The Uffizi Gallery in Florence doesn’t particularly need an introduction, seeing that it’s one of the most widely-visited museums in Italy, the home of great artistic works from the Renaissance. If you pay the Uffizi a visit, you can see Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, Dürer’s Adoration of the Magi, Caravaggio’s Bacchus, Michelangelo’s The Holy Family, and Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait as a Young Man. Or you could do the same by dialing up the Uffizi’s Virtual Tour, embedded above, or available here. It’s essentially a Google Street View tour of the entire museum. It’s admittedly a little tedious. But if you have a lot of time and a handy floor plan, you can still immerse yourself in a collection that’s been enchanting visitors since the 18th century.
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For a good long while, or at least a few decades, the best things on TV in the U.S. happened outside the major broadcast and national cable networks. And like a great many other cultural happenings of the previous century, you would have to live in New York to experience them. I mean, of course, the weird, wonderful world of Manhattan public access cable TV. Here you could watch, for example, Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party, created by the titular host as “a drug-fueled re-interpretation of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy After Dark”—as we noted in a recent post—and featuring the most cutting-edge artists and musicians of the day.
Around the same time, Andy Warhol conducted his version of a celebrity interview show on local cable, and as the banal infotainment of daytime talk show and 24-hour-cable news developed on mainstream TV, a dozen bizarre, hilarious, raunchy, and ridiculous interview and call-in shows took hold on New York cable access in the years to follow (some of them still exist).
I happened to catch the tail end of this golden era, which tapered off in the nineties as the internet took over for the communities these shows served. But oh, what it must have been like to watch the thriving downtown scene document itself on TV from week-to-week, alongside the legendarily flamboyant Manhattan subcultures that found their voices on cable access?
Quite a few people remember it well, and were thrilled when the video at the top emerged from obscurity: an episode of TV-CBGB shot in 1981, “an odd glimpse,” writes Martin Schneider at Dangerous Minds, “of a CBGB identity that never took shape, as a cable access mainstay.” It is unclear how many episodes of the show were shot, or aired, or still exist in some form, but what we do have above seems representative, according to two Billboard articles describing the show. The first, from July 11, 1981, called the project “the first rock’n’roll situation comedy on cable television.”
Created by CBGBs owner, Hilly Kristal, the show aimed to give viewers slices of life from the Bowery institution, which was already famous, according to Billboard, as “the club that pioneered new music.” Kristal told the trade magazine, “There will always be a plot, though a simple plot. It will be about what happens in the club, or what could happen.” He then goes on to describe a series of plot ideas which, thankfully, didn’t dominate the show—or at least what we see of it above. The episode is “90% performance,” though “not true concert footage,” Schneider writes.
After an odd opening intro, we’re thrown into a song from Idiot Savant. Other acts include The Roustabouts, The Hard, Jo Marshall, Shrapnel, and Sic Fucks. While not among the best or most well-known to play at the club, these bands put on some excellent performances. By November of the following year, it seems the first episode had still not yet aired. Billboard quotes Kristal as calling TV-CBGB “one step further in exposing new talent. Radio and regular tv aren’t doing it. MTV is good, but it’s showing mostly top 40.”
Had the show migrated to MTV, Schneider speculates, it might have become a “national TV icon,” fulfilling Kristal’s vision for a new means of bringing obscure downtown New York musicians to the world at large. It might have worked. Though the sketches are lackluster, notable as historical curiosities, the music is what makes it worthwhile, and there’s some really fun stuff here—vital and dramatic. While these bands may not have had the mass appeal of, say, Blondie or the Ramones, they were stalwarts of the early 80s CBGB scene.
The awkward, strangely earnest, and often downright goofy skits portraying the goings-on in the lives of club regulars and employees are both somehow touching and tedious, but with a little polish and better direction, the whole thing might have played like a punk rock version of Fame—which maybe no one needed. As it stands, given the enthusiasm of several YouTube commenters who claim to have watched it at the time or been in the club themselves, the episode constitutes a strange and rare document of what was, if not what could have been.
Whistled language is a rare form of communication that can be mostly found in locations with isolating features such as scattered settlements or mountainous terrain. This documentary above shows how Dr. Mark Sicoli, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University, conducts field studies among speakers of a Chinantec language, who live in the mountainous region of northern Oaxaca in Mexico. The Summer Institute of Linguistics in Mexico has recorded and transcribed a whistled conversation in Sochiapam Chinantec between two men in different fields. The result can be seen and heard here.
The most thoroughly-researched whistled language however is Silbo Gomero, the language of the island of La Gomera (Canary Islands). In 2009, it was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The UNESCO website has a good description of this whistled language with photos and a video. Having almost died out, the language is now taught once more in schools.
Note: This post first appeared on our site back in 2013.
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By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
If you know just one piece by avant-garde composer and all-around oracle of indeterminacy John Cage, you know 1952’s 4′33″, which consists, for that length of time, of no deliberately played sounds at all. You’d think that if any piece could be played without a score, Cage’s signature composition could, but he did make sure to write one, and we featured it here on Open Culture a few years ago. Look at that score, of sorts, and you’ll sense that Cage had an interest not just in unconventional music, but in equally unconventional ways of notating that music. Hence the Notations project, Cage’s 1969 book collecting pieces of scores by 269 different composers and accompanying them with short texts.
Assembling the book from materials archived at the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Cage did include a page of one of his own scores, though not that of 4′33″ but of Music of Changes, a piano piece he’d composed the year before it for his friend David Tudor.
Tudor, a pianist as well as a composer of experimental music in his own right, also gets a page in Notations from his 1958 work Solo for Piano (Cage) for Indeterminacy. Lest this sound like a too-neat structure of reciprocity, rest assured that in the composition of the book’s text, as Cage explains in the book’s introduction, indeterminacy ruled, with “a process employing I‑Ching chance operations” dictating the number of words to be written, about which scores, and in what size and typeface as well.
Notations, which also includes scores from the Beatles, Leonard Bernstein, Paul Bowles, Charles Ives (from whose archive Cage picked a blank piece of song paper), Gyorgy Ligeti, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Steve Reich, Igor Stravinsky, Toru Takemitsu, and many others, inspired a more recent follow-up project called Notations 21, which you can learn about in the video just below. A collaboration between musicologist and composer Theresa Sauer and designer Mike Perry, that 2009 book collects more than a hundred pieces of creative notation from some of the composers featured in Cage’s original, but also many who weren’t composing or indeed even alive in his day.
Notations 21 stands as a testament to Cage’s enduring influence as not just a composer but as the promoter of a worldview all about harnessing the forces of chance to enrich our lives, and to put us in a clearer frame of mind to see what comes next. “Musical notation is one of the most amazing picture-language inventions of the human animal,” Ross Lee Finney writes in the text of the original Notations. “It didn’t come into being of a moment but is the result of centuries of experimentation. It has never been quite satisfactory for the composer’s purposes and therefore the experiment continues.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
FYI: David Bowie died two years ago today. And to commemorate the anniversary, HBO has just started airing David Bowie: The Last Five Years, a 90-minute BBC documentary that revisits Bowie’s less public final years. If you don’t already have HBO, you could always watch the doc by signing up for a free trial for HBO Now (HBO’s streaming service). Here’s a quick summary/overview of the film:
In the last years of his life, David Bowie ended nearly a decade of silence to engage in an extraordinary burst of activity, producing two groundbreaking albums and a musical. David Bowie: The Last Five Years explores this unexpected end to a remarkable career.
On the 2003–2004 “Reality” tour, David Bowie had a frightening brush with mortality, suffering a heart attack during what was to be his final full concert. He then disappeared from public view, only re-emerging in the last five years of his life to make some of the most important music of his career. Made with remarkable access, Francis Whately’s documentary is a revelatory follow-up to his acclaimed 2013 documentary David Bowie: Five Years,which chronicled Bowie’s golden ‘70s and early-‘80s period.
While illuminating iconic moments of his extraordinary and prolific career, David Bowie: The Last Five Years focuses on three major projects: the albums The Next Day and the jazz-infused Blackstar (released on Bowie’s 69th birthday, two days before his death in 2016), and the musical Lazarus, which was inspired by the character he played in the 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Dispelling the simplistic view that his career was simply predicated on change, the film includes revealing interviews with many of Bowie’s closest creative collaborators, including: Tony Visconti, Bowie’s long-time producer; musicians who contributed to The Next Day and Blackstar; Jonathan Barnbrook, the graphic designer of both albums; Robert Fox, producer of Lazarus, along with cast members from the show, providing a unique behind-the-scenes look at Bowie’s creative process; and Johan Renck, director of Bowie’s final music video, “Lazarus,” which was widely discussed as foreshadowing his death.
You can watch a trailer for the new film up above.
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Even if you don’t know the name György Ligeti, you probably already associate his music with a set of mesmerizing visions. The work of that Hungarian composer of 20th-century classical music appealed mightily to Stanley Kubrick, so much so that he used four of Ligeti’s pieces to score 2001: A Space Odyssey. One of them, 1962’s Aventures, plays over the final scenes in an electronically altered form, which drew a lawsuit from the composer who’d been unaware of the modification. But he didn’t do it out of purism: though he wrote, over his long career, almost entirely for traditional instruments, he’d made a couple forays into electronic music himself a decade earlier.
Ligeti fled Hungary for Vienna in 1956, soon afterward making his way to Cologne, where he met the electronically innovative likes of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Gottfried Michael Koenig and worked in West German Radio’s Studio for Electronic Music.
There he produced 1957’s Glissandi and 1958’s Artikulation, the latter of which lasts just under four minutes, but, in the words of TheGuardian’s Tom Service, “packs a lot of drama in its diminutive electronic frame.” Ligeti himself “imagined the sounds of Artikulation conjuring up images and ideas of labyrinths, texts, dialogues, insects, catastrophes, transformations, disappearances,” which you can see visualized in shape and color in the “listening score” in the video above.
Created in 1970 by graphic designer Rainer Wehinger of the State University of Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart, and approved by Ligeti himself, the score’s “visuals are beautiful to watch in tandem with Ligeti’s music; there’s an especially arresting sonic and visual pile-up, about 3 mins 15 secs into the piece. This isn’t electronic music as postwar utopia, a la Stockhausen, it’s electronics as human, humorous drama,” writes Service. Have a watch and a listen, or a couple of them, and you’ll get a feel for how Wehinger’s visual choices reflect the nature of Ligeti’s sounds. Just as 2001 still launches sci-fi buffs into an experience like nothing else in the genre, those sounds will still strike a fair few self-described electronic music fans of the 21st century as strange and new — especially when they can see them at the same time.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
From Norman McLaren and René Jodoin comes a 1969 short animation called “Spheres.” Here, you can watch “spheres of translucent pearl float weightlessly in the unlimited panorama of the sky, grouping, regrouping or colliding like the stylized burst of some atomic chain reaction.” All the while, “the dance is set to the musical cadences of Bach, played by pianist Glenn Gould.” A perfect combination.
This film participates in a long tradition of animations exploring geometry, some of which you can find in the Relateds right below.
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