At the Haymarket Bus Station in Newcastle (UK), commuters and passers-by were invited to contribute a note or two to a Beethoven Sonata. Men and women, young and old, people from different walks of life — they all lent a hand and shared in a centuries-old musical tradition. Compared to some of the elaborate flashmob performances we’ve seen, this presentation was rather simple. But, as you know, sometimes less is more.
Thanks Anton for sending our way.
On Thursday night, I finally understood it — how fans felt back in July 1965, when Bob Dylan strapped on an electric guitar and did sonic violence to the norms and expectations of the Newport Folk Festival. Fans wanted to hear the Bob Dylan they knew and loved — the folk Dylan who played a simple acoustic guitar, harmonica and not much more. But the times were-a-changin, and they got something different, very different. See here.
Almost 50 years later, Dylan keeps giving his fans a different Dylan. When the Never Ending Tour rolled through San Francisco this week, he played songs the fans came to hear — classics like Love Minus Zero/No Limit, Like A Rolling Stone, Tangled Up in Blue, and A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall. Except he set them to new melodies, and between his gravelly voice and the gravelly sound system, it took some fans minutes to realize what they were listening to. I cite one example above. In how many minutes can you name that tune?
(Note: The song above was originally recorded in Dresden in July. It was also played in SF this past week.)
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Rock and pop musicians, as we all remember from the end of This is Spinal Tap, sometimes find fame in the least expected countries. Tufnel, St. Hubbins, and Smalls found themselves embraced in Japan, a country that has since become the go-to cliché for the final resting place of fan enthusiasm for American and English has-beens and never-weres. But what to say about a performer who becomes famous specifically in South Africa? It happened to the singer-songwriter Rodriguez, the Detroit-bred son of American immigrants whose 1970 and 1971 albums Cold Fact and Coming from Reality provided the soundtracks for thousands upon thousands of South African adolescences. His poetic protest songs seemed to hit home with a generation fed up with apartheid society, and you can only imagine what a loss they must have felt upon hearing that their bard of choice had fatally set himself aflame onstage.
Both the South African popularity and the rumors of self-immolation came as a surprise to the man himself, who had remained living in Detroit as a student and demolition laborer since the seventies. He’s since enjoyed occasional bursts of rediscovery, like the one that sent him on his first South African tour in 1998, but only now, at age seventy, has he attained the kind of recognition that his dedicated listeners would insist he deserved long ago. This owes to the efforts of the young Swedish filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul, whose iPhone-shot documentary Searching for Sugar Man opened the 2012 Sundance Film Festival with Rodriguez’s story. You can watch its trailer at the top of this post, and a recent 60 Minutes segment featuring Bendjelloul and Rodriguez himself just above. YouTube also hosts many Rodriguez performances, including this rendition of his signature song “Sugar Man” performed at the Triple Door in Seattle.
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould was one of the most brilliant and idiosyncratic interpreters of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. In this 1962 special for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Gould reveals the same brilliance and idiosyncrasy in his understanding of Bach’s place in history.
Bach, says Gould, was not so much ahead of his time as outside it. “For Bach, you see, was music’s greatest non-conformist, and one of the supreme examples of that independence of the artistic conscience that stands quite outside the collective historical process.”
“Glenn Gould on Bach,” was first broadcast in Canada on April 8, 1962, two years before Gould’s retirement from performing and only two days following his controversial Carnegie Hall concert with the New York Philharmonic, in which Gould’s interpretation of the Brahams D‑minor piano concerto was so eccentric that Leonard Bernstein felt compelled to make a disclaimer to the audience. The centerpiece of the Bach broadcast is a performance of the Cantata BWV 54 featuring the American countertenor Russell Oberlin. “Glenn Gould on Bach” is a fascinating and entertaining half hour–essential viewing for lovers of Baroque and Classical music.
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Amid the many disturbing reports of rising fascist groups in Europe comes one particularly egregious story of the small town of Jamel in the east German region of Mecklenberg. According to The Independent, in the tiny village of some 40 people, seven of the ten houses are owned by members of Germany’s far right National Democratic Party (NPD), making the village “almost a pure neo-Nazi stronghold,” where other residents and neighbors of the town are frightened into silence. Der Spiegel writes that the NPD, “which glorifies the Third Reich,”
has been in the state parliament since 2006 and neo-Nazi crimes are part of daily life. In recent months, a series of attacks against politicians from all the democratic parties has shaken the state. Sometimes hardly a week goes by without an attack on another electoral district office, with paint bombs, right-wing graffiti and broken windows.
Despite their dominance in miniscule Jamel, however, the NPD does not go unopposed. Two residents, Horst and Birgit Lohmeyer, have decided to fight back with the most potent weapon they could find: music. The Lohmeyers, who migrated to Jamel from Hamburg, seeking a rural retreat, have instead found themselves organizing a music festival in their backyard to counter the neo-Nazi presence. The short film above, Jamel Rockt, documents how the Lohmeyers were galvanized into action after their town was occupied by NPD. The film is full of captivating performances and interviews.
The Lohmeyer’s mode of protest resembles any other small-town outdoor rock festival, but its significance is thrown into high relief by the threat posed by their fascist neighbors. Kay Sondgen, of the band Youth Red Cross, sums up the feelings of the participants quite well, saying, “if you don’t fly the flag and just look away, then fear gains the upper hand. And later people will say, ‘It wasn’t my fault. Nothing to do with me.’ You have to fly the flag! If everyone does that then extremism, in whatever form, simply can’t gain the upper hand.” Sondgen’s phrase “flying the flag” could mean any number of things. For the rockers and fans of the Jamel festival, it means countering extremism with art, and refusing to be intimidated in a place “where right-wing extremists can do virtually whatever they want.”
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
In 1946 the great Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev was at the height of his success in the Soviet cultural world, but the state of his health was falling.
Only a year before, in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, Prokofiev had conducted the glorious premier performance of his widely praised Fifth Symphony. “The hall was probably lit as usual,” remembered the pianist Sviatoslav Richter, who was there, “but when Prokofiev stood up, it seemed as though the light poured down on him from on high. He stood there, like a monument on a pedestal.” But a few days later Prokofiev fainted and took a terrible fall, injuring his head and nearly dying as a result. The diagnosis was severe high blood pressure. Prokofiev’s doctors advised him to move away from Moscow to someplace quiet, so in the summer of 1946 he purchased a dacha in the wooded suburb of Nikolina Gora.
A short time later a government film crew visited the 55-year-old Prokofiev at his new home. The clip above is one of two surviving takes, according to Simon Morrison of Princeton University, author of The People’s Artist: Prokofiev’s Soviet Years. In the film, Prokofiev sits at the piano and plays a selection from one of the waltzes in his ballet Cinderella, which had premiered the previous fall at the Bolshoi Theatre. The composer then walks over to his desk and is asked to say a few words about what he is working on. His reply, as translated on YouTube:
Well, right now I am working on a symphonic suite of waltzes, which will include three waltzes from Cinderella, two waltzes from War and Peace and one waltz from the movie score Lermontov. The War and Peace has just been brilliantly produced in Leningrad, where the composer Cheshko made an especially noteworthy appearance as a tenor, giving a superb performance in the role of Pierre Bezukhov. Besides this suite, I am working on a sonata for violin and piano [No. 1 in F minor], upon completion of which I will resume work on the Sixth Symphony, which I had started last year. I have just completed thre suites from the Cinderella ballet and I am now turning the score over to copyists for writing the parts, so that most likely the suites will already be performed at the beginning of the fall season.
The video concludes with a fragment of silent footage which, according to Morrison, shows Prokofiev playing the cadenza of the finale of his Third Piano Concerto at Moscow in 1927 with “Persimfans,” an early Soviet orchestra that operated without a conductor, in keeping with the proletarian ideals of the revolution. The rare films offer a fascinating glimpse of the great composer’s playing technique. As Morrison told us in an email:
The footage taken at Nikolina Gora clearly shows that he had massive hands, fluid (if a little rusty) technique, and awkwardly rigid posture. He plays from the forearms down, metronomically, with an ease and finesse that indisputably contributed to his technique of chromatic displacement (playing music in one key or tonality but then inflecting it with pitches from other tonal areas). His was an intuitive manner of composition, influenced by the natural feel of the keyboard under his hands–slide-slipping between black and white keys, as shadows of one another.
Less than two years after the Nikolina Gora newsreel footage was made, Prokofiev’s life took a bad turn. On February 10, 1948 he was accused, along with Dmitri Shostokovich and others, of “formalism,” which the pianist and Prokofiev scholar Boris Berman describes as “a political libel in the guise of an aesthetic term.” Formalist art was viewed as being elitist and “undemocratic” for its preoccupation with form over content. As a result, Prokofiev and the others were unable to perform or broadcast their work. And just ten days after his denunciation, Prokofiev’s wife Lina was arrested and charged with “espionage” for trying to send money to her mother in Spain. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Stress from the crises caused Prokofiev’s health to deteriorate further, and on March 5, 1953 he died from a cerebral hemorrhage. Joseph Stalin died the same day.
h/t Matthew Barnes
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Andy Warhol was many things to many people in his long and eventful career: painter and provocateur, promoter and director. But it surprised me to learn that he also made music videos. Well, he made one music video, for The Cars single “Hello Again” from their 1984 album Heartbeat City. The biggest hit from that album, “You Might Think,” was a massive MTV video hit and one of the first music videos to use computer graphics. Warhol plays on much of the aesthetic of the “You Might Think” video, which kind of epitomized the cheesy, slightly sexist, mid-eighties look The Cars made big: giant, scantily-clad women, rudimentary computer graphics scenes featuring sunglasses and cocktails, and, of course, plenty of cars. But there’s also lots of signature Warhol here: lots of parties, lots of bodies, lots of sex (and nudity).
Pop music always played a significant role in Warhol’s work, so it seems only natural that he would align himself with the cutting-edge mid-eighties synthpop of the Cars. What’s more, he appears in a cameo as a bartender in the video, which also features a very young Gina Gershon. For obvious reasons, the extended, uncensored version of Warhol’s video (watch it here) didn’t make the rounds on MTV. The censored version is, you might say, just a little less sexy, and a lot less Warhol. Since Warhol died in 1987, this video represents one of the last pieces of the artist’s work. Warhol, an early adopter of digital graphics technology, had previously used Amiga computers to animate images of Marilyn Monroe and create computer art of his friend Debbie Harry. See him “paint” the “first computer artwork,” a portrait of Harry, on an Amiga computer below.
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Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Wah Wah:
In 1994 Jimmy Page and Robert Plant collaborated on a new musical project for the first time since the death 14 years earlier of Led Zeppelin’s drummer, John Bonham. The reunion resulted from an invitation to appear on MTV’s hit series Unplugged. But Page and Plant wanted to steer clear of nostalgia, so they excluded former Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones from the project and named it Unledded.
The resulting album and DVD feature an assortment of Zeppelin songs that were reinterpreted with the help of an Egyptian ensemble, an Indian vocalist and the London Metropolitan Orchestra, but perhaps the most interesting part of the project was a trio of new songs recorded with local musicians in Marrakesh, Morocco. Those performances, shown here, were the result of a collaboration with traditional musicians of the Gnawa minority, whose sub-Saharan ancestors were brought to Morocco many centuries ago as slaves.
“We’d never met the Gnawa when we went there,” said Plant in a 1994 interview, “but they were very patient, and smiling is a great currency.” Gnawa music is traditionally performed for prayer and healing, and differs from other North African music. “They play a kind of music which is much more akin to the music of the Mississippi Delta than it is to do with Arab music,” Plant said in another interview. “It’s haunting, seductive, and quite alluring.”
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