Between 750 BC and 400 BC, the Ancient Greeks composed songs meant to be accompanied by the lyre, reed-pipes, and various percussion instruments. More than 2,000 years later, modern scholars have finally figured out how to reconstruct and perform these songs with (it’s claimed) 100% accuracy.
[Ancient Greek] instruments are known from descriptions, paintings and archaeological remains, which allow us to establish the timbres and range of pitches they produced.
And now, new revelations about ancient Greek music have emerged from a few dozen ancient documents inscribed with a vocal notation devised around 450 BC, consisting of alphabetic letters and signs placed above the vowels of the Greek words.
The Greeks had worked out the mathematical ratios of musical intervals — an octave is 2:1, a fifth 3:2, a fourth 4:3, and so on.
The notation gives an accurate indication of relative pitch.
So what did Greek music sound like? Below you can listen to David Creese, a classicist from the University of Newcastle, playing “an ancient Greek song taken from stone inscriptions constructed on an eight-string ‘canon’ (a zither-like instrument) with movable bridges. “The tune is credited to Seikilos,” says Archaeology Magazine.
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One night in October of 1938, listeners tuned into CBS radio to hear a piece of radio theater (listen below) so frightening and, for its time, realistic, that people across New England and eastern Canada fled their homes to escape danger. Or so the legend goes. With Orson Welles reading the part of an astronaut and professor, the Mercury Theatre on the Air’s broadcast of War of the Worlds hit a frayed nerve in the American public.
The show aired during the tense years leading up to World War II, when fascism was on the rise in Europe. Many took the “news” of an alien invasion for truth. It would have been easy to be fooled: the story, adapted from H.G. Wells’ early sci-fi novel, was written as a simulated news broadcast. It opened with an introduction from the novel and a note that the adaptation was set a year ahead (1939). For those who missed that disclaimer, the remainder of the show was unsettling to say the least.
A reporter read a weather report. Then came dance music played by a fictitious band (“Ramon Raquello and his Orchestra”) that was interrupted by news of bizarre explosions on the surface of Mars. Soon Orson Welles made his appearance, interviewed as an expert who denied the possibility of any life on the red planet. But then came the news of a cylindrical meteorite landing in northern New Jersey. A crowd gathered and a “reporter” came on the scene to watch the cylinder unscrew itself and reveal a rocketship inside.
Chaos ensued, followed by a Martian invasion of New York City, where people ran into the East River “like rats.”
Welles offered another disclaimer at the end of the story (when the aliens succumbed to Earth’s pathogens) to remind listeners that the broadcast was fiction.
Too little, too late? Or just great theater?
The next day, Welles held a brilliant news conference where he apologized for putting a fright into listeners. (It’s another great piece of theater.) Meanwhile the broadcast established the Mercury Theatre on the Air—already an acclaimed stage production company—as one of America’s top-rated radio programs. Until then the show had languished in relative obscurity. After sending thousands of people into a panic, the show earned advertising sponsorship from Campbell’s Soup.
Kate Rix writes about digital media and education. Follow her on Twitter.
Over at the Retronaut they’ve highlighted some early, overly-optimistic newspaper reports that came out after the Titanic sank in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912. The World reported “Titanic Sinking; No Lives Lost.” The Vancouver Daily Province declared “The Titanic Sinking, But Probably No Lives Lost.” Meanwhile, The New York Times got closer to the truth with its lengthy headline:“Titanic Sinks Four Hours After Hitting Iceberg; 866 Rescued By Carpathia, Probably 1,250 Perish; Ismay Safe, Mrs. Astor Maybe, Noted Names Missing.” The real death toll climbed to 1,514. Last year, on the 100th anniversary of the maritime tragedy, Christopher Sullivan, an editor at the Associated Press, researched the story and tried to explain how newspapers fell so short of the mark. Speaking to the web site Journalism.co.uk he gave this explanation:
From fronting the Velvet Underground to putting out four solid sides of feedback noise to collaborating with Metallica on a semi-spoken word album based on the plays of Frank Wedekind, the late avant-rocker Lou Reed had a way of never working on quite what you’d expect him to. Easier said than done, of course, but Reed managed to sustain a long, always-interesting career and position in the culture by exercising that strength not just in music but in other forms as well. Above we have Red Shirley, a half-hour documentary film he made with Ralph Gibson in 2010. (Score provided by “the Metal Machine Trio”.) We get the premise up front, onscreen: “On the eve of her 100th birthday, Lou sat down with his cousin Shirley for a tête-à-tête.” Most nearly-100-year-olds have, presumably, seen a lot; Shirley Novick has seen even more.
“During World War I she emerged unscathed from Poland after her family’s house was hit by a dud shell,” writes the Wall Street Journal’s Nicolas Rapold in an article that also includes Reeds own’s reflections on his cousin and her thoroughly historical life. “At 19, she journeyed to Canada without her parents, thus escaping the fate of relatives during World War II. (‘Hitler took care of them,’ she curtly remarks in the film.)
Leaving Canada, which she deemed ‘too provincial,’ Ms. Novick joined thousands of immigrants in New York City’s garment industry. There, over the course of 47 years, her debate skills came in handy as an outspoken activist during union scraps. She would later join the 1963 civil rights march on Washington.” Snagfilms tags Red Shirley with the apt label “fascinating people,” but for a solid documentary, you also need a fascinated interviewer, and Reed fills that role. “The only other thing I would like to do is make a movie about martial arts,” Reed told Rapold. “Like, travel around to different teachers and tournaments, compare techniques and training.” That we’ll never see it now fills me with regret.
The film should be viewable in most all geographies, or so our Twitter followers tell us. (Our apologies if you’re not in one of them.) You can find Red Shirley permanently housed in our collection of 575 Free Movies Online.
You’ll get a charge out this picture taken long ago. It captures Mark Twain, a literary giant of the 19th century, tinkering in the laboratory of the great inventor, Nikola Tesla. According to the University of Virginia, the photo was taken in the spring of 1894, when Century Magazine published an article called “Tesla’s Oscillator and other Inventions.” Still available online, the article begins:
[Mr. Tesla] invites attention to-day, whether for profound investigations into the nature of electricity, or for beautiful inventions in which is offered a concrete embodiment of the latest means for attaining the ends most sought after in the distribution of light, heat, and power, and in the distant communication of intelligence. Any one desirous of understanding the trend and scope of modern electrical advance will find many clues in the work of this inventor. The present article discloses a few of the more important results which he has attained, some of the methods and apparatus which he employs, and one or two of the theories to which he resorts for an explanation of what is accomplished.
Below, we’ve got more vintage Twain (including Twain topless), plus some choice Tesla picks:
“A Short History of the Highrise,” a four-part interactive New York Times “Op-Doc” reminds me of a pop-up book. The very first lever I pulled (actually it was a wooden bucket) added a couple of stories to a medieval tower! I even snagged a couple of complimentary factoids about the Tower of Babel! Bonus!
The kids are gonna love it!
There are doors to push, scenic postcards to flip, a little Roman guy to drag to the right… what a creative use of the Times’ massive photo morgue. Director Katerina Cizek skitters throughout history and all over the globe, swinging by ancient Rome, Montezuma’s Castle cliff dwelling, China’s Fujian province, 18th century Europe, and Jacob Riis’ New York. Apparently, vertical housing is nothing new.
( I did find myself wondering what director Cizek might be angling for at the Dakota. The storied apartment building was long ago dwarfed by taller additions to New York City’s urban landscape, but its multiple appearances in the series indicate that it’s still its most desirable. Mercifully, none of the interactive features involve John Lennon.)
Would that a similar restraint had been exercised with regard to narration. I would have gladly listened to Professor Miles Glendinning, the mass housing scholar who lends his expertise to the project’s subterranean level. Alas, the non-interactive portion is marred by a bizarre rhyme scheme meant to “evoke a storybook.” If so, it’s the sort of storybook no adult (with the possible exception of the singer Feist, who was hopefully paid for her participation) wants to read aloud. A sample:
Publicly sponsored housing isn’t everywhere the diet
Beyond Europe, North America and the Soviet Union, high rise development is rampantly private.
Seriously?
Given the level of discourse, I see no reason we were deprived of a rhyme for “phallic symbol.” Those animated buildings do reach for the sky.
If it all gets a bit much you can head straight for “Home.” The final installment jettisons the cutesy-bootsy rhymes in favor of a lovely tune by Patrick Watson, which makes a pleasant soundtrack to reader-supplied photos of their balconies. The images have been arranged thematically — pets, storms, night — and the cumulative effect is charming. Click “More readers’ stories of life in high-rises” to read the first-hand accounts that go with these views. If your perch is high enough, you can submit one of your own.
You can watch a video trailer for “A Short History of the Highrise” up top and Part 1 of Cizek’s film below that. But to get the full interactive experience you’ll want to head over to the New York Times web site.
It seems only natural that Joseph Stalin, who presided over perhaps the most staggeringly vast erasure of human beings, their property, their documents and histories, should have also been a meticulous editor. Whether we know it or not, the invisible hand of an editor intrudes between us and nearly everything we read (even if it’s the writer as editor), making esoteric decisions, creating alternate outcomes and deleting the past. In Stalin’s day, and still in many editorial departments today, the editor wielded a colored pencil instead of a keyboard, and hovered over manuscripts, noting addenda, correcting minutia, slashing through sentences, and scribbling indecipherable comments in the margins. Stalin’s pencil was blue, a color that was not visible when photographed.
This color becomes a metaphor for Stalin’s invisibility in a fascinating article on Stalin as editor by Holly Case, associate professor of history at Cornell University. Before Stalin was Stalin, he was Joseph Djugashvili, revolutionary bolshevik and seminary dropout, “a ruthless person, and a serious editor.” Stalin rejected 47 of Lenin’s articles to Pravda (and suppressed Lenin’s warnings about his protégée after the former’s death). And once he assumed power as head of the Soviet state in the mid-twenties, Stalin continued in this capacity, heavily rewriting documents and manuscripts, and scrawling notes and revisions over hundreds of official party documents. “For Stalin,” Case writes, “editing was a passion that extended well beyond the realm of published texts.” She comments on the paradox of the dictator’s inescapable public presence and his intrusive, yet invisible, editorial tendencies:
Stalin always seemed to have a blue pencil on hand, and many of the ways he used it stand in direct contrast to common assumptions about his person and thoughts. He edited ideology out or played it down, cut references to himself and his achievements, and even exhibited flexibility of mind, reversing some of his own prior edits.
So while Stalin’s voice rang in every ear, his portrait hung in every office and factory, and bobbed in every choreographed parade, the Stalin behind the blue pencil remained invisible. What’s more, he allowed very few details of his private life to become public knowledge, leading the Stalin biographer Robert Service to comment on the remarkable “austerity” of the “Stalin cult.”
We should not mistake Stalin’s “self-effacement,” Case writes, for modesty. She quotes the enigmatic street artist Banksy to make the point: “invisibility is a superpower.” Stalin applied the power of his pencil to thousands of official documents and pieces of propaganda, even completely rewriting the 1938 Soviet bible, The Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Commissioned for a team of authors in 12 chapters, Stalin found it necessary to “fundamentally revise 11 of them” (see the first edition title page above).
Stalin’s blue pencil also intervened in more direct, and chilling ways. The document at left shows a list of people held by the NKVD, forerunners to the KGB. The blue handwriting scrawled over the list is Stalin’s. It reads “Execute everyone.”
We have another execution order below, this time in the form of a 1940 letter written by Stalin’s secret police chief Beria and recommending “execution by shooting” for around 20,000 prisoners, most of them Polish officers, at a camp in Katyn, a massacre the Soviets blamed on the Nazis. Beria’s letter (below) bears the signatures, in blue pencil, of Stalin and several Politburo members.
In addition to heavily editing propaganda and signing mass death warrants, Stalin used his pencil to deface drawings by 19th century Russian painters, scrawling “crude and ominous captions” beneath them in red or blue. He left his mark on 19 pictures, all of them nudes, most of them male. He slashed through their torsos and other body parts with the pencil (below) and wrote on one of the drawings, “Radek, you ginger bastard, if you hadn’t pissed into the wind, if you hadn’t been so bad, you’d still be alive.” Karl Radeck was a revolutionary activist in the 20s that historians believe Stalin had killed in 1939. Historian Nikita Petrov—who believes Stalin defaced the drawings between 1939 and 1946—says of them: “These captions show Stalin wasn’t just malicious and primitive, but that he was also very dangerous.” It is indeed deeply unsettling for an editor to see Stalin’s ruthless hand move freely from the violence of his slash-and-burn textual changes to that of his mass execution orders and crude, “loutish” debasement of human forms.
The Second World War was waged over six long years on every continent save South America and Antarctica. Seventy-some years later, the daily shifts of the European Theater’s front lines can be tracked in under seven minutes, thanks to a mysterious, map-loving animator known variously as Emperor Tigerstar or Kaiser Tigerstar (the latter accounts for the helmet-wearing kitten gracing the upper corner of his World War I time-lapse).
The power-shifting colors (blue for Allies, red for Axis) are mesmerizing, as is a relentless timer ticking off the days between Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939 and VE Day, May 8, 1945. Royalty-free music by Kevin MacLeod and audio samples ranging from Hitler and Mussolini’s declarations of war to Roosevelt’s Day of Infamy speech add import.
Careful reading of his blog reveals a diehard history buff with a weakness for metal music, wholesome CGI movies, and statistics.
He’s also a workaholic. His YouTube channel boasts a boggling assortment of map animations. This in addition to an alternate YouTube channel where he remaps history in response to his own “what if” type prompts. Somehow he finds the time to preside over The Blank Atlas, a site whose members contribute unlabeled, non-copyrighted maps available for free public download. And he may well be a brony, as evidenced by the video he was purportedly working on this summer, World War II: As Told by Ponies.
Ayun Halliday didn’t know she’d be keeping things fresh by failing to listen to a single second of 8th grade Geography. Follow her @AyunHalliday
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