John, you’ll conduct
Percy, you’ll be on violin
what’s my instrument, Papa?
your instrument is listening, Mary
the greatest instrument of all
you don’t have to point that so close to me
well you keep backing away, silly
how are you supposed to really hear it if you keep backing away into corners
oh
i manage
keep playing, i’m still looking
dont you mean listening
sure
i don’t think you really need me for this
of course we need you
you’re the page turner
but there’s only one page of music
yes but soon we’ll be able to play more than one sheet
we’ll need you to be ready then
also you’re not looking at the page
i really need you to be looking at the page right now
his harp’s not so great
maybe if enough of us crowd onto the piano
it will collapse
and i’ll get to go home
oh
oh that’s
this is good, that’s good
i was just thinking that this rare moment of quiet solitude with a book could really use a fuck ton of lutes to improve it
and Lord
if you can see your way towards denting or in some way rendering this clarinet unplayable
at least until we reach Seville
I promise I will make a pilgrimage on my knees to Rome Herself
Mummy
Mummy there’s men at the door that want to play music at us
you might as well let them in, darling
it’s time you learned that when men want to play music at you
there’s simply no stopping them
and the sooner you get it over with the sooner they leave
bring that bow an inch closer to that vile scratchbox and I’ll see to it that hat of yours goes so far inside you they’ll be picking feathers out of your grave
Maria
Maria we can’t read the music when you hold it up like that
oh
what a shame
this is actually the only way I can hold music, so
oh wow
a shepherd with a lute
a shepherd who wants to play us his music on a lute what a fucking surprise to me
please let me guess
is it a song about your reluctant mistress?
because i swear to fucking God in Shit Heaven I haven’t heard a shepherd sing about his reluctant mistress in at least six Christing hours
i could bash him in the back of the head before he even noticed i was moving
i could say a peddler did it
we could bury him with his harp
“He loved that harp,” i’d say at the service
“it’s only right that we bury him with it”
“damn that peddler”
this book doesn’t even have any words in it
i just want him to think i’m busy
let me play you another one in the Apollonian style and you tell me if you can hear the difference
oh
i’d love to
but just
i need you to keep holding me
that’s so sweet
yes i just can’t get enough of this holding
i’d love to listen to another version of your mountain hymnal but i’m just too in love with you to let go of this arm
well i can play it one-handed
that’s the Corinthian fashion
no i’m going to need you to hold me with all of your hands
maybe
if i am very very lucky
the chandelier will break and kill everyone
and then i can go home
you just keep that little guitar strapped to the back of you
and keep your hands where i can see them, friend
no one’s playing their guitar at me tonight
just keep walking, pal
i could almost reach the gun from here
the deer was lucky
the deer was dead
[Images via Wikimedia Commons]
Tags: artwork, just one more song babe, music, women in western art history
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“and Lord
if you can see your way towards denting or in some way rendering this clarinet unplayable
at least until we reach Seville
I promise I will make a pilgrimage on my knees to Rome Herself”
And yet she apparently has no problem with the bagpipe being played directly behind her head.
A bagpipe is a damn delight compared to a poorly played clarinet.
I once had the dubious privilege of attending a bagpipe concert that had to be moved indoors because of rain. (Ah, Scotland.) I honestly thought my head was going to explode. I could feel the plates of my skull vibrating. I might have lost some teeth.
ETA: I love bagpipes, BTW. Just not in very close proximity to my tender brain parts.
Oh dear! Well then, that’s completely understandable. My condolences for your teeth and skull. Eeeek!
Fun fact: bagpipes were a symbol of fertility in Enlightenment-era art.
I did think that she had some misplaced priorities there.
The post is about music. Bagpipes = not relevant.
Who’s even playing this piano?
I’m pretty sure that’s Liszt and his ten thousand obsessive female fans.
“Obsessive” or “in complete agony”? I guess for some guys it’s hard to tell the difference.
At any rate, the pianist in the chandelier painting is most definitely Schubert.
Obligatory link to picture of young Liszt here.
I’d let him serenade me once or twice.
I’d certainly give an audience to him and his freakishly large hands.
Seriously, a 9th with one hand. Who the fuck does that? Bastard.
There actually appears to be a lady playing at the spinet (or perhaps the clavichord). She is directly behind the gentleman who seems very committed to his singing.
Is it even a piano? But that one woman looks in distress.
“please let me guess
is it a song about your reluctant mistress?
because i swear to fucking God in Shit Heaven I haven’t heard a shepherd sing about his reluctant mistress in at least six Christing hours”
As an English major and a lover of art history, this is the best thing EVER.
This sent me into ecstasies.
But what of the lady with the flower? And her purple-clad girlfriend who seems to think that Sleater-Kinney could totally use a bassist if they could only hear her play?
I don’t usually feel bad for the men in these paintings, but the old man in #5 is SO SAD.
Wait wait wait. Is that Deth? It is! It’s totally Deth waiting for Morgan to show up so he can give him his damn 3-starred harp already.
To be fair, many of them are supposed to be singing (at least according to the “rules” of painting musicians at the time, i.e. they have sheet music and/or their mouths are open)
“christing”
“vile scratchbox”
my hero
Love it, as always. This reminds me — I’m wondering if any of the Toastie academics have a similar problem at conferences, where a group of male attendees will do an “impromptu” performance one night of the conference. It’s always the boring white men playing bad jazz or folk music and they expect an audience and appreciation. Why? Why do they think anyone wants to listen to them?
I bet….I bet it has something to do with penises.
I see you have encountered Penn Jilette’s Bacon & Beer Party at The Amazing Meeting. $20 (in addition to the exorbitant regular con fees at TAM) to listen to him sing songs about his dick — thanks no thanks.
This happened to me recently at a work function. There was a lecture on architecture, and then suddenly an intermission with an impromptu “blues” performance by a few older white gentlemen. It went about as well as you’d expect. Had a been a mere audience member I would have fled in terror, rather than sitting like a deer in headlights with the fakest smile ever plastered on my face, trying to have a small measure of dignity/save my job.
You poor thing. I think I would die in that situation.
I involuntarily just made the most disgusted nose-wrinkling oh-fucken’-hell-no face in a fancy beauty salon and had to quickly compose my features…. BLUES. NO.
Thank God no, but now I will always live in fear of it happening.
It was barely charming in college when all the boys thought they were the next John Mayer … now it’s scarcely tolerable on the most talented and handsome dude in the room.
Yes why does this happen??? Who goes to a genetics conference and has room in their suitcase for a poster AND a guitar?
They still believe “anyway here’s Wonderwall” will get them a lady-person.
I’m a musicologist, and it happens surprisingly little at my conferences. When it does, it’s always rehearsed and advertised in advance, and always very good (you do NOT want to put on a shitty performance at a musicology conference). It helps that a significant percentage of musicologists have also had performance careers (the big difference between us and art history).
Oh my god I have never even heard of that happening at a conference.
But now that you mention it, I know a guy who brought his guitar to AAR this past November. I just assumed he was going to some kind of Thanksgiving hootenanny or something afterwards, so he was forced to schlep his guitar to the conference.
It seems that one of my saving graces may be my ability to interpret things in a more positive way than warranted. Let’s call it happy hermeneutics.
Or not.
OMG. We go to the same conferences.
Those… those adultchildren in #4… I do not like them.
It’s the Disappointed Dachshund face! Known and beloved of Dixie lovers everywhere!
And while we’re at it’ what’s up with goat-dog in the fuck-ton of lutes pic?
I love this series. These are all tremendous. Can’t possibly name a favorite, but the last one was a good way to go out.
let me play you another one in the Apollonian style and you tell me if you can hear the difference`
honestly, i would prefer you put on some underware; you obviously had time this morning to pick this fetching hat but pants were too much to ask?
it’s time you learned that when men want to play music at you
there’s simply no stopping them
and the sooner you get it over with the sooner they leave
FALSE. They will never stop. You can leave the fucking country and men at parties with guitars will still find you. It will never stop.
*sob* please save me from men who are convinced they will Make It As A Rock Star.
“….It’s a cooooooold and it’s a lonely hallelloooooooooyaaaaaa:”
*breaks guitar over my knee*
There is nothing fucking worse than a guy super earnestly playing an instrument at you. Where do you look?! How do you not laugh?! I have literally begged men to stop less than 4 notes into a song, TO NO AVAIL. What is this part of their DNA?!
I had a brief fling with a guy who once started singing to me IN BED. (It was a song from A Very Potter Musical – I still can’t decide if that makes it better or worse.) Like, honey, I appreciate your attempt to impress me with your (imaginary) musical prowess, but I wouldn’t want to listen to you singing in any circumstances, let alone in bed when there are much better things you could be doing with your mouth.
I had a guy in college once stand up immediately after we made out, go get his electric guitar, and start playing it at me very very badly. I just stood there like a deer in the headlights trying not to laugh. It was the death knell for our barely nascent relationship.
I dated a guy for 3.5 years who, post breakup, moved briefly to L.A. to be (I am not shitting you, this was his bio on tumblr) “a bard, a storyteller, and a gamer.” Early in the relationship, he tried to serenade me several times and I SHUT. IT. DOWN. He had a decent singing voice, and could play guitar passingly well, but good LORD. Not in public, sir, are you MAD?!
I mean, clearly I was the mad one, because I let that go on for several years, but hey I was 18. My friends told me post-breakup that they had foisted him on me in order to get him off another (better, apparently) friend’s back. I already liked him but they added fuel to the fire on PURPOSE.
Honestly. College. Feh.
What a moron. Everyone knows Vermont is the place to go be a bard, storyteller, and gamer.
Ugh, I even liked a guy who did this at me right before we started dating and I just barely managed to keep a straight face when this happened. We were in a choral group together in college, but his singing voice was really weird, and one of the best parts of my breaking up with him five long years later was the relief I felt at not pretending that I liked it anymore.
I will see the giant-headed children with unblinking eyes from #1 in my nightmares tonight. And every night thereafter.
Oh hey! Today’s Poorly Drawn Lines is relevant!
Quick pendantic note (pun intended), That’s not a clarinet, it’s a shawm and ancestor to the modern oboe. That poor woman is being subjected to the torture of being aurally bombarded with TWO double reeded instruments intended for loud outdoor playing and now she probably has hearing damage. Ugh, men.
Eddy Merckx once won a time trial stage in the Giro d’Italia while trying to escape from a shawm player following him on a motorcycle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nt5KX__G778
OK I just died
This. Is. Amazing.
Given how few of the lutes in #7 are lutes, I’m just assuming that Mallory takes the same attitude towards musical instruments as towards textile arts.
Yeah, there’s definitely only one lute there (and surprisingly accurate bow-holds on the viols, kudos).
Good points all around
I was waiting for someone to explain what the vicar’s harp *actually* is, because I am mostly sure it isn’t a harp. It does seem to be made from a femur though.
And let’s be real, a shawm is much more painful to listen to than a clarinet, all other things being equal.
Is it a shawm or a piffero? (Is a piffero a kind of shawm? I’m not as up on my double reeds as I should be.) Pifferi are often accompanied by bagpipes, I know, and they still play them in Italy.
It IS a piffero which is a type of Catalonian shawm. Good eye! Basically it’s a bagpipe minus the bag and drones and per Wikipedia belongs to a family of instruments called “bombarde.”
How appropriate B)
I was going to comment as same but I knew someone else would likely have already done it, so you earn an adoring look from me.
Signed, Player of Two Double-Reed Instruments
The dude in the last one has some excellent leg-warmers, but I’m concerned his ankles will be cold.
“damn that peddler”
i could say a peddler did it
we could bury him with his harp
“He loved that harp,” i’d say at the service
“it’s only right that we bury him with it”
Something this post has made me realize is that we do not have nearly enough novels about unrepentant, cool-headed lady-murderers.
It’s not a novel, but that picture immediately put my in mind of the song by Lorenz Hart, which has to be sung by Ella Fitzgerald in total jauntiness. There are many other fine murders committed in this song:
Sir Philip played the harp;
I cussed the thing.
I crowned with his harp
to bust the thing.
And now he plays where harps are
just the thing,
To keep my love alive,
To keep my love alive.
This is one of my favorite show tunes ever; it is pure delight. And Ella does indeed have the best version of everything.
Sir Paul was a frail;
he looked a wreck to me.
At night he was a horse’s neck to me
So I performed an appendectomy
To keep my love alive!
“Tell the lute-guy that if he keeps tuning that thing around us, they will never find the body.”
http://es.wahooart.com/Art.nsf/O/8Y3GNA/$File/The…
Some of those dogs are surprisingly good at giving intense side-eye. The ones in #7 and #12 in particular.
I see she’s given him a bit of a black eye with that wordless book. Can’t say I disapprove.
These “women in art” posts are my spirit animal.
A bagpipe is a damn delight compared to a poorly played clarinet.
Whatever may be said of his skill as a lyrist, one can’t deny that Phrygian Cap Boy’s plan worked like a charm.
The woman in #6 who is rolling her eyes so hard that she looks dead? I love her. I want to be her. She is the ur-Liz Lemon.
There should really be an Anyway Here’s Wonderwall tag.
Yessssssssssss.
the greatest instrument of all (?)
Not enough anatomically impossible bowed-string playing, is what I say. (The boy in No. 1 is holding his bow really high up, but he’s a child, and it is a theoretically possible bow-hold, so I’ll let it pass.)
Also, he and his siblings have astonishingly large heads.
I hadn’t noticed that, and now I can’t unsee it. Your head should not be bigger than your violin, kid.
I mean, it’s not his fault, but it’s certainly a misfortune. Hopefully they’ll all grow into their noggins.
bring that bow an inch closer to that vile scratchbox and I’ll see to it that hat of yours goes so far inside you they’ll be picking feathers out of your grave
I feel delight and affection for your work from a safe and respectful distance.
The faces on the page-turner one are going to haunt my nightmares pretty much forever.
Okay wait, the chandelier image is of Schubert (rosy cheeks! curls!) at a Schubertiade! I am in full support of the aims, messages, and transcendent insight of this series, but I suspect that it would be a very rare woman who could yawn at Schubert playing Schubert. The woman in the frilly white shawl is clearly telling dude in the doorway to stop breathing up the delicious Schubert air.
You’re totally right! And I want to be part of that scene (not many things could convince me to time-travel, especially to early-19th-century Vienna, but the chance to attend a Schubertiade might be one of them).
Schubert is one of the girls
The sad harpist is so sad that no one is listening to him!
Honourable mention to the lady in green having an orgasm behind the piano.
if only these dragons weren’t busy being the walls
Everything in her face says, “UGH, STOP ALREADY.” She’s even throwing her book over her shoulder in disgust.
Me too, I understand– In my situation it was a naked, self-satisfied guy wielding a guitar like it was an extension of his cock. An utter crime against humanity. Can remember lying there naked with my nipples shrinking into themselves (I commend their attempt to hide), and then my eye started twitching. It nearly ruined the Cure for me. I mean if you’re gonna play something terribly, choose a terrible song from a terrible band. Bludgeoning the work of a great band just adds insult to injury.
I'm having a similar conversation with someone at the moment. He keeps asking if I've read his novel. I keep pretending messenger is broken.
Re: Let Me Play You One in the Apollonian Style: It reminds me of one day when I got a call from the director of a museum who was putting together an exhibit of ancient Greek manuscripts, art, whatever (I’ve forgotten, it was a long time ago.) She wanted to know if I knew a lyre player. The only thing I could tell her was that as far as I know, the last one died about 2,000 years ago.
Then explain THIS!
![]()
maybe
if i am very very lucky
the chandelier will break and kill everyone
and then i can go home
Why is she not throwing herself across the piano? THAT’S SCHUBERT AT THE KEYS. If she won’t then I will.
Hahahaha, "the well-I-never guy".
Yes. Just…yes.