In 1968, Pink Floyd’s rela­tion­ship with increas­ing­ly drug-addled lead singer/songwriter/guitarist Syd Bar­rett unrav­eled. Though Barrett’s depar­ture wasn’t offi­cial­ly announced until April, that band had already begun, by neces­si­ty, per­form­ing and record­ing with­out him late the pre­vi­ous year, adding gui­tarist David Gilmour to the line­up to sup­plant Syd’s errat­ic per­for­mances. In Feb­ru­ary of ’68 the band appeared minus Syd on a French live-music pro­gram called Baton Rouge. Six­ties music blog A Dandy in Aspic describes the show as cap­tur­ing dur­ing its year-long run “some of the best British Mod/Psych bands at their peak,” includ­ing The Small Faces, The Moody Blues, and the Yard­birds, with Jim­my Page.

This Floyd footage, how­ev­er, is espe­cial­ly sig­nif­i­cant for its por­trait of the band find­ing its way through the trau­ma of its chief architect’s men­tal demise, with a seem­ing­ly awk­ward Gilmour tak­ing over:  “It still sounds great, but the band are vis­i­bly uncom­fort­able. Roger Waters’ dark psy­che­del­ic gem ‘Set The Con­trols For the Heart Of The Sun’ sounds amaz­ing, and ‘Let there Be [More] Light’ is an indi­ca­tion of Pink Floy­d’s new, post-Syd direc­tion.”

In addi­tion to those two songs from their upcom­ing sec­ond album A Saucer­ful of Secrets, the band plays two songs from their debut, Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The weird mys­ti­cal chant “Astron­o­my Domine” doesn’t suf­fer at all, since key­boardist Richard Wright sang the lead vocals on the album ver­sion and does so again here. David Gilmour takes over the lead for Barrett’s “Flam­ing,” which is such a Syd song, with its dis­turb­ing and child­like lyrics and loopy vocal melody, that his absence becomes notice­able. But it comes off fine, if some­what stiff, and the song remained in their set for years after­ward.

For more clas­sic psy­che­del­ic per­for­mances from the 1967–68 Baton Rouge, head over to A Dandy in Aspic.

via Kurt Loder/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Doc­u­men­taries on the Mak­ing of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here

Psy­che­del­ic Scenes of Pink Floyd’s Ear­ly Days with Syd Bar­rett, 1967

Syd Bar­rett: Under Review, a Full Doc­u­men­tary About Pink Floyd’s Bril­liant and Trou­bled Founder

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Son­net 18

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

Back in 2012, we fea­tured a 1975 Talk­ing Heads con­cert at CBGB, ref­er­enc­ing Gen­er­a­tion X author Dou­glas Cou­p­land’s telling def­i­n­i­tion of who, exact­ly, con­sti­tutes that cohort: “If you liked the Talk­ing Heads back in the day, then you’re prob­a­bly X.” Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly iron­ic and sin­cere, artis­tic and com­mer­cial, ram­shackle and pol­ished, cere­bral and impul­sive: the sen­si­bil­i­ties of David Byrne’s influ­en­tial new-wave band and the zeit­geist pro­file of Gen­er­a­tion X share too many qual­i­ties to list. 1975, for a Gen Xer, would cer­tain­ly count as “back in the day,” though per­haps a bit too far back in the day for many of them to have gained entrance to such a vibrant­ly scuzzy venue as CBGB. Just five years lat­er, though, many more of them would have come of just enough age to engage with the Heads, who by that point had blown up in pop­u­lar­i­ty, play­ing huge venues all over the world.

You may have seen the band play­ing Rome in 1980 when we post­ed that show in 2012, and today we give you anoth­er of their Euro­pean gigs from that same break­out year, in Dort­mund. That loca­tion, about 250 miles from Cou­p­land’s Cana­di­an Air Force base birth­place in Ger­many, in a Ger­many still divid­ed, brings to mind not just the impor­tance of themes of the late Cold War to the nov­el­ist’s work, but to Gen­er­a­tion X itself, the last kids to grow up under the cred­i­ble threat of sud­den nuclear anni­hi­la­tion. Such an uneasy psy­cho­log­i­cal and ide­o­log­i­cal envi­ron­ment would have an effect on the for­ma­tion of any­one’s cre­ative mind, as it must also have on that of Gen­er­a­tion X’s pre­de­ces­sors, the Baby Boomers — a group in which the 1952-born Byrne falls right in the mid­dle. The Cold War may have end­ed, but the Talk­ing Heads’ music, as you’ll expe­ri­ence in this Dort­mund con­cert, tran­scends both tem­po­ral and geo­graph­i­cal con­text.

Set list:

1. “Psy­cho Killer”
2. “Cities”
3. “Zim­bra”
4. “Once in a Life­time”
5. “Ani­mals”
6. “Crosseyed and Pain­less”
7. “Life Dur­ing Wartime”
8. “The Great Curve”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Talk­ing Heads Play CBGB, the New York Club that Shaped Their Sound (1975)

Live in Rome, 1980: The Talk­ing Heads Con­cert Film You Haven’t Seen

Talk­ing Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” Per­formed on Tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese Instru­ments

David Byrne: How Archi­tec­ture Helped Music Evolve

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

Singing a piece of music for the first time while read­ing the notes from a sheet is hard, and requires com­plete con­trol of one’s vocals. Today, the most pop­u­lar ways of teach­ing this skill to musi­cians are based on the solfège method, where notes on a scale are matched to par­tic­u­lar syl­la­bles: your stan­dard do, re, mi, fa, so la, si. Stu­dents prac­tice singing dif­fer­ent com­bi­na­tions of these syl­la­bles, using vary­ing rhythms and inter­vals, and even­tu­al­ly cement their knowl­edge of that par­tic­u­lar scale.  The method is, sur­pris­ing­ly, almost a mil­le­ni­um old, with the first Euro­pean use of this mnemon­ic tech­nique dat­ing back to the mid­dle ages.

In the 11^th cen­tu­ry, a monk known as Gui­do of Arez­zo, began to use the “Guidon­ian hand” as way to teach medieval music singers his hexa­chord, or six-note scales. Arez­zo, who had also devised the mod­ern musi­cal nota­tion sys­tem, had noticed that singers strug­gled to remem­ber the var­i­ous Gre­go­ri­an chants that the monas­tic orders per­formed in the monas­ter­ies.

To help their mem­o­riza­tion, Gui­do decid­ed to take the first syl­la­ble in each line of the well known hymn Ut Queant Lax­is, and cre­at­ed a hexa­chord, or six note scale, that singers famil­iar with the hymn already knew: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la.  The hand, shown above, was a map of the musi­cal notes in this hexa­chord sys­tem, with each note asso­ci­at­ed with a par­tic­u­lar joint. In all, the Guidon­ian hand ranges almost three octaves. Although it had fall­en out of use for the past few cen­turies, the Guidon­ian hand seems to be mak­ing a come­back. Here’s a video of the method in action, for­ward­ed our way by Anton Hecht, an Open Cul­ture read­er:

I love the con­cept, but can’t help feel that using the Guidon­ian hand dur­ing a per­for­mance makes you look a lit­tle like a first grad­er strug­gling with basic arith­metic.

For more infor­ma­tion on the Guidon­ian hand, check out this write­up of a 2011 Stan­ford sym­po­sium, and watch anoth­er demon­stra­tion video, here.

Ilia Blin­d­er­man is a Mon­tre­al-based cul­ture and sci­ence writer. Fol­low him at @iliablinderman, or read more of his writ­ing at the Huff­in­g­ton Post.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to a Record­ing of a Song Writ­ten on a Man’s Butt in a 15-Cen­tu­ry Hierony­mus Bosch Paint­ing

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Dis­cov­er the “Brazen Bull,” the Ancient Greek Tor­ture Machine That Dou­bled as a Musi­cal Instru­ment

Explo­sive Cats Imag­ined in a Strange, 16th Cen­tu­ry Mil­i­tary Man­u­al