Adrian Daub’s “But Who Tells Them What To Sing?” is an investigation of the history of Hollywood film choruses — not obvious LH material, but as it turns out there are some passages of Hattic interest:
As the soprano Catherine Bott said: “You enter a studio and you open the score and off you go. You sing what you’re told, and it’s all about versatility, just being able to adapt to the right approach, whatever that may be for that conductor or that composer.” And part of that, singers told me, was singing the words — whatever they may be. As Donald Greig pointed out to me, a lot of these singers have training in classics; they certainly know their way around a Requiem or a Stabat Mater. And yet often enough when they step into Abbey Road they’re being asked to sing perfectly nonsensical phrases in pseudo-Latin — but the studio is booked, the clock is ticking, and as Bott put it, “that’s not the time to put up your hand and, you know, correct the Latin.” […]
Interestingly enough, early in this long tradition of made-up languages, Hollywood felt the need to pretend that it did mean something. When Lost Horizon was released in 1937, Columbia Pictures claimed in its publicity material that Dimitri Tiomkin’s score “includes authentic folk songs of Tibet.” The same press sheet noted that the Hall Johnson Choir, a popular gospel choir, “will sing the folk song arrangements in the native Tibetan language.”
Film music historians agree that this is hogwash. There is no evidence Tiomkin researched Tibetan folk songs for his score — what the ad men were selling as “authentic folk songs” were almost certainly newly written pieces in a made-up language. Tiomkin had started out as a concert pianist and relied on a small army of orchestrators to turn his melodies into actual playable scores. Someone in that group put a pen to paper and wrote these pieces, and either that same person or someone else seems to have made up some fake Tibetan text to distribute to the singers. […]
I grew up on Hollywood films in dubbed versions — though those didn’t typically dub the music. Meaning, as a kid who didn’t speak English, I became pretty used to following a plot in German, then the music would swell and I’d sort of tune out for a few minutes as the soundtrack, and the English language, washed over me. I’d get the basic idea of course — the characters were happy, or sad, or patriotic — but I had no idea what they were saying, and I was okay with that.
That’s sort of how most of us feel when we listen to the theme to the 21st-century version of Battlestar Galactica — unless we happen to be familiar with the mantras of the Rig Veda. Still, it’s a culturally specific experience. These days we can’t watch fantasy or science fiction without being sung at in Sanskrit, Old Norse, Dwarvish, Elvish, Uruk-hai, Klingon, and so on. When composer John Williams returned to the Star Wars universe for 1999’s The Phantom Menace, he composed an amped-up piece for the final duel — and over its churning ostinatos he overlaid a chorus belting out a … Sanskrit translation of a Welsh poem. And apparently the syllables of the Sanskrit text were rearranged to the point of incomprehensibility. Clearly, these shows and movies are not addressing us as potential speakers of Klingon or Sanskrit or even Welsh — they’re interested in the feel and a sound of a language rather than its meaning. At one recording session, Donald Greig told me, “they spent ages telling us how to pronounce the Russian and then we realized, ‘well this doesn’t actually mean anything.’” This turns out to be both a pretty new and pretty old way of listening to music. […]
After all, unlike a humming chorus, a Latin chorus does create extra levels of meaning for those who want to listen more carefully. Composer Jerry Goldsmith wrote “Ave Satani” for The Omen as a deliberate transposition of various Catholic masses. While the individual Latin may have been hard to pick up on (and wasn’t entirely correct to boot), listeners who were Catholic likely would have recognized what was being inverted here, given that they’d spent most Sundays around the actual Latin texts. It’s not clear how seriously Goldsmith (or the choirmaster who jotted down the Latin lyrics for the composer) grappled with that dimension of the score — for one thing, the very title of the piece messes up the declension of Satan. But that dimension was there nonetheless — The Omen was part of a kind of religious revival in Hollywood, and though it plays as camp today it was taken far more seriously then. […]
This gets a lot more troubling in the case of the phrase “Nants ingonyama bagithi baba,” likely one of the most repeated, parodied, and bowdlerized lines of text in any soundtrack. It’s clear that it isn’t addressing the average viewer with the intention of being understood. The very fact that it is in Zulu, but the story of The Lion King appears to take place in the Serengeti, thousands of miles to the north, suggests that the language is here to signal one thing and one thing only: African-ness.
For contrast, look at the way composer Michael Abels’ score for Jordan Peele’s Get Out features Swahili voices: Outside of the considerable number of Swahili speakers in the world, most people watching Get Out won’t know what the singers are saying. But what they’re saying does matter, in a way: Literally “listen to your ancestors,” but as a saying meaning something kind of like “you’re about to be in danger.” The viewer who doesn’t understand this line is missing an important warning about what is to come in the film. As is, of course, the film’s African American protagonist who cannot listen (or at least understand) his ancestors. Peele and Abels manage to wring from this small decision a whole range of subtle points.
He ends with a thoughtful account of the use of Goethe’s “Wandrers Nachtlied” at the end of the 2008 film Valkyrie (“The strange thing is: I am pretty sure Goethe’s ‘Nachtlied’ is the first utterance in actual German in this film about Germany”). Though it has nothing to do with movies, this seems a good place to add that the lyrics of the Talking Heads’ “I Zimbra,” while based on Hugo Ball’s poem “Gadji beri bimba,” are heavily “adapted” — for instance, the titular phrase does not occur in Ball, who has “i zimzalla” and “im zimbrabim.” It’s a nice question to what extent the butchering of a meaningless text is reprehensible.
The challenges to both singers and composers, especially now that they strive to at least “sound genuine”! Of course they are Hattily interesting.
This post reminds me of the well known Charlie Chaplin film (I forget the title) in which he is a singing waiter who forgets his words and i mprovises meaningless lines using French words.
“Se bella giu satore.”
(The comments include the French original of “Je cherche après Titine.”)
“Ave Satani” is wrong straight away. I have no desire to discover more.
Rubbish pseudo-Latin is sadly common among English-language SF and fantasy authors who seem unaware that Latin is an actual language, and that you can’t just string dictionary items together and expect it to be correct (or more likely, they Just Don’t Care, and insultingly assume that the reader doesn’t care either, and is equally ignorant.)
The best counterexample to this lamentable tendency is (naturally enough) Ada Palmer.
I’ve always been irritated by the Swahili in The Lion King. Somebody all too evidently thought, “It’s African! Let’s have words in The African Language, to show how enlightened we are!” It’s like throwing in bits of Armenian to add verisimilitude to your account of the South Wales collieries.
What is this alleged Welsh poem that the alleged John Williams allegedly translated into bad Sanskrit for the alleged Phantom Menace? Does it actually exist anywhere outside a PR handout?
a part of why i like my favorite piano player at the piano bar i frequent* is her refusal to let anyone butcher the isiZulu in Circle of Life**. instead, for the chorus parts, we sing “pink pajamas, penguins on the bottom”, which probably comes from drunken riffing lost in the mists of time…
.
* though not recently: despite the owners’ decision to re-open, drinking heavily and singing in a crowded basement is, well, somewhere between ill-advised and deadly, depending on how many tourists are lying about their vaccinations that day)
** a song, and show, i’m not fond of, aside from its important role as one of the few ways for black performers to build up the broadway credits that they need to get steady broadway/off-broadway/touring work, and its excellent puppetry design.
Romanes eunt domus!
It’s like throwing in bits of Armenian to add verisimilitude to your account of the South Wales collieries.
Armenian and Hebrew as stand-ins for Kazakh are fine, when the speakers are fluent and oh so very shameless.
All I remember from the movie Lawrence of Arabia is the Heathen Orientals calling him “Orrence”, for some reason, and a mob of Swarthy Sons of the Desert shouting “[ʔakaba]! [ʔakaba]!” instead of [ʕagaba] or such.
“…over the local cries and the shrilling of women came the measured roar of men’s voices, chanting, ‘Feisal, Nasir, Shukri, Urens’, in waves…”
Seven Pillars, 1935 text, 1.xi.18, p. 668
I was reading a popular article by Leanne Hinton recently describing something like this among California Indian singers. In one case, a Havasupai song stretches three-syllable phrases into six-syllable lines by apparentl just adding a bunch of random-looking syllables between words: nyaj evah gets stretched to venyajo evaha.
All I remember from the movie Lawrence of Arabia
“Orrence”, at least, is authentic-ish: his hosts reinterpreted the L- in his name as the Arabic definite article and named him “Awrans”.
Why wouldn’t they keep the l-, as in (if I may) your name?
(Dept. of nitpick: the Havasupai are in Arizona.)
Surprisingly many Arabic speakers insist on calling me Amin, no matter how I introduce myself. (I don’t particularly object to that pronunciation, but it really annoys my mother.)
“As is, of course, the film’s African American protagonist who cannot listen (or at least understand) his ancestors.” This seems to contain an extremely dubious assumption that if only the fellow knew Swahili like his ancestors he would understand the warning. The median African-American, of course, has African ancestors who overwhelmingly-to-exclusively came from parts of Africa thousands of miles to the west of the part of the continent where Swahili was/is commonly spoken as either an L1 or L2. At least as far away as the setting of the Lion King is from where Zulu is spoken, I should think. It’s a large and linguistically diverse continent.
OTOH, the “African American protagonist” character, named Chris Washington, is apparently played by an actor named Daniel Kaluuya, who was born and raised in England and whose parents immigrated thence from Uganda. So the actor himself is substantially more likely to have had ancestors who understood Swahili than the character would have.
Obviously by some point in the 1960’s Swahili had become for whatever contingent reasons having to do with the politics of the day a go-to symbolic pan-African language for many Americans (both with and without African ancestry of their own), with the lack of any historical connection to the actual African ancestors of most actual African-Americans apparently not being thought at the time to be a problem.
I remember reading that in the first Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan film, the cast just made up nonsense words, but one of them turned out to be an obscenity in some language, so the studio told them they had to speak a real language and hired someone who knew Swahili to write their lines. Not that they ever said much in Swahili, except to the elephants, as I recall. Those films were rather vague as to exactly what part of Africa they were in.
A snippet of “Cad Goddeu” via Robert Graves, apparently.
Was I the only one brought up short by Daub’s, “the phrase ‘Nants ingonyama bagithi baba,’ likely one of the most repeated, parodied, and bowdlerized lines of text in any soundtrack”? I mean, that’s not even the most repeated and parodied line in an African language from that movie! (That would be “hakuna matata,” in Swahili.) Reading that bizarre claim about The Lion King immediately triggered my If he writes something that is that obviously false to an inexpert observer, how much can the rest of what he writes be trusted? alarm.
TV Tropes has it all and more.
Contrast:
||: Ecce homo
qui est faba :||
@Tim May:
Thanks!
The source in The White Goddess aligns nicely with John Williams’ general intellectual spuriousness …
The Welsh poem is from the pseudepigrapha fathered on the real Taliesin in the Llyfr Taliesin. I would like to track down the closing “obscure reference to metalwork”, but I’ve only got Ifor Williams’s edition of (what he regarded as) the genuine poems of the historical Taliesin.
There is some pop song in pseudo-Latin for which some Turkish students made a parody video that is put to use in internet memes. Every year a few of my new students ask me to translate the lyrics for them… They always look crestfallen when I tell them it is just nonsense.
I love the following comment on the YouTube parody, from Tarık PM:
Sanskrit done right in this extremely moving film ending, in which the following Vedic mantra is heard:
(Vajasaneyi Samhita 31.18)
By the way, for LH readers who might not know him, bass-baritone Donald Grieg is an extremely fine singer, by the way. Here is one of my favorite performances of his.
there is no other way to the Supreme Goal
With my rusty Sanskrit I can figure out that नान्यः पन्थाः विद्यते (na anyaḥ panthāḥ vidyate) is ‘no other way is found’; where’s the Supreme Goal?
@Xerib: I think I heard Ameno a hundred times on radio and TV, but I didn’t know that it just had a nonsense text. So thanks for the illumination!
where’s the Supreme Goal?
No, this is the Supreme Goal.
Where’s the Supreme Goalie ? The Anti-Maradona, that is ?
Apologies for the confusing post. The word yanāya should be ’yanāya. I forgot the apostrophe to represent the avagraha symbol ऽ. The translation is a loose one I quickly pasted from the internet to represent how it is usually taken by those who recite it. The word that this translation is rendering as “to the Supreme Goal” is ayanāya, which I take as a dative of end or purpose of ayana- “going, advancement, progress; a way, path” (second column, middle of page, here):
Your post wasn’t confusing at all, my Sanskrit just wasn’t up to it! Thanks for the explanation.
So, this “going” that evidently refers to the “passing over death” in the preceding sentence was reinterpreted as “to the Supreme Goal”? Looks like there’s a lot of history of religion in there.
But what of the Supreme Goat?
@Stu Clayton: I’m anything but a football reference, but I believe the consensus candidate for Supreme Goalie remains Lev Yashin.
But what of the Supreme Goat?
Just another name for Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods, the Goat with a Thousand Young….
@John Cowan: Interestingly, it’s not actually clear whether Lovecraft originally intended Shub-Niggurath to be the “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!” The two are just phrases that appeared together in a repeated chant in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1931). The phrase “Iä! Shub-Niggurath!” had previously appeared in 1928 in “The Dunwich Horror,” but there is no indication of its meaning there. In light of the frequently description of Wilbur Whateley as “goatish” in “The Dunwich Horror,” a most natural candidate for the black goat is Yog-Sothoth, who certainly does have many offspring.
The first mention of the goat is in a recording of an eldritch ritual that the narrator of “The Whisperer in Darkness” hears:
Subsequent verses also mention Azathoth and Nyarlathotep,* but of Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, Yog-Sothoth is notably omitted from the ritual chant—unless Yog-Sothoth is “Him Who is not to be Named,” in which case the “Black Goat of the Woods” could be a sobriquet used in place of Yog-Sothoth’s taboo name.
Evidently, either Lovecraft himself or (more likely, I think) somebody else eventually decided to make “Shub-Niggurath” the proper name of the entity also referred to as “The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young” Whether this originated as a misunderstanding, Lovecraft himself did subsequently endorse the identification. (He grew somewhat dismissive in his later years of his use of made-up occult names—calling the writing that emphasized them “Yog-Sothothery”—and was, in any case, moving in a more science fiction direction in many of his last writings.)
* Besides his own creations, Lovecraft mentions a number of his correspondents’ (and others’) creations elsewhere in the story, although in contexts in which it is not clear which which of the mentioned entities are actually real,
There are a bunch of threads that mention Lawrence of Arabia, but this seemed the best place to drop this comment. It’s about a couple of linguistic matters that have arisen as I have been rereading The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
My best friend Scott likes Auda Abu Tayi, or at least Anthony Quinn’s portrayal of him in the film. Once, when complemented on treating his graduate students well, Scott responded with, “I am a river to my people!” At Auda’s first meal after Lawrence meets him, this bizarre event occurred:
I was texting Scott about this, and, by way of introduction, I mentioned that I was rereading “Lawrence of Arabia’s book.” However, since this was on my phone, I took advantage of autocomplete. I got as far as “Lawr” and it suggested “Lawrence,” so I selected that. Among the suggestions for the next word was “of”; I tapped that too. Then the AI behind the autocomplete made a hilarious error. “Arabia” was nowhere to be seen in the set of suggestions for the following word. The only country among them was “Indonesia.”
I can sort of imagine what the algorithm was “thinking.” Its training data has been interpreted as containing “Lawrence of [Muslim country]”; “Muslim country” itself is shorthand here for one of a number of proper names that tend to show up in parallel contexts. It “knows” Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country, so it suggests that. Still, I thought it was pretty funny.
The second linguistic point was something from the book itself. As Auda is leading troops north to join the rest of his tribe for their planned attack on Aqaba, they naturally stay away from the main caravan paths. This means the troops pass through all sorts of rough volcanic terrain, which Lawrence describes vividly. However, this particular sentence especially jumped out at me as particularly outre:
I’m not quite sure what image Lawrence was trying to convey with tesseract, but my best guess is he was thinking of depictions of a hypercube as a collection of eight distorted cubes pressed face-to-face up against one-another.
Wonderful! I really have to reread that book — it’s been too long.
I’m not quite sure what image Lawrence was trying to convey with tesseract
I take him to be evoking a tiled floor, a mosaic – “stone tight to stone”. Indoor paving-stones. A tessera is a tile.
Is “tesseract” is a typesetting error for “tesserae” ? Or maybe “tesseract” was sometimes used to describe a particular kind of mosaic pattern. Some mosaics look more “geometric” than others.
@Stu Clayton: I thought maybe there was another meaning to tesseract, but the OED doesn’t know of any meaning other than “hypercube.” It does note the word is sometimes used figuratively; A Wrinkle in Time would be an example of that.
A misprint or an error on Lawrence’s part is possible, but I think it’s unlikely. His writing contains frequent odd comparisons and metaphors, such as comparing certain attitudes to the upas tree. This just seemed to me to be another of those peculiarities.
It’s just a transcription error in the Project Gutenberg Australia etext. Other editions (e.g.) have “tesserae”.
What I remember about Auda, other than that Lawrence liked him, is that Lawrence refused to allow his Arabic transcriptions to be made consistent. So at one point there’s the name Suda, which I felt sure was a typo for Auda—but the index obediently has an entry for Suda.
I spell my names anyhow, to show what rot the systems are.
@Tim May: Too bad, I guess, although “tesserae” is almost as good as “tesseract.” I suppose that, since I knew about the spelling variations that Jerry Friedman and languagehat (and John Cowan earlier) mentioned, I had gotten out of the habit, while reading Lawrence, of thinking things might be actual unintentional mistakes.
@Hat: Too bad the reviewer didn’t query “Suda” so we’d know something about how far Lawrence was willing to go.
Yeah, I suspect he would have said “For heaven’s sake, that’s a bloody typo! Don’t you people have any sense?”
There’s no point in being consistently inconsistent.
Three years later, and “this video is no longer available” 🙁
Top comments:
“Such an iconic moment in volleyball history.”
“Diego Maradona when he was asked what he wanted for his 60th birthday:
‘I dream of being able to score another goal against England, this time with the right hand!’
RIP Maradona.”
“Maradona eliminated the English single handedly..”
Given that Lawrence did not type, I’m a ltlle surprised that whatever typist read that as “Suda” in his manuscript didn’t just correct it.
Maybe the typist saw an A and typed an S without noticing.