Frederick Pollack wrote:
> It's called the War Requiem. Benjamin Britten wrote the music around
> the poems of Wilfred Owen. Music premiered in 1961 for poems composed
> in 1917-18. Sadly we continue to know what it means.
>>
>> kw
>>
> No, no, Ken, I know the piece, but what I was thinking of is an actual
> military tattoo, a march-rhythm --- British Army, I thought. Used at
> executions mandated by courts-martial.
Ah, a literal dead march. Okay. Who would talk about such things now?
We've been sanitized for years. Have we indeed had military executions
since WW1 for desertion, cowardice under fire? More likely (failed
humor) now they would be for throwing cigarette butts on the walkways or
calling someone a Bad Name. Every time I have looked at the terrible
images of the four convicted Lincoln conspirators first sitting on the
scaffold in the Capitol Prison yard, then dangling from the nooses, I
wonder if the greater public outside the walls knew what was going on in
anything but the most general cliches ("Justice was done," etc.). This
I vaguely recall was a comment Camus made about the generalities and
empty puff-language of execution reporting used to support the
persistence of capital punishment. Nothing about blood pouring from a
neck when the head is off, nothing about a hanged man voiding and
ejaculating when his neck breaks (see Anthony Burgess for that one), or
the nasty little piss-puddle chair-dance of someone electrocuted,
nothing about the chest exploding from catching bullets at a firing
squad not ten feet from you.
The most notable description I've encountered in the Brit tradition is
presumably fiction, Kipling's ballad "Danny Deever." Someone set it to
music and I first heard it 20 years ago sung by the late American
baritone Leonard Warren. With the music and the way it was sung, it was
a horror. I read it to one of my classes last semester and caught myself
starting to fall into its rhythm and singing it, too, poor kids. The
orchestration is built around muffled drums. Would a man who murdered
one of his own comrades while the man was asleep have been afforded the
dignity of a dead march? I always figured Danny Deever for a PTSD victim
out in India who went over the edge.
I know very little about the French Army mutiny in 1917 except that
there was one. Mass executions followed. Dead marches for the
condemned?--who knows. Kubrick's film "Paths of Glory," apparently
based on an earlier incident in 1916, features the dead march from the
chateau prison to the stakes.
Someone else can supply the corrections.
ken
--
Ken Wolman http://awfulrowing.wordpress.com/ http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html
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"All writers are hunters, and parents are the most available prey."--Francine du Plessix Gray
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