Leonard Bernstein: The Greatest 5 Minutes in Music Education

in Education, Music | June 4th, 2025

We’ve pre­vi­ous­ly writ­ten about one of Leonard Bernstein’s major works, The Unan­swered Ques­tion, the stag­ger­ing six-part lec­ture that the mul­ti-dis­ci­pli­nary artist gave as part of his duties as Har­vard’s Charles Eliot Nor­ton Pro­fes­sor. Over 11 hours, Bern­stein attempts to explain the whith­er and the whence of music his­to­ry, notably at a time when Clas­si­cal music had come to a sort of cri­sis point of atonal­i­ty and anti-music, but was still pre-Merzbow.

But, as Bern­stein said “…the best way to ‘know’ a thing is in the con­text of anoth­er dis­ci­pline,” and these six lec­tures bring in all sorts of con­texts, espe­cial­ly Chomsky’s lin­guis­tic the­o­ry, phonol­o­gy, seman­tics, and more. And he does it all with fre­quent trips to the piano to make a point, or bring­ing in a whole orchestra—which Bern­stein kept in his back pock­et for times just like this.

Jok­ing aside, this is still a major schol­ar­ly work that has plen­ty inside to debate. That’s per­ti­nent a half a cen­tu­ry after the fact, espe­cial­ly when so much music feels like it has stopped advanc­ing, just recy­cling.

The above clip is just one of the gems to be found among the lec­tures, some­thing that one view­er found so stun­ning they record­ed it off the tele­vi­sion screen and post­ed to YouTube.

In the clip, Bern­stein uses the melody of “Fair Har­vard,” also known as “Believe Me, If All Those Endear­ing Young Charms” by Thomas Moore—recognizable to the young’uns as the fid­dle intro to “Come On, Eileen”—as a start­ing point. He assumes a pre­his­toric hominid hum­ming the tune, then the younger and/or female mem­bers of the tribe singing along an octave apart.

From this moment of musi­cal and human evo­lu­tion, Bern­stein brings in the fifth interval—only a few mil­lion years later—and then the fourth. Then polypho­ny is born out of that and…well, we don’t want to spoil every­thing. Soon Bern­stein brings us up to the cir­cle of fifths, com­press­ing them into the 12 tones of the scale, and then 12 keys.

Bern­stein can hear the poten­tial for chaos, how­ev­er, in the pos­si­bil­i­ties of “chro­mat­ic goulash,” and so ends with Bach, the mas­ter of “tonal con­trol” who bal­anced the chro­mat­ic (which uses notes out­side a key’s scale) with the dia­ton­ic (which doesn’t). (It all comes back to Bach, doesn’t it?)

And there the video ends, but you know where to find the rest. And final­ly we’ll leave you with this oth­er, more explo­sive, ren­der­ing of “Fair Har­vard.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2018.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonard Bern­stein Intro­duces the Moog Syn­the­siz­er to the World in 1969, Play­ing an Elec­tri­fied Ver­sion of Bach’s “Lit­tle Fugue in G”

Glenn Gould Plays Bach on His U.S. TV Debut … After Leonard Bern­stein Explains What Makes His Play­ing So Great (1960)

Leonard Bernstein’s Mas­ter­ful Lec­tures on Music (11+ Hours of Video Record­ed at Har­vard in 1973)

Leonard Bern­stein Demys­ti­fies the Rock Rev­o­lu­tion for Curi­ous (if Square) Grown-Ups in 1967

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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How John Lennon Wrote the Beatles’ Best Song, “A Day in the Life”

in Music | June 3rd, 2025

If you’re under 60, you prob­a­bly heard the line “I read the news today, oh boy” before encoun­ter­ing the song it opens. Even after you dis­cov­ered the work of the Bea­t­les, it may have tak­en you some time to under­stand what, exact­ly, it was that John Lennon read in the news. The “lucky man who made the grade” and “blew his mind out in a car” turn out to have been inspired by the young Guin­ness heir Tara Browne, who’d fatal­ly wiped out in his Lotus Elan. The fig­ure of 4,000 holes in the roads of Black­burn came from anoth­er page of the same edi­tion of the Dai­ly Mail. These are just two of the mem­o­rable images in “A Day in the Life,” which son­i­cal­ly recon­structs the fab­ric of the nine­teen-six­ties as the Bea­t­les knew it.

In his new video below, Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, calls “A Day in the Life” “arguably the Bea­t­les’ best song.” Crit­ic Ian Mac­Don­ald is rather less ambigu­ous in his book Rev­o­lu­tion in the Head: The Bea­t­les’ Records and the Six­ties, pro­claim­ing it “their finest sin­gle achieve­ment.”

And if any sin­gle fac­tor shaped its devel­op­ment, that fac­tor was LSD. “A song about per­cep­tion — a sub­ject cen­tral both to late-peri­od Bea­t­les and the coun­ter­cul­ture at large — ‘A Day in the Life’ con­cerned ‘real­i­ty’ only to the extent that this had been revealed by LSD to be large­ly in the eye of the behold­er,” he writes. Lennon may have proven to be the group’s most ded­i­cat­ed enthu­si­ast of that short­cut to enlight­en­ment. It’s worth not­ing, as Puschak does, that it was Browne who first “turned on” Paul McCart­ney.

Though pri­mar­i­ly John’s work, “A Day in the Life” would­n’t be what it is with­out Paul’s dou­ble-time bridge, whose jaun­ti­ly nar­ra­tive ordi­nar­i­ness makes the vers­es all the more tran­scen­dent. The need for some kind of tran­si­tion between these dis­parate John and Paul parts led to George Mar­tin’s com­mis­sion­ing a 40-piece orches­tra instruct­ed to play from the low­est notes up to the high­est, a col­lec­tive glis­san­do quadru­ple-record­ed and mixed to sound like the end of the world. In the­o­ry, per­haps, all this — to say noth­ing of Lennon’s ref­er­ences to the Albert Hall, the House of Lords, and his own role in Richard Lester’s How I Won the War — should­n’t work togeth­er. But the result, as Mac­Don­ald puts it, remains one of “the most pen­e­trat­ing and inno­v­a­tive artis­tic reflec­tions of its era,” as expe­ri­enced by the young men stand­ing at its very cen­ter.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A 17-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Bea­t­les Songs: 338 Tracks Let You Hear the Musi­cal Evo­lu­tion of the Icon­ic Band

The Exper­i­men­tal Move­ment That Cre­at­ed The Bea­t­les’ Weird­est Song, “Rev­o­lu­tion 9”

The Amaz­ing Record­ing His­to­ry of The Bea­t­les’ “Here Comes the Sun”

Is “Rain” the Per­fect Bea­t­les Song?: A New Video Explores the Rad­i­cal Inno­va­tions of the 1966 B‑Side

The Mak­ing of the Last Bea­t­les Song, “Now and Then”: A Short Film

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Every Place Ref­er­enced in The Bea­t­les’ Lyrics: In 12 Min­utes, Trav­el 25,000 Miles Across Eng­land, France, Rus­sia, India & the US

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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How Bob Dylan Kept Reinventing His Songwriting Process, Breathing New Life Into His Music

in Music | May 26th, 2025

On his 84th birth­day this past Sat­ur­day, Bob Dylan played a show. That was in keep­ing with not only his still-seri­ous tour­ing sched­ule, but also his appar­ent­ly irre­press­ible instinct to work: on music, on writ­ing, on paint­ing, on sculp­ture. Even his occa­sion­al tweet­ing draws an appre­cia­tive audi­ence every time. The Bob Dylan of 2025 is not, of course, the Bob Dylan of 1965, but then, the Bob Dylan of 1965 was­n’t the Bob Dylan of 1964. This con­stant artis­tic change is just what his fans appre­ci­ate, not that they don’t still put on his ear­ly stuff with reg­u­lar­i­ty.

In the ear­li­est of that ear­ly stuff, as music YouTu­ber David Hart­ley explains in the new video above, Dylan “wrote songs by rein­vent­ing tra­di­tion.” Using noth­ing but his voice, gui­tar, and har­mon­i­ca, the young Dylan “imi­tat­ed some of the most well-known folk melodies,” plac­ing him­self in that long Amer­i­can tra­di­tion of bor­row­ing and rein­ter­pre­ta­tion. But as dra­ma­tized in the recent film A Com­plete Unknown, he soon “went elec­tric,” and with the change in instru­men­ta­tion came a change in song­writ­ing method: “He would just come up with end­less pages of lyrics, some­thing he once called ‘the long piece of vom­it.’ ”

The advice to “puke it out now and clean it up lat­er” has long been giv­en, in var­i­ous forms, to aspir­ing artists every­where. One aspect worth high­light­ing about the way Dylan did it was that, despite writ­ing pop­u­lar songs, he drew a great deal of inspi­ra­tion from more tra­di­tion­al lit­er­a­ture, to the point that his notes hard­ly appear to con­tain any­thing resem­bling vers­es or cho­rus­es at all. Only in the stu­dio, with a band behind him, could Dylan give these ideas their final musi­cal shape — or rather, their final shape on that par­tic­u­lar album, often to be mod­i­fied end­less­ly, and some­times rad­i­cal­ly, over decades of live per­for­mances to come.

Hart­ley tells of more dra­mat­ic changes to Dylan’s music and his process of cre­at­ing. The motor­cy­cle crash, the Base­ment Tapes, the open E tun­ing, Blood on the Tracks: all of these now lie half a cen­tu­ry or more in the past. To go over all the ways Dylan has approached music since then would require more hours than all but the most rabid enthu­si­asts (though there are many) would watch. The video does include a 60 Min­utes clip from 2004 in which Dylan says that “those ear­ly songs were almost mag­i­cal­ly writ­ten,” and that he would­n’t be able to cre­ate them any­more. But then, nor could the Dylan of High­way 61 Revis­it­ed have record­ed Time Out of Mind, and nor, for that mat­ter, could the Dylan of Time Out of Mind have record­ed any of Dylan’s albums from this decade — or those that could, quite pos­si­bly, be still to come.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Mas­sive 55-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Bob Dylan Songs: Stream 763 Tracks

How Bob Dylan Cre­at­ed a Musi­cal & Lit­er­ary World All His Own: Four Video Essays

Watch Bob Dylan Make His Debut at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val in Col­orized 1963 Footage

Hear Bob Dylan’s New­ly Released Nobel Lec­ture: A Med­i­ta­tion on Music, Lit­er­a­ture & Lyrics

Com­pare the “It Ain’t Me Babe” Scene from A Com­plete Unknown to the Real Bob Dylan & Joan Baez Per­for­mance at the New­port Folk Fes­ti­val

Bob Dylan Explains Why Music Has Been Get­ting Worse

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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How the First Rock Concert Ended in Mayhem (Cleveland, 1952)

in History, Music | May 20th, 2025

“Amer­i­ca has only three cities: New York, San Fran­cis­co, and New Orleans. Every­where else is Cleve­land.” That obser­va­tion tends to be attrib­uted to Ten­nessee Williams, though it’s become some­what detached from its source, so deeply does it res­onate with a cer­tain expe­ri­ence of life in the Unit­ed States. But con­sid­er this: can every Amer­i­can city claim to be where rock and roll began — or at least the site of the very first rock and roll con­cert? Cleve­land can, thanks to Alan Freed, a famous radio announc­er of the nine­teen-for­ties and fifties. The Moon­dog Coro­na­tion Ball he orga­nized in 1952 may have end­ed in dis­as­ter, but it began a pop-cul­tur­al era that arguably con­tin­ues to this day.

Hav­ing attained pop­u­lar­i­ty announc­ing in a vari­ety of radio for­mats, includ­ing jazz and clas­si­cal music, Freed was awak­ened to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of what was then known as rhythm and blues by a local record-store own­er, Leo Mintz. It was with Mintz’s spon­sor­ship that Freed launched a pro­gram on Cleve­land’s WJW-AM, for which he cul­ti­vat­ed a hep­cat per­sona called “Moon­dog.” (Some cred­it the name to an album by Rob­by Vee and The Vees, and oth­ers to the avant-garde street musi­cian Moon­dog and his epony­mous “sym­pho­ny.”) Start­ing at mid­night, the show broad­cast hours of so-called “race music” to not just its already-enthu­si­as­tic fan base, but also the young white lis­ten­ers increas­ing­ly intrigued by its cap­ti­vat­ing, propul­sive sounds.

Freed soon com­mand­ed enough of an audi­ence to describe him­self as “King of the Moon­dog­gers.” When he announced the upcom­ing Moon­dog Coro­na­tion Ball, a show at Cleve­land’s hock­ey are­na fea­tur­ing sets from such pop­u­lar acts as Paul Williams and the Huck­le­buck­ers, Tiny Grimes and the Rock­ing High­landers (an all-black group whose sig­na­ture kilts would sure­ly stir up “cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion” dis­course today), Varet­ta Dil­lard, and Dan­ny Cobb, the Moon­dog­gers turned out. About 20,000 of them turned out, in fact, twice what the venue could han­dle. A tick­et mis­print was to blame, but the dam­age had been done — or rather, it would be done, when the well-dressed but over-excit­ed crowd stormed the are­na and the author­i­ties were called in to shut the show down by force.

In the event, only the first two acts ever took the stage. The planned coro­na­tion of the two most pop­u­lar teenagers in atten­dance (a holdover from anoth­er cul­tur­al dimen­sion entire­ly) nev­er hap­pened. But the spir­it of rebel­lious­ness wit­nessed at this first-ever rock con­cert was like a genie that could­n’t be put back in its bot­tle. How­ev­er square his image, Freed, who pop­u­lar­ized the term “rock and roll” as applied to music, was nev­er much of a rule-fol­low­er in his pro­fes­sion­al life. His lat­er impli­ca­tion in the pay­ola bribe scan­dals of the late fifties sent his career into a tail­spin, and his ear­ly death fol­lowed a few years lat­er. But to judge by re-tellings like the one in the Drunk His­to­ry video just above, he remains the hero of the sto­ry of the Moon­dog Coro­na­tion Ball — and thus a hero of rock and roll his­to­ry.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Live Music Archive Lets You Stream/Download More Than 250,000 Con­cert Recordings–for Free

Inti­mate Live Per­for­mances of Radio­head, Son­ic Youth, the White Stripes, PJ Har­vey & More: No Host, No Audi­ence, Just Pure Live Music

How the Grate­ful Dead’s “Wall of Sound” — a Mon­ster, 600-Speak­er Sound Sys­tem — Changed Rock Con­certs & Live Music For­ev­er

The Ori­gin of the Rooftop Con­cert: Before the Bea­t­les Came Jef­fer­son Air­plane, and Before Them, Brazil­ian Singer Rober­to Car­los (1967)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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1980s Metalhead Kids Are Alright: Scientific Study Shows That They Became Well-Adjusted Adults

in Music, Psychology | May 20th, 2025

In the 1980s, The Par­ents Music Resource Cen­ter (PMRC), an orga­ni­za­tion co-found­ed by Tip­per Gore and the wives of sev­er­al oth­er Wash­ing­ton pow­er bro­kers, launched a polit­i­cal cam­paign against pop music, hop­ing to put warn­ing labels on records that pro­mot­ed Sex, Vio­lence, Drug and Alco­hol Use. Along the way, the PMRC issued “the Filthy Fif­teen,” a list of 15 par­tic­u­lar­ly objec­tion­able songs. Hits by Madon­na, Prince and Cyn­di Lau­per made the list. But the list real­ly took aim at heavy met­al bands from the 80s — name­ly, Judas Priest, Möt­ley Crüe, Twist­ed Sis­ter, W.A.S.P., Def Lep­pard, Black Sab­bath, and Ven­om. (Inter­est­ing foot­note: the Sovi­ets sep­a­rate­ly cre­at­ed a list of black­balled rock bands, and it looked pret­ty much the same.)

Above, you can watch Twist­ed Sis­ter’s Dee Snider appear before Con­gress in 1985 and accuse the PMRC of mis­in­ter­pret­ing his band’s lyrics and wag­ing a false war against met­al music. The evi­dence 40 years lat­er sug­gests that Snider per­haps had a point.

A study by psy­chol­o­gy researchers at Hum­boldt State, Ohio State, UC River­side and UT Austin “exam­ined 1980s heavy met­al groupies, musi­cians, and fans at mid­dle age” — 377 par­tic­i­pants in total — and found that, although met­al enthu­si­asts cer­tain­ly lived riski­er lives as kids, they were nonethe­less “sig­nif­i­cant­ly hap­pi­er in their youth and bet­ter adjust­ed cur­rent­ly than either mid­dle-aged or cur­rent col­lege-age youth com­par­i­son groups.” This left the researchers to con­tem­plate one pos­si­ble con­clu­sion: “par­tic­i­pa­tion in fringe style cul­tures may enhance iden­ti­ty devel­op­ment in trou­bled youth.” Not to men­tion that heavy met­al lyrics don’t eas­i­ly turn kids into dam­aged goods.

You can read the report, Three Decades Lat­er: The Life Expe­ri­ences and Mid-Life Func­tion­ing of 1980s Heavy Met­al Groupies here. And, right above, lis­ten to an inter­view with one of the researchers, Tasha Howe, a for­mer head­banger her­self, who spoke yes­ter­day with Michael Kras­ny on KQED radio in San Fran­cis­co.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in July 2015.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dev­il­ish His­to­ry of the 1980s Parental Advi­so­ry Stick­er: When Heavy Met­al & Satan­ic Lyrics Col­lid­ed with the Reli­gious Right

Sovi­et Union Cre­ates a List of 38 Dan­ger­ous Rock Bands: Kiss, Pink Floyd, Talk­ing Heads, Vil­lage Peo­ple & More (1985)

Watch Heavy Met­al Park­ing Lot, the Cult Clas­sic Film That Ranks as One of the “Great Rock Doc­u­men­taries” of All Time

A Blue­grass Ver­sion of Metallica’s Heavy Met­al Hit, “Enter Sand­man”

The Hu, a New Break­through Band from Mon­go­lia, Plays Heavy Met­al with Tra­di­tion­al Folk Instru­ments and Throat Singing

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The Secret Link Between Jazz and Physics: How Einstein & Coltrane Shared Improvisation and Intuition in Common

in Music, Physics | May 15th, 2025

Sci­en­tists need hob­bies. The gru­el­ing work of nav­i­gat­ing com­plex the­o­ry and the pol­i­tics of acad­e­mia can get to a per­son, even one as laid back as Brown Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor and astro­physi­cist Stephon Alexan­der. So Alexan­der plays the sax­o­phone, though at this point it may not be accu­rate to call his avo­ca­tion a spare time pur­suit, since John Coltrane has become as impor­tant to him as Ein­stein, Kepler, and New­ton.

Coltrane, he says in a 7‑minute TED talk above, “changed my whole research direc­tion… led to basi­cal­ly a dis­cov­ery in physics.” Alexan­der then pro­ceeds to play the famil­iar open­ing bars of “Giant Steps.” He’s no Coltrane, but he is a very cre­ative thinker whose love of jazz has giv­en him a unique per­spec­tive on the­o­ret­i­cal physics, one he shares, it turns out, with both Ein­stein and Coltrane, both of whom saw music and physics as intu­itive, impro­visato­ry pur­suits.

Alexan­der describes his jazz epiphany as occa­sioned by a com­plex dia­gram Coltrane gave leg­endary jazz musi­cian and Uni­ver­si­ty of Mass­a­chu­setts pro­fes­sor Yusef Lateef in 1967. “I thought the dia­gram was relat­ed to anoth­er and seem­ing­ly unre­lat­ed field of study—quantum grav­i­ty,” he writes in a Busi­ness Insid­er essay on his dis­cov­ery, “What I had real­ized… was that the same geo­met­ric prin­ci­ple that moti­vat­ed Einstein’s the­o­ry was reflect­ed in Coltrane’s dia­gram.”

The the­o­ry might “imme­di­ate­ly sound like untestable pop-phi­los­o­phy,” writes the Cre­ators Project, which show­cas­es Alexander’s physics-inspired musi­cal col­lab­o­ra­tion with exper­i­men­tal pro­duc­er Rioux (sam­ple below). But his ideas are much more sub­stan­tive, “a com­pelling cross-dis­ci­pli­nary inves­ti­ga­tion,” pub­lished in a book titled The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Struc­ture of the Uni­verse.

Alexan­der describes the links between jazz and physics in his TED talk, as well as in the brief Wired video fur­ther up. “One con­nec­tion,” he says, is “the mys­te­ri­ous way that quan­tum par­ti­cles move.… Accord­ing to the rules of quan­tum mechan­ics,” they “will actu­al­ly tra­verse all pos­si­ble paths.” This, Alexan­der says, par­al­lels the way jazz musi­cians impro­vise, play­ing with all pos­si­ble notes in a scale. His own impro­vi­sa­tion­al play­ing, he says, is great­ly enhanced by think­ing about physics. And in this, he’s only fol­low­ing in the giant steps of both of his idols.

It turns out that Coltrane him­self used Einstein’s the­o­ret­i­cal physics to inform his under­stand­ing of jazz com­po­si­tion. As Ben Ratliff reports in Coltrane: The Sto­ry of a Sound, the bril­liant sax­o­phon­ist once deliv­ered to French horn play­er David Amram an “incred­i­ble dis­course about the sym­me­try of the solar sys­tem, talk­ing about black holes in space, and con­stel­la­tions, and the whole struc­ture of the solar sys­tem, and how Ein­stein was able to reduce all of that com­plex­i­ty into some­thing very sim­ple.” Says Amram:

Then he explained to me that he was try­ing to do some­thing like that in music, some­thing that came from nat­ur­al sources, the tra­di­tions of the blues and jazz. But there was a whole dif­fer­ent way of look­ing at what was nat­ur­al in music.

This may all sound rather vague and mys­te­ri­ous, but Alexan­der assures us Coltrane’s method is very much like Einstein’s in a way: “Ein­stein is famous for what is per­haps his great­est gift: the abil­i­ty to tran­scend math­e­mat­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions with phys­i­cal intu­ition. He would impro­vise using what he called gedanken­ex­per­i­ments (Ger­man for thought exper­i­ments), which pro­vid­ed him with a men­tal pic­ture of the out­come of exper­i­ments no one could per­form.”

Ein­stein was also a musi­cian—as we’ve not­ed before—who played the vio­lin and piano and whose admi­ra­tion for Mozart inspired his the­o­ret­i­cal work. “Ein­stein used math­e­mat­i­cal rig­or,” writes Alexan­der, as much as he used “cre­ativ­i­ty and intu­ition. He was an impro­vis­er at heart, just like his hero, Mozart.” Alexan­der has fol­lowed suit, see­ing in the 1967 “Coltrane Man­dala” the idea that “impro­vi­sa­tion is a char­ac­ter­is­tic of both music and physics.” Coltrane “was a musi­cal inno­va­tor, with physics at his fin­ger­tips,” and “Ein­stein was an inno­va­tor in physics, with music at his fin­ger­tips.”

Alexan­der gets into a few more specifics in his longer TEDx talk above, begin­ning with some per­son­al back­ground on how he first came to under­stand physics as an intu­itive dis­ci­pline close­ly linked with music. For the real meat of his argu­ment, you’ll like­ly want to read his book, high­ly praised by Nobel-win­ning physi­cist Leon Coop­er, futur­is­tic com­pos­er Bri­an Eno, and many more bril­liant minds in both music and sci­ence.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Physics Cours­es

The Musi­cal Mind of Albert Ein­stein: Great Physi­cist, Ama­teur Vio­lin­ist and Devo­tee of Mozart

CERN’s Cos­mic Piano and Jazz Pianist Jam Togeth­er at The Mon­treux Jazz Fes­ti­val

Bohemi­an Grav­i­ty: String The­o­ry Explored With an A Cap­pel­la Ver­sion of Bohemi­an Rhap­sody

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Cleanest Recordings of 1920s Louis Armstrong Songs You Will Ever Hear

in Music | May 13th, 2025

On Youtube, jazz enthu­si­ast Jonathan Holmes declares: “I can guar­an­tee this is the clean­est sound­ing Louis Arm­strong record you’ll ever hear! With the orig­i­nal trans­fer sup­plied by Nick Del­low, here is the moth­er record which was shipped by Okeh to Ger­many for their Odeon press­ings. The sound is won­der­ful­ly imme­di­ate, and crys­tal clear.” No crack­le and pop. That’s how Holmes describes the pris­tine record­ing you can hear above of the Louis Arm­strong clas­sic, “Ain’t Mis­be­havin’.” Below, hear anoth­er “moth­er met­al” record­ing of anoth­er Arm­strong song, “Knee Drops.” Enjoy the ear­ly Satch­mo in all of its won­der­ful clar­i­ty.

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Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Aging Louis Arm­strong Sings “What a Won­der­ful World” in 1967, Dur­ing the Viet­nam War & The Civ­il Rights Strug­gle

1,000 Hours of Ear­ly Jazz Record­ings Now Online: Archive Fea­tures Louis Arm­strong, Duke Elling­ton & Much More

Watch the Ear­li­est Known Footage of Louis Arm­strong Per­form­ing Live in Con­cert (Copen­hagen, 1933)

Louis Arm­strong Remem­bers How He Sur­vived the 1918 Flu Epi­dem­ic in New Orleans

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David Bowie/Nirvana’s “The Man Who Sold The World” Played on the Gayageum, a Korean Instrument from the 6th Century

in Music | May 13th, 2025

East meets West, and the Ancient, the Mod­ern. That’s what hap­pens every time Luna Lee plays one of your favorites on the Gayageum, a Kore­an instru­ment that dates back to the 6th cen­tu­ry. We’ve fea­tured her work in years past (see the Relat­eds below). Above, watch one of her stand­out performances—a cov­er of “The Man Who Sold The World,” the song first writ­ten by David Bowie in 1970, then famous­ly per­formed by Nir­vana on MTV Unplugged in 1993. An alter­nate video fea­tures Luna on vocals here. Enjoy!

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Clas­sic Blues Songs By John Lee Hook­er, B.B. King & Mud­dy Waters Played on the Gayageum, a Tra­di­tion­al Kore­an Instru­ment

David Bowie and Klaus Nomi’s Hyp­not­ic Per­for­mance on SNL (1979)

Watch Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’ Per­formed on a Gayageum, a Tra­di­tion­al Kore­an Instru­ment

Three Pink Floyd Songs Played on the Tra­di­tion­al Kore­an Gayageum: “Com­fort­ably Numb,” “Anoth­er Brick in the Wall” & “Great Gig in the Sky”

Ste­vie Ray Vaughan’s Ver­sion of “Lit­tle Wing” Played on Tra­di­tion­al Kore­an Instru­ment, the Gayageum

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