Take R.E.M.‘s 1991 bal­lad “Los­ing My Reli­gion” and rework it from minor to major scale, and here’s what you get — some­thing that’s, as one Vimeo com­menter called it, “rec­og­niz­able enough to be nostalgic…unique enough to be shared!” Oth­er songs dig­i­tal­ly reworked by MajorScaled TV include “Rid­ers on the Storm” by The Doors, Metal­li­ca’s “Noth­ing Else Mat­ters,” and Djan­go Rein­hardt’s “Minor Swing.” Fol­low MajorScaled TV on Face­book for even­tu­al addi­tions to the col­lec­tion.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it,” Reworked in Major Key, Becomes a Cheer­ful Pop Song

R.E.M. Reveals the Secrets Behind Their Emo­tion­al­ly-Charged Songs: “Los­ing My Reli­gion” and “Try Not to Breathe”

R.E.M Plays “Radio Free Europe” on Their Nation­al Tele­vi­sion Debut on The David Let­ter­man Show (1983)

After hear­ing this week from two great French com­posers linked to the Impres­sion­ist move­ment–Claude Debussy and Mau­rice Rav­el–we con­tin­ue our series of clas­sic piano-roll record­ings with a trio of per­for­mances by the last of the great Russ­ian Roman­tic com­posers: Sergei Rach­mani­noff.

When the Bol­she­viks seized the aris­to­crat­ic Rach­mani­nof­f’s estate short­ly after the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion of 1917, he and his fam­i­ly fled to Scan­di­navia and then to Amer­i­ca, where they arrived in Novem­ber of 1918. To make mon­ey, the cash-strapped émi­gré put aside com­pos­ing and embarked on a gru­el­ing per­for­mance sched­ule, and in March of 1919 agreed to make a series of piano-roll record­ings for the Amer­i­can Piano Com­pa­ny, or “Ampi­co.”

It was a time of tran­si­tion for musi­cal enter­tain­ment. Most fam­i­lies who were not poor owned a piano, in keep­ing with the tra­di­tion that home enter­tain­ment was a do-it-your­self affair. But as tech­nol­o­gy advanced, peo­ple became more accus­tomed to the idea of hear­ing the music of a world-famous vir­tu­oso in their own liv­ing room. Play­er pianos, or pianolas, sound­ed bet­ter than ear­ly phono­graphs and could still serve the func­tion of a reg­u­lar piano, so for awhile there was a boom­ing busi­ness in the per­fo­rat­ed paper rolls that kept them play­ing.

Rach­mani­noff was inter­est­ed in tap­ping into the piano roll mar­ket, but was skep­ti­cal at first about the qual­i­ty of the record­ings. When he made his first record­ing at the Ampi­co stu­dio in New York, he was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised when he heard the play­back. “Gen­tle­men,” he report­ed­ly said, “I, Sergei Rach­mani­noff, have just heard myself play.” He would even­tu­al­ly record 35 pieces for Ampi­co between 1919 and 1929, twelve of which were his own com­po­si­tions. In the video above, we hear three of his best-known piano-roll record­ings:

1. Rach­mani­noff plays his famous Pre­lude in C Sharp Minor, Op. 3, No. 2 , from the 1892 suite, Morceaux de fan­taisie (“Fan­ta­sy Pieces”), record­ed on March 17, 1919.
2. Rach­mani­noff plays his own piano tran­scrip­tion of his pop­u­lar 1902 song “Lilacs,” from 12 Romances (also known as 12 Songs), Op. 21, record­ed on April 6, 1922.
3. Rach­mani­noff plays a famous short piece writ­ten by anoth­er Russ­ian com­pos­er: Niko­lai Rim­sky-Kor­sakov’s 1903 “Flight of the Bum­ble­bee,” record­ed on Feb­ru­ary 1, 1929.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Rav­el Plays Rav­el: The Haunt­ing, Melan­choly ‘Oiseaux Tristes,’ 1922

Debussy Plays Debussy: The Great Com­poser’s Play­ing Returns to Life

Watch the Great Russ­ian Com­pos­er Sergei Rach­mani­noff in Home Movies

Yes­ter­day we fea­tured a piano-roll record­ing of the French com­pos­er Claude Debussy play­ing his “La soirée dans Grenade” in 1913. Today we bring you a lyri­cal and melan­choly work record­ed in 1922 on a sim­i­lar device by Debussy’s younger friend and rival, Mau­rice Rav­el. It’s called “Oiseaux tristes,” or “Sad Birds.”

The impe­tus for com­pos­ing the piece came in 1904, when Rav­el heard a sec­ond-hand account of some­thing Debussy had said. Accord­ing to Alex­is Roland-Manuel, Rav­el’s friend and biog­ra­ph­er, Debussy had told the pianist Ricar­do Viñes that when writ­ing his exper­i­men­tal piece, “D’un cahi­er d’esquiss­es,” he had been “dream­ing of a kind of music whose form was so free that it would sound impro­vised, of works which would seem to have been torn out of a sketch­book.”

Viñes recount­ed Debussy’s state­ment at a meet­ing of “Les Apach­es,” a group of rad­i­cal writ­ers, artists and musi­cians, of which Rav­el was a mem­ber. Rav­el respond­ed by say­ing that he was ready to put Debussy’s dream into action. He drew his inspi­ra­tion from an expe­ri­ence he had one morn­ing in the for­est at Fontain­bleau. Rav­el’s friend and for­mer music school class­mate Émile Vuiller­moz remem­bered:

He was stay­ing with friends and one morn­ing he heard a black­bird whistling a tune and was enchant­ed by its ele­gant, melan­choly arabesque. He had mere­ly to tran­scribe this tune accu­rate­ly, with­out chang­ing a note, to pro­duce the limpid, poet­ic piece which spir­i­tu­alis­es the nos­tal­gic call of this French broth­er of the For­est Bird in Siegfried.

After the meet­ing, Rav­el set to work on the E Flat Minor “Oiseaux tristes,” which he ded­i­cat­ed to Viñes and includ­ed in his five-piece suite, Miroirs. “Oiseaux tristes is the most typ­i­cal of my way of think­ing,” Rav­el wrote in his 1928 auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal sketch. “It evokes birds lost in the oppres­sive­ness of a very dark for­est dur­ing the hottest hours of sum­mer.”

Rav­el record­ed “Oiseaux tristes” and four oth­er pieces in Lon­don on June 30, 1922, using a Duo-Art repro­duc­ing piano. Unlike the Welte-Mignon machine used by Debussy in 1913 (Rav­el also made a pair of record­ings on the Welte-Mignon at about the same time as Debussy) the Duo-Art sys­tem did not auto­mat­i­cal­ly record the dynam­ics of the per­for­mance. So when Rav­el played “Oiseaux tristes” at the stu­dio in Lon­don, there was an engi­neer seat­ed next to him at a con­sole, turn­ing dials to cap­ture the dynam­ic mod­u­la­tions in his play­ing. After­ward, Rav­el lis­tened to a play­back on a pianola and, sat­is­fied with the results, signed his name on the orig­i­nal roll.

I am a child of Bea­t­les fans; we owned near­ly every album in orig­i­nal mono vinyl press­ings. But some­how there was a hole in our collection—a whale-sized hole, it turned out—because we didn’t have a copy of the White Album. I was intro­duced to it lat­er by a friend, who shared its secrets with me like one would share the favorite work of a favorite poet—reverently. We delved into the his­to­ry and learned that record­ing ses­sions were noto­ri­ous­ly fractious—with Ringo step­ping away for a while and Paul step­ping in on the drums, and with the oth­ers record­ing solo, some­times with ses­sion play­ers, rarely in the same room togeth­er— a sit­u­a­tion reflect­ed in the track­ing of the record, which feels like a com­pi­la­tion of songs by each Bea­t­le (but Ringo), rather than the usu­al smooth affair of Lennon/McCartney, and occa­sion­al Har­ri­son pro­duc­tions.

That rangi­ness is what makes the White Album spe­cial: it’s feels so famil­iar, and yet it’s not like any­thing they’d done before and presages the genius to come in their solo careers. So imag­ine my sur­prised delight at stum­bling across a boot­leg that die-hard com­pletists have sure­ly known about for ages (though it only saw release in 2002): The Bea­t­les: Unplugged is a record­ing of acoustic songs, most of which would appear on the the White Album, played and sung by John, Paul, and George at George’s house in Esher—hence the bootleg’s sub­ti­tle, the Kin­fauns-Ses­sions (Kin­fauns was the name of George’s home). Here are the close vocal har­monies that seemed to mark a group of musi­cians in near-per­fect har­mo­ny with each oth­er (but with­out Ringo, again). And here are some of the Bea­t­les’ most poignant, point­ed, and vaude­vil­lian songs live and direct, with­out any stu­dio tricks what­so­ev­er.

Of course these were record­ed as demos, and not meant for release of any kind, but even so, they’re fair­ly high-qual­i­ty, in a lo-fi kind of way. Lis­ten­ing to the songs in this form makes me think of the folk/psych revival­ism of the so-called New Weird Amer­i­ca that hear­kened back to so much six­ties’ trip­py play­ful­ness, but most­ly eschewed the major label stu­dio sound of six­ties’ records and wel­comed promi­nent tape hiss and sin­gle-track, bed­room takes. Giv­en the rapid pop-cul­ture recy­cling that is the hall­mark of the ear­ly 21st cen­tu­ry, The Bea­t­les: Unplugged sounds strange­ly mod­ern.

The Unplugged ses­sion includes a won­der­ful­ly airy ren­di­tion of “Dear Pru­dence,” which like so many of these songs, was writ­ten dur­ing The Bea­t­les’ sojourn in India, about Mia Farrow’s sis­ter (a com­plete track­list is here). The com­pil­ers of the release have tacked on three addi­tion­al songs: “Spir­i­tu­al Regen­er­a­tion India” (also a birth­day trib­ute to The Beach Boy’s Mike Love), an odd­ly upbeat stu­dio run-through of “Hel­ter Skel­ter,” and a free-form acoustic med­ley of tra­di­tion­al songs called “Rishikesh No. 9” (also called “Spir­i­tu­al Christ­mas”). In addi­tion to the slew of White Album songs, the record­ing ses­sion also fea­tures McCartney’s “Junk,” which lat­er appeared on his 1970 solo album McCart­ney and John Lennon’s “Jeal­ous Guy” (here called “Child of Nature”), which sur­faced on 1971’s Imag­ine. As Allmusic’s Bruce Eder writes, Unplugged is a boot­leg so good, “the folks at Apple and EMI ought to be kick­ing them­selves for not think­ing of it first.”

Relat­ed Con­tent

Eric Clapton’s Iso­lat­ed Gui­tar Track From the Clas­sic Bea­t­les Song, ‘While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps’ (1968)

Hear the 1962 Bea­t­les Demo that Dec­ca Reject­ed: “Gui­tar Groups are on Their Way Out, Mr. Epstein”

How Bertrand Rus­sell Turned The Bea­t­les Against the Viet­nam War

Peter Sell­ers Reads The Bea­t­les’ “She Loves You” in Four Voic­es

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian. He recent­ly fin­ished a dis­ser­ta­tion on land, land­scape, and labor. 

Like mil­lions of African Amer­i­cans in the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, the blues­man John Lee Hook­er made the Great Migra­tion from the rur­al South to the urban North. Trav­el­ing a cir­cuitous route from his native Clarks­dale, Mis­sis­sip­pi, Hook­er set­tled in 1943 in Detroit, Michi­gan, where he worked at a car fac­to­ry by day and played in the blues clubs by night. In 1948 his first sin­gle, “Boo­gie Chillen,’ ” rose to num­ber one on the rhythm and blues charts and intro­duced Hook­er’s unique style of elec­tric blues, which sound­ed clos­er to the Mis­sis­sip­pi Delta than Chica­go. It was a style that would have an enor­mous impact on rock and roll. Hook­er’s dri­ving, one-chord boo­gie rhythms can be heard in the music of the Rolling Stones, ZZ Top, George  Thoro­good and count­less oth­ers. Today we bring you two of our favorite videos of Hook­er. Above is a per­for­mance, cir­ca 1970, of Hook’s clas­sic 1961 sin­gle, “Boom Boom.” Below is a 1965 per­for­mance from the Amer­i­can Folk Blues Fes­ti­val of his sec­ond, less­er-known sin­gle from 1948, “Hobo Blues.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Mar­tin Scors­ese Presents The Blues

Mud­dy Waters and Friends on the Blues and Gospel Train, 1964

Lead Bel­ly: The Only Known Footage of the Great Blues­man, 1935 and 1945