During a visit to Vanderbilt University last year, Billy Joel fielded a question from a freshman, Michel Pollack. To paraphrase: “My favorite song of yours is New York State of Mind. Can I play it for you on the piano while you sing?” To which Joel replied, “Ok.” And off they went. It’s a lovely impromptu moment. But it was a little too much for Pollack. A little overwhelmed by the whole experience, he got a 69 on his calculus exam the next day. But who could blame him. We have more impromptu musical moments below.
The Chorus Project is the sort of opportunity parents dream about—talent-based, high profile, and helmed by visionary adults in tune with teenagers’ emotional and pre-professional needs. The select few—there are 39, leading one to wonder what happened to number 40—range in age from 14–18. They hail from a variety of backgrounds, coming together after school and over the summer to sing, and ultimately record, choral arrangements of rock and pop hits, orchestrated by well known musicians. The 1970s Langley Schools Music Project is a big influence, as is the television show Glee.
Their fresh-faced, orthodontia-enhanced take on the David Byrne / St.Vincent collaboration “Who,” above, embodies the Chorus Project approach, garnering St. Vincent’s stamp, or rather, Tweet, of approval.
Byrne recently advised young musicans to expect that retaining freedom and creative control means taking a financial hit. How comforting to find Chorus Project founder Lauren Bromley Hodge ennumerating that path’s alternate rewards:
Music is a universal language, crossing cultural and income barriers. Singing in a chorus creates community, friendship and trust. In a society where arts based educational opportunities are drastically reduced and threatened, this music project gives young singers the chance to learn about singing, performing and recording from musicians and teachers.
Cultural and income barriers aren’t the only boundaries music transcends. As one Metafilter user remarked after viewing the Chorus Project’s spin on The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset,” arranged by the dBs’ Chris Stamey:
Can someone let that adolescent boy singing lead on “Waterloo Sunset” know that my sixteen year-old self called and his heart is broken from the crush he’ll never be able to say hello to?
Because sob.
See, kids? You don’t need leather pants or facial hair to be cool!
My favorite Chorus Project performance thusfar is their cover of the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back.” The purity of those opening bars reminded me of high school and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” in equal parts. I dug the cinder blocks in the background. I appreciated the deep look of concentration upon soloist Presyce Baez’s face, as well as the catlike, canary-stuffed expression of his partner, Ally Copenhaver, biding her time until the one-and-a-half minute mark when… leapin’ lizards! That kid’s got an impressive set of pipes, making it all the more gratifying to see her showing up in a supporting capacity elsewhere in her chorus’s oeuvre.
There may be no more distinguished lecture series in the arts than Harvard’s Norton lectures, named for celebrated professor, president, and editor of the Harvard Classics, Charles Eliot Norton. Since 1925, the Norton Professorship in Poetry—taken broadly to mean “poetic expression in language, music, or fine arts”—has gone to one respected artist per year, who then delivers a series of six talks during their tenure. We’ve previously featured Norton lectures from 1967–68 by Jorge Luis Borges and 1972–73 by Leonard Bernstein. Today we bring you the first three lectures from this year’s Norton Professor of Poetry, Herbie Hancock. Hancock delivers his fifth lecture today (perhaps even as you read this) and his sixth and final on Monday, March 31. The glories of Youtube mean we don’t have to wait around for transcript publication or DVDs, though perhaps they’re on the way as well.
The choice of Herbie Hancock as this year’s Norton Professor of Poetry seems an overdue affirmation of one of the country’s greatest artistic innovators of its most unique of cultural forms. The first jazz composer and musician—and the first African American—to hold the professorship, Hancock brings an eclectic perspective to the post. His topic: “The Ethics of Jazz.” Given his emergence on the world stage as part of Miles Davis’ 1964–68 Second Great Quartet, his first lecture (top) is aptly titled “The Wisdom of Miles Davis.” Given his swerve into jazz fusion, synth-jazz and electro in the 70s and 80s, following Davis’ Bitches Brew revolution, his second (below) is called “Breaking the Rules.”
Notoriously wordy cultural critic Homi Bhabha, a Norton committee member, introduces Hancock in the first lecture. If you’d rather skip his speech, Hancock begins at 9:10 with his own introduction of himself, as a “musician, spouse, father, teacher, friend, Buddhist, American, World Citizen, Peace Advocate, UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, Chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz” and, centrally, “a human being.” Hancock’s mention of his global peace advocacy is significant, given the subject of his third talk, “Cultural Diplomacy and the Voice of Freedom” (below). His mention of the role of teacher is timely, since he joined UCLA’s music department as a professor in jazz last year (along with fellow Davis Quintet alumnus Wayne Shorter). Always an early adopter, pushing music in new directions, Hancock calls his fourth talk “Innovation and New Technologies” (who can forget his embrace of the keytar?). His identity as a Buddhist is central to his talk today, “Buddhism and Creativity,” and his final talk is enigmatically titled “Once Upon a Time….” Find all of the lectures on this page.
Hancock’s last identification in his intro—“human being”—“may seem obvious,” he says, but it’s “all-encompassing.” He invokes his own multiple identities to begin a discussion on the “one-dimensional” self-presentations we’re each encouraged to adopt—defining ourselves in one or two restrictive ways and not “being open to the myriad opportunities that are available on the other side of the fortress.” Hancock, a warm, friendly communicator and a proponent of “multidimensional thinking,” frames his “ethics of jazz” as spilling over the fortress walls of his identity as a musician and becoming part of his broadly humanist views on universal problems of violence, apathy, cruelty, and environmental degradation. He calls each of his lectures a “set,” and his first two are carefully prepared talks in which his life in jazz provides a backdrop for his wide-ranging philosophy. So far, there’s nary a keytar in sight.
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.
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.
Recently attacked by Cossacks in Sochi and by black-clad men with green antiseptic in Moldova, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina have, since their December release from a two-year prison sentence, remained the very public faces of the punk band/agit-prop collective known as Pussy Riot. The two also continue to raise the band’s profile in the States. Last month alone, they appeared on The Colbert Report and onstage with Madonna at a star-studded Amnesty International event.
Not only prominent activists for prison reform, Nadia and Masha—as they’re called in the HBO documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer—have become celebrities. (So much so that other mostly anonymous members of the group have disowned them, citing among other things issues with “personality cult.”) The HBO doc begins with profiles of the women, as does a new book, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, by Russian journalist Masha Gessen.
In an interview Friday for KQED in San Francisco (above), Gessen—a lesbian mother who recently moved to the United States for fear of persecution—describes how Vladimir Putin, Pussy Riot’s primary target, has regained his popularity with the Russian people after his aggressions at the Ukraine border and Crimea’s Sunday vote for secession. She cites, for example, alarming poll numbers of only 6% of Russians who oppose an invasion of Ukraine. Yet at the time of Pussy Riot’s infamous performance at a Moscow cathedral in February of 2012, which led to Tolokinnikova and Alyokhina’s imprisonment, the anti-Putin protest movement made the autocratic ruler very nervous.
Gessen sketches the history of the movement in her interview (and details it in the book). At first the protests involved the situationist antics of performance art collective Voina—“War”—(see Tolokonnikova, above at far right, with other Voina members in 2008). The feminist punk band has only emerged in the past three years, when Voina’s art-school pranks became Pussy Riot’s provocations days after Putin announced his intent to return to the presidency.
One month before the cathedral performance that sent Nadia and Masha to prison, the band appeared in their trademark fluorescent dresses and balaclavas in Red Square (top). Only three months prior, on October 1, 2011, they released their first song, “Ubey seksista” (“Kill the Sexist”) and—as members of Voina—announced the arrival of Pussy Riot, a radical opposition to the authoritarianism, patriarchy, and crony capitalism they allege characterize Putin’s rule.
In November of 2011, Pussy Riot staged its first public performance (above), scaling atop scaffolding and Moscow trolley and subway cars while scattering feathers and dancing to their song “Osvobodi Bruschatku” (“Release the Cobblestones”). The song recommends that Russians throw cobblestones in street protests because–as Salon quotes from the group’s blog—“ballots will be used as toilet paper” in the approaching elections.
The collective next released the video for “Kropotkin Vodka” (above), featuring a montage of public appearances in fashionable locations around Moscow. The locations were chosen, the band writes, specifically as “forbidden sites in Moscow.” More from their (Google-translated) blog below:
The concerts were held in public places [for] wealthy putinists: boutiques in the capital, at fashion shows, luxury cars and roofs close to Kremlin bars […] Performances included arson and a series of musical occupations [of] glamorous areas of the capital.
The song takes its title and inspiration from Peter Kropotkin, the 19th century Russian aristocrat-turned-anarcho-communist intellectual.
In their open letter publicly releasing their two most prominent members from the group, six members of Pussy Riot write that the “ideals of the group” Nadia and Masha have allegedly abandoned were precisely “the cause for their unjust punishment.” The two have become, they say, “institutionalized advocates of prisoners’ rights.” And yet in mid-December, 2011, the band performed their song “Death to Prison, Freedom to Protests” on the rooftop of a detention center holding opposition leaders and activists. This was at the height of the anti-Putin movement when upwards of 100,000 people took to the streets of Moscow chanting “Russia without Putin” and “Putin is a Thief” and demanding free elections.
While most of us only heard of Pussy Riot after their arrest and trial for the cathedral stunt, their “breakthrough performance,” writes Salon, occurred one month earlier at the Red Square appearance at the top of the post. This was when the band decided to “take revolt to the Kremlin,” and coincided with promises from Putin to reform elections. “The revolution should be done by women,” said one member at the time. “For now, they don’t beat us or jail us as much.” The situation would turn rather quickly only weeks later, and it was with Pussy Riot, says Gessen, that the wave of arrests and beatings of protesters began. The band’s current schism comes just as the anti-Putin movement seems to be fracturing and losing resolve, and the future of democratic opposition in Putin’s increasingly belligerent Russia seems entirely uncertain.
A film that began its life as a script called Who Killed Bambi?, written by Roger Ebert and Russ Meyer, The Great Rock and Roll Swindle (trailer below) became a farcical caper starring the Sex Pistols minus their lead singer. Johnny Rotten had quit the band at this point and appears only in archival footage. Mostly The Great Rock and Roll Swindle was a vehicle for Malcolm McLaren to sell himself as the guru of punk and the driving force behind the band. Directed by Julien Temple (who also made the far superior Sex Pistols doc, The Filth and the Fury), Swindle is also notable for almost launching a Sid Vicious solo career, and it might have worked, were it not for his epically destructive flame-out in 1978.
The film saw release two years later, and produced a soundtrack album, which I remember finding in a used record bin—pre-Google—and thinking I’d discovered some long lost Sex Pistols album. One listen disabused me of the notion. Some of album is a snapshot of the band’s shambolic final days, but most of it is devoted to “jokey material” from the movie and most of that is pretty terrible. The sole exception is Sid’s version of Paul Anka’s “My Way” (top), a sneering piss take on the song Sinatra made famous. After some obnoxious faux-crooning, Sid tears through song with punk aplomb. Allmusic aptly describes the performance as “inarguably remarkable” yet showing that Sid was “incapable of comprehending the irony of his situation.”
The moment of the performance itself is bathed in sad irony. I’ve always thought it showed that—had he just a little more instinct for self-preservation—we might have someday seen Sid Vicious recording an album’s worth of bratty takes on the American Songbook, but probably at McLaren’s behest. What more he might have had in him is anyone’s guess; in life he seemed unable to rise above the role McLaren assigned him in the film “Gimmick.” But he made it look good. Those familiar with Alex Cox’s definitive portrait Sid and Nancy will of course remember Gary Oldman’s recreation of Sid’s “My Way” (above). Convincing stuff, but no substitute for the real thing.
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 11th 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.
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