Transferral, transition, transfixion, transcendence...

Following the suggestion of Rullsenberg, I have set up a free account at Last.fm and have spent the last three days "life-boating" songs from my list at my soon-to-be-no-more station at Launchcast, the one I've been building up for over five years. This may take some time; I have over 15,000 songs rated at Launchcast, and although many are duplicated, quadruplicated and more (depending on how many albums they show up on), I don't know if I will make it through the songs I actually like by the 15th.

While I transfer, I've been slowly working out how Last.fm works. I'm not allowed to say how much I like a song, album or artist, for example. I can either "love it", simply save it to my station without comment, or ban it, whereas at Lauchcast, I had the option of rating something up to five stars (or banning it), or in my case, rating out of one hundred. Last.fm has the interesting feature of embedding YouTube videos at the individual song sites. At least, it does for some people. I tried linking several times when I saw no video available although I knew of one at YouTube. I entered the URL, a green icon came up, saying "Video added". Yet, when I checked later, still no video was there. I wonder if I have to have a paid subscription or something...

One of these was for the devastating second movement of Henryk Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. This piece has been much on my mind as I've been viewing a repeat of the documentary series Auschwitz: The Nazis & the 'Final Solution'. (I was watching the British version narrated by Samuel West; the one shown on PBS had Linda Hunt doing the narration.) Every time they launched into a heartrending description of slaughter, it was signaled either by Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel, or by the opening chords of the second movement of the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. My elder daughter, working at her homework while I sat in horror by the television set, turned and asked: "Why do they always play this music when someone is dying?" She didn't just mean the documentary. Both pieces figure in the screen version of Wit, starring Emma Thompson as a John Donne scholar succumbing to ovarian cancer. (As an aside, if you haven't seen Wit, you must. The play won a Pulitzer Prize. I've seen both the play and the movie. They're not easy viewing, but they're transcendent in every sense of the word.)

I gave elder daughter a quick and inadequate history of both pieces of music, and later discovered she had saved a YouTube video of the Gorecki piece to her account.
Here it is:
When I hear it, I find myself transfixed where I am. The opening chords are based on a Polish folk melody, but brim with the spirit of youth. Then an oppressive chord on the strings takes over, and over it the soprano starts, very low: "Mama.....don't cry...." As I understand it, Henryk Górecki heard of a prison in southern Poland where, amongst the hundreds of messages scratched on the wall by prisoners facing torture and death by the Nazis, there was a poignant message from Helena Wanda Błażusiakówna who was imprisoned there in late 1944: "O Mamo nie płacz nie—Niebios Przeczysta Królowo Ty zawsze wspieraj mnie" (Oh Mamma do not cry—Immaculate Queen of Heaven support me always)
He said that among all the messages of fear, anger, despair, this simple message from an eighteen-year-old girl really stood out, in its lack of self-concern. There seems to be evidence that Helena Wanda survived her ordeal and married a Roman Pawlik, but the vast majority of Nazi prisoners didn't. So I sit when this music begins, unable to move, thinking of the children led into the Nazi abattoirs, with and without their mothers, and of the children being exploited, tortured, murdered today. I'm really glad Helena Wanda's mum got her back.