Johannes Kepler determined just how the planets of our solar system make their way around the sun. He published his innovative work on the subject from 1609 to 1619, and in the final year of that decade he also came up with a theory that each planet sings a song, and each in a different voice at that. Mars is a tenor, Mercury is a soprano, and Earth, as the BBC show QI (or Quite Interesting) recently tweeted, “is an alto that sings two notes Mi and Fa, which Kepler read as ‘Miseriam & Famem’, ‘misery and famine’ ” — two phenomena not unknown on Earth in Kepler’s time, even though the scientific revolution had already started to change the way people lived.
Not all of the best minds of the scientific revolution thought purely in terms of calculation. The blog ThatsMaths describes Kepler’s mission as explaining the solar system “in terms of divine harmony,” finding “a system of the world that was mathematically correct and harmonically pleasing.” Truly divine harmony could presumably find its expression in music, an idea that led Kepler to explain “planetary motions in terms of harmonic relationships, a scheme that he called the ‘song of the Earth.’ ”
According to this scheme, “each planet emits a tone that varies in pitch as its distance from the Sun varies from perihelion to aphelion and back” — that is, from the nearest they get to the sun to the farthest they get from the sun and back — “producing a continuous glissando of intermediate tones, a ‘whistling produced by friction with the heavenly light.’ ”
Kepler named the combined result “the music of the spheres,” but what does it sound like? Switzerland-based cornettist Bruce Dickey wants to give us a sense of it with Nature’s Whispering Secret, “a project for a CD recording exploring the ideas about music and cosmology of Johannes Kepler.” Demanding the musicianship of not just Dickey but composer Calliope Tsoupaki, singer Hana Blažíková, and a group of singers and instrumentalists from across Europe and America as well, all “among the most distinguished musicians performing 16th-century polyphonic music today.” The Indiegogo campaign for this ambitious tribute to Kepler’s ideas at the intersection of science and aesthetics, which involves an album as well as a series of live performances into the year 2020, is on its very last day, so if you’d like to hear the music of the spheres for yourself, consider making a contribution.
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.
“For sixty years, conventional wisdom has told us that women generally did not perform rock and roll during the 1950s,” writes Leah Branstetter, Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Case Western Reserve University. Like so many cultural forms into which we are initiated, through education, personal interest, and general osmosis, this popular form of Western music—now a genre with seventy years under its belt—has functioned as an almost ideal example of the great man theory of history.
It can seem like settled fact that Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and their celebrated male contemporaries invented the music; and that women played passive roles as fans, studio audience members, groupies, personifications of cars and guitars.…
The reality is, however, that hundreds—or maybe thousands—of women and girls performed and recorded rock and roll in its early years. And many more participated in other ways: writing songs, owning or working for record labels, working as session or touring musicians,designing stage wear, dancing, or managing talent…. [W]omen’s careers didn’t always resemble those of their more famous male counterparts. Some female performers were well known and performed nationally as stars, while others had more influence regionally or only in one tiny club. Some made the pop charts, but even more had impact through live performance. Some women exhibited the kind of wild onstage behavior that had come to be expected from figures Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard—but that wasn’t the only way to be rebellious, and others found their own methods of being revolutionary.
Branstetter’s project, a digital dissertation, covers dozens of musicians from the period, just a fraction of the names she has uncovered in her research. Some of the women profiled were never particularly well-known. Many more were accomplished stars before the 60’s girl group phenomenon, and continued performing into the 21st century.
Meet rockers like Sparkle Moore (see up top), born in Omaha, Nebraska and inspired by Bill Haley in the mid-fifties to play rockabilly in her hometown. She went on to tour the country, putting out record after record. “By 1957,” writes Branstetter, “she had about forty songwriting credits to her name.” Teen magazine Dig wrote that Moore had “an amazing resemblance to the late James Dean… Presley’s style and Dean’s looks.” She is still a “favorite with rockabilly fans,” notes her biography. Moore “has been inducted into the Iowa Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and also made a new album in 2010 entitled Spark-a-Billy.”
Meet Lillie Bryant, one half of duo Billie & Lillie, whose breezier R&B sounds and more wholesome image resonated with early rock and roll fans, promoters, and stars. Bryant began performing in New York City clubs as a teenager. Then producers Bob Crewe and Frank Slay turned her and singer Billie Ford into a duo who went on to star in legendary DJ Alan Freed’s stage shows, “including a six-week tour with Chuck Berry and Frankie Lymon” and an appearance on American Bandstand. Bryant still performs in her hometown of Newburgh, New York.
Meet The Chantels. “Formed in the Bronx, New York in the early 1950s,” they were “among the first African-American female vocal groups to gain national attention.” They also toured with Alan Freed and appeared on American Bandstand and The Dick Clark Show. In 1961, their hit “Look in My Eyes” went to number 14 on the pop charts and 6 on the R&B charts. (Thirty years later, it appeared on the Goodfellas soundtrack.)
Most people who grew up on the music of the 50s and 60s have likely heard of many of these women rockers, or have at least heard their music if they didn’t know the names and faces. But Branstetter’s project does more than tell the stories of individuals—in biographies, interviews (with, for one, Jerry Lee Lewis’s sister, singer and piano player Linda Gail Lewis), blog posts, playlists (hear one below), song analyses, and essays.
She also substantiates her larger claim that women’s “contributions shaped the culture and sound of rock and roll,” in numerous well-documented ways. This despite the fact that women in early rock were told versions of the same thing Joan Jett heard 20 years later—“girls don’t play rock and roll.” They sometimes heard it from other women in the music business. Pop singer Connie Frances, for example, offered her opinion in a 1958 issue of Billboard: “A girl can’t sing rock and roll. It’s basically too savage for a girl singer to handle.”
Attitudes like these persisted so long, and became so unconscious, that one of the largest guitar makers in the world, Fender, and several other musical instrument makers, may have lost millions in sales before they finally realized that women make up half of new guitar players. Women in Rock and Roll’s First Wave will inspire and enlighten many of those young musicians who didn’t grow up knowing anything about Sparkle Moore or The Chantels, but should have. Unless rock historians willingly ignore the work of scholars like Branstetter, subsequent accounts should reflect a more expansive, inclusive, view of the territory. Starthere.
Fleetwood Mac lost one lead singer and guitarist after another in the 70s, first to a mental health crisis, then a religious cult, then dramatic firings and relational breakdowns. They were in a bit of a shambles when new prospect Lindsay Buckingham arrived, bringing with him even more drama, as well as an unknown singer, Stevie Nicks. One year later, their breakup coincided with the dissolution of John and Christine McVie’s marriage, and drummer and namesake Mick Fleetwood’s divorce, during the recording of the massive-selling Rumors album in 1976.
Somehow, the band kept on, making greater leaps forward with Tusk, surviving into the 90s intact and mounting several reunion tours afterward. How? Many a book and documentary have tackled the subject. But maybe the main reason is plain.
Despite enduring circumstances that would tear most bands apart, despite the cynical lures and traps of wealth and fame, Fleetwood Mac’s professional longevity came from the fact that they were musicians who loved playing together, who knew how good they were at what they did, and knew they were better when they did it together.
Not only did the new five-piece put aside huge personal conflicts and an already legendary history to make some of the greatest pop music ever written, both collaborating and letting individual songwriters take the lead, but they had the smarts to recognize the enormous talent they had in Nicks, who first joined the band at Buckingham’s insistence then quickly became its star frontwoman. Her magnetism was undeniable, her songwriting bewitching, her stage presence transformative.
Fans seeing Nicks onstage with the band after the release of 1975’s Fleetwood Machave “no idea who Stevie Nicks is,” writes Rob Sheffield at Rolling Stone. They have “heard ‘Rhiannon’ on the radio,” have maybe bought the record, but “they’ve never seen her rock.” Then they did—explaining the origins of “Rhiannon” on The Old Grey Whistle Test (top) before launching into the “song about a Welsh witch,” and going full-on new-age diva with super-feathered hair on The Midnight Special (above).
“She’s the new girl in a long-running band,” writes Sheffield, “but she’s here to blow all that history away. She keeps pushing the song harder, faster, as if she’s impatient to prove the new Mac is a real savage-like rock monster, now that she’s fully arrived.” Buckingham was the right guitarist at the right time in the band’s evolution, stepping into several huge pairs of shoes to help them recreate their sound. But Stevie Nicks provided the voice and electrifyingly weird energy they needed to become their best new selves.
Big, dramatic TV appearances were one thing, but the band’s transition from British blues rockers to pop radio superstars wasn’t a total eclipse of their past. While they may have been promoted as a Stevie Nicks-centric entity, Christine McVie still played a major singer/songwriter role, as did Buckingham. In one of their first live concerts with the two new members, at the Capitol Theatre in New Jersey, above, McVie opens the set with “Get Like You Used to Be” and “Spare Me a Little of Your Love.”
Buckingham shows off his impeccable blues and country chops, and Nicks sits in on backing vocals, then takes the lead three songs in on “Rhiannon.” Other new songs in the short setlist include “World Turning,” sung by McVie and Buckingham, and the Buckingham-led “Blue Letter” and “I’m So Afraid.” (They reach as far back in the back catalog as Peter Green’s “Green Manalishi.”) It’s clear at this point that the band doesn’t quite know what to do with Stevie Nicks. But once they debuted on television, she knew exactly how to sell herself to audiences.
FYI: If you happen to be an Audible member, you can download Rob Sheffield’s audiobook, The Wild Heart of Stevie Nicks, as a free additional book this month. (It’s part of their Audible Originals program.) If you’re not an Audible member, you can always sign up for a free 30-day trial here.
The American folk revival of the 1950s and 60s paid dividends in the 1970s, a decade we usually associate with prog rock, disco, funk, and punk. These were the years of some of Crosby, Stills & Nash and Neil Young’s best acoustic folk, and the finest work of Joni Mitchell and James Taylor, both of whom had such unique takes on folk guitar that they redefined the instrument for generations. Mitchell drew from her teenage appreciation for jazz guitar, which she taught herself to play while still in high school. Taylor picked up his unusual voicings and arrangements from a number of American sources.
His influences, he told Adam Gopnik on The New Yorker Radio Hour, came from his early study of the cello (he played “badly, reluctantly,” he says); early exposure to Broadway show tunes and “light classics”, thanks to parents who shuttled him by train from North Carolina to New York City, and his admiration for Elvis, the Beatles, and Ray Charles.
Through a mix of childhood training, adolescent obsessions, and a mature fingerstyle honed by hours and hours of patient practice, Taylor came to dominate the charts with songs like 1970’s “Fire and Rain” and “Country Road,” bringing his acoustic folk and country sensibilities to soft rock stations everywhere.
Taylor’s songwriting, for all its lyrical drama and melancholy, begins with the guitar. Through pure technique, he makes the instrument sing, pulling his melodies from chord patterns and picking styles. As befits such a thoughtful player, he is also a teacher of the instrument, offering a free series of lessons for playing his most beloved songs. Here you can see his “Fire and Rain” lesson further up, “Country Road” above, and at the top, a brief intro to the series from Taylor himself.
Note that these lessons are for intermediate players, at least, and assume prior familiarity with the chord changes in the songs. The videos were originally available on Taylor’s website, and required a sign-in, he says, somewhat apologetically. Since 2011, they are all—8 lessons total—available on his official YouTube channel. See lesson number 6, “Carolina in My Mind,” just below, and watch all the rest for free here.
Neil Young has worked with Rick James in the Mynah Birds and David Crosby, Steven Stills, and Graham Nash in CSNY. He’s recorded everything from tearjerking piano ballads to brilliantly meandering psych rock to folk, country, and early 80s electronic. He perfected the spontaneous sound of albums recorded live and loose in a barn, but he is meticulous about technology and sound quality. He’s a superstar and self-described “rich hippie” who has near-universal credibility with indie artists. He is both “a hippie icon but also the godfather of grunge,” says the Polyphonic video above.
Young’s many seeming contradictions only strengthen his musical integrity. The shaggy Canadian singer, songwriter, guitarist, and leader of Buffalo Springfield and Crazy Horse has made films under the pseudonym “Bernard Shakey,” recorded soundtracks for acclaimed films, and inspired far more than the signature Seattle sound, though Pearl Jam and Nirvana both acknowledged their debt.
The Velvet Underground may get much of the credit for the sonic qualities of indie and alternative rock, but Young deserves more than a little recognition for influencing not only Kurt Cobain but also the likes of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon, and Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus.
It’s a hell of a rock and roll resume, to have achieved lasting, significant influence on modern folk, country, and indie rock, just to name the most obvious genres Young has touched, in a career showcasing some of the most emotionally honest music ever captured on record. Despite the shambling, seemingly out-of-control nature of much of his output, it’s a very carefully crafted showcase. The 1979 live album Rust Never Sleeps, for example, functions as both a summation of his musical output up to that point and a metacommentary on the many—or well, the two—sides of Neil Young.
On one side, mellow, moody, solo acoustic folk, on the other, raucous, distorted rock and roll, courtesy of Crazy Horse. Bookending the record, the mirror image songs “My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)” and “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black),” tracks that apply the two different treatments to similar lyrics and arrangements, integrating the two sides of Young, which Polyphonic roughly divides into his acoustic Canadian pastoral side—warbling homesick ballads full of references to Ontario and other points north—and his American side: raw, edgy, full of righteous political indignation in songs like “Ohio, “Southern Man,” “Alabama,” and “Rockin’ in the Free World.”
Those who love Neil Young need no further inducement to embrace his contradictions, even when his work is uneven. The tension between them keeps fans hanging on, knowing full well that his less successful efforts are paths on the way to yet more brilliant restatements of his major themes and minor chords. Those less familiar, or less appreciative, of Neil Young’s formidable legacy may find they’ve underestimated him after watching this whirlwind tour through his tireless crusade against musical complacency, war, racism, and environment destruction, and the rust that has crept over so many of his contemporaries.
When Led Zeppelin appeared in late 1968, they already had the makings of a supergroup, so to speak, though only founding member Jimmy Page was a famous rock star. Four equally talented and seasoned musicians, each integral to the band’s sound. But it might have been otherwise. Page first intended to create a literal supergroup, joining his fellow former Yardbird Jeff Beck and The Who’s Keith Moon and John Entwistle.
Who knows what might have come of it? Moon supposedly quipped that it would go down like a lead balloon, inspiring the name of the band that was to come. This history makes all the more poignant the fact that Moon’s last onstage performance before his death was with Led Zeppelin.
Moon joined the band during the L.A. stop of their 1977 tour to ramble drunkenly into the microphone and sit in on a drum and tambourine with John Bonham during a nearly 20-minute drum solo on “Moby Dick.”
Moon also joined the band during the two-song encore of “Whole Lotta Love” and “Rock & Roll.” See parts of those performances at the top in audience footage. His brief moments behind John Bonham’s drums cannot be considered representative of what a hypothetical Keith Moon-backed Led Zeppelin might sound like. Not only was he playing another drummer’s kit—a significant handicap for Moon—but also, the Keith Moon of 1977 was not the Keith Moon of 1968. These documents of rock history can’t tell us what might have been, only, for a brief moment, what was.
Moon has been regarded as one of the greatest drummers in rock for his huge musical personality. “No drummer in a true rock & roll band has ever been given—has ever seized, perhaps—so much space and presence,” wrote Greil Marcus in tribute when Moon died the year after his Led Zeppelin cameo. Moon, “as Jon Landau pointed out years ago… played the parts conventionally given over to the lead guitar.” Moon called himself, with typical sarcasm, “the best Keith Moon-type drummer,” an insight into just how singular his playing was. His total lack of restraint fit The Who perfectly.
But history would decree that Bonham become the ideal Led Zeppelin-type drummer. He played lead parts as well, but never at the expense of rhythm. The pitfall of a supergroup—or a group of equally superb musicians—is that everyone can tend to overplay. Bonham was a superb musician, but also a drummer who knew exactly how to accommodate others’ virtuosity—building spacious rhythmic structures that held together the bombast of Plant and Page in a coherent whole. Bonham could follow Page’s riffs just as often as he could deploy his own thundering hooks.
Keith Moon was at his best playing Keith Moon, sounding “as if he came out of nowhere to take over the world,” wrote Marcus. The Who’s “best singles and album tracks not only featured Moon, they were built around him,” Entwistle and Townshend providing structure while Moon supplied the fiery core. Hear him at his incandescent best in the isolated drum track for “Wont’ Get Fooled Again” above and read more about what made him so indelibly unique in Marcus’ eulogy for “the best drummer in the history of rock ‘n roll.” Listen to a full audience audio recording of that 1977 concert just below.
Harp guitars have been around since at least the 19th century, and if you want a good, enthusiastic, intellectual argument on the exact date of its birth, you’ll find many an organologist ready to do that. (Here’s a page filled with information about the subject.) But it was only recently, in 2014, that the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments finally recognized the harp guitar as its own thing. New- or old-fangled as it might be, the harp guitar contains both the usual six strings and fretted neck and a neighboring series of unstopped open strings. Well known musicians who have played them include John McLaughlin, David Lindley, and Robbie Robertson.
But look up the instrument on the ‘net and there’s one name that will pop up before anybody else: 29 year old Canadian Jamie Dupuis. He’s earned millions of views on his YouTube channel for arranging and performing covers of rock and metal classics.
He’s certainly a fan of Pink Floyd, as you can see above in his cover of “Comfortably Numb.” The ringing, echoing quality of the harp guitar’s body suit the song well, as it starts to resemble a sort of synth-string wash.
The acoustic-based Floyd songs work as well as you might expect. “Wish You Were Here” for example.
Dupuis shows his skill with the more experimental electronics of Dark Side of the Moon. He adds a slide guitar and effects to “Time”:
…which works even better on “Breathe”:
And he brings out the very strange looking Dyer Electric Guitar Harp for “Welcome to the Machine,” using some double-tracking to give him some soloing space.
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.
What if everything you thought you knew about grunge was a lie? Maybe you’ve suspected all along! But even if you were there, or somewhere, in that time of abysmally low internet literacy and connectivity, when every traditional media outlet was flannel, floppy hair, mopey half-protests, festivals, Seattle.… When you could save $6-$13 on “women’s grunge” and “$5 on kids’ grunge too!” at major department store chains…
But we may still remember grunge as a movement—with charismatic leaders and tragic heroes. A movement to reclaim serious, heavy, emotional hair rock from the profoundly unserious hair bands of the 80s. The first wave of Pacific Northwest bands to emerge with Nirvana, Soundgarden, and Pearl Jam were earnest and well-meaning and “primal,” says Bruce Pavitt, co-founder of the legendary Seattle record label Sub Pop.
Sub Pop midwifed the scene by signing so many of the bands that made it big, cultivating the sound and look of dirty, angry backwoodsmen with guitars. “Grunge Made Blue-Collar Culture Cool,” wrote Steven Kurutz in The New York Times Style Section just a few days ago, an implicit acknowledgment that the mostly-white and largely male scene sold a particular image of blue-collar that resonated, says Pavitt, because it represented an “ ‘American archetype.”
Pavitt and co-founder Jonathan Poneman were diehard fans of the music but they were no starry-eyed idealists—they understood exactly how to sell the region’s quirks to a national and international media. “It could have happened anywhere,” Poneman has said, “but there was a lucky set of coincidences. [Photographer] Charles Peterson was here to document the scene, [producer] Jack Endino was here to record the scene. Bruce and I were here to exploit the scene.”
But what was the scene? Was it “Grunge”? What is “Grunge”? How do you pronounce “Grunge”? What do “Grunge” people eat? After being peppered with one too many questions when the shockwave of Nirvana’s major label debut Nevermindhit in 1992, Poneman referred a reporter to a former Sub Pop employee, Megan Jasper, then working as a sales rep for Caroline records. The reporter, Rick Marin, was calling from The New York Times’ Style Section, asking for help compiling a grunge lexicon. What kinds of things do “Grunge” people say?
“By then,” writes Alan Siegel at The Ringer, “only outsiders earnestly used the term ‘grunge’ as a noun.” It was, says Charles Cross, former editor of alternative paper The Rocket, “an overhyped, inflated word that doesn’t have actual meaning in Seattle.” As for grunge slang, such a thing “didn’t exist.” The only thing to do, Jasper decided, was “react by trying to make fun of it,” she says. She had done the very same thing months earlier, when British magazine Sky made the same request. “I gave them a bunch of fake shit.”
As she says in the interview clip at the top, she asked Marin to toss out normal words and she would give him “grunge” equivalents. “I kept escalating the craziness of the translations because anyone in their right mind would go, ‘Oh, come on, this is bullshit.’… but it never happened because he was concentrating so hard on getting the information right.” Thus, the grunge lexicon below, published in The New York Times in 1992. (“All subcultures speak in code,” goes the caption. This one would be appearing in malls nationwide.)
bloated, big bag of bloatation – drunk
bound-and-hagged – staying home on Friday or Saturday night
cob nobbler – loser
dish – desirable guy
fuzz – heavy wool sweaters
harsh realm – bummer
kickers – heavy boots
lamestain – uncool person
plats – platform shoes
rock on – a happy goodbye
score – great
swingin’ on the flippity-flop – hanging out
tom-tom club – uncool outsiders
wack slacks – old ripped jeans
It’s unlikely Marin ever traveled to Seattle and tried to bond with fellow kids, or he would not have published Jasper’s hoax glossary in an article otherwise critical of the mainstreaming of grunge. Marin compared the phenomenon to “the mass-marketing of disco, punk and hip-hop. Now with the grunging of America, it’s happening again. Pop will eat itself, the axiom goes.” It’s a thorough, well-sourced piece that quotes many of the scene’s founders, including Poneman, never suspecting they might be having a laugh.
The fake news grunge lexicon was a huge hit in Seattle, where Jasper was celebrated by her friends and family. “I got a very nice pat on the back,” she says. People clipped the lexicon to their shirts at shows. Indie label C/Z records then printed t‑shirts. “Lamestain” appeared on one. “Harsh Realm” on another. Mudhoney spread around Jasper’s slang in a Melody Maker interview with straight faces. It should have been debunked immediately “but this was 1992,” writes Siegel, “Snopes wasn’t around yet. Hell, The New York Times was still four years away from launching a website.”
Then, writer and reporter Thomas Frank called Jasper and asked, “there’s no way this is real, right?” Immediately, she responded, “Of course it’s not real.” Frank published the scoop in 1993; the Times smeared him as a hoaxer to discredit the revelation. The Baffler faxed the Times this note: “When The Newspaper of Record goes searching for the Next Big Thing and the Next Big Thing piddles on its leg, we think that’s funny.” These days, we might expect a Twitter war.
No one Siegel interviews seems to have been particularly upset about the whole thing. Marin’s “eyebrow is totally raised” throughout his piece, says his former editor Penelope Green. (Marin himself declined to be interviewed.) But the story has far less to do with one credulous reporter working a deadline and more to do with his argument—grunge had been rapidly packaged and sold, and by The Times, no less! But maybe its image was sort of a joke to begin with, one that now gets such straight-faced, reverent, sealed-behind-glass-cases treatment that you have to laugh.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
