getting PHYSICAL with the sort of parlour celtic music Martin Henry Dawson grew up with

I like a little Celtic fiddle music as much as the next guy but I do not regard the fiddle as  representative of the main flow of Celtic Music from ancient times till today, not by a long long, long shot.

Maybe its because I am a historian by bent or maybe its because I am not a instrumentalist.

See the problem is that I could not help but notice that from ancient times, the official symbol of ALL celtic life was not a lion or a sword but rather a musical instrument  - and at that, a harp not a fiddle.

It remains the official symbol today, see everything in Ireland in the commercial world and on the coat of arms of Ireland, the UK and yes even my native Canada !

As a historian this told me that traditionalists in Celtic Music, so focused on fast fiddle dance tunes, were actually emulating only the Modern Era in Celtic Music - the 300 years since the upscale Italian violin moved down into poorer rural Celtic circles.

They were ignoring the thousands of years, before and after the rise of the fiddle,  when the most popular music to Celts was a vocal song.

Even skilled instrumentalists find it difficult to successfully hum, whistle or scat sing a fast complex wide ranging instrumental melody.

But the typical vocal melody is both slow enough and of limited pitch range that it is easy to remember and hum, greatly helped by the sense of the words and story enabling one to better remember the tune.

 Further I say that all over the world and all over the course of human history, singers have found it easiest and best to self-accompany themselves —- and that they did so by strumming and plucking a stringed instrument : a lyre, a harp, a lute and today a guitar.

Not singing while blowing through a wind or brass instrument, beating a drum or playing a fiddle.

(But maybe while playing a cello like instrument, playing a keyboard, or hitting a small drum.)

One can blow and then sing, its tiring but possible, but one can not blow and sing at the same time.

That leaves all wind and brass instruments out of the singers’ domain straight away.

Now one can pound a big drum and sing, just as one can play a fiddle and sing but to the listener neither sounds very good.

The problem is physical : a loud drum, even if played two feet below a singer’s mouth simply has too wide a sound spectrum and is far too loud to allow the needed separation between singers’ words and supporting accompaniment.

The fiddle, even played on the chest is simply too close to the vocalists’ mouth and is too close to the overtones of the singer’s words, to work well.

Singing and playing  into the same microphone makes it even worse than hearing a fiddler-singer un-amplified.

But when the sound box of an instrument is physically far enough away from the singer’s vocal sound box, and acoustically quiet enough in volume and far enough away in shared overtones, a singer’s words finally get a decent chance to be heard.

And heard by the vast majority of people in all times and places who care first and foremost for the words and the tune - not what the sidemen are up to.

Getting the overtones soft enough and low in pitch enough removed from the singer’s overtones and get everything physically far enough away : this the harp-lute-lyre-guitar do very well.

In addition the plucked nature of the ‘chords’ seems to echo better how the vocal chords work , even compared to the bowed chords of the violin family.

Martin Henry Dawson’s Canadian Edwardian Era family were evangelical Presbyterian, very well educated and leaning towards the upper class side of middle class small town life, so music for them probably was more often heard in the parlour than on the streets in band marches or in kitchen ‘let your hair downs’.

And Dance Halls were totally out of the question !

Music was sung and played by amateurs in the parlour, usually led by young women or reluctant young male teens formally trained by a music teacher, but then joined in by everybody.

Parlour guitars, spinet pianos and harmonium pedal organs, wooden keyless flutes, violins, voices.

Not skilled enough to really be called chamber music but in ancient terms, definitely “inside” music to be contrasted with the “outdoor” oriented jazz music of the brass marching band influenced American ragtime, jazz and blues music existing in the same era.

Stripped down to its basics, it is really just back to the ancient harper-singer’s instrumental music consisting simply of arpeggio accompaniment melodies played beneath and between the intermittent phrases of a solo vocal melody.

Chords ? If you want to call a horizontal series of melody notes some kind of weird extended chord, sure.

But really just melody melody all the time : two melodies (bass and treble) chasing each other about.

So : not the LOUD THICK simultaneous thunder of wide and vertical block chords so beloved by musicians paid to make the sort of thick music arrangements required to fill a concert hall/dance hall/ parade square/sports stadium with hundreds or thousands of listeners adding to the din.

Parlour Music could be very lively indeed and very dynamic, but it remained very ‘thin’ : its simply didn't need to be LOUD, simply to be loud enough to contrast with other parlour notes played very quiet indeed.

Parlour got its variety partly from the fact it didn't adhere to a few 2 bar ostinatos in the accompaniment played non-stop throughout the entire piece in the American blues-oriented tradition.

Instead, the music was based on carefully arranged sheet music that varied both the treble and bass melody throughout the piece.

But in addition, the parlour audience didn’t like or need the thick loud non-stop playing of all the instrumentalists all the time (brass band-isms) needed to fill concert halls or streets with music.

Instead its musicians self-arranged to drop in and out, turn on turn, to add their heterophonic variants on the main singer-player’s efforts : playing this or that part of the bass or treble sheet music, maybe in unison but in another instrument’s timbre, or maybe an octave up or down, or maybe in staccato instead of legato, etc.

Often this was also as much down to the fact that most parlour amateurs were very amateur indeed and simply couldn't really play all that well, so they ghosted the score’s notes most of the night, but then dropped in the few licks they liked well enough to really learn well !

A few quiet instruments, playing turn on turn, scattered over a well-stuffed Edwardian parlour did not ‘blend’ like a big orchestra in an even bigger reverberant hall : instead the results gave a distinctly modern-like wide-panned stereo effect to listeners equally scattered across the well-stuffed parlour.

The relevance of all this to my musical on Dawson’s penicillin efforts ?

Well, I wager that less than 1% of the world goes to a EDM nightclub, classical concert or opera hall or rock stadium as frequently as for three hours once a week.

Most of us hear our 99% of our music in the modern-day version of Dawson’s parlour : on headphones, or from a laptop computer’s speakers, or from a small radio or Google box, or from our parlour TV speakers.

Yet because Americans love their music thick and loud ( “chords’n’drums” ) and America still dominates the thoughts of music producers world-wide, we still arrange our music recordings as if the music is mostly to be heard by hundreds and thousands packed into a vast noisy space.

The music of my Dawson Musical is going to be oriented to be melodic not harmonic,  horizontal & thin but varied and dynamic, recorded in a parlour and meant to be heard in a parlour at parlour music levels.

And I suspect there even a lot of Americans will secretly love it that way, too.

But while I believe the parlour tradition of the family gathered around the parlour spinet filled with printed sheet music is never coming back, I don’t think the ethos of parlour music is dead.

My music from my Musical will be freely available for amateurs to play at home in re-mixable/muteable/changeable MIDI files with on screen lyrics, aka the .KAR files.

Karaoke sing over the Midi track live to your friends in your bedroom or living room, but first adjusting the tempo and key to better suit your voice, muting the existing vocal track and perhaps substituting an oboe for the recorder for the treble fills while my mellow jazz guitar sample is replaced by a harder distorted electric guitar sample, etc.

Your sibling, parent or relatives of course have their totally different take on the arrangement they want to sing to - while your aunt will insist on playing her guitar along side the Midi track.

Fair enough ! Live and let live, Parlour Style....

Shock of the Old hits british shibboleth that yankee deep tank stole all our penicillin profits

I have always been a great fan of David Edgerton’s “The Shock of the Old” .

Now nothing is more repeated  in the history of science circles (or is more untrue) than the claim that Britain developed penicillin but all the profits were stolen by the Americans when Whitehall won’t let British industry develop deep tank production methods.

(Actually the British academic establishment wanted to synthesize penicillin instead and dragged industry and government along. As did the American scientists on their side of the pond, except in America there was one remaining New Deal Agency and a normally very hard-nosed industrialist momentarily softened by the needless death of his beloved daughter, both who went all out for the superiority of natural penicillin jam today, during the war, rather than synthetic penicillin jam tomorrow, after the war.)

Pfizer felt sure deep tank  fermentation penicillin would be superior to semi-solid mass  fermentation grown in shallow trays because it had proven this to be so with citric acid two decades earlier.

Anglo-American historians have been united in this view of the eternal superiority of high tech deep tank for 75 years  —— but the Chinese and the Indians feel differently.

Quietly, too quietly for historians to notice, Pfizer finally bailed from its eternal money spinner high tech deep tank citrus acid when chinese low tech shallow tray Production proved way cheaper.

And Indians and Chinese are intent on fortifying their huge lead in the production of industrial ferments by looking again at the oldest possible fermentation process - as seen out in the wild, which almost always takes place on the surface of barely wet solid masses.

Because these scientists know that Deep Tank (submerged fermentation) actually uses an awful lot of energy and capital and needed careful expensive human controllers and cast off a lot of  terrible waste products....

‘Modernization is the unintended collective results of the process of individual humans seeing ever wider into the diversity of physical reality’

Modernists recoiled from the results, while Post-Modernists accepted them.

It was thus that Martin Henry Dawson’s modernizing efforts that made him a villain to Modernists but a hero to Post-Modernists.

In the Fall of 1940, Henry Dawson took from his fifteen years of pioneering microbial work (HGT/Quorum Sensing/Molecular Mimicry/Biofilm Persisters/the unlikely survival of ‘Weak-Sister’ R & L Forms) the strong sense that there was, in fact, no direct connection between size & strength & purity and survival intelligence.

Those species that accepted the small, the weak, and the ‘deficient’ seemed better equipped for Evolution’s bottom line, long term reproductive survival.

Henry then applied this insight to the high value he placed on small microbial penicillin factories, small human penicillin processing efforts and upon small weak ‘deficient’ human patients...

Mary Louise’s death from meningitis helped bring in Unpatented (penicillin) For All ; Baby Carl’s death from meningitis helped bring in Medicare For All

If you follow my penicillin blogs over the years you already know the story of Mary Louise Jr, daughter of John L Smith, the de facto boss of a small fine chemicals firm in Brooklyn during the critical wartime years of Penicillin.

Massive, non-toxic, doses of Penicillin, the original kind, Penicillin G, is still the best way to prevent deaths from rapidly acute bacterial meningitis.

This had been known for over ten years when Mary Louise died, but no doctor had yet had the nerve to inject raw penicillium juice into a human patient.

Like Dr Alexander Fleming, the world’s doctors were willing to let patients died needlessly, until the chemists synthesized pure penicillin, if they ever would.

They did not and have not.

If we had waited for the chemists, we’d still be waiting for the Antibiotics Revolution to begin.

That changed on October 16th 1940 when a Nova Scotian born and raised doctor, Martin Henry Dawson, put basically raw penicillium juice into two patients, hoping to save their lives from an invariably fatal disease he was sure penicillin could cure.

That disease was the once-dreaded SBE, subacute bacterial endocarditis, a frequent consequent of having rheumatic fever as a kid.

Once-dreaded because Dawson was right : penicillin does cure SBE and all kinds of other once fatal diseases.

 Dawson said that if only somebody - anybody - had bit the bullet in 1938 and made a little of impure natural penicillin - Mary Louise would still be alive.

As would (savage irony fully intended) Robert Fleming in that same year 1938,if only Alexander Fleming had got off his comfortable arse and made just a little impure natural penicillin, enough to save his favourite brother from easily-cured-with-pencillin-pneumonia.

John L listened intently to Dawson, no doubt remembered his daughter pointlessly dying that long ago summer day of dreadful meningitis, and ‘bit the bullet’.

The normally highly cautious manager put his company full in (and more) to make as much impure natural penicillin as quick as possible, bucking his industry, the big universities and the Allied governments’ firm conviction that only synthetic penicillin would do the trick.

Dawson, Smith and his firm were proved fully right and the others fully wrong.

His firm, Pfizer, never looked back.

Baby Carl’s needless tragic death from meningitis helped more than any other single event to make Medicare reality in Canada

Baby Carl’s story was once much better known than that of Mary Louise, which is known only to people who read deeply in specialist accounts of wartime penicillin.

Carl Derhousoff was nine months old on July 1 1962, a seemingly healthy child of Dokabour parents Mr and Mrs Peter Derhousoff, farming in rural southern Saskatchewan.

Suddenly, as is always the way with rapidly acute meningitis, the baby took deadly sick and his desperate parents set off to the nearest small town with a doctor.

In any other month, in any other province in Canada, or indeed almost anywhere else in the world in 1962, the doctor would have suspected meningitis and given the baby a big needleful of penicillin G and sent the baby on to the nearest town with a general hospital.

Bu in Saskatchewan on July 1 1962, almost all the provinces doctors had closed their doors, to protest the incoming medicare system.

The ever more despairing parents drove on and on, from pillar to post, being rejected everywhere until they arrived at the big hospital in Weyburn.

Too late, their desperate drive for life had all been for not.

As I recall their terrible drive, I am afraid I can only think of the world’s best known lieder, DER ERLKONIG, by Schubert and Goethe : it recalls a father’s desperate horse ride through the night, as he holds his very sick child by his side, en route to a doctor. Always the fevered boy hear the seductive voice of the Elf King calling the boy over to the peaceful calm of permanent death and the father’s equally pleading to the boy that it is only the wind, or the fog or the leaves rustling.

The ride ends as sadly as Mr and Mrs Derhousoff.

The story was big big news across Canada and indeed around the world and it probably did help to break the doctors’ strike a few weeks later.

Medicare in Canada never looked back and within a few years was stoutly defended by the very same doctors who had once let an innocent baby die rather than bend to the democratic will of the people.

I was just at my sister Tracy’s house and as it happens she is almost exactly the same age as Carl and I remember well looking at tiny Tracy when I learned about baby Carl, as I followed the news of the Doctors Strike closely on CBC radio, in Macleans and in the Canadian edition of Time Magazine.

Her health was good, but my mother’s was not after her birth and Mom came very close to dying around the time of the Doctors Strike.

Believed me, back then, many  many times I thanked God that we were living in Nova Scotia and not Saskatchewan....

Dawson’s only crime was his belief in “Unpatented-For-All”

But I am being rather redundant : because of course unpatented (penicillin) IS (penicillin) for-all.

Its so much more than the basic fact that firms around the world would not being paying any patent fees to make natural penicillin.

Because the real point is this : the supply of un-patented penicillin makers could not be artificially restricted by denying patent licenses to them, regardless of their ability and willingness to pay, with the intent to thus indirectly keeping the price artificially high for the lucky few, those few privileged to hold the patents on artificially synthesized penicillin.

For this was the real aim behind the largely unknown wartime treaty between America and the UK devised to aid in dividing the world market for life-saving penicillin between only the two of them.

May I note - again - that there was no such treaty between the world’s two leading superpowers to divide the world market for atomic energy.

Again, may I note that America was (and is) traditionally super reluctant to sign international treaties in general.

So historians would do well to take this treaty as a priceless prism into how the two superpowers actually saw the varying economic importance of atomic energy versa antibiotics, circa 1945.

Dawson’s opponents saw a few pure people making a little pure synthetic penicillin for  a select few patients : Dawson saw diverse people making copious amounts of natural penicillin for a diversity of patients.

Beginning as it did in September 1940, this then, was the FIRST Manhattan Project : Unpatented-For-All .

Note to historians :

Henry Dawson’s only real crime was promoting postmodern Diversity during a worldwide hegemony of eugenic Modernity...

Making YOU a healthier, safer, more effective soldier - so ME and MY KIDS don’t have to put on a uniform

So much of middle class elite efforts in WWII semi-consciously revolved around ways to ensure that ‘others‘ fought so effectively in a  brief high tech war that the middle class and their children would not end up inside a long drawn repeat of WWI’s bloody/muddy trench warfare.

Susan Lindee’s research into ‘experimental injury’ certainly shows how much war medicine was directed at keeping thse ‘others‘ alive and in effective combat.

There are many other examples.

Churchill signed off on a proposal that scarce penicillin in the Italy Campaign would not go to save dying soldiers — who would only end up discharged to Civvy Street anyway.

Rather it would go to heal elite combat forces who contracted (usually non-life threatening) VD , so as to return them to battle  in weeks not the usual months.

*Anything to avoid having to draft people in the rear echelons into combat roles.*

The elite combat units were known to be particularly prone to contract VD - supposedly this confirmed  their virility and virulence.

I think it was an honourable way to avoid death on the front lines for a few months. IE  a way that untidy reality stomped on middle class plans for a rational war —- deliberately getting VD being a variant on traditional enlisted men’s gold-bricking !

Equally, the fierce stateside white male resistance to having women and blacks in the war factories was based, above all, on the certain knowledge that the men freed up by this effort would only go on towards making General Marshall’s planned original size for the Army a reality. (Big as the eventual WWII US Army seemed to be, the Battle of the Bulge showed how short-handed Marshall and his staff long feared it would be, once into heavy combat.)

The trials of Henry Dawson...

..went on long after his death.

In the end, historians proved a far more potent foe than all the gathered forces of the American OSRD, NAS and British CMC: prosecutor, judge, jury, executioner.

Henry might have come from a Liberal family but all his critics were Whigs.

Henry’s penicillin efforts were thus an unsightly complication in their re-telling of a smooth spores-to-riches/ government-academia-industry-hands-across-the-water triumph....