Note: Though the service came to an end earlier today, it looks like you can now watch a recording of the farewell ceremony above. If you make it to the end, you’ll notice that there was an issue with the audio when Dave Grohl began speaking. You can hear a slightly touched-up version here.
Just a quick note: “Lemmy” Kilmister’s memorial service is now streaming live on Youtube. Click play above. Ian Fraser Kilmister was an English musician, singer and songwriter who founded and fronted the rock band Motörhead. He died on December 29th, at the age of 70.
“Not everyone ‘digs’ underground movies, but those who do can ‘dig’ ’em here.” Now imagine those words spoken in the archetypal so-square-it’s-cool consummate midcentury newscaster voice — or actually watch them enunciated in just that manner out on the steps of New York’s The Bridge, “one of several small theaters around the country where ‘underground’ films are shown.” The report, which aired on CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite on December 31st, 1965, introduced to mainstream Americans such avant-garde filmmakers as Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, and Andy Warhol — as well as a certain band called the Velvet Underground.
This six-minute segment spends some time with Piero Heliczer, filmmaker, poet, and “once the Jackie Coogan of Italy.” As Dangerous Minds’ Martin Schneider writes, “When CBS came a‑callin’ to do its story, Heliczer was shooting a 12-minute short called Dirt, featuring the Velvet Underground, and that was the scene Heliczer happened to be shooting that day. (For some reason none of the fellows in the band are wearing a shirt.)” Schneider also quotes Velvet Underground founding member Sterling Morrison, who credits playing in Heliczer’s “happenings” with showing him the possibilities of experimental music: “The path ahead became suddenly clear — I could work on music that was different from ordinary rock & roll since Piero had given us a context to perform.”
I can only imagine how the viewers of fifty years and one week ago must have reacted to hearing these cutting-edge filmmakers discussing “the narrative aspect and the poetic aspect” of cinema, let alone seeing clips of their works themselves, right down to a representative twenty seconds of Andy Warhol’sSleep. It even includes a clip from Brakhage’s Two: Creeley/McClurewhich must have made more than a few of them wonder if their set had suddenly gone on the blink. But even the most staid of CBS’s audience must have come away with a novel idea or two worth thinking about, such as Brakhage’s stated aim of making movies “for viewing in a living room, rather than in a theater.” That, perhaps, they could dig.
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!
Before the New Year, we brought you footage of Russian polymathic inventor Léon Theremin demonstrating the strange instrument that bears his surname, and we noted that the Theremin was the first electronic instrument. This is not strictly true, though it is the first electronic instrument to be mass produced and widely used in original composition and performance. But like biological evolution, the history of musical instrument development is littered with dead ends, anomalies, and forgotten ancestors (such as the octobass). One such obscure oddity, the Telharmonium, appeared almost 20 years before the Theremin, and it was patented by its American inventor, Thaddeus Cahill, even earlier, in 1897. (See some of the many diagrams from the original patent below.)
Cahill, a lawyer who had previously invented devices for pianos and typewriters, created the Telharmonium—also called the Dynamaphone—to broadcast music over the telephone, making it a precursor not to the Theremin but to the later scourge of telephone hold music. “In a large way,” writes Jay Williston at Synthmuseum.com, “Cahill invented what we know of today as ‘Muzak.’” He built the first prototype Telharmonium, the Mark I, in 1901. It weighed seven tons. The final incarnation of the instrument, the Mark III, took 50 people to build at the cost of $200,000 and was “60 feet long, weighed almost 200 tons and incorporated over 2000 electric switches…. Music was usually played by two people (4 hands) and consisted of mostly classical works by Bach, Chopin, Greig, Rossini and others.” The workings of the gargantuan machine resemble the boiler room of an industrial facility. (See several photographs here.)
Needless to say, this was a highly impractical instrument. Nevertheless, Cahill not only found willing investors for the enormous contraption, but he also staged successful demonstrations in Baltimore, then—after disassembling and moving the thing by train—in New York. By 1905, his New England Electric Music Company “made a deal with the New York Telephone Company to lay special lines so that he could transmit the signals from the Telharmonium throughout the city.” Cahill used the term “synthesizing” in his patent, which some say makes the Telharmonium the first synthesizer, though its operation was as much mechanical as electronic, using a complicated series of gears and cylinders to replicate the musical range of a piano. (See the operation explained in the video at the top.) “Raised bumps on cylinders helped create musical contour notes,” writes Popular Mechanics, “not unlike a music box, with the size of the cylinder determining the pitch.”
The huge, very loud Telharmonium Mark III ended up in the basement of the Metropolitan Opera House for a time as Cahill worked on his scheme for pumping music through the telephone lines. But this plan did not come off smoothly. “The problem was,” Popular Mechanics points out,” all cables leak off radio waves. Sending a gigantic, amplified signal on turn-of-the-20th-century phone lines was bound to cause trouble.” The Telharmonium created interference on other phone lines and even interrupted Naval radio transmissions. “Rumor has it,” the Douglas Anderson School of the Arts writes, “that a New York businessman, infuriated by the constant network interference, broke into the building where the Telharmonium was housed and destroyed it, throwing pieces of the machinery into the Hudson river below.”
The story seems unlikely, but it serves as a symbol for the instrument’s collapse. Cahill’s company folded in 1908, though the final Telharmonium supposedly remained operational until 1916. No recordings of the instrument have survived, and Thaddeus Cahill’s brother Arthur eventually sold the last prototype off for scrap in 1950 after failing to find a buyer. The entire rationale for the instrument had been supplanted by radio broadcasting. The Telharmonium may have failed to catch on, but it still had a significant impact. Its unique design inspired another important electronic instrument, the Hammond organ. And its very existence gave musical futurists a vision. The Douglas Anderson School writes:
Despite its final demise, the Telharmonium triggered the birth of electronic music—The Italian Composer and intellectual Ferruccio Busoni inspired by the machine at the height of its popularity was moved to write his “Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music” (1907) which in turn became the clarion call and inspiration for the new generation of electronic composers such as Edgard Varèse and Luigi Russolo.
The instrument also made quite an impression on another American inventor, Mark Twain, who enthusiastically demonstrated it through the telephone during a New Year’s gathering at his home, after giving a speech about his own not inconsiderable status as an innovator and early adopter of new technologies. “Unfortunately for Thaddeus Cahill,” writes William Weir at The Hartford Courant, “Twain’s support wasn’t enough to make a success of the Telharmonium.” Learn more about the instrument’s history from this book.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: When the star is unable to perform, a talented underdog is plucked from the chorus and thrown into the spotlight with just minutes to prepare.
It’s a crowd pleasing plot, one that occasionally plays out in real life, as it did at the 1998 Grammy Awards, above.
The twist was that the underdog role went to the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, pinch-hitting for her friend, operatic superstar, Luciano Pavarotti, benched by a sore throat at the zero hour.
Given the nature of the event, the Radio City Music Hall audience probably wouldn’t have minded had the planned programming been scrapped in favor of “Respect,” “Natural Woman,” or any number of tunes Franklin can crush without batting an eyelash.
Franklin wasn’t totally green in the Puccini department. As master of ceremonies Sting informed the crowd, she’d performed the song two nights earlier at a fundraiser for MusiCares. Still, a fair amount of chutzpah was necessary.
Naturally, a handful of opera purists refused to fall under the spell, even when Franklin hit that celebrated high B, but they seem to comprise a minority.
Pavarotti, whom Sting presented with a living Legend Grammy immediately following Franklin’s performance, died in 2007.
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!
But the handwritten packing list Godmother of Punk Patti Smith scrawled upside down on a photocopied receipt from a children’s bookstore on the eve of a 40-date European tour comes close. One can kind of imagine her stuffing her adaptors, her Japanese pants, and her “9 underwears” into a shopping bag or a dirty day pack, using it as a pillow in the back of the van…
Behold the reality, below.
Smith’s hard shell case is kitted out with practiced precision, its contents pared to the leanest of luxury-brand necessities to keep her happy and healthy on the road.
Other essentials in Smith’s tour bag include loquat tea for her throat and plenty of reading material. In addition to the Hunger Games, she elected to take along some old favorites from author Haruki Murakami:
I decide this will be essentially a Haruki Murakami tour. So I will take several of his books including the three volume IQ84 to reread. He is a good writer to reread as he sets your mind to daydreaming while you are reading him. thus i always miss stuff.
Readers, use the comments section to let us know what indispensable items you would pack when embarking on a 40-city tour with Patti Smith.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this fall. Follow her @AyunHalliday
Last summer, we highlighted an almost unbelievably rich resource for music fans: the Music Vault, a Youtube archive of 22,000 live concert videos from a range of artists, spanning about four decades into the present. In a time of soaring ticket prices, the Music Vault allows us to catch a show at home for free, and to see bands we missed in their heyday perform on stages around the world. Last summer, I wrote, “enjoy revisiting the glory days and rest assured, they aren’t going away anytime soon.” But I spoke too soon, as many Music Vault videos (there were only 13,000 then) began disappearing, along with the nostalgia and hip currency they offered. Well, now they’re back up and running, and let’s hope it’s for good.
If that’s not what you’re into, there’s also plenty of punk and new wave, like the classic Talking Heads performance of “Life During Wartime” above at the Capitol Theatre from 1980 (see the complete concert here). You can also catch Iggy Pop in ’86, Blondie in ’79, the Ramones in ’78, Prince in ’82, or Green Day in ’94. You don’t get the cred from saying you were there, whatever that’s worth, but you get the thrill of seeing these artists in their prime, (almost) live and direct. Fancy more contemporary fare? Check out the New Music Discovery channel with live performances from current acts, curated by Daytrotter and Paste Magazine. Dig funk, soul, and reggae? They’ve got you covered, with shows from Parliament-Funkadelic, Jimmy Cliff, Curtis Mayfield, and many more. See Bob Marley and the Wailers do a stellar rendition of “No Woman, No Cry” at the Oakland Auditorium in 1979, below.
You know what they say: eighty percent of the work you do on a project, you do getting the last twenty percent of that project right. But most of that other twenty percent of the work must go toward getting started in the first place; you’ve got to get over a pretty big hill just to get to the point of writing the first sentence, painting the first stroke, shooting the first shot, or playing the first chords. Avant-garde composer John Cage knew well the challenges of just getting started, and his thoughts on the subject motivated him, toward the end of his career, to do the written, performed, and recorded project we feature today, How to Get Started.
Cage himself only put on How to Get Started once, at an international conference on sound design at George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch on August 31, 1989. It worked like this: he brought with him ten note cards, each of which contained notes for a particular “idea” he wanted to talk about. On went a tape recorder, and he began speaking improvisationally about the first idea. Then he flipped to the next card, and as he talked about its idea, the recording of the first one played in the background. He continued with this procedure until, by the tenth idea on the tenth card, he had his impromptu speeches on all nine previous ideas playing simultaneously behind him. You can get an idea of what his readings sounded like in the three clips (from howtogetstarted.org) embedded here [first, second, third].
The ten ideas Cage jotted down on his notecards come inspired by, and inspired him to discuss further, his own creative experiences. In the first, he describes a new compositional process that came to him in a dream, which involves crumpling a score into a ball and unfolding it again. In the third, he thinks back to his work Roaratorio, an Irish circus on Finnegans Wake, which converted Joyce’s novel into music, and imagines a way forward that would involve turning into music not one book at a time but several. In the fifth, he references Marcel Duchamp’s “The Creative Act,” which brought home for him the notion of how audiences “finish the work by listening,” which led to his creating works of “musical sculpture,” including one particularly memorable example involving “between 150 and 200” Yugoslavian high school students, all playing their instruments in different places.
Cage’s other stories of creative epiphany in How to Get Started involve a trip to an anechoic chamber; finding out what made one dance performance at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts so “tawdry, shabby, miserable”; discovering the artist’s “inner clock” in Leningrad; and how he works around what no less a musical mind than Arnold Schoenberg diagnosed as his absent sense of harmony. You can read a transcript of all of them in a PDF of How to Get Started’s companion booklet. And depending upon how inspired you find yourself (or how close you live to Philadelphia), you might consider making the trip to the Slought Foundation, who have built a room specially designed for the piece. You might not come out of it feeling like you’ve absorbed all the creativity of John Cage, but he himself points us toward the important thing: not the amorphous quality of creativity, but the action of getting started.
Tom Lehrer earned a BA and MA in mathematics from Harvard during the late 1940s, then taught math courses at MIT, Harvard, Wellesley, and UC-Santa Cruz. Math was his vocation. But, all along, Lehrer nurtured an interest in music. And, by the mid 1950s, he became best known for his satirical songs that touched on sometimes political, sometimes academic themes.
Today we’re presenting one of his classics: “The Elements.” Recorded in 1959, the song features Lehrer reciting the names of the 102 chemical elements known at the time (we now have 115), and it’s all sung to the tune of Major-General’s Song from The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan. You can hear a studio version below, and watch a nice live version taped in Copenhagen, Denmark, in September 1967.
Follow Open Culture on Facebook and Twitter and share intelligent media with your friends. Or better yet, sign up for our daily email and get a daily dose of Open Culture in your inbox. And if you want to make sure that our posts definitely appear in your Facebook newsfeed, just follow these simple steps.
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.
