Recently I’ve been diving back into making music on my laptop. Just like the iPhone has done to bulky equipment like cameras and keyboards, the digital workstation has shrunk tons of gear, from music to mastering, down into software. There’s certainly no way I’m going to lug a mini-Moog to a coffee shop. But I’m willing to dabble with synth software, turn those dials and knobs, and see what happens.
So this upload of “Intro to Synthesis,” an instructional VHS from 1985, is perfect for me, and maybe you too. The hair, the clothes, and the jokes might be dated, but the info is not. In the above video, Dean Friedman–who if you close your eyes sounds like late night host Seth Meyers–lays out the building blocks of sound (pitch, timbre, volume), the five types of waveforms, and the seven components of a synthesizer, from oscillators to the LFO.
All of these features are still found on the synth interfaces used today in some form or another, and Friedman goes through every element at a methodical but appreciated pace. The three videos are an hour each.
And it pays to study the controls of synths and learn what makes them tick. The Yamaha DX‑7 contained many pre-sets which, unfiddled with, sound dated and appear on many an ‘80s pop hit. Meanwhile, Brian Eno, one of the few to actually read the manual, made “The Shutov Assembly” and other mid-era ambient tracks with the very same machine and nothing sounds quite like it.
Happy twiddling!
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
If you were to ask me “What is jazz?” I wouldn’t presume to know the answer, and I’m not sure any single composition exists to which one could point to as an ideal type. Maybe the only thing I’m certain of when it comes to jazz is—to quote Wallace Stevens—“it must change.”
Of course, there’s an incredibly rich history of jazz, broadly known, especially to those who have seen Ken Burns’ expansive documentary. I’d also recommend the excellent jazz writing of Amiri Baraka, Stanley Crouch, or Philip Larkin. For the young, we might consult Langston Hughes’ illustrated jazz history. And maybe everyone should read Charles Mingus’ Grammy-nominated essay “What is a Jazz Composer?” in which the contrarian genius writes, “each jazz musician is supposed to be a composer. Whether he is or not, I don’t know.”
Mingus the iconoclast argued for tearing up the text even as he sought a classical pedigree for jazz. His wish was partly granted by the influence of jazz on composers like Leonard Bernstein, who sought to answer the question “What is Jazz?” in a 1956 spoken-word LP. The tension between jazz as a compositional or wholly improvisational art seems to resound throughout the form, in all of its many guises and variations. But one thing I think every jazz musician knows is this: Standards, a common compendium of songs in the tradition.
You’ve got to know the rulebook (or the fakebook, at the least), before you can throw it out the window. Even some of the most innovative jazz artists who more or less invented their own scales, modes, and harmonies—like Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman—either studied at conservatory or paid their dues as sidemen playing other people’s songs. Jazz—Coleman once told Jacques Derrida—is “a conversation with sounds.” Its underlying grammar comes from the Standards.
Until fairly recently, the only way one could get a proper education in the standards was on the job. Critic, jazz historian, and pianist Ted Gioia writes as much in his comprehensive 2012 reference, The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire. Gioia’s “education in this music was happenstance and hard earned.” He writes, “aspiring musicians today can hardly imagine how opaque the art form was just a few decades ago—no school I attended had a jazz program or even offered a single course on jazz.”
How times have changed. These days, if you can get in, you can take graduate-level classes taught by the greats, such as Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter at UCLA. Hundreds more less-famous jazz musician professors stand at the ready in music departments worldwide or at the renowned Berklee College of Music.
But for those autodidacts out there, Gioia—who has served on the faculty at Stanford University and been called “one of the outstanding music historians in America”—offers an exceptional guide to the Standards, one we can not only read, but also, thanks to Jim Higgins of the Journal Sentinel, listen to, in the Spotify playlist above. (If you need Spotify’s free software, download it here.) In a companion essay, Higgins describes the process of compiling “as many of the performances [Gioia] recommended” in his commentary on 250 jazz standards.
Gioia names over 2,000 different performances of those 250 standards, and the playlist contains nearly all of them. You’ll find, for example, “several different recordings of ‘In a Sentimental Mood’ by the composer (including one with John Coltrane), as well as versions by Sonny Rollins, Art Tatum, McCoy Tyner, Abdullah Ibrahim and Buddy Tate, and Chris Potter.” While the playlist is “not a complete reflection of Gioia’s recommendations,” given that certain artists’ work cannot be streamed, “there’s a lot of music here”—a whole lot—“spanning a century.”
The experience of listening to this incredible library will not be complete without some context. Gioia’s book contains a “short historical and musical essay” on each of the 250 songs and he isn’t shy about offering incisive critical commentary. Other than going to music school or joining a touring band, I can’t think of a better way to learn the Standards.
English playwright, lyricist, actor and raconteur Noel Coward (1899 –1973) is still remembered for his plays such as the wife-after-death comedy Blithe Spirit and Private Lives; his playlet Still Life, which became the classic David Lean film Brief Encounter, and his scripting and co-direction of the WW2 morale-booster In Which We Serve, also directed by Lean, for which Coward won an Honorary Academy Award. However, he’s perhaps better known now more as an image of archetypal mid-20th century Englishness, replete with dressing-gown and cigarette-holder, and the hundreds of witty songs and poems he wrote, such as Mad Dogs and Englishman and Mrs Worthington, which he performed in cabaret in his distinctively clipped English manner to much acclaim in London and, latterly, in Las Vegas.
His 1946 song Alice (Is At It Again), written and then cut from his flop musical Pacific 1860, became a standard of his cabaret act and, with its suggestive lyrics, risqué subject matter and sly wit, is typical of his oeuvre. It’s thus a surprising choice perhaps by rising Australian actress Sarah Snook for the subject of her new short film Alice, co-devised with director Laura Scrivano, and the second film of The Passion, a new online series of performed poetry films coming out of Australia. The first film in the series, A Lovesong, starring Daniel Henshall (from AMC’s Turn: Washington Spies), featured T.S. Eliot’s modernist masterpiece The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (watch it below), so Alice is a change both in style and tone for the series, but continues the project’s experimentation in rendering poetry on film for a digital audience.
Sarah, who won critical acclaim for her genderswitching role in the 2015 science-fiction thriller Predestination, found the Coward text in a bookshop in San Francisco, while sourcing a text for her film for the series.
Says Sarah:
(Director) Laura and I were interested in the ideas of femininity and how that is expressed, particularly in sexual or sensual terms. When I read the poem, I was charmed by it and excited by the potential and challenge of contemporizing it for The Passion. Coward’s themes are very much of the time and place of the original lyrics’ writing, as is his take on them, while our adaptation is an updating, an exploration of female sexuality and empowerment that Coward plays with, and the wildness and freedom of discovering that. Our Alice, who I think nods to Coward’s, is breaking out of the strictures of her background, and being free and true to herself.
Originally Alice, as read by Coward, would have been performed with a patter, a rhythm of its own, with a sense of irony and a lot of wit, and certainly in his very particular RP accent. It’s hard to escape that as it’s written so well and embedded so deeply into the lines, with a particular scansion, but I wanted to go against that somewhat, while retaining and respecting Coward’s sparkle and playfulness.
Alice is the second film of The Passion series, in which actors select a text which has a personal significance for them or strikes a particular chord, and then work closely in collaboration with director Laura Scrivano to develop it as a new performance piece for film. A third film is currently in development. More information about the series can be found at this website.
Dan Prichard is an online film and webseries producer, based in Sydney, whose work explores identity, place, and the space between film and performance in the digital arena. Visit his website and follow him on twitter @georgekaplan81
It’s been 15 years since computer scientist and physicist Stephen Wolfram published his bestselling book A New Kind of Science. And now Wolfram has put his book online. It’s available in its entirety, all 1,200 pages, including the superb graphics. Feel free to read the pages on the web. Or download them as PDFs.
It’s also worth reading Wolfram’s new blog post where, in announcing the new online edition, he revisits the intellectual contributions he made with the book.
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Though he’s best known for his spare, absurdist tragicomedy, Waiting for Godot, playwright, poet, and novelist Samuel Beckett wrote what might be his most-quoted line at the end of The Unnamable, the third book in a hypnotic trilogy that begins with Molloy and continues with Malone Dies: “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
These novels, and the original Godot, were all written in French, then translated into English by Beckett himself. But Beckett was an Irish writer, who—like his contemporary, hero, countryman, and almost-father-in-law James Joyce—lived most of his life in voluntary exile. Like Joyce, Beckett wrote about Irish characters, and his “theme,” noted a 1958 New York Times reviewer of The Unnamable, “is the very Irish one in this century: the identity of opposites.”
Nothing in Beckett encapsulates this idea more concisely than the seven-word concluding line of The Unnamable. It’s a sentence that sums up so much of Beckett—his elliptical aphorisms; his dry, acerbic wit; and his unwavering stare into the abyss. As one contemporary of his suggested, Beckett will remain relevant “as long as people still die.” His primary subject is indeed one of the few truly universal themes.
But to only think of Beckett as morbid is not to read Beckett or see his work performed. While he can be unrelentingly grim, he is also never not in control of the dry humor of his voice. In his animated School of Life introduction to Beckett above, Alain de Botton begins with an anecdote about Beckett at a much-anticipated cricket match. Observing the perfect weather, a companion of his remarked, “This is the sort of day that would make you glad to be alive.” To which Beckett replied, “I wouldn’t go as far as that.”
The story, de Botton, says, “nicely encompasses two aspects of Samuel Beckett: his famously bleak view of life, and his mordant sense of humor.” They are qualities that for Beckett have the status of philosophical principles—though the author himself had a very fraught, almost allergic, relationship to philosophy. He gave up teaching early in his career, as we learn in the video, because “he felt he could not teach to others what he did not know himself.” When a version of Waiting for Godot debuted in 1952, Beckett sent a note to be read in his place. He wrote, in part:
All I knew I showed. It’s not much, but it’s enough for me, by a wide margin. I’ll even say that I would have been satisfied with less. As for wanting to find in all that a broader, loftier meaning to carry away from the performance, along with the program and the Eskimo pie, I cannot see the point of it. But it must be possible …
The necessity of the pointless exercise; the richness in the poverty of existence—stripped of its pretense and grand, self-important narratives.… These ideas arise from “the themes of failure that so dominate his work,” says de Botton. Though Beckett resisted interpretation in his own writing, he wrote an early study of Marcel Proust that interpreted the French author’s work as a philosophy of life which rests “on the making and appreciation of art.” Given that this is a School of Life video, this interpretation becomes the favored way to read Beckett. There are many others. But as the title of a 1994 Samuel Beckett reader—I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On—suggests, every approach to Beckett must somehow try to account for the stubborn intensity of his contradictions.
Upon arriving in Venice in the late 1930s, columnist and Algonquin Round Table regular Robert Benchley immediately sent a telegram back home to America: “Streets full of water. Please advise.” The line has taken its place in the canon of American humor, but in more recent times the image of water-filled streets — unintentionally water-filled streets, that is — has arisen most often in the conversation about climate change. Some of the potential disaster scenarios envision every major coastal city on Earth eventually turning into a kind of Venice, albeit a much less pleasant version thereof.
And so what better place than the one that hosts perhaps the world’s best known art exhibition, the Venice Biennale, to express climate-change anxiety in the form of public sculpture? “Venice is known for its gondolas, canals, and historic bridges,” writes Condé Nast Traveler’s Sebastian Modak, “but visitors will now also be greeted by another, albeit temporary, reminder of the city’s intimate relationship with water: a giant pair of hands reaching out of the Grand Canal and appearing to support the walls of the historic Ca’ Sagredo Hotel.” The piece is called Support, and it’s created by Barcelona-based Italian sculptor Lorenzo Quinn.
“I have three children, and I’m thinking about their generation and what world we’re going to pass on to them,” Quinn told Mashable’s Maria Gallucci. “I’m worried, I’m very worried.” The hands of his 11-year-old son actually provided the model for the polyurethane-and-resin hands of Support, weighing 5,000 pounds each, that stand on 30-foot pillars at the bottom of the Grand Canal. Modak quotes one of Quinn’s Instagram posts which describes the work as speaking to the people “in a clear, simple and direct way through the innocent hands of a child and it evokes a powerful message, which is that united we can make a stand to curb the climate change that affects us all.”
Those arguing in favor of more aggressive political measures to counteract the effects of climate change have gone to great lengths to point out what forms those effects have so far taken. But the fact that, apart from a stretch of hot summers, few of those effects have yet manifested undeniably in most people’s lives has certainly made their job harder. But nobody who visits Venice during the Biennale could fail to pause before Support, a work whose visual drama demands a reaction that temperature charts or data-filled studies can’t hope to provoke by themselves. And even apart from the issue at hand, as it were, Quinn’s sculpture reminds us that art, even in as deeply historical a setting as Venice, can also keep us thinking about the future.
Helen Keller achieved notoriety not only as an individual success story, but also as a prolific essayist, activist, and fierce advocate for poor and marginalized people. She “was a lifelong radical,” writes Peter Dreier at Yes! magazine, whose “investigation into the causes of blindness” eventually led her to “embrace socialism, feminism, and pacifism.” Keller supported the NAACP and ACLU, and protested strongly against patronizing calls for her to “confine my activities to social service and the blind.” Her critics, she wrote, mischaracterized her ideas as “a Utopian dream, and one who seriously contemplates its realization indeed must be deaf, dumb, and blind.”
Twenty years later she found a different set of readers treating her ideas with contempt. This time, however, the critics were in Nazi Germany, and instead of simply disagreeing with her, they added her collection of essays, How I Became a Socialist, to a list of “degenerate” books to be burned on May 10, 1933. Such was the date chosen by Hitler for “a nationwide ‘Action Against the Un-German Spirit,’” writes Rafael Medoff, to take place at German Universities—“a series of public burnings of the banned books” that “differed from the Nazis’ perspective on political, social, or cultural matters, as well as all books by Jewish authors.”
Books burned included works by Einstein and Freud, H.G. Wells, Hemingway, and Jack London, Students hauled books out of the libraries as part of the spectacle. “The largest of the 34 book-burning rallies, held in Berlin,” Medoff notes, “was attended by an estimated 40,000 people.”
Not only were these demonstrations of anti-Semitism, but their contempt for ideas appealed broadly to the Nazi philosophy of “Blood and Soil,” a nationalist caricature of rural values over a supposedly “degenerate,” polyglot urbanism. “The soul of the German people can again express itself,” declared Joseph Goebbels ominously at the Berlin rally. “These flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they also light up the new.”
“Some American editorial responses” before and after the burnings, “made light of the event,” remarks the United States Holocaust Museum, calling it “silly” and “infantile.” Others foresaw much worse to come. In one very explicit expression of the terrible possibilities, artist and political cartoonist Jacob Burck drew the image above, evoking the observation of 19th century German writer Heinrich Heine: “Where one burns books, one will soon burn people.” Newsweek described the events as “’a holocaust of books’… one of the first instances in which the term ‘holocaust’ (an ancient Greek word meaning a burnt offering to a deity) was used in connection with the Nazis.”
The day before the burnings, Keller also displayed a keen sense for the gravity of book burnings, as well as a “notable… early concern,” notes Rebecca Onion at Slate—outside the Jewish community, that is—for what she called the “barbarities to the Jews.” On May 9, 1933, Keller published a short but pointed open letter to the Nazi students in TheNew York Times and elsewhere, abjuring them to stop the proposed burnings. She wrote in a religious idiom, invoking the “judgment” of God and paraphrasing the Bible. (Not a traditional Christian, she belonged to a mystical sect called Swedenborgianism.) At the top of the post, you can see the typescript of her letter, with corrections and annotations by Polly Thompson, one of her primary aides. Read the full transcript below:
To the student body of Germany:
History has taught you nothing if you think you can kill ideas. Tyrants have tried to do that often before, and the ideas have risen up in their might and destroyed them.
You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds. I gave all the royalties of my books for all time to the German soldiers blinded in the World War with no thought in my heart but love and compassion for the German people.
I acknowledge the grievous complications that have led to your intolerance; all the more do I deplore the injustice and unwisdom of passing on to unborn generations the stigma of your deeds.
Do not imagine that your barbarities to the Jews are unknown here. God sleepeth not, and He will visit His judgment upon you. Better were it for you to have a mill-stone hung around your neck and sink into the sea than to be hated and despised of all men.
Keller added the penultimate paragraph of the published text later. (See the handwritten addition at the bottom of the typed draft.) Her concern for the “grievous complications” of the German people was certainly genuine. The expression also seems like a targeted rhetorical move for a student audience, conceding the situation as “complex,” and appealing in more philosophical language to “justice” and “wisdom.” The Nazis ignored her protest, as they did the “massive street demonstrations” that took place on the 10th “in dozens of American cities,” the Holocaust Museum writes, “skillfully organized by the American Jewish Congress” and sparking “the largest demonstration in New York City history up to that date.”
Five years later, however, another planned book burning—this time in Austria before its annexation—was prevented by students at Williams College, Yale, and other universities in the U.S., where pro- and anti-Nazi partisans fought each other on several American campuses. U.S. students were able to push the Austrian National Library to lock the books away rather than burn them. Keller “is not known to have commented specifically” on these student protests, writes Medoff, “but one may assume she was deeply proud that at a time when too many Americans did not want to be bothered with Europe’s problems, these young men and women understood the message of her 1933 letter—that the principles under attack by the Nazis were something that should matter to all mankind.”
The story of malicious space aliens invading Earth has a resonance that knows no national boundaries. In fact, many modern versions make explicit the moral that only fighting off an existential threat from another planet could unify the inherently fractious human species. H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel The War of the Worlds, in many ways the archetypal telling of the space-invaders tale, certainly proved compelling on both sides of the pond: though set in Wells’ homeland of England, it made a lasting impact on American culture when Orson Welles produced a thoroughly localized version for radio, his infamous War of the WorldsHalloween 1938 broadcast. (Listen to it here.)
And so who better to illustrate a mid-2oth-century edition of the novel than Edward Gorey? He was born in and spent nearly all his life in America, but developed an artistic sensibility that struck its many appreciators as uncannily mid-Atlantic. His work continues to draw descriptions like “Victorian” and “gothic,” surely underscored by his association with the British literature-adapting television show Mystery!, for whose title sequences he drew characters and settings, and the young-adult gothic mystery novels of Anglophile author John Bellairs. The Gorey-illustrated War of the Worlds came out in 1960 from Looking Glass Library, featuring his drawings not just at the top of each chapter but on its wraparound cover as well. Though out of print, you can find old copies for sale online.
Gorey had begun his career in the early 1950s at the art department of publisher Doubleday Anchor, creating book covers and occasionally interior illustrations. In addition to Bellairs’ novels, he would also go on to put his artistic stamp on such literary classics as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, bringing to each his signature combination of whimsy and dread in just the right proportions. Given the inherent ominousness and threat of The War of the Worlds, Gorey’s dark side comes to the fore as the story’s long-legged terrors arrive and wreak havoc on Earth, only to fall victim to common disease.
Though conceptually similar to the illustrations in Pearson’s, drawn by an artist (usually of children’s books) named Warwick Goble, they don’t get into quite as much detail — but then, they don’t have to. To evoke a complex mixture of fascinated anticipation and creeping fear, Gorey never needed more than an old house, a huddle of silhouettes, or a pair of eyes glowing in the darkness.
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