Alaskan Range: Running The Gamut
Here’s a welcome to a new columnist, Greg Hill.
Greg is the director of the North Star Borough Libraries in Fairbanks, Alaska. He also writes for his local newspaper, the Daily News-Miner. Fairbanks is the second largest city in Alaska, the largest state in the United States.
Greg, as you would expect, has read widely. He has a most engaging way with words.
Today he writes about Julie Andrews, who once said of herself “Sometimes I’m so sweet even I can’t stand it.”
“Mary Poppins” and puberty both arrived for me about the same time, and once I’d have devotedly followed the Julie Andrews Obsession Page www.geocities.com/hollywood/cinema/4756/
Even “enamored” is putting it lightly, for her voice and fresh wholesomeness made her seem to me as Brigit Bardot appeared to my peers. Though passion’s faded over time, she’ll always personify the sweet-voiced Guinevere of Camelot to me. Besides, she’s an author.
It’s heartening to know that my idol’s boring. The biggest scoop from her latest book, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years is that her birth was illegitimate. Kirkus Review, the strictest of the half-dozen review journals the library staff reads to help us choose the best books, writes of Andrews’ autobiography, “All this is clearly and elegantly presented … writing about her phenomenal Broadway successes In My Fair Lady and Camelot, Andrews provides entertaining gossip … as well as insightful, informative analysis of the technical aspects of her craft.”
Andrews’ mom may have been selfish and cold and her stepdad greedy and pushy, but you won’t get much about it from her. Kirkus concludes that her memoir “Bears out the suspicion that Richard Sterling’s unrevealing Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography (2008) faithfully reflects its subject’s personality.” With idols, ignorance is often blissful. For example, recent photos reveal that over her 73 years Dame Julie has somehow aged, with little consideration for her fans. Moreover, her new “mature” hairstyle, and especially losing her trademark bangs, is particularly troubling. Currently Andrews is an American Library Association spokeswoman and National Library Week chairperson, complete with YouTube clips, public service announcements, and lots of photos that remind her fans of time’s irrevocable progression.
The Sound of Music isn’t my favorite musical, even with Dame Julie starring, and “Doe, a Deer, a Female Deer” is particularly grating. That’s because a year-long sight-reading class was required to get into my high school choir. Choral sight reading, or “solfeggio,” is singing multi-part musical arrangements without hearing or seeing them previously. We learned how to identify which note in the music was “do,” and its pitch, and then used a mental “do, re, mi” system to extrapolate the following notes. Until Guido d’Arezzo, the de Vinci of music, came along in 992 A.D., this was like reading unpunctuated writing without spaces between the words.
The noted 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica states that Guido “has by many been called the father of modern music,” due to his important innovations. He invented the stave system, for instance, using lines and spaces to indicate musical pitch. Before Guido’s system, the notes were imprecisely and arbitrarily placed, and knowing which pitch the composer intended was often impossible. Guido’s top hit, “Ut, Re, Mi,” is described in a ChristianityToday.com article titled “The Original Do, Re, Mi.” Author David Neff says, “Julie Andrews made it popular, but the real musical genius behind this singing aid was a medieval monk.” For his system Guido used the first syllables in the lines of a popular hymn to John the Baptist: “Ut queant laxis/ Resonare fibris/ Mira gestorum/ Famuli tourum/ Solve poluti/ Labi reatum.” It means, “That your servants/ May freely sing/ The miracles/ Of your deeds/ remove all stains/ From their unclean lips.”
“Ut, Re, Mi” was an even better springboard to celebrity than “Do, Re, Mi” was for Dame Julie. Guido’s fellow Pomposa monastery monks grew jealous when students flocked to his classes, so he left for non-monastic Arezzo, where there was a large choir eager to outshine other towns by adopting his methods. Neff’s article mentions that sometimes medieval composers needed a seventh note, so Guido “allowed for a note below, which he designated by the Greek letter ‘gamma.’ And thus the range of notes became known by their first two syllables, ‘gamma’ + ‘ut,’ or gamut. That explains why today, when you ‘run the gamut,’ you move through the entire range of something.”
Some gamuts are sweeter than others, like Dame Julie’s career arc that began with her first speaking and singing role at age three and now speaking out for libraries. As the lady herself put it, “Sometimes I’m so sweet even I can’t stand it.”
