Dave Wiseman: An attempt at a braided essay!
1.The here and now : I realise now that it comes as a necessity when you move to a new place. A new town, a new workplace. You simply have to let go of some things and embrace new ideas: new people, places and ways of being with people. Though it’s not always simple. When some forms of music have always been a part of your life, played such significant roles, sometimes it can be hard to move on. There is a strong temptation, (maybe even desire) to replay, recall, relive, relove those songs that you regard almost as highly as the most significant others in your past. Songs about love, lust and life that you connected strongly with have wrapped themselves around you, perhaps a little like ivy braided around a tree. Songs that made you feel as if you truly belonged, that you were significant: really significant. That you were something more than just a random collection of carbon atoms; stardust if you want to get all fancy about it.
2. In my past Very young, I recall sitting in a dark hushed cinema, staring at the light. People whispering, a few quiet coughs. Was it the different reality I liked? That beams of light dancing through celluloid could do this to us all? Is that really all it took to bring us together, to have us all waiting expectantly, our senses, our very consciousness merging? Bournemouth Odeon was (remarkably) where the magic happened. A warm summer afternoon on holiday in 1966. Mum, Dad and I at the cinema together to see ‘The Sound of Music’. All together, sharing the moment. I had no preconception or expectation, except I recall my Grandma had become unusually animated when telling us about it, that we had to go and see it (but then she loved mountains). The interminable adverts over , (Lime Kia Ora by Lyons Maid anyone?) the curtains swept apart and I was transported to a land I’d never seen before. White snowpeaked mountains, green, green grassy meadows with their cud chewing goats, on the steep hillside. Their bells tinkling and in the valley far below, church bells chiming the hour. And then a glorious musical score swelling up, gathering pace, enveloping you. Even now, I’m getting teary eyed remembering it. What exactly is it that I am remembering, that brings such an emotional rush, fully sixty years later?
3. I always need some analysis! Perhaps all knowing critics would step in here, in a rush to explain it all. To expand on the film critique that I took in so avidly, when I finally applied to study film production twenty years on. How then I realised that I needed to understand what exactly had happened to me (and, I discovered, so many others) as we sat back as youngsters and watched the technicolor magic unfold. Marie Hallander expands on this process in a fascinating article entitled “Never Again the Everyday”: On Cinema, Colportage and the Pedagogical Possibilities of Escapism. She notes that escapism is defined in the Cambridge English Dictionary as “a way of avoiding an unpleasant or boring life, especially by thinking, reading, etc. about more exciting but impossible activities.” But, she asks ‘what are the pedagogical possibilities of escapism (and in her case) through watching a TV series’? Can such experiences even change us in positive ways that may lead to early emancipation?
4. Re-learning to learn: By the time I moved to Almeria in Andalucia, Spain a few years ago this was a process I felt I’d long understood as being possible, and of being codified, expanded upon, used, reused, and even crafted in films I had made. I understood the significance, the power, the ‘lese-majesty’ if you like of music fused together with potent imagery. Perhaps I had become even a little blase about the whole process. As Neil Tennant wrote, in his three minute piece of perfectly salacious, delicious pop rap, ‘Wet End Girls’ in 1987
Too many shadows, whispering voices
Faces on posters, too many choices
If, when, why, what? How much have you got?
Have you got it, do you get it
If so, how often?
Which do you choose
The hard or soft option?
It was all a little to co-modified,too safe, a pastiche: like a stale cream bun with it’s vividly red glace cherry knocked off. What was new or different? Yes, I still thrilled to the form but how many times can you watch Jesus Christ Superstar, South Pacific, Oklahoma, without feeling that the sweetness was just a little too sweet? Like that spanish gateau from a cheap patisserie, that looks delicious but tastes of nothing but empty, sugary calories. Was I done with the form, the love affair finally over?
5. Those ‘special’ times: Where was that strange rush I had felt as a seven year old as I giddily took in the costumes, the glorious dysfunctional yet connected family, the thrilling notion that if things got too bad you could just burst into a song, a dance or waltz your way out of it all. Out in a thunderstorm? Sing! Bad day? Put on a puppet show and let your marionettes dance away. Or dance around a gazebo as you sing to your new love. Sing of thoughts, feelings, emotions. You don’t need to lock them all away. Sing: the world will love you, sing: the future becomes clear. Sing to escape all the evil in the world. My young self couldn’t possibly articulate it but whilst even he wasn’t naive enough to believe that singing would solve everything, he had just realised that you can at least escape into a fantasy world for precious moments when the outcome was pre-ordained. You could control things in a way that you couldn’t in real life. So much more than day dreaming, this was full on and total immersion.
6. Always a little more explanation needed: Of course you can go further with this, if you are so inclined. As Hallander tells us this early experience “means that the pedagogical possibilities for the child at school are not placed in the future, in adult life, but rather in the here and now, and that this possibility does not include a determination or a direction, nor does it always enter into a realisation.” (Hållander, 2020, p. 28) These pedagogical possibilities she relates to politics, ethics, aesthetics and the societal, and as moments of transformations where existential and emancipatory becoming can take place. Yes, it can first occur to us, as I related earlier when we are little but what if it can, in fact, happen at any age, at any time, in any space?
7. Brave new worlds: So it was with not a little sense of trepidation, that I began to listen in long lockdown days to new rhythms, to the music associated with the tempo of Spanish culture. Even I, a professed hispanophile, I came to realise had not really even touched the culture that I had sworn I loved , that I had no real understanding of it, I’d been eating from a whole tray of stale cream buns. I watched Spanish quiz programs only to realise that the Spanish had grown up with a range of traditional music sounds and rhythms that were a world away from anything I was familiar with. Infused with traditional gypsy music, flamenco, rhythms from the far south of El Andalus, from even further south on the African continent and from the New World, along with that which was home grown in its urban barrios. Music by artists such as Fuel Fandango, Vetusta Morla and that culled from the Spanish dynamic urbanista scene, like new wave Biznaga, sometimes imported and coming from the likes of for example Brazilian batucada drumming bands; then there is the gay Madrileno based word poet, Victor Algora, musically capturing his own personal themes from within Spanish inner city life. And equally that each group has developed its own blend of specialised visual imagery. In particular ‘The Eyes of Pablo‘ from Algora and videos such as ‘Mi Danza’ from Fuel Fandango and 2K20 from Biznaga. And you know, poco o poco I learned to love again: to be inflamed, touched, upset and entranced by these unique slices of the rich Spanish culture.
8. The Takeaway ‘The Sound of Music’ improbably then was my gateway to seeing life in a different way, understanding how we can create in it, how malleable it can be and how crafting such stories can help us be the person, the people we want to be. You just need find the key that unlocks your own door to an inner garden. One that we can feed, nourish and water to keep it healthy and happy. And one that with practice can grow into something that we can feel justifiably proud of. I like to think that is what the ‘Sound of Music’ was doing with others in my community through the years, in its own way.
9. Conclusion: Early in the last century, the German born composer Ernest Bloch(1878-1959) wrote ‘A Philosophy of Hope’ in which he discussed escapism in terms of liberty; of developing an understanding of escapism as a pedagogical phenomenon that could be the very start to changing things (in his terms, the beginning of a revolution; and yes he was a bit of Marxist). He helped us understand that the pedagogical possibilities of escapism exist very much in terms of transformation, empowerment and freedom, in relation to colportage, (literature peddling), fairy tale and hope. Rather than stunting us, these activities are a vital part of our growing up into mature, aware and fully formed adults (as I had unwittingly experienced with the musical form).
Reassuringly it seems we can use them to help us at any time in our lives when we need to reassess our position: to realign, refocus and relearn, just as I began too again at the start of my own Spanish journey last year. And amen to that!
