Pink Floyd Plays in Venice on a Massive Floating Stage in 1989; Forces the Mayor & City Council to Resign

in Music | April 25th, 2024

When Roger Waters left Pink Floyd after 1983’s The Final Cut, the remaining members had good reason to assume the band was truly, as Waters proclaimed, “a spent force.” After releasing solo projects in the next few years, David Gilmour, Nick Mason, and Richard Wright soon discovered they would never achieve as individuals what they did as a band, both musically and commercially. Gilmour got to work in 1986 on developing new solo material into the 13th Pink Floyd studio album, the first without Waters, A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

Whether the record is “misunderstood, or just bad” is a matter for fans and critics to hash out. At the time, as Ultimate Classic Rock writes, it “would make or break their future ability to tour and record without” Waters. Richard Wright, who could only contribute unofficially for legal reasons, later admitted that “it’s not a band album at all,” and mostly served as a showcase for Gilmour’s songs, supported in recording by several session players.

Still A Momentary Lapse of Reason “surpassed quadruple platinum status in the U.S.,” driven by the single “Learning to Fly.” The Russian crew of the Soyuz TM‑7 took the disc with them on their 1988 expedition, “making Pink Floyd the first rock band to be played in outer space,” and the album “spawned the year’s biggest tour and a companion live album.”

Uncertain whether the album would sell, the band only planned a small series of shows initially in 1987, but arena after arena filled up, and the tour extended into the following two years, with massive shows all over the world and the usual extravaganza of lights and props, including “a large disco ball which opens like a flower. Lasers and light effects. Flying hospital beds that crash in the stage, Telescan Pods and of course the 32-foot round screen.” As in the past, the over-stimulating stage shows seemed warranted by the huge, quadrophonic sound of the live band. When they arrived in Venice in 1989, they were met by over 200,000 Italian fans. And by a significant contingent of Venetians who had no desire to see the show happen at all.

This is because the free concert had been arranged to take place in St. Mark’s square, coinciding with the widely celebrated Feast of the Redeemer, and threatening the fragile historic art and architecture of the city. “A number of the city’s municipal administrators,” writes Lea-Catherine Szacka at The Architects’ Newspaper, “viewed the concert as an assault against Venice, something akin to a barbarian invasion of urban space.” The city’s superintendent for cultural heritage “vetoed the concert” three days before its July 15 date, “on the grounds that the amplified sound would damage the mosaics of St. Mark’s Basilica, while the whole piazza could very well sink under the weight of so many people.”

An accord was finally reached when the band offered to lower the decibel levels from 100 to 60 and perform on a floating stage 200 yards from the square, which would join “a long history… of floating ephemeral architectures” on the canals and lagoons of Venice. Filmed by state-run television RAI, the spectacle was broadcast “in over 20 countries with an estimated audience of almost 100 million.”

The show ended up becoming a major scandal, splitting traditionalists in the city government and progressives on the council—who believed Venice “must be open to new trends, including rock music” (deemed “new” in 1989). It drew over 150 thousand more people than even lived within the city limits, and while “it was reported that most of the fans were on their best behavior,” notes Dave Lifton, and only one group of statues sustained minor damage, officials claimed they “left behind 300 tons of garbage and 500 cubic meters of empty cans and bottles. And because the city didn’t provide portable bathrooms, concertgoers relieved themselves on the monuments and walls.”

Enraged afterward, residents shouted down the Mayor Antonio Casellati, who attempted a public rapprochement two days later, with cries of “resign, resign, you’ve turned Venice into a toilet.” Casellati did so, along with the entire city council who had brought him to power. Was the event—which you can see reported on in several Italian news broadcasts, above—worth such unsanitary inconvenience and political turbulence? The band may have taken down the city’s government, but they put on a hell of a show–one the Italian fans, and the millions of who watched from home, will never forget. See the front rows of the crowd queued up and restless on barges and boats in footage above. And, at the top of the post, see the band play their 14-song set, with bassist Guy Pratt subbing in for the departed Roger Waters. It’s apparently the original Italian broadcast of the event.

Pink Floyd Films a Concert in an Empty Auditorium, Still Trying to Break Into the U.S. Charts (1970)

How Pink Floyd Built The Wall: The Album, Tour & Film

Pink Floyd’s Debut on American TV, Restored in Color (1967)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagnessd

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Discover the Singing Nuns Who Have Turned Medieval Latin Hymns into Modern Hits

in Music, Religion | April 19th, 2024

We now live, as one often hears, in an age of few musical superstars, but towering ones. The popular culture of the twenty-twenties can, at times, seem to be contained entirely within the person of Taylor Swift — at least when the media magnet that is Beyoncé takes a breather. But look past them, if you can, and you’ll find formidable musical phenomena in the unlikeliest of places. Take the Poor Clares of Arundel, a group of singing nuns from Sussex who, during the COVID-19 pandemic, “smashed all chart records to become not only the highest-charting nuns in history, but also the UK’s best-selling classical artist debut,” reports Classic FM’s Maddy Shaw Roberts.

“Music is at the heart of the nuns’ worship,” writes the Guardian’s Joanna Moorhead, but the idea of putting out an album “came about initially as a bit of a joke.” Not long after receiving a visit from a curious music producer, the singing Poor Clares — skilled and unskilled alike — found themselves in a proper recording studio, laying down tracks.

Roberts describes the resulting debut Light for the World as “a collection of Latin hymns produced for a twenty-first century audience, bringing calm and beauty during a time when so many were separated from their loved ones.” Just a few weeks ago, they released its follow-up May Peace I Give You, the video for whose title track appears at the top of the post.

May Peace I Give You comes from Decca Records, a label famous in part for their rejection, in 1962, of a scruffy rock-and-roll band called the Beatles. Presumably determined not to make the same mistake twice, they’ve since taken chances on all manner of acts, starting with the Rolling Stones; over the decades, they’ve reached beyond the well-trodden spaces in popular and classical music. The success of the Poor Clares goes to show that this practice continues to pay off, and that — like the popular Gregorian chant and gospel booms of decades past — venerable holy music retains its resonance even in our trend-driven, not-especially-religious age. And as the promotion of their new Abbey Road-recorded album proves, even for the monastically disciplined, some temptations are irresistible.

via Classic FM

Experience the Mystical Music of Hildegard Von Bingen: The First Known Composer in History (1098 – 1179)

10 Rules for Appreciating Art by Sister Wendy Beckett (RIP), the Nun Who Unexpectedly Popularized Art History on TV

Manuscript Reveals How Medieval Nun, Joan of Leeds, Faked Her Own Death to Escape the Convent

Religious Songs That Secular People Can Love: Bob Dylan, The Byrds, Sam Cooke, Johnny Cash & Your Favorites

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

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Sun Ra Plays a Music Therapy Gig at a Psychiatric Hospital & Inspires a Patient to Talk for the First Time in Years

in Music, Psychology | April 3rd, 2024

For some time now it has been fashionable to diagnose dead famous people with mental illnesses we never knew they had when they were alive. These postmortem clinical interventions can seem accurate or far-fetched, and mostly harmless—unless we let them color our appreciation of an artist’s work, or negatively influence the way we treat eccentric living personalities. Overall, I tend to think the state of a creative individual’s mental health is a topic best left between patient and doctor.

In the case of one Herman Poole Blount, aka Sun Ra—composer, bandleader of free jazz ensemble the Arkestra, and “embodiment of Afrofuturism”—one finds it tempting to speculate about possible diagnoses, of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, for example. Plenty of people have done so. This makes sense, given Blount’s claims to have visited other planets through astral projection and to himself be an alien from another dimension. But ascribing Sun Ra’s enlightening, enlivening mytho-theo-philosophy to illness or dysfunction truly does his brilliant mind a disservice, and clouds our appreciation for his completely original body of work.

In fact, Sun Ra himself discovered—fairly early in his career when he went by the name “Sonny”—that his music could perhaps alleviate the suffering of mental illness and help bring patients back in touch with reality. In the late 50’s, the pianist and composer’s manager, Alton Abraham, booked his client at a Chicago psychiatric hospital. Sun Ra biographer John Szwed tells the story:

Abraham had an early interest in alternative medicine, having read about scalpel-free surgery in the Philippines and Brazil. The group of patients assembled for this early experiment in musical therapy included catatonics and severe schizophrenics, but Sonny approached the job like any other, making no concessions in his music.

Sun Ra had his faith in this endeavor rewarded by the response of some of the patients. “While he was playing,” Szwed writes, “a woman who it was said had not moved or spoken for years got up from the floor, walked directly to his piano, and cried out ‘Do you call that music?’” Blount—just coming into his own as an original artist—was “delighted with her response, and told the story for years afterward as evidence of the healing powers of music.” He also composed the song above, “Advice for Medics,” which commemorates the psychiatric hospital gig.

It is surely an event worth remembering for how it encapsulates so many of the responses to Sun Ra’s music, which can—yes—confuse, irritate, and bewilder unsuspecting listeners. Likely still inspired by the experience, Sun Ra recorded an album in the early sixties titled Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy, a collection of songs, writes Allmusic, that “outraged those in the jazz community who thought Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane had already taken things too far.” (Hear the track “And Otherness” above.) But those willing to listen to what Sun Ra was laying down often found themselves roused from a debilitating complacency about what music can be and do.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Sun Ra’s Full Lecture & Reading List From His 1971 UC Berkeley Course, “The Black Man in the Cosmos”

When Sun Ra Went to Egypt in 1971: See Film & Hear Recordings from the Legendary Afrofuturist’s First Visit to Cairo

Sun Ra Applies to NASA’s Art Program: When the Inventor of Space Jazz Applied to Make Space Art

Watch a 5‑Part Animated Primer on Afrofuturism, the Black Sci-Fi Phenomenon Inspired by Sun Ra

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The Song From the 1500’s That Blows Rick Beato Away: An Introduction to John Dowland’s Entrancing Music

in History, Music | March 28th, 2024

In 2006, Sting released an album called Songs from the Labyrinth, a collaboration with Bosnian lutenist Edin Karamazov consisting mostly of compositions by Renaissance composer John Dowland. This was regarded by some as rather eccentric, but to listeners familiar with the early music revival that had already been going on for a few decades, it would have been almost too obvious a choice. For Dowland had long since been rediscovered as one of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century’s musical superstars, thanks in part to the recordings of classical guitarist and lutenist Julian Bream.

“When I was a kid, I went to the public library in Fairport, New York, where I’m from, and I got this Julian Bream record,” says music producer and popular Youtuber Rick Beato (previously featured here on Open Culture) in the video above. Beato describes Bream as “one of the greatest classical guitarists who ever lived” and credits him with having “popularized the classical guitar and the lute and renaissance music.” The particular Bream recording that impressed the young Beato was of a John Dowland composition made exotic by distance in time called “The Earl of Essex Galliard,” a performance of which you can watch on Youtube.

Half a century later, Beato’s enjoyment for this piece seems undiminished — and indeed, so much in evidence that this practically turns into a reaction video. Listening gets him reminiscing about his early Dowland experiences: “I would put on this Julian Bream record of him playing lute, just solo lute, and I would sit there and I would putt” — his father having been golf enthusiast enough to have installed a small indoor putting green — and “imagine living back in the fifteen-hundreds, what it would be like.” These pretend time-travel sessions matured into a genuine interest in early music, one he pursued at the New England Conservatory of Music and beyond.

What a delight it would have been for him, then, to find that Sting had laid down his own version of “The Earl of Essex Galliard,” sometimes otherwise known as “Can She Excuse My Wrongs.” In one especially striking section, Sting takes “the soprano-alto-tenor-bass part” and records the whole thing using only layers of his own voice: “there’s four Stings here,” Beato says, referring to the relevant digitally manipulated scene in the music video, “but there’s actually more than four voices.” Songs from the Labyrinth may only have been a modestly successful album by Sting’s standards, but it has no doubt turned more than a few middle-of-the-road pop fans onto the beauty of English Renaissance music. If Beato’s enthusiasm has also turned a few classic-rock addicts into John Dowland connoisseurs, so much the better.

Bach Played Beautifully on the Baroque Lute, by Preeminent Lutenist Evangelina Mascardi

Watch All of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Performed on Original Baroque Instruments

Hear Classic Rock Songs Played on a Baroque Lute: “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” “White Room” & More

Renaissance Knives Had Music Engraved on the Blades; Now Hear the Songs Performed by Modern Singers

What Makes This Song Great?: Producer Rick Beato Breaks Down the Greatness of Classic Rock Songs in His New Video Series

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hear the Evolution of Mozart’s Music, Composed from Ages 5 to 35

in History, Music | March 27th, 2024

More than a quarter of a millennium after he composed his first pieces of music, different listeners will evaluate differently the specific nature of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s genius. But one can hardly fail to be impressed by the fact that he wrote those works when he was five years old (or, as some scholars have it, four years old). It’s not unknown, even today, for precocious, musically inclined children of that age to sit down and put together simple melodies, or even reasonably complete songs. But how many of them can write something like Mozart’s “Minuet in G Major”?

The video above, which traces the evolution of Mozart’s music, begins with that piece — naturally enough, since it’s his earliest known work, and thus honored with the Köchel catalogue number of KV 1. Thereafter we hear music composed by Mozart at various ages of childhood, youth, adolescence, and adulthood, accompanied by a piano roll graphic that illustrates its increasing complexity.

And as with complexity, so with familiarity: even listeners who know little of Mozart’s work will sense the emergence of a distinctive style, and even those who’ve barely heard of Mozart will recognize “Piano Sonata No. 16 in C major” when it comes on.

Mozart composed that piece when he was 32 years old. It’s also known as the “Sonata facile” or “Sonata semplice,” despite its distinct lack of easiness for novice (or even intermediate) piano players. It’s now cataloged as KV 545, which puts it toward the end of Mozart’s oeuvre, and indeed his life. Three years later, the evolutionary listening journey of this video arrives at the “Requiem in D minor,” which we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture for its extensive cinematic use to evoke evil, loneliness, desperation, and reckoning. The piece, KV 626, contains Mozart’s last notes; the unanswerable but nevertheless irresistible question remains of whether they’re somehow implied in his first ones.

Hear the Pieces Mozart Composed When He Was Only Five Years Old

Read an 18th-Century Eyewitness Account of 8‑Year-Old Mozart’s Extraordinary Musical Skills

Mozart’s Diary Where He Composed His Final Masterpieces Is Now Digitized and Available Online

What Movies Teach Us About Mozart: Exploring the Cinematic Uses of His Famous Lacrimosa

See Mozart Played on Mozart’s Own Fortepiano, the Instrument That Most Authentically Captures the Sound of His Music

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Radiohead’s “Creep” Sung by a 1,600-Person Choir in Australia

in Music | March 27th, 2024

Everybody can sing. Maybe not well. But why should that stop you? That’s the basic philosophy of Pub Choir, an organization based in Brisbane, Australia. At each Pub Choir event, a conductor “arranges a popular song and teaches it to the audience in three-part harmony.” Then, the evening culminates with a performance that gets filmed and shared on social media. Anyone (18+) is welcome to attend.

Above, you can watch a PubChoir performance, with 1600 choir members singing a moving version of Radiohead’s “Creep.” On their YouTube channel, you can also find Pub Choir performances of Coldplay’s “Yellow,” Toto’s “Africa,” and The Bee Gees “How Deep Is Your Love.”

Find other choir performances in the Relateds below.

via Kottke

A Choir with 1,000 Singers Pays Tribute to Sinéad O’Connor & Performs “Nothing Compares 2 U”

Watch David Byrne Lead a Massive Choir in Singing David Bowie’s “Heroes”

Patti Smith Sings “People Have the Power” with a Choir of 250 Fellow Singers

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Performed in Classical Latin

in Language, Music | March 5th, 2024

By the early nineteen-nineties, at least in the United States, Latin instruction in schools wasn’t what it had once been. Students everywhere had long been showing impatience and irreverence about their having to study that “dead language,” of course. But surely it had never felt quite so irrelevant as it did in a world of shopping malls, cable television, and the emerging internet. Thirty years ago, few students would have freely chosen to do their Latin homework when they could have been, say, listening to Nirvana. But now, in the age of Youtube, they can have both at once.

In the video above, the_miracle_aligner covers “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in a medieval (or “bardcore”) style, using not just period instrumentation but also a translation of its lyrics into Latin. Since its release a few years ago, this Colosseum-worthy version of the song that defined grunge has drawn thousands upon thousands of appreciative comments from enthusiasts of Nirvana and Latin alike.

As one of the latter points out, “most Latin words rhyme because of conjugation,” and when they don’t, the language’s unusual freedom of word order provides plenty of opportunity to make it work. Still, the song contains more than its share of truly inspired choices: another commenter calls it “just immaculate” how “the ‘hello, how low’ rhymes as ‘salvé, parve.’ ”

As tends to be the way with those of us here in the twenty-first century inclined to dig deep into a language like Latin, some take the opportunity to get into character: “I vividly remember the night Gaius Kurtus Cobainius the Elder premiered this song at the Amphitheater of Pompey in the Summer of 91AD. The plebs went nuts and were throwing Sesterti and Denari on the stage. I even saw a patrician woman lift her tunic! Oh how I miss those days.” In whatever language it’s sung, the instantly recognizable “Smells Like Teen Spirit” will send any Generation-Xers in earshot right back to the strenuous slacking of their own youth. And the cry “Oblectáte, nunc híc sumus” would have cut as sharply in the age of bread and circuses as it did in the MTV era — or, for that matter, as it does now.

How Nirvana’s Iconic “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Came to Be: An Animated Video Narrated by T‑Bone Burnett Tells the True Story

Hip 1960s Latin Teacher Translated Beatles Songs into Latin for His Students: Read Lyrics for “O Teneum Manum,” “Diei Duri Nox” & More

Nirvana’s “Come As You Are” Played By Musicians Around the World

The First Live Performance of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (1991)

What Ancient Latin Sounded Like, And How We Know It

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 5 ) |

Keith Richards Performs “I’m Waiting For The Man”: A New Tribute to Lou Reed

in Life, Music | March 4th, 2024

“To me, Lou stood out. The real deal! Something important to American music and to ALL MUSIC! I miss him and his dog.” — Keith Richards

On what would have been Lou Reed’s 82nd birthday (March 2), Keith Richards released a cover of “I’m Waiting for the Man,” a track originally written by Reed in 1966, then recorded by the Velvet Underground the next year. Previously covered by David Bowie, OMD, and French singer Vanessa Paradis, the song makes sense in Keith Richards’ hands. As one YouTuber put it, “Seeing Keith perform this Velvet Underground classic is watching him take a victory lap over his addiction. He’s been away from that life for decades and now he’s telling the story about someone else, even though he lived it for a long time. This is a triumph for him.”

Richards’ cover will appear on the forthcoming album The Power of the Heart: A Tribute to Lou Reed, where songs move from Reed’s “groundbreaking years with the Velvets into his majestic solo career.” Contributors include Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, Rufus Wainwright, Lucinda Williams, Rickie Lee Jones, Bobby Rush, and Rosanne Cash. The album will be released on Record Store Day (April 20th). Get more deets here.

Below, as a bonus, watch Reed and Bowie perform “I’m Waiting for the Man” together, apparently at Reed’s 50th birthday bash in 1997.

Keith Richards Shows Us How to Play the Blues, Inspired by Robert Johnson, on the Acoustic Guitar

Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson’s Three Rules for Living Well: A Short and Succinct Life Philosophy

Chuck Berry Takes Keith Richards to School, Shows Him How to Rock (1987)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Pink Floyd Plays in Venice on a Massive Floating Stage in 1989; Forces the Mayor & City Council to Resign

Discover the Singing Nuns Who Have Turned Medieval Latin Hymns into Modern Hits

Sun Ra Plays a Music Therapy Gig at a Psychiatric Hospital & Inspires a Patient to Talk for the First Time in Years

The Song From the 1500’s That Blows Rick Beato Away: An Introduction to John Dowland’s Entrancing Music

Hear the Evolution of Mozart’s Music, Composed from Ages 5 to 35

Radiohead’s “Creep” Sung by a 1,600-Person Choir in Australia

Hear Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Performed in Classical Latin

Keith Richards Performs “I’m Waiting For The Man”: A New Tribute to Lou Reed

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