How Saxophones Are Made: Two Short Films (Including One by Sesame Street) Take You Inside Saxophone Factories

in Music, Television | October 23rd, 2017


Many of us, hand­ed a sax­o­phone, would­n’t have the first clue about how to play it prop­er­ly, and almost none of us would have any idea at all about how to make one. Then again, those of us of a cer­tain gen­er­a­tion might feel an old mem­o­ry com­ing back to the sur­face: had­n’t we once wit­nessed the inner work­ings of a sax­o­phone fac­to­ry? We did if we ever hap­pened to catch the clas­sic 1980 Sesame Street short above which shows the sax­o­phone-mak­ing process in its entire­ty, begin­ning with flat sheets of met­al and end­ing up, two min­utes lat­er, with jazz­i­ly playable instru­ments — just like the one we’ve heard impro­vis­ing to the action onscreen the whole time.

Gold­en-age Sesame Street always did well with reveal­ing how things were made in a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly mes­mer­iz­ing way, as also seen around the same time in an even more wide­ly remem­bered two min­utes in a cray­on fac­to­ry. Both it and the sax­o­phone work­shop, though they use plen­ty of tech­nol­o­gy, look like quaint­ly, even charm­ing­ly labor-inten­sive oper­a­tions today: in almost every step shown, we see not just a machine or tool but the human (or at least a part of the human) oper­at­ing it.

And it turns out, the art of sax­o­phone-mak­ing has­n’t changed as much in the sub­se­quent decades as we might imag­ine. The Bet­ter Sax video above shows in a bit more detail what actu­al­ly hap­pens inside a mod­ern sax­o­phone fac­to­ry, name­ly that of wood­wind and brass instru­ment mak­er Hen­ri Selmer Paris, whose sax­o­phones have been played by Char­lie Park­er, John Coltrane, Paul Desmond, Son­ny Rollins and Cole­man Hawkins. And while some of the equip­ment clear­ly grew more advanced in the years since the Sesame Street short, the over­all process remains clear­ly rec­og­niz­able, as does the con­cen­tra­tion evi­dent in the actions and on the faces of all the skilled work­ers involved, albeit on a much larg­er scale. The day when we can 3D-print our own sax­o­phones at home — the cul­mi­na­tion of the indus­tri­al evo­lu­tion­ary process glimpsed in two dif­fer­ent stages in these videos — will come, but it cer­tain­ly has­n’t come yet.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Nina Simone Sing the Black Pride Anthem, “To Be Young, Gift­ed and Black,” on Sesame Street (1972)

Watch Her­bie Han­cock Rock Out on an Ear­ly Syn­the­siz­er on Sesame Street (1983)

Watch Jazzy Spies: 1969 Psy­che­del­ic Sesame Street Ani­ma­tion, Fea­tur­ing Grace Slick, Teach­es Kids to Count

Learn How Crayons Are Made, Cour­tesy of 1980s Videos by Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers

Glass: The Oscar-Win­ning “Per­fect Short Doc­u­men­tary” on Dutch Glass­mak­ing (1958)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Maria Anna Mozart Was a Musical Prodigy Like Her Brother Wolfgang, So Why Did She Get Erased from History?

in Gender, History, Music | October 19th, 2017

When peo­ple ask why we have specif­i­cal­ly black his­to­ries, or queer his­to­ries, or women’s his­to­ries, it can be hard for many who do his­tor­i­cal research to take the ques­tion seri­ous­ly. But in fair­ness, such ques­tions point to the very rea­son that alter­na­tive or “revi­sion­ist” his­to­ries exist. We can­not know what we are not told about history—at least not with­out doing the kind of dig­ging pro­fes­sion­al schol­ars can do. Vir­ginia Woolf’s trag­ic, but fic­tion­al, his­to­ry of Shakespeare’s sis­ter notwith­stand­ing, the claims made by cul­tur­al crit­ics about mar­gin­al­iza­tion and oppres­sion aren’t based on spec­u­la­tion, but on case after case of indi­vid­u­als who were ignored by, or shut out of, the wider cul­ture, and sub­se­quent­ly dis­ap­peared from his­tor­i­cal mem­o­ry.

One such extra­or­di­nary case involves the real sis­ter of anoth­er tow­er­ing Euro­pean fig­ure whose life we know much more about than Shakespeare’s. Before Wolf­gang Amadeus Mozart began writ­ing his first com­po­si­tions, his old­er sis­ter Maria Anna Mozart, nick­named Nan­nerl, had already proven her­self a prodi­gy.

The two toured Europe togeth­er as children—she was with her broth­er dur­ing his 18-month stay in Lon­don. “There are con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous reviews prais­ing Nan­nerl,” writes Sylvia Milo, “and she was even billed first.” A 1763 review, for exam­ple, sounds indis­tin­guish­able from those writ­ten about young Wolf­gang.

Imag­ine an eleven-year-old girl, per­form­ing the most dif­fi­cult sonatas and con­cer­tos of the great­est com­posers, on the harp­si­chord or fortepi­ano, with pre­ci­sion, with incred­i­ble light­ness, with impec­ca­ble taste. It was a source of won­der to many.

18th cen­tu­ry clas­si­cal audi­ences first came to know Wolf­gang as part of a broth­er-sis­ter duo of “wun­derkinder.” But the sis­ter half has been air­brushed out of the pic­ture. She does not appear in the defin­i­tive Hol­ly­wood treat­ment, Milos Forman’s Amadeus. And, more­over, she only recent­ly began to emerge in the aca­d­e­m­ic and clas­si­cal worlds. “I grew up study­ing to be a vio­lin­ist,” writes Sylvia Milo. “Nei­ther my music his­to­ry nor my reper­toire includ­ed any female com­posers.”

With my braid­ed hair I was called “lit­tle Mozart” by my vio­lin teacher, but he meant Wolfi. I nev­er heard that Amadeus had a sis­ter. I nev­er heard of Nan­nerl Mozart until I saw that fam­i­ly por­trait.

In the por­trait (top), Nan­nerl and Wolf­gang sit togeth­er at the harp­si­chord while their father Leopold stands near­by. Nan­nerl, in the fore­ground, has an enor­mous pom­padour crown­ing her small oval face. Of the hair­do, she wrote to her broth­er, in their typ­i­cal­ly play­ful rap­port, “I am writ­ing to you with an erec­tion on my head and I am very much afraid of burn­ing my hair.”

After dis­cov­er­ing Nan­erl, Milo poured through the his­tor­i­cal archives, read­ing con­tem­po­rary accounts and per­son­al let­ters. The research gave birth to a one-woman play, The Oth­er Mozart, which has toured for the last four years to crit­i­cal acclaim. (See a trail­er video above). In her Guardian essay, Milo describes Nannerl’s fate: “left behind in Salzberg” when she turned 18. “A lit­tle girl could per­form and tour, but a woman doing so risked her rep­u­ta­tion…. Her father only took Wolf­gang on their next jour­neys around the courts of Europe. Nan­nerl nev­er toured again.” We do know that she wrote music. Wolf­gang praised one com­po­si­tion as “beau­ti­ful” in a let­ter to her. But none of her music has sur­vived. “Maybe we will find it one day,” Milo writes. Indeed, an Aus­tralian researcher claims to have found Nannerl’s “musi­cal hand­writ­ing” in the com­po­si­tions Wolf­gang used for prac­tice.

Oth­er schol­ars have spec­u­lat­ed that Mozart’s sis­ter, five years his senior, cer­tain­ly would have had some influ­ence on his play­ing. “No musi­cians devel­op their art in a vac­u­um,” says musi­cal soci­ol­o­gist Ste­van Jack­son. “Musi­cians learn by watch­ing oth­er musi­cians, by being an appren­tice, for­mal­ly or infor­mal­ly.” The ques­tion may remain an aca­d­e­m­ic one, but the life of Nan­nerl has recent­ly become a mat­ter of pop­u­lar inter­est as well, not only in Milo’s play but in sev­er­al nov­els, many titled Mozart’s Sis­ter, and a 2011 film, also titled Mozart’s Sis­ter, writ­ten and direct­ed by René Féret and star­ring his daugh­ter in the tit­u­lar role. The trail­er above promis­es a rich­ly emo­tion­al peri­od dra­ma, which—as all enter­tain­ments must do—takes some lib­er­ties with the facts as we know, or don’t know, them, but which also, like Milo’s play, gives flesh to a sig­nif­i­cant, and sig­nif­i­cant­ly frus­trat­ed, his­tor­i­cal fig­ure who had, for a cou­ple hun­dred years, at least, been ren­dered invis­i­ble.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1200 Years of Women Com­posers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now

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

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

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Hallelujah!: You Can Stream Every Leonard Cohen Album in a 22-Hour Chronological Playlist (1967–2016)

in Music | October 18th, 2017

Every­body knows the war is over. Every­body knows the good guys lost.

Per­haps no one since Thomas Hardy has matched Leonard Cohen in the dogged per­sis­tence of lit­er­ary bleak­ness. Cohen’s entry into a Zen monastery in 1996 was a “response to a sense of despair that I’ve always had,” he said in an inter­view that year. Ten years lat­er, Cohen told Ter­ry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air, “I had a great sense of dis­or­der in my life of chaos, of depres­sion, of dis­tress. And I had no idea where this came from. And the pre­vail­ing psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic expla­na­tions at the time didn’t seem to address the things I felt.”

Only a hand­ful of peo­ple on the plan­et have expe­ri­enced the “life of chaos” Leonard Cohen lived as an acclaimed poet, nov­el­ist, singer, and one of the most beloved song­writ­ers of the last sev­er­al decades. But mil­lions iden­ti­fy with his emo­tion­al tur­moil. Cohen’s expres­sions of despair—and of rev­er­ence, defi­ance, love, hatred, and lust—speak across gen­er­a­tions, telling truths few of us con­fess but, just maybe, every­body knows. Cohen’s death last year brought his career back into focus. And despite the mourn­ful occa­sion for revis­it­ing his work, he may be just the song­writer many of us need right now.

The great themes in Cohen’s work come togeth­er in his most famous song, “Hal­lelu­jah,” which has, since he first record­ed it in 1984 to lit­tle notice, become “everybody’s ‘Hal­lelu­jah,’” writes Ash­ley Fet­ters at The Atlantic, in a suc­ces­sion of cov­ers and inter­pre­ta­tions from Jeff Buck­ley and Rufus Wain­wright to Shrek and The X Fac­tor. It is here that the depths of despair and heights of tran­scen­dence meet, the sex­u­al and the spir­i­tu­al reach an accord: “This world is full of con­flicts and full of things that can­not be rec­on­ciled,” Cohen has said of the song. “But there are moments when we can… rec­on­cile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hal­lelu­jah.’”

Every­body knows it’s a mess. But it often takes a Leonard Cohen to con­vince us that—at least sometimes—it’s a beau­ti­ful one. If you feel you need more Leonard Cohen in your life, we bring you the playlist above, a com­plete chrono­log­i­cal discog­ra­phy avail­able on Spo­ti­fy—from the sparse, haunt­ing folk melodies of Cohen’s first album, 1967’s The Songs of Leonard Cohen to last year’s grip­ping swan song, You Want It Dark­er. In-between the leg­endary debut and mas­ter­ful sum­ma­tion are sev­er­al live albums, the clas­sics Songs from a Room, Songs of Love and Hate, and oth­ers, as well as that odd 1988 album I’m Your Man, in which Cohen set his grim ironies and uni­ver­sal truths to the sounds of eight­ies synth-pop, inton­ing over slap bass and drum machine the indeli­ble, gen­tly mock­ing lyrics he co-wrote with fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor Sharon Robin­son:

Every­body knows that the boat is leak­ing
Every­body knows that the cap­tain lied
Every­body got this bro­ken feel­ing
Like their father or their dog just died
Every­body talk­ing to their pock­ets
Every­body wants a box of choco­lates
And a long-stem rose
Every­body knows

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Say Good­bye to Leonard Cohen Through Some of His Best-Loved Songs: “Hal­lelu­jah,” “Suzanne” and 235 Oth­er Tracks

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

A 17-Hour, Chrono­log­i­cal Jour­ney Through Tom Petty’s Music: Stream the Songs That Became the Sound­tracks of Our Lives

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

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A‑ha Performs a Beautiful Acoustic Version of Their 1980s Hit, “Take on Me”: Recorded Live in Norway

in Music | October 17th, 2017

When the Nor­we­gian syn­th­pop band A‑ha record­ed “Take on Me” in 1984, the song did­n’t meet instant suc­cess. It took record­ing two dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the track, and releas­ing it three sep­a­rate times, before the song man­aged to climb the charts, peak­ing at #1 on the US Bill­board Hot 100 and #2 on the UK Sin­gles Chart.

Since then, the song has enjoyed a pret­ty fine after­life. It has clocked near­ly 500 mil­lion plays on YouTube. You’ll find it on count­less 1980s antholo­gies and playlists. And now you can watch an entire­ly new per­for­mance of the song, which has already gone viral on YouTube. Record­ed this past June in Nor­way, as part of an unplugged con­cert for MTV, this ver­sion is more sub­tle and melan­choly than the orig­i­nal. And, as many Youtube com­menters read­i­ly note, it’s rather beau­ti­ful.

Find more details about the per­for­mance on A‑ha’s web­site.

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:

New Order’s “Blue Mon­day” Played with Obso­lete 1930s Instru­ments

1980s Met­al­head Kids Are All Right: New Study Sug­gests They Became Well-Adjust­ed Adults

All Hail the Beat: How the 1980 Roland TR-808 Drum Machine Changed Pop Music

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200,000+ Vintage Records Being Digitized & Put Online by the Boston Public Library

in Archives, History, Internet Archive, Music | October 17th, 2017

It may be a great irony that our age of cul­tur­al destruc­tion and—many would argue—decline also hap­pens to be a gold­en age of preser­va­tion, thanks to the very new media and big data forces cred­it­ed with dumb­ing things down. We spend ample time con­tem­plat­ing the loss­es; archival ini­tia­tives like The Great 78 Project, like so many oth­ers we reg­u­lar­ly fea­ture here, should give us rea­sons to cel­e­brate.

In a post this past August, we out­lined the goals and meth­ods of the project. Cen­tral­ized at the Inter­net Archive—that mag­nan­i­mous cit­i­zens’ repos­i­to­ry of dig­i­tized texts, record­ings, films, etc.—the project con­tains sev­er­al thou­sand care­ful­ly pre­served 78rpm record­ings, which doc­u­ment the dis­tinc­tive sounds of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry from 1898 to the late-1950s.

Thanks to part­ners like preser­va­tion com­pa­ny George Blood, L.P. and the ARChive of Con­tem­po­rary Music, we can hear many thou­sands of records from artists both famous and obscure in the orig­i­nal sound of the first mass-pro­duced con­sumer audio for­mat.

Just a few days ago, the Inter­net Archive announced that they would be joined in the endeav­or by the Boston Pub­lic Library, who, writes Wendy Hana­mu­ra, “will dig­i­tize, pre­serve” and make avail­able to the pub­lic “hun­dreds of thou­sands of audio record­ings in a vari­ety of his­tor­i­cal for­mats,” includ­ing not only 78s, but also LP’s and Thomas Edison’s first record­ing medi­um, the wax cylin­der. “These record­ings have nev­er been cir­cu­lat­ed and were in stor­age for sev­er­al decades, uncat­a­logued and inac­ces­si­ble to the pub­lic.”

The process, notes WBUR, “could take a few years,” giv­en the siz­able bulk of the col­lec­tion and the metic­u­lous meth­ods of the Inter­net Archive’s tech­ni­cians, who labor to pre­serve the con­di­tion of the often frag­ile mate­ri­als, and to pro­duce a num­ber of dif­fer­ent ver­sions, “from remas­tered to raw.” The object, says Boston Pub­lic Library pres­i­dent David Leonard, is to “pro­duce record­ings in a way that’s inter­est­ing to the casu­al lis­ten­er as well as to the hard-core music lis­ten­er in the research busi­ness.”

Thus far, only two record­ings from BPL’s exten­sive col­lec­tions have become avail­able—a 1938 record­ing called “Please Pass the Bis­cuits, Pap­py (I Like Moun­tain Music)” by W. Lee O’Daniel and His Hill­bil­ly Boys and Edvard Grieg’s only piano con­cer­to, record­ed by Fred­dy Mar­tin and His Orches­tra in 1947. Even in this tiny sam­pling, you can see the range of mate­r­i­al the archive will fea­ture, con­sis­tent with the tremen­dous vari­ety the Great 78 Project already con­tains.

While we can count it as a great gain to have free and open access to this his­toric vault of record­ed audio, it is also the case that dig­i­tal archiv­ing has become an urgent bul­wark against total loss. Cur­rent record­ing for­mats instant­ly spawn innu­mer­able copies of them­selves. The phys­i­cal media of the past exist­ed in finite num­bers and are sub­ject to total era­sure with time. “The sim­ple fact of the mat­ter,” archivist George Blood tells the BPL, “is most audio­vi­su­al record­ings will be lost. These 78s are dis­ap­pear­ing left and right. It is impor­tant that we do a good job pre­serv­ing what we can get to, because there won’t be a sec­ond chance.”

via WBUR

Relat­ed Con­tent:

25,000+ 78RPM Records Now Pro­fes­sion­al­ly Dig­i­tized & Stream­ing Online: A Trea­sure Trove of Ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry Music

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

BBC Launch­es World Music Archive

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

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Hear Florence Welch’s Radio Documentary About the Making of David Bowie’s Heroes (Free for a Limited Time)

in Music | October 16th, 2017

Image by AVRO and Becky Sul­li­van, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

As of this moment, you have 22 days left to stream a one-hour radio doc­u­men­tary host­ed by Flo­rence Welch (of Flo­rence + The Machine). It takes a close look at the mak­ing of David Bowie’s land­mark album Heroes, released 40 years ago. The doc­u­men­tary (stream­able here) explores “the per­son­al and musi­cal fac­tors that influ­enced the album’s writ­ing and record­ing in Berlin in 1977.” It also cov­ers,  accord­ing to the BBC, the fol­low­ing ground:

Flo­rence will fea­ture [archival mate­r­i­al] of the late David Bowie explain­ing why he chose to live and work in Berlin and the impact the city’s his­to­ry had on the mas­ter­piece he cre­at­ed. She’ll also meet the album’s pro­duc­er Tony Vis­con­ti to get an insight to the unique record­ing tech­niques he employed to inter­pret Bowie’s cre­ative vision and how the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the famous Hansa Stu­dios, which are sit­u­at­ed in a huge for­mer cham­ber music con­cert hall, con­tributed to the album’s influ­en­tial sounds. Iggy Pop, who was liv­ing with Bowie in Berlin dur­ing the record­ing of the album, recalls how a bat­tle with drug addi­tion, bank­rupt­cy and a legal dis­pute with his ex wife for access to his son all pro­vid­ed inspi­ra­tion for the album’s lyrics and Bri­an Eno, who col­lab­o­rat­ed with David through­out the LP’s record­ing, explains the unique musi­cal struc­tures he and David employed to com­pose the inno­v­a­tive songs.

Berlin’s rad­i­cal cul­tur­al diver­si­ty had always fas­ci­nat­ed Bowie and Flo­rence will explain how the oppor­tu­ni­ty to live and work in the city dur­ing the tur­bu­lent polit­i­cal peri­od pri­or to the fall of ‘the Wall’ pro­vid­ed the per­fect aus­tere envi­ron­ment for David and his col­lab­o­ra­tors to exper­i­ment with music inspired by sev­er­al Ger­man tech­no bands of the 70’s, includ­ing Neu!, Kraftwerk and Can.

When you’re done lis­ten­ing, we’d strong­ly rec­om­mend watch­ing this won­der­ful video where Tony Vis­con­ti, the pro­duc­er of David Bowie’s 1977 album, takes you inside the LP’s mak­ing. Don’t miss it. It’s a gem.

via NME

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Depeche Mode Releas­es a Goose­bump-Induc­ing Cov­er of David Bowie’s “Heroes”

Pro­duc­er Tony Vis­con­ti Breaks Down the Mak­ing of David Bowie’s Clas­sic “Heroes,” Track by Track

David Bowie Per­forms a Live Acoustic Ver­sion of “Heroes,” with a Bot­tle Cap Strapped to His Shoe, Keep­ing the Beat

David Bowie & Bri­an Eno’s Col­lab­o­ra­tion on “Warsza­wa” Reimag­ined in a Com­ic Ani­ma­tion

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Hear 1,500+ Genres of Music, All Mapped Out on an Insanely Thorough Interactive Graph

in Music, Technology | October 13th, 2017

If you are ready for a time-suck inter­net expe­ri­ence that will also make you feel slight­ly old and out of step with the cul­ture, feel free to dive into Every Noise at Once. A scat­ter-plot of over 1,530 musi­cal gen­res sourced from Spotify’s lists and based on 35 mil­lion songs,  Every Noise at Once is a bold attempt at musi­cal tax­on­o­my. The Every Noise at Once web­site was cre­at­ed by Glenn McDon­ald, and is an off­shoot of his work at Echo Nest (acquired by Spo­ti­fy in 2014).

McDon­ald explains his graph thus:

This is an ongo­ing attempt at an algo­rith­mi­cal­ly-gen­er­at­ed, read­abil­i­ty-adjust­ed scat­ter-plot of the musi­cal genre-space, based on data tracked and ana­lyzed for 1,536 gen­res by Spo­ti­fy. The cal­i­bra­tion is fuzzy, but in gen­er­al down is more organ­ic, up is more mechan­i­cal and elec­tric; left is denser and more atmos­pher­ic, right is spiki­er and bounci­er.

It’s also egal­i­tar­i­an, with world dom­i­nat­ing “rock-and-roll” giv­en the same space and size as its neigh­bors choro (instru­men­tal Brazil­ian pop­u­lar music), cow­boy-west­ern (Con­way Twit­ty, Mer­le Hag­gard, et. al.), and Indi­an folk (Asha Bhosle, for exam­ple). It also makes for some strange bed­fel­lows: what fac­tor does musique con­crete share with “Chris­t­ian relax­i­tive” oth­er than “rea­sons my col­lege room­mate and I nev­er got along.” Now you can find out!

Click on any of the gen­res and you’ll hear a sam­ple of that music. Dou­ble click and you’ll be tak­en to a sim­i­lar scat­ter-plot graph of its most pop­u­lar artists, this time with font size denot­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty and a sim­i­lar sam­ple of their music.

I’ve been spend­ing most of my time explor­ing up in the top right cor­ner where all sorts of elec­tron­ic dance sub­gen­res hang out. I’m not too sure what dif­fer­en­ti­ates “deep tech house” from “deep deep house” or “deep min­i­mal tech­no” or “tech house” or even “deep melod­ic euro house” but I now know where to come for a refresh­er course.

Spo­ti­fy and oth­er ser­vices depend on algo­rithms and tax­onomies like this to deliv­er con­sis­tent lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ences to its users, and they were attract­ed to Echo Nest for its work with gen­res. Echo Nest was orig­i­nal­ly based on the dis­ser­ta­tion work of Tris­tan Jehan and Bri­an Whit­man at the MIT Media Lab, who over a decade ago were try­ing to under­stand the “fin­ger­prints” of record­ed music. Now when you lis­ten to Spotify’s per­son­al­ized playlists, Echo Nest’s research is the engine work­ing in the back­ground.

McDon­ald says in this 2014 Dai­ly Dot arti­cle this isn’t about a machine guess­ing our taste.

“No, the machines don’t know us bet­ter than we do. But they can very eas­i­ly know more than we do. My job is not to tell you what to lis­ten to, or to pass judg­ment on things or ‘make taste.’ It’s to help you explore and dis­cov­er. Your taste is your busi­ness. Under­stand­ing your taste and sit­u­at­ing it in some intel­li­gi­ble con­text is my busi­ness.”

If you’d like a more pas­sive jour­ney through the ever expand­ing music genre uni­verse, there’s a Spo­ti­fy playlist of one song from each genre (all 1,500+) above. See you in the deep, deep house!

via Kottke.org

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Hip Hop Music Visu­al­ized on a Turntable Cir­cuit Dia­gram: Fea­tures 700 Artists, from DJ Kool Herc to Kanye West

Crime Jazz: How Miles Davis, Count Basie & Duke Elling­ton Cre­at­ed Sound­tracks for Noir Films & TV

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. 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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John Coltrane Draws a Mysterious Diagram Illustrating the Mathematical & Mystical Qualities of Music

in Math, Music | October 12th, 2017

In a post ear­li­er this year, we wrote about a draw­ing John Coltrane gave his friend and men­tor Yusef Lateef, who repro­duced it in his book Repos­i­to­ry of Scales and Melod­ic Pat­terns. The strange dia­gram con­tains the eas­i­ly rec­og­niz­able cir­cle of fifths (or cir­cle of fourths), but it illus­trates a much more sophis­ti­cat­ed scheme than basic major scale the­o­ry. Just exact­ly what that is, how­ev­er, remains a mys­tery. Like every mys­ti­cal explor­er, the work Coltrane left behind asks us to expand our con­scious­ness beyond its nar­row bound­aries. The dia­gram may well show a series of  “mul­ti­plic­i­ties,” as sax­o­phon­ist Ed Jones writes. From the way Coltrane has “grouped cer­tain pitch­es,” writes vibes play­er Corey Mwam­ba, “it’s easy to infer that Coltrane is dis­play­ing a form of chro­mat­ic mod­u­la­tion.” These obser­va­tions, how­ev­er, fail to explain why he would need such a chart. “The dia­gram,” writes Mwam­ba, “may have a the­o­ret­i­cal basis beyond that.” But does any­one know what that is?

Per­haps Coltrane cleared cer­tain things up with his “cor­rect­ed” ver­sion of the tone cir­cle, above, which Lateef also reprint­ed. From this—as pianist Matt Rat­cliffe found—one can derive Giant Steps, as well as “the Star of David or the Seal of Solomon, very pow­er­ful sym­bol­ism espe­cial­ly to ancient knowl­edge and the Afro­cen­tric and even­tu­al­ly cos­mic con­scious­ness direc­tion in which Coltrane would ulti­mate­ly lead on to with A Love Supreme.”

Sound too far out? On the oth­er side of the epis­te­mo­log­i­cal spec­trum, we have physi­cist and sax play­er Stephon Alexan­der, who writes in his book The Jazz of Physics that “the same geo­met­ric prin­ci­ple that moti­vat­ed Einstein’s the­o­ry was reflect­ed in Coltrane’s dia­gram.” Like­wise, sax­o­phon­ist Roel Hol­lan­der sees in the tone cir­cle a num­ber of math­e­mat­i­cal prin­ci­ples. But, remain­ing true to Coltrane’s syn­the­sis of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and sci­ence, he also reads its geom­e­try accord­ing to sacred sym­bol­ism.

In a detailed explo­ration of the math in Coltrane’s music, Hol­lan­der writes, “all ton­ics of the chords used in ‘Giant Steps’ can be found back at the Cir­cle of Fifths/Fourths with­in 2 of the 4 aug­ment­ed tri­ads with­in the octave.” Exam­in­ing these inter­lock­ing shapes shows us a hexa­gram, or Star of David, with the third tri­ad sug­gest­ing a three-dimen­sion­al fig­ure, a “star tetra­he­dron,” adds Hol­lan­der, “also known as ‘Merk­a­ba,” which means “light-spir­it-body” and rep­re­sents “the inner­most law of the phys­i­cal world.” Do we actu­al­ly find such heavy mys­ti­cal archi­tec­ture in the Coltrane Circle?—a “’divine light vehi­cle’ alleged­ly used by ascend­ed mas­ters to con­nect with and reach those in tune with the high­er realms, the spirit/body sur­round­ed by counter-rotat­ing fields of light (wheels with­in wheels)”?

As the occult/magical/Kabbalist asso­ci­a­tions with­in the cir­cle increase—the numerol­o­gy, divine geom­e­try, etc.—we can begin to feel like Tarot read­ers, join­ing a col­lec­tion of ran­dom sym­bol­ic sys­tems togeth­er to pro­duce the results we like best. “That the dia­gram has to do with some­thing,” writes Mwam­ba, “is not in doubt: what it has to do with a par­tic­u­lar song is unclear.” After four posts in which he dis­sects both ver­sions of the cir­cle and pon­ders over the pieces, Mwan­da still can­not defin­i­tive­ly decide. “To ‘have an answer,’” he writes, “is to direct­ly inter­pret the dia­gram from your own view­point: there’s a chance that what you think is what John Coltrane thought, but there’s every chance that it is not what he thought.” There’s also the pos­si­bil­i­ty no one can think what Coltrane thought.

The cir­cle con­tains Coltrane’s musi­cal exper­i­ments, yet can­not be explained by them; it hints at the­o­ret­i­cal physics and the geom­e­try of musi­cal com­po­si­tion, while also mak­ing heavy allu­sion to mys­ti­cal and reli­gious sym­bol­ism. The musi­cal rela­tion­ships it con­structs seem evi­dent to those with a firm grasp of the­o­ry; yet its strange intri­ca­cies may be puz­zled over for­ev­er. “Coltrane’s cir­cle,” writes Fae­na Aleph, is a “man­dala,” express­ing “pre­cise­ly what is, at once, both para­dox­i­cal and obvi­ous.” Ulti­mate­ly, Mwam­ba con­cludes in his series on the dia­gram, “it isn’t pos­si­ble to say that Coltrane used the dia­gram at all; but explor­ing it in rela­tion to what he was say­ing at the time has led to more under­stand­ing and appre­ci­a­tion of his music and life.”

The cir­cle, that is, works like a key with which we might unlock some of the mys­ter­ies of Coltrane’s lat­er com­po­si­tions. But we may nev­er ful­ly grasp its true nature and pur­pose. What­ev­er they were, Coltrane nev­er said. But he did believe, as he tells Frank Kof­sky in the 1966 inter­view above, in music’s abil­i­ty to con­tain all things, spir­i­tu­al, phys­i­cal, and oth­er­wise. “Music,” he says, “being an expres­sion of the human heart, or of the human being itself, does express just what is hap­pen­ing. The whole of human expe­ri­ence at that par­tic­u­lar time is being expressed.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” Ani­mat­ed (Part II)

A New Mur­al Pays Trib­ute to John Coltrane in Philadel­phia

The Secret Link Between Jazz and Physics: How Ein­stein & Coltrane Shared Impro­vi­sa­tion and Intu­ition in Com­mon

The His­to­ry of Spir­i­tu­al Jazz: Hear a Tran­scen­dent 12-Hour Mix Fea­tur­ing John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Her­bie Han­cock & More

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

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