The View from the Spaghetti Factory

For the past three months, I’ve been spending a short time each day learning French.

Why? Well, first you have to understand why not. I don’t completely lack a background in French… like just about every British schoolkid, I learned French from the start of high school, continuing up to O Level standard. However, by that point (aged sixteen) I was more comfortable with German, so I followed a Germanic theme with an A Level in German and a BA degree in Swedish. Even with the onset of working, tax-paying adulthood (all terms used loosely) where education starts to be a pleasurable pastime rather than a necessary evil, I never revisited French. In our household, Nicola has always been The One Who Speaks French, and I’m not going to be competing with her MA in French literature in a hurry.

Earlier this year I pondered this situation. It seemed daft that my knowledge of French had atrophied to the point of virtual non-existence, given my enthusiastic consumption of so much French culture. My CD collection features music from Perotin to Boulez, along with lots of gypsy jazz, and I’ve read French authors in translation, from Zola to Perec. I stuff my belly with their food, wine and other drinks, and I’ve marvelled at their contributions to art and design. And yet my linguistic ability was on the level of “deux bières, s’il vous plaît”.

I started with the Michel Thomas courses, working through the basic and advanced packages a couple of times each. That brought back some long-forgotten vocabulary and established most of the general rules and structures in my mind. The Michel Thomas material is great for learning to formulate your thoughts in the language, but there’s very little emphasis on aural skills (and absolutely no use of the written word, such is the very nature of his teaching method).

Reading material is easy to sort out under your own steam; I’m not ready to tackle Jacques Attali just yet, but there’s a good range of children’s books and chatty lifestyle magazines for absorbing real, idiomatic French. In terms of aural skills, my long-term aim is to be able to listen to Radio France podcasts, but until then I’ve found some useful beginner/intermediate material at the iTunes Store (where the podcasts are generally free). In case you’re in the same situation as me, here’s a few recommendations…

French poetry podcast - Camille Chevalier reads, explains and explores a poem every month.

The French Pod Class - Comprehensive lessons from Sebastien, including videos, PDF texts and other teaching material.

Ecouter en Français facile - Vincent Durrenberger reads short texts on a variety of subjects.

Working through the vast backlog of “ooh, that looks interesting” podcasts I’ve downloaded recently, I found a great little feature on Alf Clausen, composer of all the background and incidental music on “The Simpsons”… basically, everything except for Danny Elfman’s title music. I’ve always been intrigued by the process of creating music around the structure of film, and quite fancy having a go at some point. As a fast-paced cartoon show with multiple layers of cultural references, “The Simpsons” must be pretty challenging to compose for, especially as the music ranges from short bursts of “aural scenery” right up to full-length parody songs.

With the hope that my bandwidth doesn’t get completely SLAMMED, I’ve uploaded the 21-minute chunk here…

Mitt i Musiken: Alf Clausen feature (14.75MB)

It’s from the Swedish radio programme “Mitt i Musiken” (*mumble*… sorry, Sveriges Radio…) but the chunks in Swedish are mostly translating and summarising what Alf says in the interview portions. It’s worth ploughing through for the rehearsal excerpts (now that’s what first-call session players sound like!) and there’s a few interesting nuggets of information. For instance, Matt Groening likes having real orchestral music on the soundtrack, in order to provide smooth continuity and sheen when the animation is a little rough and ready. Also, it turns out that Alf Clausen is hugely influenced by Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, which, on reflection, doesn’t surprise me. I’ll be talking about that piece right here, once the Proms season starts…