An Animated Leonard Cohen Offers Reflections on Death: Thought-Provoking Excerpts from His Final Interview

in Animation, Life, Magazines, Music | November 11th, 2019

A month before Leonard Cohen died in Novem­ber, 2016, The New York­er’s edi­tor David Rem­nick trav­eled to the songwriter’s Los Ange­les home for a lengthy inter­view in which Cohen looked both for­ward and back.

As a for­mer Zen monk, he was also adept at inhab­it­ing the present, one in which the shad­ow of death crept ever clos­er.

His for­mer lover and muse, Mar­i­anne Ihlen, had suc­cumbed to can­cer ear­li­er in the sum­mer, two days after receiv­ing a frank and lov­ing email from Cohen:

Well, Mar­i­anne, it’s come to this time when we are real­ly so old and our bod­ies are falling apart and I think I will fol­low you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beau­ty and your wis­dom, but I don’t need to say any­thing more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good jour­ney. Good­bye old friend. End­less love, see you down the road.

The New York­er has nev­er shied from over-the-top phys­i­cal descrip­tions. The cour­te­ous, high­ly ver­bal young poet, who’d evinced “a kind of Michael Cor­leone Before the Fall look, sloe-eyed, dark, a lit­tle hunched” was now very thin, but still hand­some, with the hand­shake of “a court­ly retired capo.”

In addi­tion to an album, You Want It Dark­er, to pro­mote, Cohen had a mas­sive back­log of unpub­lished poems and unfin­ished lyrics to tend to before the sands of time ran out.

At 82, he seemed glad to have all his men­tal fac­ul­ties and the sup­port of a devot­ed per­son­al assis­tant, sev­er­al close friends and his two adult chil­dren, all of which allowed him to main­tain his music and lan­guage-based worka­holic habits.

Time, as he not­ed, pro­vides a pow­er­ful incen­tive for fin­ish­ing up, despite the chal­lenges posed by the weak­en­ing flesh:

At a cer­tain point, if you still have your mar­bles and are not faced with seri­ous finan­cial chal­lenges, you have a chance to put your house in order. It’s a cliché, but it’s under­es­ti­mat­ed as an anal­gesic on all lev­els. Putting your house in order, if you can do it, is one of the most com­fort­ing activ­i­ties, and the ben­e­fits of it are incal­cu­la­ble.

He had clear­ly made peace with the idea that some of his projects would go unfin­ished.

You can hear his fond­ness for one of them, a “sweet lit­tle song” that he recit­ed from mem­o­ry, eyes closed, in the ani­mat­ed inter­view excerpt, above:

Lis­ten to the hum­ming­bird

Whose wings you can­not see

Lis­ten to the hum­ming­bird

Don’t lis­ten to me.

Lis­ten to the but­ter­fly

Whose days but num­ber three

Lis­ten to the but­ter­fly

Don’t lis­ten to me.

Lis­ten to the mind of God

Which doesn’t need to be

Lis­ten to the mind of God

Don’t lis­ten to me.

These unfin­ished thoughts close out Cohen’s beau­ti­ful­ly named posthu­mous album, Thanks for the Dance, sched­uled for release lat­er this month.

Dianne V. Lawrence, who designed Cohen’s hum­ming­bird logo, a motif begin­ning with 1979’s Recent Songs album, spec­u­lates that Cohen equat­ed the hum­ming­bird’s enor­mous ener­gy usage and sus­te­nance require­ments with those of the soul.

Read Remnick’s arti­cle on Leonard Cohen in its entire­ty here. Hear a record­ing of David Rem­nick­’s inter­view with Cohen–his last ever–below:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Leonard Cohen’s Final Inter­view: Record­ed by David Rem­nick of The New York­er

Leonard Cohen’s Last Work, The Flame Gets Pub­lished: Dis­cov­er His Final Poems, Draw­ings, Lyrics & More

How Leonard Cohen Wrote a Love Song

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Decem­ber 9 for her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Lou Reed’s Mixtape for Andy Warhol Discovered by Cornell University Professor: Features 12 Previously Unreleased Songs

in Music | November 11th, 2019

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

It’s every researcher’s dream: that some­where among the pile of mate­ri­als lies gold, an undis­cov­ered mas­ter­piece, or an unknown piece to a puz­zle that com­pli­cates con­ven­tion­al knowl­edge. That’s what Cor­nell University’s Judith Peraino dis­cov­ered while going through some of the 3,500 cas­settes in the Andy Warhol archive. Here she found a mix-tape cas­sette that Lou Reed had made for Andy in the mid-sev­en­ties, with one side a selec­tion of songs from recent live gigs, the oth­er side con­tain­ing 12 unknown and unre­leased songs by Reed, accom­pa­nied by only his gui­tar, record­ed at home in New York City.

Labeled “The Phi­los­o­phy Songs (From A to B and Back),” the songs are Reed’s response to Warhol’s 1975 book The Phi­los­o­phy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, which his men­tor had sent to Reed in gal­ley proof. Their rela­tion­ship was always dif­fi­cult. After an unpleas­ant breakup after the Vel­vet Under­ground came out from under Warhol’s shad­ow, the two nev­er worked togeth­er again. But they kept in touch in the way that cer­tain bit­ter exes do: keep­ing it cor­dial, pos­si­bly con­sid­er­ing work­ing togeth­er again, then real­iz­ing why they broke up in the first place.

Prof. Peraino sur­mised that the tape is relat­ed to a musi­cal Warhol want­ed to cre­ate with Reed based on Warhol’s book. And in fact Reed uses pas­sages from the book as jump­ing off points for the lyrics, she found. There’s a song each about “fame, sex, and the busi­ness of art,” and two about drag queens. But Reed used oth­er songs to crit­i­cize Warhol for his seem­ing indif­fer­ence to the deaths of Fac­to­ry stars Can­dy Dar­ling and Eric Emer­son, adding that he should have died after being shot in 1968. Reed then apolo­gies to Warhol at the end of the song.

Because her research was about the begin­nings of mix­tape cul­ture, queer­ness, and Warhol’s end­less box­es of cas­settes, she is excit­ed about both sides of the tape. Mix­tapes, she explains, were a way for peo­ple to com­mu­ni­cate com­plex emo­tions with­out hav­ing to sim­ply write them down. Songs strike emo­tion­al chords in so many ways.

The tape “is an exam­ple of Lou Reed curat­ing him­self, putting togeth­er an ide­al set list for Andy Warhol,” Peraino says in Cornell’s video inter­view. “I see the mes­sage of the tape as being both courtship and breakup in a sense. The one side is say­ing, look at me, what I’ve able to do this year…and now look at you.”

Apart from a 30-sec­ond excerpt, found on Variety’s web page, there are no cur­rent plans to release some­thing so rough, and with so many rights issues at stake.

Lou Reed did go on to make some­thing sim­i­lar how­ev­er, when in 1990 he wrote Songs for Drel­la with fel­low Vel­vet John Cale.

via Cor­nell

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Andy Warhol Eat an Entire Burg­er King Whopper–While Wish­ing the Burg­er Came from McDonald’s (1981)

Andy Warhol Demys­ti­fied: Four Videos Explain His Ground­break­ing Art and Its Cul­tur­al Impact

The Lou Reed Archive Opens at the New York Pub­lic Library: Get Your Own Lou Reed Library Card and Check It Out

Meet the Char­ac­ters Immor­tal­ized in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”: The Stars and Gay Rights Icons from Andy Warhol’s Fac­to­ry Scene

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.

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Watch J.S. Bach’s “Air on the G String” Played on the Actual Instruments from His Time

in Music | November 5th, 2019

There is no wrong way to lis­ten to the music of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach. You may pre­fer the aus­tere, idio­syn­crat­ic piano inter­pre­ta­tions of Glenn Gould; you may pre­fer the ground­break­ing ana­log-syn­the­siz­er ren­di­tions painstak­ing­ly record­ed by Wendy Car­los (whose ear­ly fans includ­ed Gould him­self); or you may pre­fer faith­ful per­for­mances using only the instru­ments extant in the late 17th to mid-18th cen­tu­ry peri­od in which Bach lived. In that last case, the San Fran­cis­co ear­ly-music ensem­ble Voic­es of Music has you cov­ered. You may remem­ber us pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tur­ing their per­for­mances of Vival­di and Pachel­bel; in the video above, you can hear and see them play Bach.

More specif­i­cal­ly, you can hear them play the sec­ond move­ment, Aria, from Bach’s orches­tral suite in D Major, BWV 1068. The instru­ments they play it on include an Ital­ian baroque vio­lin from 1660 and an Aus­tri­an baroque vio­la from 1680, as well as more recent­ly craft­ed exam­ples rig­or­ous­ly mod­eled after instru­ments from that same era. “As instru­ments became mod­ern­ized in the 19th cen­tu­ry, builders and play­ers tend­ed to focus on the vol­ume of sound and the sta­bil­i­ty of tun­ing,” says VoM’s expla­na­tion of their use of peri­od instru­ments. “Mod­ern steel strings replaced the old­er mate­ri­als, and instru­ments were often machine made. His­tor­i­cal instru­ments, built indi­vid­u­al­ly by hand and with over­all lighter con­struc­tion, have extreme­ly com­plex over­tones — which we find delight­ful.”

Any lover of Bach’s music has heard this piece many times, not least due to its pop­u­lar­iza­tion in the late 19th cen­tu­ry, in an arrange­ment by Ger­man vio­lin­ist August Wil­helmj, as “Air on the G String.” The orig­i­nal work dates to “some time between the years 1717 and 1723,” writes music blog­ger Özgür Nevres, when Bach com­posed it for his patron Prince Leopold of Anhalt. It also holds the hon­or of being the first work by Bach ever record­ed, “by the Russ­ian cel­list Alek­san­dr Verzh­bilovich and an unknown pianist, in 1902 (as the Air from the Over­ture No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068).” But no mat­ter how many dif­fer­ent record­ings from dif­fer­ent eras of Bach’s orches­tral suite in D Major in which you’ve steeped your­self, if you’ve only heard it played on mod­ern instru­ments, a per­for­mance like Voic­es of Music’s shows that it still has sur­pris­es to offer.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Sounds of the Actu­al Instru­ments for Which Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, and Han­del Orig­i­nal­ly Com­posed Their Music

The Authen­tic Vivaldi’s The Four Sea­sons: Watch a Per­for­mance Based on Orig­i­nal Man­u­scripts & Played with 18th-Cen­tu­ry Instru­ments

The Authen­tic Pachelbel’s Canon: Watch a Per­for­mance Based on the Orig­i­nal Man­u­script & Played with Orig­i­nal 17th-Cen­tu­ry Instru­ments

Watch Glenn Gould Per­form His Last Great Stu­dio Record­ing of Bach’s Gold­berg Vari­a­tions (1981)

All of Bach for Free! New Site Will Put Per­for­mances of 1080 Bach Com­po­si­tions Online

How a Bach Canon Works. Bril­liant

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Oscar-Nominated Composer Danny Elfman Teaches an Online Course on Writing Music for Film: A Look Inside His Creative Process

in Film, Music | November 4th, 2019


FYI: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

To have watched some of the great­est film and tele­vi­sion in the last thir­ty-five years is to have been immersed in the music of Mark Moth­ers­baugh and Dan­ny Elfman—two artists who have scored Hol­ly­wood block­busters and indie hits alike since the mid-eight­ies when they start­ed on TV’s Pee-wee’s Play­house and Tim Burton’s 1985 com­e­dy Pee-wee’s Big Adven­ture, respec­tive­ly. They also hap­pen to have played in two of the 1980’s weird­est, most exper­i­men­tal New Wave bands, Devo and Oin­go Boin­go.

Moth­ers­bough went on to score every­thing from Rugrats to Thor: Rag­narok, but he’s maybe best known for his work with Wes Ander­son. Like­wise, Elfman—who has worked with every­one from Gus Van Sant to Bri­an De Pal­ma to Peter Jack­son to Ang Lee—formed a cre­ative bond with Bur­ton, to such a degree that it’s near impos­si­ble to imag­ine a Tim Bur­ton film with­out a Dan­ny Elf­man score.

When Bur­ton first approached him for Pee-wee’s Big Adven­ture, the Oin­go Boin­go front­man was just about to release “Weird Sci­ence,” for the infa­mous John Hugh­es film of the same name. Already a band with a mas­sive cult fol­low­ing, they became pop stars, and Elf­man became one of the most dis­tinc­tive film com­posers of the last sev­er­al decades.

He scored Beetle­juice, Bat­man, Edward Scis­sorhands, Bat­man Returns, Sleepy Hol­low, The Night­mare Before Christ­mas, Corpse Bride, and, most recent­ly, Burton’s Dum­bo. Now he’s shar­ing his secrets for aspir­ing film com­posers every­where with his very own Mas­ter­class. “I’m going to tell you from my per­spec­tive,” he says in the trail­er above, “how I do these things”: things includ­ing instru­men­ta­tion, orches­tra­tion, melody, and tone—“the most impor­tant thing you’re going to cap­ture in a film score.”

In the screen­shots here, see excerpts of the course top­ics, which include units on the films Milk, The Unknown Known, and The Night­mare Before Christ­mas, an exam­ple of “writ­ing specif­i­cal­ly for a character”—a char­ac­ter, Jack Skelling­ton, whose singing voice Elf­man also pro­vid­ed.

For those who feel they’ll nev­er mea­sure up to a career like Dan­ny Elfman’s, he intro­duces all impor­tant units on inse­cu­ri­ty and fail­ure. Per­haps the most impor­tant les­son of all, he says above, with infec­tious enthu­si­asm, is learn­ing that “it’s okay to fail, to feel inse­cure. Doubt­ing your­self, find­ing con­fi­dence and mov­ing for­ward, and then doubt­ing what you’ve just done…. I think this is the life of a com­pos­er. I think it’s the life of an artist.”

Can such things be taught, or can they only be lived? Each teacher and stu­dent of the arts must at some point ask them­selves this ques­tion. Per­haps they only learn the answer when they try, and fail, and try again any­way. Sign up for Elman’s course here.

You can take this class by sign­ing up for a Mas­ter­Class’ All Access Pass. The All Access Pass will give you instant access to this course and 85 oth­ers for a 12-month peri­od.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Take Every Mas­ter­Class Course For Less Than a Cup of Good Cof­fee

Why Mar­vel and Oth­er Hol­ly­wood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Per­ils of the “Temp Score”

All of the Music from Mar­tin Scorsese’s Movies: Lis­ten to a 326-Track, 20-Hour Playlist

Bri­an Eno Reveals His Favorite Film Sound­tracks

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

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Bowie’s Bookshelf: A New Essay Collection on The 100 Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life

in Books, Music | October 31st, 2019

Like some rock stars of his gen­er­a­tion, David Bowie had a lit­er­ary cast of mind; unlike most of those col­leagues, he also made his asso­ci­a­tion with books explic­it. (Not for noth­ing did he appear on that READ poster.) When­ev­er this sub­ject aris­es, it’s tempt­ing to bring up the sto­ry of how The Man Who Fell to Earth direc­tor Nico­las Roeg poked fun at the extreme num­ber of books with which Bowie sur­round­ed him­self dur­ing the time he was act­ing in that film, as we did when we post­ed about the David Bowie book club. Launched by Bowie’s son, the film­mak­er Dun­can Jones, that project was meant to read through Bowie’s own list of top 100 books, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Now, thanks to the work of music jour­nal­ist John O’Con­nell, Bowie’s love of books has a book of its own.

Pub­lished in the UK as Bowie’s Books and in the US as Bowie’s Book­shelf, O’Con­nel­l’s essay col­lec­tion takes the 100 books the man who was Zig­gy Star­dust, Aladdin Sane, and The Thin White Duke named as favorites. In each he finds the rel­e­vant ques­tions (or at least fas­ci­nat­ing ones) to ask about each book’s rela­tion­ship to Bowie’s life and work: “How did the pow­er imbued in a sin­gle suit of armor in The Ili­ad impact a man who loved cos­tumes, shift­ing iden­ti­ty, and the siren song of the alter-ego?” Or, “How did the poems of T.S. Eliot and Frank O’Hara, the fic­tion of Vladimir Nabokov and Antho­ny Burgess, the comics of The Beano and The Viz, and the ground­break­ing pol­i­tics of James Bald­win influ­ence Bowie’s lyrics, his sound, his artis­tic out­look?”

Kirkus Reviews notes that “many of Bowie’s selec­tions speak to his obvi­ous pas­sion for music, espe­cial­ly ear­ly rock ’n’ roll and R&B (Greil Mar­cus, Ger­ri Her­shey), his famous Japanophil­ia (Yukio Mishi­ma, Tadanori Yokoo), and his stint in Ger­many (Alfred Döblin, Otto Friedrich).” O’Con­nel­l’s com­pletist analy­sis of Bowie’s top-100-books list, com­posed for an exhi­bi­tion at the Vic­to­ria & Albert Muse­um just six years ago, also reveals “the range and play­ful­ness in Bowie’s read­ing, from hefty tomes on the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion to lad­dish com­ic books like The Beano.” Oth­er essays cov­er Loli­ta, The Gnos­tic Gospels, A Con­fed­er­a­cy of Dunces, and White Noise, all part of a mix­ture that would tan­ta­lize any cul­tur­al crit­ic — much like the work of David Bowie, who still con­sti­tutes a cul­ture unto him­self.

Bowie’s Book­shelf: The Hun­dred Books that Changed David Bowie’s Life can be ordered now.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

The David Bowie Book Club Gets Launched by His Son: Read One of Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books Every Month

David Bowie Urges Kids to READ in a 1987 Poster Spon­sored by the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: Space Odd­i­ty, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

The Sto­ry of How David Jones Became David Bowie Gets Told in a New Graph­ic Nov­el

Bri­an Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion & 59 Books For Build­ing Your Intel­lec­tu­al World

David Bowie Picks His 12 Favorite David Bowie Songs: Lis­ten to Them Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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.

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The Entire Archive of Contact: A Journal for Contemporary Music Has Been Digitized and Put Online

in Archives, Music | October 30th, 2019

FYI on a new dig­i­ti­za­tion project:

“Con­tact: A Jour­nal for Con­tem­po­rary Music was active from 1971–1990 and inde­pen­dent­ly pub­lished by its edi­tors. As with many inde­pen­dent print pub­li­ca­tions of that era, this has meant that, for read­ers and researchers oper­at­ing in a con­tem­po­rary dig­i­tal land­scape, the rich­ness of its resource has been all but inac­ces­si­ble. In recog­ni­tion of this sit­u­a­tion, in the years 2016–2019, the entire jour­nal was digi­tised and made avail­able over the course of a three-year research project..”

“Con­tact’s basic inten­tions – as set out ful­ly in the first issue, dat­ed Spring 1971 – were to pro­mote informed dis­cus­sion of 20th-cen­tu­ry music in gen­er­al and the music of our own time in par­tic­u­lar. Among the orig­i­nal con­cerns of the founders of the mag­a­zine were that pop­u­lar musics, jazz and con­tem­po­rary folk music should play a part in our scheme. In the ear­li­er days, espe­cial­ly, we con­tin­u­al­ly sought for good writ­ing in these fields, as well as con­tri­bu­tions on ‘seri­ous’ music.”

Enter the Con­tact online archive here…

via @ide­o­forms

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

 

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Watch the Opening of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with the Original, Unused Score

in Film, Music | October 30th, 2019

How does a movie become a “clas­sic”? Expla­na­tions, nev­er less than utter­ly sub­jec­tive, will vary from cinephile to cinephile, but I would sub­mit that clas­sic-film sta­tus, as tra­di­tion­al­ly under­stood, requires that all ele­ments of the pro­duc­tion work in at least near-per­fect har­mo­ny: the cin­e­matog­ra­phy, the cast­ing, the edit­ing, the design, the set­ting, the score. Out­side first-year film stud­ies sem­i­nars and delib­er­ate­ly con­trar­i­an cul­ture columns, the label of clas­sic, once attained, goes prac­ti­cal­ly undis­put­ed. Even those who active­ly dis­like Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance, would sure­ly agree that its every last audio­vi­su­al nuance serves its dis­tinc­tive, bold vision — espe­cial­ly that open­ing use of “Thus Spake Zarathus­tra.”

But Kubrick did­n’t always intend to use that piece, nor the oth­er orches­tral works we’ve come to close­ly asso­ciate with mankind’s ven­tures into realms beyond Earth and strug­gles with intel­li­gence of its own inven­tion. Accord­ing to Jason Kot­tke, Kubrick had com­mis­sioned an orig­i­nal score from A Street­car Named Desire, Spar­ta­cus, Cleopa­tra, and Who’s Afraid of Vir­ginia Woolf com­pos­er Alex North.

At the top of the post, you can see 2001’s open­ing with North’s music, and below you can hear 38 min­utes of his score on Spo­ti­fy. As to the ques­tion of why Kubrick stuck instead with the tem­po­rary score of Strauss, Ligeti, and Khatch­a­turi­an he’d used in edit­ing, Kot­tke quotes from Michel Cimen­t’s inter­view with the film­mak­er:

How­ev­er good our best film com­posers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a mul­ti­tude of great orches­tral music avail­able from the past and from our own time? [ … ]  Although [North] and I went over the pic­ture very care­ful­ly, and he lis­tened to these tem­po­rary tracks and agreed that they worked fine and would serve as a guide to the musi­cal objec­tives of each sequence he, nev­er­the­less, wrote and record­ed a score which could not have been more alien to the music we had lis­tened to, and much more seri­ous than that, a score which, in my opin­ion, was com­plete­ly inad­e­quate for the film.

North did­n’t find out about Kubrick­’s choice until 2001’s New York City pre­miere. Not an envi­able sit­u­a­tion, cer­tain­ly, but not the worst thing that ever hap­pened to a col­lab­o­ra­tor who failed to rise to the direc­tor’s expec­ta­tions.

For more Kubrick and clas­si­cal music, see our recent post: The Clas­si­cal Music in Stan­ley Kubrick’s Films: Lis­ten to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Decem­ber 2014.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Watch a New­ly-Cre­at­ed “Epi­logue” For Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

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Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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What Guitars Were Like 400 Years Ago: An Introduction to the 9 String Baroque Guitar

in History, Music | October 30th, 2019

Maybe it’s just me, but it some­times feels like gui­tar music is on the wane. Sure, there are plen­ty of gui­tar bands out there, gui­tar sales seem to hold steady, but the syn­the­siz­er, midi con­troller, and dig­i­tal audio work­sta­tion have become the dom­i­nant instru­ments of pop­u­lar music. Then again, it’s short-sight­ed to count the gui­tar out just yet, giv­en the 500-year longevi­ty of its design.

In the 17th cen­tu­ry, the Lute Soci­ety of Dart­mouth notes, the gui­tar was “cul­ti­vat­ed by play­ers and com­posers with­in the courts of princes and kings.” The Baroque gui­tar was very much like the mod­ern six string (or, as often these days, sev­en and eight string) that we know today, “aside from a dif­fer­ence of tun­ing,” writes luthi­er Clive Tit­muss. Where “the mod­ern gui­tar is a baritone/tenor… the baroque is an alto instru­ment, about the size of a vio­la.”

The dif­fer­ences in size and pitch change the sus­tain and artic­u­la­tion. The Baroque gui­tar’s tonal char­ac­ter­is­tics are much more del­i­cate, per­cus­sive, and lute-like. “The great­est music for baroque gui­tar is dif­fi­cult to ren­der ade­quate­ly on the mod­ern gui­tar because the tra­di­tions of the two instru­ments have diverged so wide­ly: They speak basi­cal­ly the same lan­guage, but with a dif­fer­ent vocab­u­lary and accent.” Ear­ly Renais­sance gui­tars had what is called a “four course” string arrange­ment, with eight dou­bled strings. The baroque gui­tar added one more for a “five course” instru­ment with nine strings.

Like its Renais­sance fore­bear, lutes, and mod­ern twelve-string gui­tars today, four of those “cours­es” were dou­bled, with pairs of strings tuned to the same note. This essen­tial­ly made it a five string gui­tar with the ring­ing sonor­i­ty of a man­dolin. In the video at the top, Bran­don Ack­er explains what this means in the­o­ry and prac­tice. The tun­ing was fair­ly close to a mod­ern six-string, but one octave up and miss­ing the low E. The lone high E string was called the chanterelle or “singing string.”

Pop­u­lar main­ly in south­ern Europe, the Baroque gui­tar “may well have been used as it fre­quent­ly is today,” the Lute Soci­ety points out: “to pro­vide a sim­ple strummed accom­pa­ni­ment for a singer or small group.” It was first held in con­tempt by ear­ly Span­ish com­posers who pre­ferred the sim­i­lar vihuela. But the gui­tar would dis­place that instru­ment, as well as the lute, in musi­cal com­po­si­tions across Spain, Italy, France and else­where in Europe.

In the videos above, you can see and hear some fine demon­stra­tions from Ack­er, who plays peri­od pieces like Suite in D Minor by Robert de Visée, court com­pos­er and musi­cian for Louis XIV and Louis XV. Below, see gui­tarist Ste­fano Maio­rana play a gor­geous Span­ish piece.

Giv­en the 400 years that sep­a­rate the mod­ern gui­tar from its Baroque ances­tor, the resem­blances are remark­able, prov­ing that the instrument’s 17th cen­tu­ry refin­ers hit on a design that per­fect­ly com­ple­ments the human voice, sounds great solo and in groups, and can han­dle both rhythm and lead. Even if most gui­tars in the future dou­ble as midi-con­trol­ling synth instru­ments, it’s prob­a­bly safe to say mod­ern music won’t give up this bril­liant, time-test­ed design any time soon.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of the Gui­tar: The Com­plete Three-Part Doc­u­men­tary

The His­to­ry of the Gui­tar & Gui­tar Leg­ends: From 1929 to 1979

The Ency­clo­pe­dia Of Alter­nate Gui­tar Tun­ings

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

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