Word: lyre
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...descends to Hades to rescue his recently-killed wife Eurydice. He convinces Persephone, wife of Hades and queen of the dead, to release Eurydice, only to lose her by looking back at her as they leave. Here, Orpheus is a rock star, with an electric guitar instead of a lyre. Instead of being married to Eurydice (Suzan Hanson), he has collided with her—literally—only once, when the taxi he was riding ran her over. She dies in his arms and becomes his obsession: Orpheus becomes haunted, refusing to play and brooding over a small shrine...
Ives considered himself a transcendentalist and intended the contrast of the soothing ephemeral strings with the sharp discordant winds to create what Thoreau called “a vibration of the universal lyre.” It was an interesting idea, but at least in this performance, it did not seem that Ives vision was realized...
Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus
Nick Cave’s newest work with the Bad Seeds, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, is a daunting affair conceptually and lyrically. The two-disc affair isn’t simply a double album—it’s two albums stuck in the same box—and though it’s easy to see one as simply the “loud” one and the other as the “quiet,” the pairing is interesting at deeper levels as well. Central to both are various Western notions of theology...
This unclear sense of irony is only confounded all the more with The Lyre of Orpheus. Though intentionally opaque and periodically über-theatrical (especially in the opening eponymous track), Lyre is never quite too much to make you cringe or laugh. Indeed, part of what makes it so intriguing is its way of doling out just enough minimalism (“Babe, You Turn Me On” and “Easy Money”) to musically temper the fact that, lyrically, this is an album built from an erudite classical myth (fittingly, perhaps, about...