The instrument in the video above dates back to 1566.
Meaning, if it were the patriarch of a human family, siring musical sons every 20 to 25 years, it would take more than 10 generations to get to composer Robert Schumann, born in 1810.
Were you to peek at the back, you’d see traces of King Charles IX of France’s coat of arms. The Latin motto Pietate et Justitia–piety and justice–still lingers on its rib.
It was constructed by the master creator, Andrea Amati, as part of a large set of stringed instruments, of which it is one of four survivors of its size and class.
After leaving Charles’ court, the violin spent time in the Henry Hottinger collection, which was eventually acquired by the Wurlitzer Company in New York. In 1966, it was donated to Cremona, Italy, Amati’s birthplace and home to an international school of violin making.
Venerable unto the point of pricelessness, from time to time it is taken out and played–to wondrous effect–by world class violinists. It’s tempting to keep anthropomorphizing, so as to wonder if it might not prefer a forever home with a gifted young musician who would take it out and play it every day. I know what a children’s author would say on that subject.
You can view Amati’s Charles IX violin in more detail here, but why stop there, when you can also like it on Facebook!
Image courtesy of The Victoria and Albert Museum
On any given weekend, in any part of the state where I live, you can find yourself standing in a hall full of knives, if that’s the kind of thing you like to do. It is a very niche kind of experience. Not so in some other weapons expos—like the Arms and Armor galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where everyone, from the most warlike to the staunchest of pacifists, stands in awe at the intricate ornamentation and incredibly deft craftsmanship on display in the suits of armor, lances, shields, and lots and lots of knives.
We must acknowledge in such a space that the worlds of art and of killing for fame and profit were never very far apart during Europe’s late Medieval and Renaissance periods. Yet we encounter many similar artisanal instruments from the time, just as finely tuned, but made for far less belligerent purposes.
As Maya Corry of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge—an institution with its own impressive arms and armor collection—comments in the video above (at 2:30), one unusual kind of 16th century knife meant for the table, not the battlefield, offers “insight into that harmonious, audible aspect of family devotions,” prayer and song.
From the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge. (Johan Oosterman )
These knives, which have musical scores engraved in their blades, brought a table together in singing their prayers, and may have been used to carve the lamb or beef in their “striking balance of decorative and utilitarian function.” At least historians think such “notation knives,” which date from the early 1500s, were used at banquets. “The sharp, wide steel would have been ideal for cutting and serving meat,” writes Eliza Grace Martin at the WQXR blog, “and the accentuated tip would have made for a perfect skewer.” But as Kristen Kalber, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, which houses the knives at the top of the post, tells us “diners in very grand feasts didn’t cut their own meat.” It’s unlikely they would have sung from the bloody knives held by their servants.
The knives’ true purpose “remains a mystery,” Martin remarks, like many “rituals of the Renaissance table.” Victoria and Albert Museum curator Kirstin Kennedy admits in the video above that “we are not entirely sure” what the “splendid knife” she holds was used for. But we do know that each knife had a different piece of music on each side, and that a set of them together contained different harmony parts in order to turn a roomful of diners into a chorus. One set of blades had the grace on one side, with the inscription, “the blessing of the table. May the three-in-one bless that which we are about to eat.” The other side holds the benediction, to be sung after the dinner: “The saying of grace. We give thanks to you God for your generosity.”
Common enough verbiage for any household in Renaissance Europe, but when sung, at least by a chorus from the Royal College of Music, who recreated the music and made the recordings here, the prayers are superbly graceful. Above, hear one version of the Grace and Benediction from the Victoria and Albert Museum knives; below, hear a second version. You can hear a captivating set of choral prayers from the Fitzwilliam Museum knives at WQXR’s site, recorded for the Fitzwilliam’s “Madonnas & Miracles” exhibit. We are as unlikely now to encounter singing kitchen knives as we are to run into a horse and rider bearing 100 pounds of finely-wrought wearable steel sculpture. Such strange artifacts seem to speak of a strange people who valued beauty whether carving up the main course or cutting down their enemies.
The story is well known. Syd Barrett, spiralling into depression, “hallucinations, disorganized speech, memory lapses, intense mood swings, and periods of catatonia,” left Pink Floyd in April, 1968, before recording two solo albums (The Madcap Laughs and Barrett) and then fading into obscurity. Above you can watch a delightful, new animation of “Effervescing Elephant,” a song Barrett first wrote during his teenage years and recorded in 1970. The new “retro-style” animation comes from Yoann Hervo. Below, find another animated take on “Effervescing Elephant,” this one from Steve Bobinksi.
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The history of the violin can be traced back to 1530, when a violin-like instrument first appeared in Gaudenzio Ferrari’s painting, “Madonna of the Orange Tree.” By the 1550s, Andrea Amati and his descendants began to craft priceless violins, in the form we know them today. And then followed other families closely associated with the golden age of these stringed instruments–the Bergonzi, the Guarneri, the Stradivari.
Shot by Baptiste Buob, the wordless documentary walks you through the making of a violin, from start to finish. A process that takes a luthier 3–4 weeks, working full-time, gets covered in 33 elegant minutes. Savor each and every one of them.
Bonus: Below, watch another film by Baptiste Buob–this one a 28-minute film detailing how French bow maker Roch Petitdemange practices his craft, again from beginning to end. A perfect complement.
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The wandering bards of old disappeared when the printing press came to town. So too have the great bandleaders largely vanished in the age of the super producer and jet-setting DJ. But for a time in the jazz and rock worlds, Olympian figures like Frank Zappa and Miles Davis played several important roles: finding and mentoring the best musicians; mastering old forms and making them new again; serving as curators, arbiters, and contrarians… issuing loud pronouncements on anything and everything as unsparing cultural critics.
Do we need tongues as sharp as Zappa and Davis’s in contemporary pop culture? Maybe, maybe not. They didn’t seem to enjoy much of anything they weren’t directly involved in creating. But man, was it fun to watch them dispense with the niceties and speak their brutal truths. We’ve heard from Zappa on everything from his loathing of the Velvet Underground to the fascism of the PMRC to the morbidity of the entire music industry. Davis’ observations were equally cutting. “His fascinating autobiography,” writes Kirk Hamilton at Kotaku, “is loaded with shit-talking, dismissals, and general acerbic jerkiness. It is fantastic.”
But you needn’t pick up Miles’ book to get an earful of his acid-tongued judgments. We need only revisit the series of “blindfold tests” he did for Downbeat magazine in the fifties and sixties. These experiments had famous musicians listen to new music, “try to pick out who is playing,” then offer their off-the-cuff takes. Davis’ first session, in 1955, began charitably enough, though not without some sweeping criticisms. He dismissed all of the soloists on Clifford Brown’s “Falling in Love with Love,” for example, except for a Swedish pianist whose name escaped him. But he gave the record four stars all the same. “The arrangement was pretty good.”
In 1958, Davis sat for his second blindfold test, with mixed results. He nearly obliterated Tiny Grimes and Coleman Hawkins’ “A Smooth One,” giving it “half a star just because… Hawkins is on it.” But in an effusive moment, he gushes over John Lewis’ “Waremeland (Dear Old Stockholm)” with a ten star rating. “All the stars are for John,” he says. By 1964, little evidence of that rare enthusiasm remained in the third blindfold test. Davis was at that moment, writes Richard Brody, “torn apart.” In a particularly irritable state of mind he “flung insults at Eric Dolphy,” Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, and a few more greats. His commentary “perfectly captures his general distaste,” writes Hamilton, “for, well, everything.”
Of Dolphy’s “Miss Ann” (above), he says, “nobody else could sound that bad!” Of the Jazz Crusaders’ “All Blues”: “What’s that supposed to be? That ain’t nothin’.” Of Duke Ellington, Max Roach and Charles Mingus’ “Caravan”: “What am I supposed to say to that? That’s ridiculous. You see the way they can fuck up music?” Like another infamous trash-talker who currently dominates every conversation with his unbelievable egomania, Davis tosses out the condescending adjective “sad” at every opportunity. Clark Terry’s “Cielito Lindo” is a “sad record.” Dolphy is “a sad motherfucker.” Cecil Taylor’s “Lena” is “some sad shit, man.”
It’s not all bad. Miles loves Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto’s “Desafinando,” giving the record five stars and its two star players the highest of praise. Four years later, his typical mood had not improved. In 1968, Davis sat for his last blindfold test. He tore into Ornette Coleman, mistaking him for Archie Shepp on “Funeral.” Of Freddie Hubbard’s “On the Que-Tee,” he says, “I wouldn’t even put that shit on a record.” Sun Ra’s “Brainville” gets a serious slam: “They must be joking—the Florida A&M band sounds better than that. They should record them, rather than this shit.” It ain’t all pure cattiness. Davis tends to like music that stays out of his musical lane, like The Electric Flag’s “Over Lovin’ You,”—a “nice record,” he says. “It’s a pleasure to get a record like that.” Likewise, the prologue from the Fifth Dimension’s Magic Garden gets a thumbs up.
When Downbeat’sLeonard Feather visited the irascible trumpet player in his hotel room for the last test, the critic “seemed shocked to find records by the Byrds, James Brown, Dionne Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Tony Bennett, and the Fifth Dimension scattered around his room,” notes Davis biographer John Szwed. “Miles seemed to have lost all interest in what was then considered jazz.” No doubt about it, no musician then or now would want to be on the receiving end of his critical barbs. Perhaps the only jazz player he never put down was the “young savant drummer” Tony Williams. Otherwise, “at some point or another,” writes Hamilton, “Davis lays low just about every other luminary in the history of jazz.” But behind the vitriol lay true genius. No one was as competitive—or as demanding of himself as he was of others—as Miles Davis.
There are guitar players, who can play a handful of songs and pick out some pleasing riffs, and there are guitarists: players who’ve mastered several styles, have a back pocket full of standards, and tour and record for a living. And then there are guitar gods, goddesses, heroes, or whatever… men and women like St. Vincent, Joe Satriani, Jeff Beck, Nancy Wilson, Steve Vai, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Merle Travis, Jimi Hendrix, and Joe Bonamassa, electric blues wunderkind who, in a way, is a successor to some the past masters. Many guitar heroes are child prodigies, and many of them had the opportunity to learn from genius musicians in their youth. Bonamassa is no exception in either case, as you can see in the video up top, in which a 12-year-old “Smokin’ Joe Bonamassa” opens for B.B. King.
Bonamassa started playing at 4 and studied under the late, great Washington, DC guitarist Danny Gatton at 11, perhaps the most unsung, most naturally gifted guitarist of all time. In 1989, he had the opportunity to tour with King, playing over 20 shows, after he had already made a name for himself in “places like Buffalo and Scranton, PA,” writes Forgotten Guitar.
In the video above, you can see Bonamassa, 12 years old, destroy on Gatton’s signature butterscotch Telecaster. It takes him and the band a couple minutes to get going, and the skeptical audience begins to shuffle their feet impatiently. Then he proceeds to blow their minds, just as he blew the minds of television audiences who saw the news segment below on Bonamassa that same year.
At thirteen, Bonamassa attracted the national attention of a program called Real Life, hosted by Jane Pauley. In the clip below, we have the pleasure of seeing the awkward middle schooler in his other element, the locker-lined hallways and the libraries at his day job. But the live footage of Bonamassa removes any doubt about how extraordinary his abilities are.
An early childhood affinity for the instrument and parental urging has had a lot to do with Bonamassa’s phenomenal skill, but as he often acknowledges, so has his tutelage under some of the greatest guitar heroes to ever live. (See him pay tribute to B.B. King below.) And as everyone who plays guitar will acknowledge, what often distinguishes guitar players from guitarists and guitar heroes is an awful lot of practice. Read Bonamassa’s top 5 practice tips for guitarists here.
Fascination with the theremin, the otherworldly electronic musical instrument developed in the late 1910s and early 1920s out of Soviet research into proximity sensors, may never cease. Some of that has to do with the unusual nature of its touchless interface, consisting of twin antennas that the player moves their hands around in order to control the tone. More of it has to do with what the few who have dared to master the theremin have achieved with it, and no discussion of the masters of the theremin can be complete without the name Clara Rockmore.
“Born in Russia, March 9, 1911, Clara inherited the family trait of perfect pitch and could pick out melodies on the piano at age two,” says the Nadia Reisberg and Clara Rockmore Foundation’s biography. Accepted into the prestigious St. Petersburg Imperial Conservatory as a violin student at the unprecedentedly young age of four, it seemed like she’d already found her path to musical stardom — until the Russian Revolution got in the way.
The family fled to America, with Clara and her pianist sister Nadia giving concerts to make money throughout the arduous journey. They arrived in New York in December 1921, but before Clara could continue her studies there, “she developed an arthritic problem with her bow arm, and had to give up the violin.”
But all was not lost: she met Leon Theremin, inventor and namesake of the theremin (previously featured here), and found herself “fascinated by the aesthetic part of it, the visual beauty, the idea of playing in the air.” Soon developing “her own finger technique, allowing her infinitely greater control of pitch and phrasing” and later suggesting modifications to the instrument to improve its range and sensitivity, she could within years play classical pieces on the theremin, making sounds no classical composer could have imagined. Her performances, sometimes accompanied by Nadia and sometimes as a part of an orchestra, led to the release of her first album (recorded by Robert Moog, whose name also echoes down the halls of electronic music), The Art of the Theremin in 1977. (Stream it on Spotify below.)
Rockmore passed away in 1998, having been brought back into the public eye a few years earlier, at least to an extent, by Steve M. Martin’s documentary Theremin: an Electronic Odyssey. Just last year, countless many more of us learned not just the word theremin but the name Clara Rockmore when Google’s front-page “doodle” celebrated her 105 birthday. Those who clicked on it could receive a brief, game-like theremin lesson from an animated version of Rockmore herself, all while hearing sounds precisely engineered to replicate her distinctive playing style. You can see the real Rockmore playing Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan” at the top of the post. Anyone who’s heard the theremin knows that no other instrument sounds quite like it — and anyone who’s heard Rockmore playing the theremin knows no other theremin has ever sounded quite like hers.
Last week, Green Day played a massive concert in London’s Hyde Park. But arguably the climax happened before the band even took the stage. Prior to the show, the stadium piped Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” through the speakers, at which point a massive singalong got underway. As one YouTuber put it, “Only Queen can rock a stadium without even being there,” a testament to their enduring influence. Enjoy the show.
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