered necessary to add the following information: "'Loose folds' and 'garden' refer to the vulva; 'living water' to the vulval juices." French and Spanish readers have to make do without such illuminating explanations.
My favourite of the songs, the aforementioned With a Patch of Night on Your Lips, culminates in the following bittersweet lines by Joan-Lluís Luís:
