Re: Doorbell dilemma

[Joshua Horowitz <horowitz...>]

-- Budowitz Home Page: http://www.merlinms.dircon.co.uk/budowitz/


All the info on Big Ben has been great. Helen Winkler, Tom Payne and Steve
Barnett, Jeffrey Miller, Thanks!

Fagin's song from Oliver sounds more to me like it stems from the La
cucaracha melody family, though have you noticed how it connects to the tune
"Vobistu vor Prohibition" which Brandwein recorded, but which was earlier
known simply as a Freylakh (it's still played as the token Jewish tune by
the tsimbl orchestra of Kolomeja). The "Who will buy"melody uses a minor
pentatonic mode, but if you follow the melody closely, it's suspiciously
similar to "Summertime." Josh


> There's a possible other link between London street sounds and Jewish music,
> that's been intriguing me. Meanwhile:
>
> I don't imagine that Big Ben was the first clock to sound like that (although
> actually Big Ben is the name of the bell itself, named, according to the
> encyclopedia next to me, after Sir Benjamin Hall, who had it installed when
> he was commissioner of works at Westminster Palace).
>
> The only reason I can think of for it sounding like that is that you had to
> have four notes. Carillon, claims the OED, is derived from the Low Latin word
> quadrilion, a group of four bells. And these four notes are arranged in the
> Westminster clock to provide a text-book four-phrase motif, with a statement
> going to the dominant, popping back up again, descending again in a slightly
> different order (perhaps to mimic the 'changes' of bell-ringers eager to
> demonstrate how many combinations of bells they can manage) and then
> returning to the tonic in an identical manner to that first return.
>
> I've heard them in Vierne; they come up in a few other pieces by British
> composers too, but I've forgotten what they are.
>
> Link - I'm curious about Lionel Bart's use of London street music. The song
> in 'Oliver' -'Who will buy this wonderful feeling?' springs from a genuine
> flowerselling catch, heard as late as the 1940s. Given that Bart was here
> being openly, indeed stylishly lightfingered himself, is it too much to
> suggest that Fagin's song 'I'm reviewing the situation' is jolly similar to
> 'Bai Mir Bistu Shen'? And if that's fair, has Lionel Bart used other
> traceably Jewish melodies?
>
> Tom Payne
>
>
> 

---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+