Kereshmeh Records

Kereshmeh Records - QuarterTone Productions - LilaSound Productions

Kereshmeh Records, QuarterTone Productions, and LilaSound Productions are a family of labels committed to bringing you the most authentic and innovative traditional and new music of Iran with the highest quality of productiions.

any of these links to learn more about Traditional Persian music and it's roots.

- The Bakhshi
- Khorasan
- Kurdistan
- Hossein Alizadeh on the Radif of Persian Classical Music
- Parviz Meshkatian on the Radif of Persian Classical Music

Die Blechtrommel

Die Blechtrommel
The Tin Drum (German: Die Blechtrommel) is a 1959 novel by Günter Grass. The novel is part of Grass' Danziger Trilogie (Danzig Trilogy).
Contents



The story is about the life of Oskar Matzerath, who writes his autobiography from memory while in a sanitorium during the years 1952-1954. However, Oskar's memories begin before those of ordinary people. The story starts with his own birth, when Oskar sees the light of "two sixty-watt bulbs" in the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland). Gifted with a piercing shriek that can shatter glass or be used as a weapon, Oskar declares himself to be one of those "auditory clairvoyant babies", whose "spiritual development is complete at birth and only needs to affirm itself". At age three he receives a tin drum for his birthday and decides, after observing the obtuseness and duplicity of the adult world, to will himself not to grow up. As a result, he retains the stature of a child while living through the beginning of World War II, the Holocaust, several love affairs, and the world of postwar Europe. Through all this the tin drum remains his treasured possession, and he is willing to kill to retain it.

Oskar considers himself to have two "presumptive fathers" - his mother's husband Alfred, a member of the Nazi Party, and her secret lover Jan, a Polish citizen of Danzig who is executed for defending the Polish Post Office in Danzig during the Nazi invasion of Poland. Oskar's mother having died, Alfred marries Maria, a woman who is secretly Oskar's first mistress. After marrying Alfred, Maria gives birth to Oskar's possible son, Kurt. But Oskar is disappointed to find that the baby persists in growing up, and will not join him in ceasing to grow at the age of three.

During the war, Oskar joins a troupe of performing dwarfs who entertain the German troops at the front line. But when his second love, the diminutive Roswitha, is killed by Allied troops in the invasion of Normandy, Oskar returns to his family in Danzig where he becomes the leader of a criminal youth gang. The Russian army soon captures Danzig, and Alfred is shot by invading troops after he goes into seizures while swallowing his party pin to avoid being revealed as a Nazi.

Oskar moves with his widowed stepmother and their son to Düsseldorf, where he models in the nude with Ulla and works engraving tombstones. He falls in love with the saintly Sister Dorothea, a neighbor, but fails to seduce her. Still devoted to his little tin drum, Oskar becomes a virtuoso jazz drummer and achieves fame and riches. One day while walking through a field he finds a severed finger: the ring finger of Sister Dorothea, who has been murdered. He then meets and befriends Vittlar. Oskar allows himself to be falsely convicted of the murder and is confined to an insane asylum, where he writes his memoirs.

[edit] Themes

[edit] Art versus war

World War II is compared with Oskar's art and music. The implied statement is that art has the ability to defeat war and hatred. Oskar escapes fighting through his musical talent. In chapter nine: The Rostrum, Oskar manages to disrupt the Nazi rally by playing his drums. Oskar plays a rhythm which is more complex and sensual than the march step of the rally. Despite his disruption of the activities of the Nazi party, the power of his music remains ambiguous. It seems that the music of the drum is simply disruptive, and not purely a moral force aligned against the Nazis. This is especially evident in another component of Oskar's music, his voice. As a substitution for singing, Oskar's voice is a terrible scream which exerts incredible power. Oskar's voice has the power to break glass, which he uses as the leader of a gang of criminals to rob stores by breaking their front windows. Grass's magical poetic imagery subtly aligns with political/ cultural events, and the reader realizes that Oskar is somehow an embodiment of Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass which signaled the unmasked aggression of the Nazi Party. Ultimately Oskar remains a complex, magically symbolic character, embodying both the wish to dismantle the emergent Nazi party as well as the aggression of the party itself. Grass beautifully elucidates the paradox and schizophrenia of post war German consciousness.

[edit] Horrors of the Nazi regime

The Tin Drum covers the period from the 1920s through the 1950s and ranges from Danzig to Cologne, Paris and Normandy. Grass describes the actions of the Nazi regime from Kristallnacht to the execution of the survivors of the Polish Post Office.

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I can sleep it off,
Sleep it back to sleep,
I can be most anything I want.
A long way from the shade,
The north side of the moon.
Down here only rich men lose their shirts.

And John Law wakes to sweep,
The morning off the street,
But no one cares if he has done his job.
And postcards never came,
From race tracks by the sea.
From a gambler who says: "You are still my lucky thing."

Bordertown,
There's been an accident in Bordertown.
Bordertown,
I am your accident in Bordertown.

Coyotes stirs the drinks,
And drives his stolen jeep,
And drives the kingsnake to its happy hole.
But I stand in the clear,
The only place he fears,
The only place he's never seen me stand.

Bordertown,
There's been an accident in Bordertown.
Bordertown,
I am your accident in Bordertown.

There ain't no seasons here,
But the freezin' still appears,
Everytime I call this home.
Can't be enough alone.

I can sleep it off,
Sleep it back to sleep,
I can be most anything I want.
A long way from the shade,
The north side of the moon.
Down here only taxi drivers know my name.

ли́и́длди́

дли́ддлдли́и́длди́ли́дли́длл
ｆｇｓｆVladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (Влади́мир Влади́мирович Маяко́вский) (July 19 [O.S. July 7] 1893 – April 14, 1930) was a Russian poet and playwright, among the foremost representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.

Michael Vasilyevich Matjuschin (Russian: Михаил Васильевич Матюшин; * 1861 in Novgorod; † 14 October 1934 in Leningrad) was a Russian painter and composer, leading member of the Russian avant-garde. From 1876 to 1881 he received training in the conservatory in Moscow and worked from 1882 to 1913 as a violinist in the yard orchestra of Saint Petersburg. Meanwhile, he studied art at a private art school together with his life companion Jelena Guro and paints in this time a series of landscapes. Matjuschin ranks among a founder Futurism in the art. He attained a life-long friendship with artist Kasimir Malevich; in 1913 Malevich and Matjuschin, along with two further artist colleagues, writes the opera Victory over the Sun, whose set was designed my Malevich supposedly inspiring him to the development of Suprematism. Matjuschin writes the music to this opera to the works of poet Velimir Chlebnikov. From 1921 to 1923 he worked in the museum for artistic culture and belonged to the museum executive committee, whose department for scientific study of the organic art he led starting from 1923

Aleksander Mikhailovich Rodchenko (Russian: Александр Михайлович Родченко, 5 December [O.S. 23 November] 1891 – December 3, 1956) was a Russian artist, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of constructivism and Russian design; he was married to the artist Varvara Stepanova.

Rodchenko was one of the most versatile Constructivist and Productivist artists to emerge after the Russian Revolution. He worked as a painter and graphic designer before turning to photomontage and photography. His photography was socially engaged, formally innovative, and opposed to a painterly aesthetic. Concerned with the need for analytical-documentary photo series, he often shot his subjects from odd angles―usually high above or below―to shock the viewer and to postpone recognition. He wrote: "One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again."



Pavel Nikolayevich Filonov (Russian: Па́вел Никола́евич Фило́нов) (January 8, 1883–December 3, 1941) was a Russian avant-garde painter, art theorist, and a poet.
Filonov was born in Moscow on January 8, 1883 (Gregorian calendar) or December 27, 1882 (Julian calendar). In 1897, he moved to St. Petersburg where he took art lessons. In 1908, he entered St. Petersburg Academy of Arts, from which he was expelled in 1910.

In 1910–1914, he took part in the arts group Soyuz Molodyozhi created by artists Elena Guro and Mikhail Matyushin. In 1912, he wrote the article The Canon and the Law, in which he formulated the principles of analytical realism, or "anti-Cubism". According to Filonov, Cubism represents objects using elements of their surface geometry but "analytical realists" should represent objects using elements of their inner soul. He was faithful to these principles for the remainder of his life.
A Peasant Family (The Holy Family), 1914, oil on canvas, 159x128 cm, Russian Museum.

During the years 1913 to 1915, Filonov was close to Vladimir Mayakovsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, and other futurists. In the autumn of 1916, he enlisted for service in World War I and served on the Romanian front. Filonov participated actively in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and served as the Chairman of the Revolutionary War Committee of Dunay region.

Konstantin Stepanovich Melnikov (Russian: Константин Степанович Мельников; August 3 [O.S. July 22] 1890, Moscow - November 28, 1974, id.) was a Russian architect and painter. His architectural work, compressed into a single decade (1923-1933), placed Melnikov on the front end of 1920s avant-garde architecture. Although associated with the Constructivists, Melnikov was an independent artist, not bound by the rules of a particular style or artistic group. In 1930s, Melnikov refused to conform with the rising stalinist architecture, withdrew from practice and worked as a portrait painter and teacher until the end of his life.