my favourite kind of oddity
Tonight I attended a concert given by Viva Voce, a professional vocal ensemble in which my good friend D sings soprano. They’re classical singers, which usually means music written and composed by dead white guys, and audiences who are close to being the same. OK, so that’s not quite accurate, but let’s just say it’s a very Westmount crowd and I’m usually the only person in the room with more than one hole per ear.
Needless to say, I did not expect the evening’s entertainment to include sexual references, let alone explicit ones explained by Peter Schubert, the choir director, before the song in question.
I don’t know if I can quite do it justice here, but I’ll try. The concert theme was "The Art of the Fugue," so fugues were the main feature of the program. Please don’t ask me to explain the technical details accurately; Encarta defines it as "a musical form in which a theme is first stated, then repeated and varied with accompanying contrapuntal lines." In other words, "Frère Jacques" on crack.
In one particular song, which Peter told us was a drinking song (?!) written in 1798 (definitely a cut above "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall"!), the lyrics and music, especially the pauses, were arranged in such a fashion that at certain points, various words from different lines combined to create the sentence "drink to her commodity." Which might not seem particularly scandalous until you learn, as I did, that commodity, according to the Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, is defined as "the private parts of a modest woman, and the public parts of a prostitute."
Here are the full lyrics, kindly provided in the program:
"Juliet is pretty, she has charms to boast. Come fill a bumper, let her be the toast. Juliet is witty, and well deserves a glass; fill, fill and drink to her, she’s a lovely lass. Her sister’s rather younger and lately got a spouse, altho’ she is an oddity, as ev’rybody knows."
That’s it. Now just picture the words in bold sung in just the right order by three different voices, and you get what’s going on.
There you have it, folks. Montreal’s renowned professional vocal ensemble can now be credited for educating me about pervy 200-year-old drinking songs and giving me one more synonym for "cunt" to add to my list.
‘Twas a scandalous night indeed. Needless to say I put my name in for the draw for 2007-2008 season tickets. You never know when you’ll come across a gem like that. And they sing good, too.