Richard Thompson and Friends
Being a folk singer means being a home to all the people who sing through you
The universe wants us to jubilate
Folk genius fills a ballroom in seedy, smelly New Jersey
Some of the oldest written music was melismatic. Melisma — that’s an oozy, radiant musicological word for the technique of singing multiple notes to articulate a single syllable. Think of Joni Mitchell’s sudden soaring on Blue’s penultimate track: I could drink a case of youuu-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oO-OO-Oo, darling — shooting the one-syllable you to the sky with eight extra tones. Think of the vocal acrobatics of a circa-2007 American Idol contestant, or of Bach’s Mass in G Major: Gloria. One word. Three syllables. 21 notes. That’s melisma. Early Christian mystics felt melisma to be the ultimate externalization of spiritual feeling, an irrepressible gushing of holiness. Medieval monks called it “jubilated singing.” Sometimes jubilated singing meant one word was sung with 300 notes. St. Augustine called it “the expression of a mind poured forth in joy.” Augustine’s view proved tenacious. Over time, the tie between joy and jubilating grew so tight that the two terms effectively fused, …
