This is another response to another Long and Short Reviews prompt. Click for links to what other people posted...
Music was a big part of my life up to about age thirty. Like all good Granola Green parents, my parents taught us to sing instead of turning on the stereo or radio. I was in the school band and chorus; as a result I was able to pay some of my tuition expenses by singing in college, and even made a little money with a retrospective recording in my late twenties. Then I slept on one side all night and woke up with some tinnitus and hearing loss on that side.
I'm Highly Sensory-Perceptive. I lived in an unpleasantly loud world before that hearing loss. I knew what caused it and how to cure it...and I preferred to live with it until recently, when it seems I've incurred enough "wear-and-tear" hearing loss that I don't mind letting the little stapedius muscles open my ears any more. The only disadvantage was that the tinnitus interfered with my enjoyment of music. I stopped buying new records or looking for new radio shows. I've listened to very little music between the summer my left ear partly closed itself off, and the autumn of 2020 when I found myself in a place where I could listen to music while using the Internet.
But mostly I've listened to songs e-friends shared, and while those songs often came out during my minimal-listening years, they are old enough to have been posted free for all on YouTube. They're not all that recent.
The most recent songs I've listened to have been topical, too, and some readers might hate them.
So the problem is to find a definition of "recent" that works for me. I hereby define "recent," in this post, as meaning "more recent than the Gershwins."
Then the question arises whether the song has to be recently written, or only recently recorded.
And most of the more recent songs I've heard, liked, learned, are religious songs. For some posts that would be fine. For this one, I don't know everyone else's religious identity, and I want a song everyone can sing.
And can it be a choral performance, or must it be a song people can sing or whistle?
I love that Wendell Berry lived to write this poem, that Malcolm Dalglish found it after he'd gone back to Scotland and set it to music. But it's not a song people are likely to sing around a campfire.
This one is recent, but not too recent to have stood the test of time. People can sing it and whistle it. So...I think that's the song I'd like to share today.
"Haven't you liked anything newer than that?" Well, actually, yes...In the 1980s the word for the kind of music I was into was "fusion." It wasn't folk, it wasn't classical, it wasn't country, it wasn't rock; it was just music, as performed and composed by people at different levels of formal training in different musical traditions. So I got onto the Substack list of this visitor from China who's trying to spread awareness of the Chinese zither called a guzheng. She's played country music duets with a banjo, she's performed a duet with a freight train...I like this wacky approach to music. Wu Fei has studied and trained for some time, obviously; in China this is a classical instrument. But she sounds as if she's having fun. Most of her "songs" are instrumental performances, like this "Silverleaf Night Song."
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