Lee Gingold makes the point rather artistically by way of The Beatles.
Music can shape our youthful minds (which reminds me of this great animated short, I Met the Walrus).
Music provides the emotional soundtrack for the good times and bad times in our lives.
It fires the imagination.
It brings us together. Just watch 13,500 people sing “Hey Jude” in Trafalgar Square.
The bottom line? Music matters…
via Kim Sherrell & @Alyssa_Milano
Tom Waits and Cookie Monster. They are one-of-a-kind characters … and yet strangely interchangeable. Above, we have the body of Cookie Monster channeling the voice of Tom Waits, singing “God’s Away On Business.” And if you doubt the similarities, simply give a listen to the all-time favorite C is for Cookie…
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via metafilter
Johann Pachelbel (1653 — 1706) wrote his Canon in D major in the late 17th century, then it disappeared for a good 300 years. It didn’t mount a comeback until Arthur Fiedler first recorded the Canon in 1940, and until the Jean-François Paillard Chamber Orchestra popularized the piece with two famous recordings (listen here). Now the Canon is everywhere. You hear it at weddings, of course. It finds its way into Beatles’ tracks. It goes fantastically viral on YouTube. (This legendary clip has 91 million views.) And now it gets cranked out of music boxes.
This video arranged by Vi Hart has a nice way of stripping things down and reminding us what a canon is fundamentally about. Along very similar lines, you will want to check out this clip showing how a Bach Canon Works. It’s pretty amazing.
via Metafilter
Composer and instrument inventor Harry Partch (1901–1974) is one of the pioneers of 20th-century experimental instrumentation, known for writing and playing music on incredible custom-made instruments like the Boo II and the Quadrangularis Reversum, and laying the foundations for many of today’s most creative experimental musical instruments.
In this Universal Newsreel footage from the 1950s, Partch conducts a student music performance on his instruments, built with insights from atomic research and Partch’s 30-year obsession with finding the elusive tones that exist between the tones of a regular piano. The setting is Mills College in Oakland, CA. The unorthodox orchestra performs music tuned to the 43-tone scale Partch invented, rather than the usual 12-tone, even though individual instruments can only play subsets of the scale.
For more on Partch’s genius and seminal innovation, see his excellent 1949 meditation, Genesis of a Music: An Account of a Creative Work, its Roots, and its Fulfillments.
Maria Popova is the founder and editor in chief of Brain Pickings, a curated inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness. She writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic and DesignObserver, and spends a great deal of time on Twitter.
Last month, the Mariachi band, “Los Trovadores de America,” played at a wedding held at the Mystic Aquarium in Stonington, Connecticut. Before wrapping up, the guys were good enough to serenade one of the beluga whales. And, you know, the sea creature seemed to appreciate it. Enjoy the weekend … H/T @sheerly
On August 1, 1981, MTV took to the U.S. airwaves, forever changing the landscape of American music and pop culture. If you were around then, you’ll remember the Apollo 11 moon landing, the astronaut planting the MTV flag on the moon’s surface, and then the first aptly picked video — the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Fast forward four years, and we were all saying, I Want My MTV.
A list of the first ten videos aired on MTV appears below. Click the links to take a walk down memory lane.
Thanks Robin for the reminder…
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Klaus Sperber was born in Immenstadt, southern Germany, in 1944. As a teenager, he discovered his love for opera and also pop music. In the early 1970s, he moved to New York and soon found many friends among the East Village artists there. Around this time, he started using the pseudonym Klaus Nomi, an allusion to the American SciFi magazine Omni and an anagram of the Latin word omni(s) (all, every). David Bowie discovered Nomi in 1978 and helped him sign with RCA records two years later. But Nomi’s musical career was cut short when he was diagnosed with AIDS — an illness virtually unheard of in those days. He died in New York on August 6th, 1983, at the age of 39 — two years before Rock Hudson’s death raised public awareness of this new illness. His ashes were scattered over New York City.
Klaus Nomi’s musical style was undoubtedly unique: he combined opera and New Wave pop music and performed his music in elaborate stage shows reminiscent of retro-futuristic Science Fiction visions of the 1920s: face painted white in Kabuki style, black lips, extravagant clothes and hairstyles inspired by Cubism. One of his most famous live performances is Total Eclipse from the music film Urgh! A Music War (1981).
The video above shows Klaus Nomi’s last performance before his death. Towards the end of 1982, he returned to Europe for a small concert tour and also performed at Eberhard Schoener’s Classic Rock Night in Munich, close to the place where he was born. He chose the Aria of the “Cold Genius” from Henry Purcell’s 1691 opera “King Arthur or, The British Worthy.” In the third scene of Act Three (The Frost Scene), the Cold Genius is awakened by Cupid and ordered to cover the landscape with ice and frost. The answer of the Cold Genius is sung by Klaus:
What power art thou, who from below / Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow / From beds of everlasting snow? / See’est thou not how stiff and wondrous old, / Far unfit to bear the bitter cold, / I can scarecly move or draw my breath? / Let me, let me freeze again to death.
This performance is certainly one of the most memorable in operatic history — Klaus Nomi conveys the message of the text with every fiber of his body (note in particular the movements of his hands and eyes). And as one YouTube commenter put it, the fact that Klaus knew that “he was dying of AIDS when he gave this performance (…) gives an added albeit unwanted poignancy to his performance.”
There are two other famous performances of The Cold Song: by Andreas Scholl and Sting. You can decide for yourself how they compare to Klaus Nomi’s interpretation.
Bonus material: In 2004, the documentary film The Nomi Song took a closer look at Klaus’s life and music (view the trailer here). YouTube also has two interviews with Klaus Nomi: Klaus Nomi on NYC 10 o’Clock News (c. 1981) and a 1982 interview from French TV.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
A quick heads up: You can stream The Concert for Bangladesh for free on iTunes this weekend. Exactly 40 years ago (August 1, 1971), Beatles’ guitarist George Harrison and sitarist Ravi Shankar teamed up to stage two benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden, hoping to raise money for refugees from East Pakistan (now independent Bangladesh). The concert film came out a year later in 1972, and now, to mark its anniversary, the good folks at Apple are streaming the film for free. Acts include Ravi Shankar, George Harrison (his first since The Beatles’ breakup), Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Billy Preston and more.
Our friends on Twitter (follow us here) tell us that the film should be accessible throughout most of the world, although there are some exceptions. Apologies in advance if you run into difficulties. H/T to Ed.
Note: NPR is carrying a video stream of The Newport Folk Festival. Catch it here.
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