Brahm's Requiem and Charlie Chaplin and Bob Dylan

A friend, who sings many Bob Dylan songs by heart and who will be singing in a performance of Brahm's Requiem in the coming months and has begun to listen to it in preparation for learning his part, commented to me a few days ago that the beginning of Brahm's Requiem (00:11) and the music written by Charlie Chaplin for the last scene of "Modern Times" (00:22) sound very similar.  Do you hear it, too?

"Selig sind, die da Lied tragen, denn sie sollen getröstet werden."

"Smile, though your heart is aching.  Smile, even though it's breaking."

My friend's observation inspired me to watch "Modern Times" on YouTube and got me to wondering if Bob Dylan might have given his 2006 album the name, "Modern Times" after having observed the same thing that my friend did about the roots of Charlie Chaplin's composition, given that so many of the songs on the "Modern Times" album have roots in older compositions.

Interesting, too, that Bob Dylan wrote a song called "Ye Shall Be Changed" and that Brahm's Requiem includes the verse from Corinthians with the words:  Wir werden aber alle verwandelt warden (but we shall all be changed).

Echoes of the gears in the factory in "Modern Times":

"Love and theft revisited or coincidence?" said the Joker to the thief.

A FIELD THAT HAS RESTED

Take rest; a field that has rested gives a beautiful crop.
-- Ovid (43 B.C. to 17 or 18 A.D.)






















Oboe's paisley pillow was given to me by a young woman who completed a 14-day residential Yoga teacher training course with me and others in sublimely beautiful Plain, Washington, in late summer of 2007. The young woman was flying home to New Jersey after the course was completed and didn't want to try to bring the pillow with her on the airplane. She had bought it as a meditation pillow to be used during the Yoga teacher training. Oboe has claimed it as her own meditation pillow. I didn't become a Yoga teacher after all but still practice a series of Yoga postures daily in the early morning.

This morning at exactly 9 a.m. the sun appeared from behind the clouds to the east and lit up the trees, cattails and grass I can see from my porch:






















Can you hear the Red-Shafted Flicker's klee-yer (after the wick wick wick wick wick wick)?

Just now, while reading about Ovid in a Wikipedia article, I began to wonder idly if Bob Dylan had read Ovid because the article mentioned a woman named Corinna. As I read further, I began to wonder if Bob Dylan had been reading Ovid as he wrote the songs for his CD released on September 11, 2001, "Love and Theft."

Here's what I found, though:

American musician Bob Dylan's album Modern Times contains songs with borrowed lines from Ovid's Poems of Exile, from Peter Green's translation. The songs are "Workingman's Blues #2", "Ain't Talkin'", "The Levee's Gonna Break", and "Spirit on the Water."

(from the Wikipedia article on Modern Times)

Come to think of it, my grandmother on my mother's side was named Cora Irene and was known as "Rena." I have a copy of Ovid's "Metamorphoses" that belonged to my grandfather, Rudolf. As Bob wrote, "Take what you have gathered from coincidence."

"Corrina, Corrina, where you been so long?"