Pressing no. 6

Gravestone, Abney Park, 2008

Gloomy Sunday

Transient and digital ___________ but somehow this MP3 has the crackle of reality to it. The master tape must have accomplished some aural distillation of sadness and mourning. ___________ More than the ballads of any serious looking, sepia shot band you could name, it is Artie Shaw’s rendition of ‘Gloomy Sunday’ that best evokes the passions and symptoms and suffering of heartbreak.

Violins sigh throughout, the big band builds on high time and again, until that “Gloomy Sunday” refrain drags them back into the darkness and mire. Shaw’s clarinet weaves ___________ an asp that brings low the Cleopatra voice of Billie Holiday. ___________ Even a listener ignorant of Holiday’s self-destruction through drugs and abuse can hear in her voice that she’s a character of the piece, not a cold observer.

And yet ___________ the song is hypnotic. One sways ___________ Dance or Trance? ___________ The answer may not be yours to choose. When ‘Gloomy Sunday’ reached America in the late ’30s it became known as ‘The Hungarian Suicide Song’. The jilted and spurned were said to drift from windows and balconies if even the merest hint of the melody reached their ears. Myth or not, in 1968 Rezső Seress,the writer, certainly did.

I carry this song in my pocket and I am far from heartbroken, today. ___________ I can tell you that 142,146 people have been born in the last nine and a half hours ___________ 58,490 have died. ___________ I can’t tell you how many of them heard ‘Gloomy Sunday’, not through guesses or through figures. ___________ I have been around 8,543 days and I’m only starting to appreciate now that I can carry an emotion around with a pause button.

© Matthew Sheret, 2008

Tags: Matthew Sheret, Gloomy Sunday