GG and Iceland

[Bradley P Lehman <bpl@UMICH.EDU>]

Elmer-Bob wrote:

>When I was involuntarily and grudgingly forced to attend mandatory
>college, a retired priest who did not strike me as a repository of Wild
>Thrills forced us to read "Njal's Saga." I braced myself for another
>tremendously boring literary classic experience, but WOW! It was the most
>thrilling, lurid, colorful, swashbuckling, violent adventure of
>protracted family revenge I'd ever read! It's still very near the top of
>my Great Books List. And most of the places where the noisy, bloody events
>of circa 1000 took place (including a spectacularly wild account of the
>conversion to Christianity) are still there -- Iceland isn't prone to rapid
>change or overdevelopment.

I remember listening to a book-on-tape from our public library, some guy
telling some of the Icelandic folk tales.  One of the most interesting was
a long involved thing with elves and trolls and whatnot, explaining why
churches face the opposite direction in Iceland.

>Too bad Gould doesn't seem to have ended up there. Unexpected visits to
>screwy places like that must have been one of the few perqs of his
>concert career he looked back on with nostalgia. I've been to his Hudson Bay
>wilderness haunts and agree with everybody that Iceland would definitely
>have been his cuppa tea. The English artist William Morris took a
>youthful visit to Iceland, and it inspired his art for the rest of his life.
>(If anybody says, "Oh, the wallpaper guy?" consider yourself whacked on the
>knuckles.)

Hey, I had some of Morris' designs as my Windows wallpaper for a while
about a year ago.  I learned about those from a CD "Music For William
Morris" that includes some of Gibbons' keyboard music, played by Martin
Souter.  The CD was evidently for some Morris retrospective exhibition.

My favorite Icelandic CD (I have at least 25, of various things) is "The
Hamrahlid Choir" with a cappella works by Nordal, Leifs, Sveinsson, and
others.  Haunting (and sort of like Sibelius' choral music).  And that led
me to collect a bunch of individual discs of Leifs' works.  Weird, wild
stuff.  "Dance of the Subhumans" in "Baldr"...weird, wild stuff.

This "Edda" CD is pretty good, too, diametrically different from Leifs:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00000IFOM/

It's about 3000% better than the strange promotional Coca-Cola CD of
Christmas music (about half in Icelandic).  Boy, there's a novelty.

The BIS CD "An Anthology of Icelandic Choir Music" is good, too, and a
disc of solo Icelandic violin music played by Rut Ingolfsdottir....

I got most of those discs after the Iceland stopover; the several discs
from the airport, and the landscape, and the storytelling all hooked me to
want to know more.


Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://i.am/bpl  or  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
CD's: http://listen.to/bpl or http://www.mp3.com/bpl

"Music must cause fire to flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks
from the clavier...." - Alfred Cortot