The guzheng was born in China over 2500 years ago. Originally made out of bamboo and silk strings, the instrument became very popular in the imperial court during the Qin period (221 to 206 BCE), and by the Tang Dynasty (618 CE to 907 CE), it was perhaps the most popular instrument in China. According to the San Francisco Guzheng Music Society, it remained popular through the late Qing dynasty (1644 A.D. — 1911 A.D.) and into the 20th century, when, in 1948, “the renowned musician Cao Zheng established the first university level guzheng program” in the country, and the “old silk strings were replaced with nylon strings, which are still being used today.”
Flavorwire titles their post on album covers designed by artist Andy Warhol—auteur of that special brand of late-midcentury, impassive yet rocking-and-rolling, New York-rooted American cool—“Beyond the Banana.” They refer, of course, to the fruit emblazoned uponThe Velvet Underground & Nico, the 1967 debut album from the avant-rock band formed right there in Warhol’s own “Factory.” It would, of course, insult your cultural awareness to post an image of that particular cover and ask if you knew Andy Warhol designed it. But how about that of Count Basie’s self-titled 1955 album above? Warhol, not a figure most of us associate immediately with jazz and its traditions, designed it, too.
We now regard Blue Note highly for its taste in not only the aesthetics of the music itself but also the packaging that surrounds it, and thus we might assume the label had a natural inclination to work with a visionary like Warhol. But in the late fifties, Blue Lights stretched Blue Note’s graphical sensibilities as well as Warhol’s own; with it, he “finally broke away from simply drawing close-ups of musicians and their instruments and delivered a piece of art as evocative as the music inside,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle’s Aidin Vaziri.
Given Warhol’s interest in the United States and its icons, it stands to reason that he would take on design jobs for Basie, Monk, and Burrell just as readily as he would for the Velvet Underground, or for those Englishmen who could out-American the Americans, the Rolling Stones. He even did an album cover for a representative of a whole other slice of American culture: playwright Tennesee Williams, author of plays like The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
In 1952, Caedmon put out a record called Tennessee Williams Reading from The Glass Menagerie, The Yellow Bird and Five Poems, and its 1960 printing bears the Warhol artwork you see just above. Warhol in all these shows an impressive willingness to adapt to the persona of the musician and the feel of their music; a casual Warhol enthusiast may own one of these albums for years without ever realizing who did the cover art. He didn’t even cleave exclusively toward American forms, or to styles that mainstream America might once have considered artistically edgy. You could hardly get further from the position of the Velvet Underground than easy-listening vocals, let alone the easy-listening vocals of the Canadian-born Paul Anka, but when the singer’s 1976 The Painter needed a cover, Warhol delivered — and with a recognizably Warholian look, no less.
“You know,” says Ray Charles in this new animated interview from Blank on Blank, “what I got to live up to is being myself. If I do that the rest will take care of itself.”
Charles always sounded like no one else. When he played or sang just a few notes, you would immediately recognize his distinctive sound, that unique blending of gospel and blues. As he explains in the interview, his style was a direct reflection of who he was. “I can’t help what I sound like,” he says. “What I sound like is what I am, you know? I cannot be anything other than what I am.”
Blank on Blank is a project that brings lost interviews with famous cultural figures back to life. The Charles video is the 12th episode in Blank on Blank’s ongoing series with PBS Digital Studios. The audio of Charles is from the Joe Smith Collection at the Library of Congress. Smith is a former record company executive who recorded over 200 interviews with music industry icons for his book Off the Record: An Oral History of Popular Music. He talked with Charles on June 3, 1987, when the musician was 56 years old. You can hear the complete, unedited interview at the Library of Congress Web site.
In the interview, Charles says that being true to himself was a night-by-night thing. “I don’t sing ‘Georgia’ like the record. I sing it true,” he says. “I sing what I sing true. Each night I sing it the way I feel that night.” For an example of Charles being true to himself, here he is performing “Georgia On My Mind” on the Dick Cavett Show on September 18, 1972:
I vividly recall my first opera. It was The Marriage of Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. A friend bought two family circle tickets—nosebleed seats—and insisted that I come along. She was a trained opera singer and aficionado. I was an unlearned neophyte. Most of my expectations were fulfilled: the enormously impressive space, plenty of bombast, intricately designed sets and costuming. And it was long. Very long. But not, as I had feared, boring. Not at all. I had not expected, in fact, to be so physically moved by the performances, and not only moved to basic emotions—I was moved deep in my gut. There’s no way I could adequately explain it.
But the medical scientists in the video above can. In “The Science of Opera,” actor Stephen Fry and comedian Alan Davies convene a panel of researchers from University College London to discuss what happened physiologically when the pair were hooked up to various sensors as they attended Verdi’s Simon Boccanegraat the Royal Opera House. Like the pairing at my first opera, Fry is a knowledgeable lover of the art and Davies is almost an opera virgin (the story of his actual first opera gets a good laugh). The gadgets attached to Fry and Davies measured their heart rates, breathing, sweat, and “various other emotional responses.” What do we learn from the experiment? For one thing, as neurobiologist Michael Trimble informs us, “music is different from all the other arts.” For example, ninety percent of people surveyed admit to being moved to tears by a piece of music. Only five to ten percent say the same about painting or sculpture. Fry and Davies’ autonomic nervous system responses confirm the power of music (and story) to move us beyond our conscious control and awareness.
And why is this? You’ll have to watch the discussion to learn more—I won’t summarize it here. Just know that we get insights not only into the science of opera, but the art as well—Verdi’s art in particular—and the various disciplines represented here do much to expand our appreciation of music, whether we specifically love opera or not. This is not the first talk on opera Fry has been a part of. He previously hosted another Royal Opera Company event called “Verdi vs. Wagner: the 200th birthday debate” (above). Though I favor the Germans, I’d say it’s a draw, but partisans of either one will likely come away with their opinions intact, having learned a thing or two along the way.
Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman strike me as a very happily married couple, an impression their live cover of Makin’ Whoopee supports.
What’s their secret? As anyone with an interest in romance or Earth Science will tell you, opposites attract. On the surface of things, the exhibitionistic, highly theatrical, always controversial Palmer is quite different from her unfailingly discreet husband of the last two-and-a-half years. (Watch him mine his reticence to great comic effect at the 2.52 mark.)
That’s not to say they don’t have things in common.
And while he has three children from a previous marriage, the Gaiman-Palmer union has yet to produce any little Neil or Amandas. Which brings us back to Makin’ Whoopee. Whether or not the lyrics jibe with one’s personal outlook, the song’s enduring popularity (85 years and counting) might suggest its central dilemma is evergreen. Its biological observations are certainly above reproach: sex often leads to babies, who lead to the sort of responsibilities that signal the end of the honeymoon, if not the marriage.
Perhaps an open relationship in the whoopee department will continue to keep things playful between the Gaiman-Palmers, regardless of what their future holds. It’s really none of our business, is it?
Ayun Halliday must tender her regrets as she is directing a cast of 15 home schooled teens in her husband’s musical, Yeast Nation, that night. Follow her @AyunHalliday
You’ve heard it in shopping malls. You’ve heard it in elevators. No doubt you’ve even heard it on the telephone, while waiting on hold. But you’ve never heard Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons like this before.
On August 8, the flamboyant British violinist Nigel Kennedy and members of his Poland-based Orchestra of Life joined with the Palestine Strings ensemble at the Royal Albert Hall in London for a very unorthodox performance of the Baroque classic for a BBC Proms broadcast. With musicians drawn mostly from the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Palestine Strings is an orchestra of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, a school founded in the Israeli-occupied territories in 1993 and named in 2004 for Said, the influential Palestinian-born writer, theorist and music aficionado who died the previous year.
The 17 members of the Palestine Strings who traveled to London ranged from 13 to 23 years old. They wore black-and-white checkered keffiyehs over their suits and dresses as a show of national pride. In the performance (shown above in its entirety), Kennedy and his collaborators followed the basic outline of Vivaldi’s four-concerto suite, but made frequent excursions into jazz and Arabic music. As Helen Wallace writes at BBC Music Magazine:
Into a basic rhythm section set-up — the irresistible bassist Yaron Stavi and Krzysztof Dziedzic on subtle percussion without drum kit, the gently agile pianist Gwilym Simcock providing a perfect continuo foil to Kennedy’s manic sawing — he wove spaces into which the young Palestinian soloists could stand and improvise in mesmerising Arabic style. These were especially successful in the apprehensive slow movement of Summer, where the shepherd boy fears the imminent storm: sinuous, silky-toned melismas from violin, viola and voice rang out, projecting like melancholy muezzin calls into the hall, and suiting perfectly Vivaldi’s open structure.
It wasn’t all good: “It Don’t Mean a Thing” cropped up in Summer apropos of nothing, while Spring opened with infuriating, Shirley Bassey-style crescendos on the final notes of every phrase. Kennedy’s own solos were pretty rough at times. At one point in Autumn he lost the thread completely and had to stop and ask the leader where they were. But he led the concertante episodes with such charm and wit, adding in birds at spring time, and delivering Winter’s aria like the purest folk air, you had to forgive the excesses.
It was one of my favorite gifts of Christmas 2006. No, all apologies to everyone who bought me thoughtful gewgaws, but it was, without a doubt, the favorite. A humble, unassuming package contained a veritable encyclopedia of Americana: over one hundred portraits of jazz, blues, and country artists from the golden eras of American music, all drawn by a foremost antiquarian of pre-WWII music, R. Crumb. Beside each portrait—some made with Crumb’s exaggerated proportions and thick-lined shading, some softer and more realist—was a brief, one-paragraph bio, just enough to situate the singer, player, or band within the pantheon.
Though a fan of this sort of thing may think that it could get no better, glued to the back cover was a slipcase containing a CD with 21 tracks—seven from each genre. A quick scan showed a few familiar names: Skip James, Charlie Patton, Jelly Roll Morton. Then there were such unknown entities as Memphis Jug Band, Crockett’s Kentucky Mountaineers, and East Texas Serenaders, culled from Crumb’s enormous, library-size archive of rare 78s. Joy to the world.
Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country began in the 80s with a series of illustrated trading cards, as you can see in the video above (which only covers the blues and jazz corners of the triangle). The first cards, “Heroes of the Blues,” came attached to old-time reissues from the Yazoo record company. Eventually expanding the cards to include jazz and country, working in each category from old photos or newsreel footage, Crumb covered quite a lot of musico-historical ground. Archivists and authors Stephen Calt, David Jasen, and Richard Nevins wrote the short blurbs. Finally Yazoo, rather than issuing the cards individually with each record, combined them into boxed sets.
The book—which validates my sense that this music belongs together cheek by jowl, even if some of its partisans can’t stand each other’s company—evolved through a painstaking process in which Crumb redrew and recolored the original illustrations from the printed trading cards (the original artwork having disappeared). You can follow one step of that process in a detailed description of Crumb’s conversion of the blues cards to a silkscreened poster. Crumb’s process is as thorough as his period knowledge. But Crumb fans know that the comic artist’s reverence for Americana goes beyond his collecting and extends to his own version of kitchen-sink bluegrass, blues, and jazz. Listen to Crumb on the banjo above with his Cheap Suit Serenaders. And if anyone feels like getting me a Christmas present this year, I’d like a copy of their record Chasin Rainbows. On vinyl of course.
You’ll almost certainly recognize the piece itself. But what have we on the screen? Clearly each block represents a sound from the piano, but what do their colors signify? “Each pitch class (C, C‑sharp, D, D‑sharp, etc.) has its own color, and the colors are chosen by mapping the musician’s ‘circle of fifths’ to the artist’s ‘color wheel,’ ” Malinowski writes in the FAQ below the video, linking to a more detailed explanation of the process on his site. He also recommends watching not just the Youtube version, improved its resolution though he has, but the newer iPad version: “Because the iPad can support 60 frames per second (instead of the usual 30), the scrolling is silky smooth (the way it’s supposed to be), and you can watch it at night, in the dark, in bed. You can get the video here.” The Music Animation Machine creator also addresses perhaps the most important question about this piece, originally titled Promenade Sentimentale, which has both signified and elicited so much emotion over the past century: “Is it just me, or does this piece make everyone cry?” Malinowski’s reply: “Maybe not everyone, but lots of people…”
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.
