I’m working on Baba Yaga songs. I have two written and will let them sit for a few days, after which time I will hate them and rewrite. One is a lullabye and the other is a getting-pushed-in-the-oven song. Next up is a dancing chicken-legs hut song. Must. Not. Listen. To. Moussorgsky.
Wikipedia’s Baba Yaga entry discusses “…an ordinary construction popular among hunter-nomadic peoples of Siberia …invented to preserve supplies against animals during long periods of absence. A doorless and windowless log cabin is built upon supports made from the stumps of two or three closely grown trees cut at the height of eight to ten feet. The stumps, with their spreading roots, would give an impression of ‘chicken legs’. A similar but smaller construction was used by Siberian pagans to hold figurines of their gods.”
Sami Storehouse, from wikicommons
I will be participating in a Hanns Eisler evening in March, an idea which is being bruited about by Dreamland Faces . The plan is to have an event to coincide with “Uncivil Wars”, an adaptation of Brecht and Eisler’s “The Roundheads and the Pointyheads” by David Gordon, which is showing at the Walker in mid-March. I am planning on assembling a children’s choir to sing some of Eisler’s music from “The Giant”, a theatre piece we played with a children’s group in Berlin a few years ago. These are some nice quirky little songs, most with text by Brecht, from ”Five Children’s Songs” and the “Hollywood Songbook,” dating from the thirties and forties. Revolutionary and seditious, and all the moreso for being delivered in treble voices. If you are interested in joining the choir, let me know.
