by Sue Schardt, In the Margin of the Other (Wed, 4-5:30pET)
Whenever I travel, I try to gather sounds to weave into making a new show, sucking from one margin to pour into the air of anyone who might be listening to WMBR. I’m just back from my first whirlwind visit to Austria and the Czech Republic, and I’m sharing something of what I discovered. You’ll find links to listen and explore the playlist at the end of this post.
It began on a bicycle for most of the first two days I was in Vienna, a city made for bikes. I first went looking for the homes of composers – Beethoven, Mozart, and a stop to gaze up at Sigmund Freud’s office just a few blocks up from Beethoven. It took a lot of figuring the bike rental, so I ran out of time for Schubert. The next day, with the bike rental mastered, I headed to Wiener Zentralfriedhof, the Vienna Central Cemetery. It’s a 45-minute ride to the outskirts of town, and there is a little corner where all of them are buried in a circle: Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Hugo Wolf, Strauss (of the waltzes). Mozart is not there because they couldn’t find his body. He was buried just up the road at St. Marx in an unmarked grave. This was routine for the “common people” (aka not of the aristocracy). It also meant that they put somebody else on top of you every ten years. They couldn’t find what might have been left of him when they went looking, but did put a tall marker on the approximate resting space at St. Marx and a second monument in the middle of the other musical dignitaries at the Central Cemetery.
Then it was off to the sounds of the countryside, about forty minutes by train north of Vienna. I walked into the Church of the Nativity of Mary, a Late-Romanesque church (1210-1230) in Schongrabern to hear the organ tuner was at work. You can hear him at the start of the show. I walked about, listening and looking (and lighting a candle to Mary). There is an amazing gothic fresco of St. Christopher spanning the full height of one wall; across is another fresco depicting the devil trying to tempt another creature (a cat?). Outside in the back of the building, sculptures dating from the 14th and 16th centuries. The tuner would sound some tones from up in the choir loft, then turn and pull pipes off the instrument individually for adjustment, then he’d put them back up.
The other country sound in today’s show is a night bird sounding in Wullersdorf, another village just up the road. I bring the song of this beautiful night bird blended into the sound of Saint George’s church bells tolling at noon time. Another ancient church. I’m staying just across the street, a stone’s throw away from the bell, with the bird on my windowsill in the dark before sunrise and managed to catch just one phrase before he flew off and his song became indistinct.
On the long and meandering drive to Prague, I had a dip in a lake surrounded by a bird sanctuary. More bird sounds for another time. Songs of annoyance at my presence rising from tufts of nesting grass.
I set my sights on two used record stores in Prague, this time walking. It was Saturday, and I soon learned that stores close early that day. Phono.cz wasn’t open. On my way over to Japan Vinyl in the main square, I passed by the theater where Mozart debuted “The Marriage of Figaro” and “Don Giovanni.” They’d locked up by the time I arrived. I took photos of the albums displayed in their window, and have done my research to grab and mix some into today’s mix: Don Tosti and his Trio from “Historic Mexican American Music,” a quite wonderful Frenchman (who sings in English), Eric Chenaux, from 1969, Pete Jolly back to back with the early sounds of Isaac Hayes…1967… beautiful cover.
Without record stores, I had to get creative so I rifled through the quite extensive (and interesting) CD collection collecting dust at the AIRbnb we were staying in. It seemed as though most dated to 2005-2008. My sense is that this was someone’s grandmother’s apartment, and they moved in when she died.
There are ghosts of Nazis throughout Vienna and, in Prague, of the subsequent Communist takeover. A word about the sidewalks on the residential streets in the neighborhood I was staying. The sound of my footfalls, moving up and down across the fat-squared cobblestone sidewalks. Biking not so good in Prague. I began to notice small squares of brass or bronze embedded in the walkways alongside the old apartment buildings lining the streets. Cobblestones pulled out and these small square commemorations of where Jewish people had been taken away to the camps. Each included their name, the date they were taken, the name of the camp. I’ve since learned that this practice began in 1996 Berlin – “Stolpersteine”, or “stumbling stones” are the brainchild of Gunter Demnig. There are now some 70,000 blocks in 1,200 cities, making this the largest decentralized monument in the world.
I began to wonder further about my fantasy grandmother who may have lived where I was staying, how she moved through those times. In the midst of the neighbors, the unthinkable happening in the course of a day, buying bread, doing laundry, making dinner, and the family next door pulled onto the street and taken away.
Here I was, in the present, with music stacked on one of her old shelves. I took photos of about thirty of the CDs and drew them in this “travelogue” mix. The Montreal-based Silver Mount Zion Memorial Orchestra starts us out, and from this culling, there’s Lonely Drifter Karen making her debut in the margin, Irishman Alasdair Roberts, Andre 3000 – though I jumped to the present with a ten-minute live performance he gave earlier this year with Stephen Colbert.
So, whoever you are, Grandchild…wherever you are. I’ll guess you’re nearly forty years old by now, maybe still in Prague, or not. Thank you for your music.
I’ll leave it at that. We’ll begin by sliding into a beautiful cut from Eric Chenaux who makes “conceptual music that’s not meant to be conceptual.” He calls this song “Wild Moon.” So here we go. Into the wilds, into the margin. I’m so glad you’re here. It’s WMBR, Cambridge.
Link to listen to In the Margin of the Other, Verse is here (note first two mins is of preceding show).