Oscar-Nominated Composer Danny Elfman Teaches an Online Course on Writing Music for Film: A Look Inside His Creative Process

in Film, Music | November 4th, 2019


FYI: If you sign up for a Mas­ter­Class course by click­ing on the affil­i­ate links in this post, Open Cul­ture will receive a small fee that helps sup­port our oper­a­tion.

To have watched some of the great­est film and tele­vi­sion in the last thir­ty-five years is to have been immersed in the music of Mark Moth­ers­baugh and Dan­ny Elfman—two artists who have scored Hol­ly­wood block­busters and indie hits alike since the mid-eight­ies when they start­ed on TV’s Pee-wee’s Play­house and Tim Burton’s 1985 com­e­dy Pee-wee’s Big Adven­ture, respec­tive­ly. They also hap­pen to have played in two of the 1980’s weird­est, most exper­i­men­tal New Wave bands, Devo and Oin­go Boin­go.

Moth­ers­bough went on to score every­thing from Rugrats to Thor: Rag­narok, but he’s maybe best known for his work with Wes Ander­son. Like­wise, Elfman—who has worked with every­one from Gus Van Sant to Bri­an De Pal­ma to Peter Jack­son to Ang Lee—formed a cre­ative bond with Bur­ton, to such a degree that it’s near impos­si­ble to imag­ine a Tim Bur­ton film with­out a Dan­ny Elf­man score.

When Bur­ton first approached him for Pee-wee’s Big Adven­ture, the Oin­go Boin­go front­man was just about to release “Weird Sci­ence,” for the infa­mous John Hugh­es film of the same name. Already a band with a mas­sive cult fol­low­ing, they became pop stars, and Elf­man became one of the most dis­tinc­tive film com­posers of the last sev­er­al decades.

He scored Beetle­juice, Bat­man, Edward Scis­sorhands, Bat­man Returns, Sleepy Hol­low, The Night­mare Before Christ­mas, Corpse Bride, and, most recent­ly, Burton’s Dum­bo. Now he’s shar­ing his secrets for aspir­ing film com­posers every­where with his very own Mas­ter­class. “I’m going to tell you from my per­spec­tive,” he says in the trail­er above, “how I do these things”: things includ­ing instru­men­ta­tion, orches­tra­tion, melody, and tone—“the most impor­tant thing you’re going to cap­ture in a film score.”

In the screen­shots here, see excerpts of the course top­ics, which include units on the films Milk, The Unknown Known, and The Night­mare Before Christ­mas, an exam­ple of “writ­ing specif­i­cal­ly for a character”—a char­ac­ter, Jack Skelling­ton, whose singing voice Elf­man also pro­vid­ed.

For those who feel they’ll nev­er mea­sure up to a career like Dan­ny Elfman’s, he intro­duces all impor­tant units on inse­cu­ri­ty and fail­ure. Per­haps the most impor­tant les­son of all, he says above, with infec­tious enthu­si­asm, is learn­ing that “it’s okay to fail, to feel inse­cure. Doubt­ing your­self, find­ing con­fi­dence and mov­ing for­ward, and then doubt­ing what you’ve just done…. I think this is the life of a com­pos­er. I think it’s the life of an artist.”

Can such things be taught, or can they only be lived? Each teacher and stu­dent of the arts must at some point ask them­selves this ques­tion. Per­haps they only learn the answer when they try, and fail, and try again any­way. Sign up for Elman’s course here.

You can take this class by sign­ing up for a Mas­ter­Class’ All Access Pass. The All Access Pass will give you instant access to this course and 85 oth­ers for a 12-month peri­od.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Take Every Mas­ter­Class Course For Less Than a Cup of Good Cof­fee

Why Mar­vel and Oth­er Hol­ly­wood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Per­ils of the “Temp Score”

All of the Music from Mar­tin Scorsese’s Movies: Lis­ten to a 326-Track, 20-Hour Playlist

Bri­an Eno Reveals His Favorite Film Sound­tracks

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Art Class Instead Of Jail: New Program Lets Young Offenders Take Free Art Classes Rather Than Spend Time in the Criminal System

in Art, Life, Museums | November 4th, 2019

Art saves lives, and art can also save an indi­vid­ual from the stig­ma of an arrest record, pro­vid­ed that the arrest is for one of 15 non-vio­lent mis­de­meanors.

Project Reset, a muse­um-based ear­ly diver­sion pro­gram in three of New York City’s five bor­oughs, aims to reframe the way youth­ful (and not so youth­ful) offend­ers see them­selves, by con­sid­er­ing an art­work via a col­lec­tive inter­pre­tive process, before using it as the inspi­ra­tion for a col­lage or oil pas­tel-based project of their own.

The stakes are high­er and far more per­son­al than they are on the aver­age pub­lic school field trip. Upon com­ple­tion of a class rang­ing from 2.5 to 4 hours, the participant’s record is wiped clean and their assigned court date is ren­dered moot.

Rather than being herd­ed through a num­ber of gal­leries, par­tic­i­pants zero in on a sin­gle work.

At the Brook­lyn Muse­um, par­tic­i­pants in the under-25 age range get a crash course in Shift­ing the Gaze, Titus Kaphar’s inten­tion­al palimpsest, in which all the fig­ures in a repli­ca of Frans Hals’ Fam­i­ly Group in a Land­scape are whit­ed out so view­ers may focus in on the only char­ac­ter of col­or, a young boy who appears to be a fam­i­ly ser­vant.

Old­er par­tic­i­pants under­take a sim­i­lar­ly deep dive on The Judge­ment by Bob Thomp­son, an African Amer­i­can artist who was inspired by the con­stant inter­play between good and evil.

While this may strike some as a cushy pun­ish­ment, it’s a legit­i­mate attempt to acquaint par­tic­i­pants with the very real impact their actions could have on future plans—including col­lege admis­sions and job appli­ca­tions.

Man­hat­tan Dis­trict Attor­ney, Cyrus Vance Jr., one of Project Reset’s archi­tects, shared a non-par­ti­san fis­cal take with City Lab’s Rebec­ca Bel­lan that may per­suade naysay­ers who feel the pro­gram rewards bud­ding crim­i­nals by giv­ing them an easy out:

If you jump sub­way turn­stiles in Man­hat­tan, you nev­er go to jail. You can do it 100 times and no court is ever going to send you to jail. So we spend about $2,200 to process a theft of ser­vices arrest for a $2.75 fare. Our jus­tice sys­tem falls most heav­i­ly on com­mu­ni­ties of col­or, and we real­ly need to rethink how we approach these cas­es, both to get bet­ter out­comes, but also to reduce the impact which is very often viewed as tar­get­ed and unfair on par­tic­u­lar com­mu­ni­ties.

Above is a list of the non-vio­lent mis­de­meanors that can chan­nel first timers toward the apt­ly named Project Reset.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Med Schools Are Requir­ing Stu­dents to Take Art Class­es, and How It Makes Med Stu­dents Bet­ter Doc­tors

Won­der­ful­ly Off­beat Assign­ments That Artist John Baldessari Gave to His Art Stu­dents (1970)

The Art Insti­tute of Chica­go Puts 44,000+ Works of Art Online: View Them in High Res­o­lu­tion

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC for her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

How to Find Silence in a Noisy World

in Life, Nature | November 1st, 2019

“Take a walk at night,” wrote avant-garde com­pos­er Pauline Oliv­eros in her 1974 “Son­ic Med­i­ta­tions,” a set of instruc­tions for what she called deep lis­ten­ing. “Walk so silent­ly that the bot­tom of your feet become ears.” Lis­ten­ing to silence opens up rich new worlds of sound. It can be a life-chang­ing expe­ri­ence.

“It’s hard to imag­ine that a sound can trans­form some­one’s life, but it hap­pened to me,” says acoustic ecol­o­gist Gor­don Hemp­ton in the short 360-degree doc­u­men­tary above, “How to Find Silence in a Noisy World.” Hemp­ton learned to walk silent­ly while car­ry­ing a micro­phone, doc­u­ment­ing his lis­ten­ing jour­ney through remote places like the Hoh Rain­for­est in Wash­ing­ton state, con­sid­ered one of the qui­etest places in North Amer­i­ca.

“By hold­ing a micro­phone, I became a bet­ter lis­ten­er. I learned that the micro­phone doesn’t lis­ten for what’s impor­tant, it doesn’t judge, it doesn’t inter­fere.” The micro­phone, that is, has no ego. Record­ed and ampli­fied, the silence of the Hoh becomes cacoph­o­ny, or a sym­pho­ny, depend­ing on how we describe it. Maybe any descrip­tion gets in the way of lis­ten­ing. “Just lis­ten,” says Hemp­ton. “Silence is the poet­ics of space. What it means to be in a place… Silence isn’t the absence of some­thing, but the pres­ence of every­thing

If silence is full of sound, why might we crave it when we’re stressed? Because we are bom­bard­ed by noise pol­lu­tion, “sounds that have noth­ing to do with the nat­ur­al acoustic sys­tem.” These sounds have been encroach­ing on places like the Hoh Rain­for­est for many decades, and Hemp­ton has doc­u­ment­ed their incur­sion over the past 30 years, build­ing a col­lec­tion of over 100 record­ings “equipped with a 3‑D micro­phone sys­tem that repli­cates human hear­ing,” notes Brain Pick­ings.

“Ema­nat­ing from his col­lec­tion… is the idea that ‘there is a fun­da­men­tal fre­quen­cy for each habitat’—a tonal qual­i­ty that shapes the sense of place and qual­i­ty of pres­ence.” Hempton’s work com­ple­ments the nature record­ings of Bernie Krause, for­mer musi­cian turned renowned expert on nat­ur­al sound, whose the­o­ry of bio­pho­ny describes how nat­ur­al sounds work togeth­er to fill in the spec­trum, each one estab­lish­ing its own spe­cif­ic band­width so as not to drown out the oth­ers.

Nat­ur­al sounds cre­ate a kind of self-reg­u­lat­ing har­mo­ny. In order to ful­ly inhab­it the space we’re in, we must be able to hear them. But as the record­ings made by Hemp­ton and Krause show us, humans have a unique abil­i­ty to feel our­selves deeply immersed in oth­er places, too, by lis­ten­ing to record­ings of their silences. Hemp­ton implies that record­ings may soon be all we have left.

“Silence,” he says, “is on the verge of extinc­tion. There is not one place left on plan­et Earth that is set aside and off lim­its to noise pol­lu­tion.” It inter­feres with the cycles of mat­ing ani­mals, dis­rupts call and response pat­terns ecosys­tems use to coor­di­nate them­selves. Silence is part of a glob­al biofeed­back sys­tem, telling us to qui­et down, slow down, and become part of all that’s hap­pen­ing around us. We ignore it to our great detri­ment.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

Free: Down­load the Sub­lime Sights & Sounds of Yel­low­stone Nation­al Park

10 Hours of Ambi­ent Arc­tic Sounds Will Help You Relax, Med­i­tate, Study & Sleep

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

The Entire History of the British Isles Animated: 42,000 BCE to Today

in Animation, History | November 1st, 2019

The Unit­ed King­dom is a con­fus­ing place for many peo­ple, and their not-quite-answered ques­tions about it go all the way to what does and does not con­sti­tute the Unit­ed King­dom in the first place. Not to give the end­ing away, but the ani­mat­ed map above by his­tor­i­cal-car­to­graph­i­cal Youtu­ber Ollie Bye even­tu­al­ly reveals that, if you’re look­ing at the British Isles, you’re look­ing at the UK — unless, of course, you’re look­ing at the Repub­lic of Ire­land. But tak­ing the long view, the polit­i­cal divi­sion of the British Isles has sel­dom been so sim­ple. We know they were pop­u­lat­ed by what we now call cau­ca­soids at least 44,000 years ago, but by 700 BC three groups had divid­ed them up: the Britons, the Picts, and the Gaels.

The com­pli­ca­tions real­ly start at the time of the Roman Empire, when, depend­ing on where in the British Isles you went, you’d have encoun­tered the Icenii, the Parisi, the Cale­donii, the Iverni, and many oth­er dis­tinct peo­ples besides. When the Roman Empire gave way to the Roman Repub­lic, Bri­tan­nia, or Roman Britain, began its expan­sion (and its road-build­ing) across the Isles, start­ing from the south­east.

But with Rome’s with­draw­al in 410 a great many new bor­ders appear like spi­der­web cracks across the land. For cen­turies there­after, the British Isles is a place of many king­doms: Mer­cia, Wes­sex, Northum­bria, Gwynedd, and Deheubarth, to name but a few. (Not to men­tion the Vikings.) And then you have a year like 1066, when the Nor­man con­quest redraws a large chunk of the map at a stroke.

Even those most igno­rant of British his­to­ry will rec­og­nize a few of the king­doms that arise lat­er on in this peri­od: the King­dom of Scot­land, for exam­ple, or the King­dom of Wales. Start­ing from the mid-12th cen­tu­ry, a cer­tain King­dom of Eng­land begins to paint the map red. By 1604, the British Isles are clean­ly divid­ed between the King­dom of Eng­land and the King­dom of Scot­land; by 1707, the King­dom of Great Britain is run­ning the whole place. The sit­u­a­tion has­n’t changed much since, though any­one who has trav­eled across the British Isles knows that the osten­si­ble lack of polit­i­cal frac­tious­ness masks many endur­ing cul­tur­al divi­sions sub­tle to the out­sider: while every­one liv­ing every­where from John o’ Groats to Land’s End may offi­cial­ly be British, few would coun­te­nance being lumped togeth­er with all the rest of them.

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:

Watch the Rise and Fall of the British Empire in an Ani­mat­ed Time-Lapse Map ( 519 A.D. to 2014 A.D.)

The Roman Roads of Britain Visu­al­ized as a Sub­way Map

Watch the His­to­ry of the World Unfold on an Ani­mat­ed Map: From 200,000 BCE to Today

The His­to­ry of Civ­i­liza­tion Mapped in 13 Min­utes: 5000 BC to 2014 AD

5‑Minute Ani­ma­tion Maps 2,600 Years of West­ern Cul­tur­al His­to­ry

A His­to­ry of the Entire World in Less Than 20 Min­utes

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Novel Adaptation

in Books, Comics/Cartoons, History, K-12, Literature | November 1st, 2019

The human imag­i­na­tion can be an extra­or­di­nary cop­ing device in times of trou­ble, a tiny win­dow pro­vid­ing men­tal escape from what­ev­er cell fate has con­signed us to.

Diarist and aspir­ing pro­fes­sion­al writer Anne Frank, who died in the Bergen-Belsen con­cen­tra­tion camp at the age of 15, chafed at her now-uni­ver­sal­ly-known con­fine­ment in the Secret Annex. She chafed at her mother’s author­i­ty and the seem­ing­ly effort­less saint­li­ness of her old­er sis­ter. Doc­u­ment­ing her dai­ly phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al real­i­ty offered tem­po­rary respite from it.

The lib­er­at­ing pow­er of the cre­ative mind is one of the aspects writer Ari Fol­man and illus­tra­tor David Polon­sky sought to tease out when adapt­ing Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl as a graph­ic nov­el.

The graph­ic nov­el for­mat decreed that entire pas­sages would be cut or con­densed. Polon­sky can use a sin­gle pan­el to show logis­tics it took Anne para­graphs to describe. The inter­per­son­al con­flicts she dwelt on are now con­veyed by facial expres­sions and body lan­guage.

As with Sid Jacob­son and Ernie Colón’s 2010 Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Autho­rized Graph­ic Biog­ra­phy, the diary’s small stage is expand­ed to give read­ers, par­tic­u­lar­ly those unac­quaint­ed with the orig­i­nal text, a his­tor­i­cal con­text for under­stand­ing the wider social impli­ca­tions of Anne’s tragedy.

But this graph­ic retelling is unique in that it traf­fics in mag­ic real­ist visu­als that should play well with 21st-cen­tu­ry youth, who cut their teeth on CGI, fast-paced edits, and stream­ing teen-focused enter­tain­ments where­in char­ac­ters are apt to break the fourth wall or break into song.

These are the read­ers to whom the project is most inten­tion­al­ly pitched. As Fol­man told Teen Vogue’s Emma Sar­ran Web­ster:

I tru­ly believe that in a few years, when the very last sur­vivors will have died, the angle that will be tak­en from the sto­ry will be that with every year, we are 10 years fur­ther away from the orig­i­nal. […] There is a severe threat that the things we have to learn from it will not be taught and learned if we don’t find a new lan­guage for them. So any new lan­guage in my opin­ion is blessed, as long as it stays with­in the frame­work and reach­es young audi­ences by means of their tools, which are now very visu­al.

Ergo, Kit­ty, Anne’s nick­name for her diary, has been per­son­i­fied, emerg­ing from the lit­tle plaid book’s pages like Peter Pan’s shad­ow, ear atten­tive­ly cocked toward the secrets Anne whis­pers into it.

The melo­dra­mat­ic Mrs. van Daan’s prized fur coat has an anthro­po­mor­phized rab­bit head col­lar, capa­ble of join­ing in the dia­logue.

Polon­sky pays homage to artists Edvard Munch, whose “degen­er­a­tive” work Hitler had removed from Ger­man muse­ums, and Gus­tav Klimt, who paint­ed many works that were con­fis­cat­ed from their Jew­ish own­ers by Nazi decree.

Young read­ers’ mod­ern sen­si­bil­i­ties also guid­ed Folman’s approach to the text. The spir­it of the orig­i­nal is pre­served, but cer­tain phras­ings have been giv­en a 21st cen­tu­ry update.

The snarky Secret Annex menus and diet tips he allows his hero­ine harken to the direct address of var­i­ous meta teen come­dies, as well as the blis­ter­ing par­o­dy of the Sara­je­vo Sur­vival Guide, a pur­port­ed trav­el guide writ­ten dur­ing the Siege.

Noble goal of engag­ing the next gen­er­a­tion aside, there are no doubt some purists who will view these inno­va­tions as impo­si­tion. Rest assured that Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graph­ic Adap­ta­tion is sanc­tioned by Anne Frank Fonds, the char­i­ta­ble foun­da­tion estab­lished by Anne’s father, Otto.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch the Only Known Footage of Anne Frank

Read the Poignant Let­ter Sent to Anne Frank by George Whit­man, Own­er of Paris’ Famed Shake­speare & Co Book­shop (1960): “If I Sent This Let­ter to the Post Office It Would No Longer Reach You”

How Art Spiegel­man Designs Com­ic Books: A Break­down of His Mas­ter­piece, Maus

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Novem­ber 4 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates Louise Jor­dan Miln’s “Woo­ings and Wed­dings in Many Climes (1900). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What Happens to the Clothes We Throw Away?: Watch Unravel, a Short Documentary on the Journey Our Waste Takes

in Fashion, Film | October 31st, 2019

When we throw our clothes away in the West, they don’t all go to a thrift store or to a recy­cling cen­ter or a local land­fill. Instead, every year 100,000 tons of clothes make their way across the ocean to India. In this aware­ness rais­ing short doc from UK-based film­mak­er Megh­na Gup­ta, we see the end point of these bales and bales of West­ern fash­ion, and the women and men who turn our waste back into thread. The thread then begins its own jour­ney, inevitably wind­ing back up as cheap import­ed clothes. And the cycle begins again.

Gup­ta lets the women speak for them­selves, in par­tic­u­lar Resh­ma, a young moth­er and wife who works in one such recy­cling cen­ter in Pani­pat, North India. We see her dai­ly life as well as the process turn­ing our castoffs into thread. Upon enter­ing the coun­try, the clothes are cut so they can’t be re-sold. Then women like Resh­ma remove but­tons, zip­pers, and any oth­er non-cloth com­po­nent.

Far, far away from even a pass­ing encounter with a West­ern­er (apart from what they’ve seen on the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel), Resh­ma and her co-work­ers cre­ate a nar­ra­tive and an image of the peo­ple send­ing all these clothes. The West must have a water short­age, Resh­ma says, that is stop­ping peo­ple from wash­ing their clothes. The West also must have a very strange diet to pro­duce the plus-size gar­ments they keep com­ing across.

Now, the West doesn’t have a water short­age, but accord­ing to EDGE (Emerg­ing Design­ers Get Exposed), the cloth­ing and tex­tile indus­try is the sec­ond largest pol­luter in the world, sec­ond only to oil, pro­duc­ing 20 per­cent of glob­al waste water, and a glob­al waste total of near­ly 13 mil­lion tons of fab­ric. Pro­duc­ing cot­ton is water-intensive—with 5,000 gal­lons need­ed just to make a pair of jeans and a t‑shirt.

Recy­cling is important—it’s been a con­stant mes­sage to the pub­lic since the 1970s. But the glob­al foot­print that this film hints at, all those car­go ships, all those trucks, all that fuel and those miles traveled…is this real­ly a solu­tion? How do we stop the demand and the dis­pos­abil­i­ty?

The doc doesn’t answer those ques­tions, and doesn’t mean to do so. It just wants you to see a small fam­i­ly in the mid­dle of a large glob­al machine. They seem hap­py enough. But they also see their fate as God-giv­en, at least in this life this time ’round.

“You tend to get dressed for oth­er peo­ple,” Reshma’s hus­band says. “But at the end of the day you’ll be as beau­ti­ful as God made you. All peo­ple have a nat­ur­al beau­ty.”

via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

M.I.T. Com­put­er Pro­gram Alarm­ing­ly Pre­dicts in 1973 That Civ­i­liza­tion Will End by 2040

Watch Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed Doc­u­men­tary Uni­verse, the Film that Inspired the Visu­al Effects of Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001 and Gave the HAL 9000 Com­put­er Its Voice (1960)

Google Cre­ates a Dig­i­tal Archive of World Fash­ion: Fea­tures 30,000 Images, Cov­er­ing 3,000 Years of Fash­ion His­to­ry

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Bowie’s Bookshelf: A New Essay Collection on The 100 Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life

in Books, Music | October 31st, 2019

Like some rock stars of his gen­er­a­tion, David Bowie had a lit­er­ary cast of mind; unlike most of those col­leagues, he also made his asso­ci­a­tion with books explic­it. (Not for noth­ing did he appear on that READ poster.) When­ev­er this sub­ject aris­es, it’s tempt­ing to bring up the sto­ry of how The Man Who Fell to Earth direc­tor Nico­las Roeg poked fun at the extreme num­ber of books with which Bowie sur­round­ed him­self dur­ing the time he was act­ing in that film, as we did when we post­ed about the David Bowie book club. Launched by Bowie’s son, the film­mak­er Dun­can Jones, that project was meant to read through Bowie’s own list of top 100 books, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Now, thanks to the work of music jour­nal­ist John O’Con­nell, Bowie’s love of books has a book of its own.

Pub­lished in the UK as Bowie’s Books and in the US as Bowie’s Book­shelf, O’Con­nel­l’s essay col­lec­tion takes the 100 books the man who was Zig­gy Star­dust, Aladdin Sane, and The Thin White Duke named as favorites. In each he finds the rel­e­vant ques­tions (or at least fas­ci­nat­ing ones) to ask about each book’s rela­tion­ship to Bowie’s life and work: “How did the pow­er imbued in a sin­gle suit of armor in The Ili­ad impact a man who loved cos­tumes, shift­ing iden­ti­ty, and the siren song of the alter-ego?” Or, “How did the poems of T.S. Eliot and Frank O’Hara, the fic­tion of Vladimir Nabokov and Antho­ny Burgess, the comics of The Beano and The Viz, and the ground­break­ing pol­i­tics of James Bald­win influ­ence Bowie’s lyrics, his sound, his artis­tic out­look?”

Kirkus Reviews notes that “many of Bowie’s selec­tions speak to his obvi­ous pas­sion for music, espe­cial­ly ear­ly rock ’n’ roll and R&B (Greil Mar­cus, Ger­ri Her­shey), his famous Japanophil­ia (Yukio Mishi­ma, Tadanori Yokoo), and his stint in Ger­many (Alfred Döblin, Otto Friedrich).” O’Con­nel­l’s com­pletist analy­sis of Bowie’s top-100-books list, com­posed for an exhi­bi­tion at the Vic­to­ria & Albert Muse­um just six years ago, also reveals “the range and play­ful­ness in Bowie’s read­ing, from hefty tomes on the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion to lad­dish com­ic books like The Beano.” Oth­er essays cov­er Loli­ta, The Gnos­tic Gospels, A Con­fed­er­a­cy of Dunces, and White Noise, all part of a mix­ture that would tan­ta­lize any cul­tur­al crit­ic — much like the work of David Bowie, who still con­sti­tutes a cul­ture unto him­self.

Bowie’s Book­shelf: The Hun­dred Books that Changed David Bowie’s Life can be ordered now.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie’s Top 100 Books

The David Bowie Book Club Gets Launched by His Son: Read One of Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books Every Month

David Bowie Urges Kids to READ in a 1987 Poster Spon­sored by the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: Space Odd­i­ty, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

The Sto­ry of How David Jones Became David Bowie Gets Told in a New Graph­ic Nov­el

Bri­an Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion & 59 Books For Build­ing Your Intel­lec­tu­al World

David Bowie Picks His 12 Favorite David Bowie Songs: Lis­ten to Them Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Animated Introduction to Medieval Taverns: Learn the History of These Rough-and-Tumble Ancestors of the Modern Pub

in Food & Drink, History | October 31st, 2019

When I think of the medieval tav­ern, I see grim footage from Bergman’s The Sev­enth Seal and grimy drink­ing scenes from Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings. While only the first of these uses an osten­si­bly his­tor­i­cal set­ting, the imagery of them all is what we think of when we think of tav­erns. Huge casks in the cor­ners, great, inde­struc­tible wood­en tables and wood­en mugs, signs with pic­tures instead of words; drunk­en singing and the occa­sion­al axe fight.

The crude­ly ani­mat­ed Sim­ple His­to­ry video above con­firms these impres­sions, describ­ing the tav­erns, inns, and ale hous­es that were ances­tors of the mod­ern pub as “places of drink­ing, gam­bling, vio­lence, and crim­i­nal activ­i­ty.” Art his­to­ry and schol­ar­ship fur­ther con­firm our impres­sion of tav­erns as rough-hewn, row­dy hous­es where brawls fre­quent­ly broke out and all sorts of shady busi­ness trans­act­ed.

Ale hous­es had an “ale stake or ale pole” that could be raised to show they had a brew ready to serve. Tav­erns had a pole with leaves, called a “bush,” for the same pur­pose. Wine might be pricey, but beer was cheap, as “tax­ing it would not have been well-received.” Bar­maids poured drinks from pitch­ers of leather into mugs of wood. Food was… well, not so good…. Maybe we can visu­al­ize tav­ern life by extrap­o­lat­ing back­wards from our local dive bars.

How­ev­er, we might find it hard to imag­ine liv­ing in a time before beer. Milan Pajic, junior research fel­low at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge, found that beer made a rel­a­tive­ly late entry in the his­to­ry of Eng­lish drink, arriv­ing only in the lat­ter half of the 14th cen­tu­ry when intro­duced by Dutch immi­grants and demand­ed by sol­diers return­ing from the 100 Years War.

Between around 1350 and around 1400, Pajic claims, all of the beer drunk in Eng­lish tav­erns was import­ed from the Nether­lands. “The first evi­dence of some­one brew­ing beer” in Eng­land, Pajic writes in an arti­cle pub­lished in the Jour­nal of Medieval His­to­ry, “comes from 1398–9.” The brew­er, a “Duche­man,” was “fined for buy­ing ‘wheat in the mar­ket in order to pro­duce beer, to the great dam­age of the same mar­ket.”

Such per­se­cu­tion could not last. In a hun­dred year’s time, a few hun­dred brew­ers could be found around the coun­try, most of them immi­grants from the Low Coun­tries. But in part because the Eng­lish dis­trust­ed the Dutch, “it took almost a cen­tu­ry from the moment it was intro­duced as an import­ed com­mod­i­ty and con­sumed large­ly by immi­grants before it came to be pro­duced on Eng­lish soil and accept­ed by the natives.”

Tav­ern, inn, and ale house designs would have con­formed to local join­ery trends, but the medieval Eng­lish tavern’s chief draw—cheap, fresh­ly-brewed beer, and lots of it—was a sus­pi­cious con­ti­nen­tal import before it became a nation­al trea­sure.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Beer Archae­ol­o­gy: Yes, It’s a Thing

The First Known Pho­to­graph of Peo­ple Shar­ing a Beer (1843)

Dis­cov­er the Old­est Beer Recipe in His­to­ry From Ancient Sume­ria, 1800 B.C.

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Entire Archive of Contact: A Journal for Contemporary Music Has Been Digitized and Put Online

in Archives, Music | October 30th, 2019

FYI on a new dig­i­ti­za­tion project:

“Con­tact: A Jour­nal for Con­tem­po­rary Music was active from 1971–1990 and inde­pen­dent­ly pub­lished by its edi­tors. As with many inde­pen­dent print pub­li­ca­tions of that era, this has meant that, for read­ers and researchers oper­at­ing in a con­tem­po­rary dig­i­tal land­scape, the rich­ness of its resource has been all but inac­ces­si­ble. In recog­ni­tion of this sit­u­a­tion, in the years 2016–2019, the entire jour­nal was digi­tised and made avail­able over the course of a three-year research project..”

“Con­tact’s basic inten­tions – as set out ful­ly in the first issue, dat­ed Spring 1971 – were to pro­mote informed dis­cus­sion of 20th-cen­tu­ry music in gen­er­al and the music of our own time in par­tic­u­lar. Among the orig­i­nal con­cerns of the founders of the mag­a­zine were that pop­u­lar musics, jazz and con­tem­po­rary folk music should play a part in our scheme. In the ear­li­er days, espe­cial­ly, we con­tin­u­al­ly sought for good writ­ing in these fields, as well as con­tri­bu­tions on ‘seri­ous’ music.”

Enter the Con­tact online archive here…

via @ide­o­forms

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!

 

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch the Opening of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey with the Original, Unused Score

in Film, Music | October 30th, 2019

How does a movie become a “clas­sic”? Expla­na­tions, nev­er less than utter­ly sub­jec­tive, will vary from cinephile to cinephile, but I would sub­mit that clas­sic-film sta­tus, as tra­di­tion­al­ly under­stood, requires that all ele­ments of the pro­duc­tion work in at least near-per­fect har­mo­ny: the cin­e­matog­ra­phy, the cast­ing, the edit­ing, the design, the set­ting, the score. Out­side first-year film stud­ies sem­i­nars and delib­er­ate­ly con­trar­i­an cul­ture columns, the label of clas­sic, once attained, goes prac­ti­cal­ly undis­put­ed. Even those who active­ly dis­like Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance, would sure­ly agree that its every last audio­vi­su­al nuance serves its dis­tinc­tive, bold vision — espe­cial­ly that open­ing use of “Thus Spake Zarathus­tra.”

But Kubrick did­n’t always intend to use that piece, nor the oth­er orches­tral works we’ve come to close­ly asso­ciate with mankind’s ven­tures into realms beyond Earth and strug­gles with intel­li­gence of its own inven­tion. Accord­ing to Jason Kot­tke, Kubrick had com­mis­sioned an orig­i­nal score from A Street­car Named Desire, Spar­ta­cus, Cleopa­tra, and Who’s Afraid of Vir­ginia Woolf com­pos­er Alex North.

At the top of the post, you can see 2001’s open­ing with North’s music, and below you can hear 38 min­utes of his score on Spo­ti­fy. As to the ques­tion of why Kubrick stuck instead with the tem­po­rary score of Strauss, Ligeti, and Khatch­a­turi­an he’d used in edit­ing, Kot­tke quotes from Michel Cimen­t’s inter­view with the film­mak­er:

How­ev­er good our best film com­posers may be, they are not a Beethoven, a Mozart or a Brahms. Why use music which is less good when there is such a mul­ti­tude of great orches­tral music avail­able from the past and from our own time? [ … ]  Although [North] and I went over the pic­ture very care­ful­ly, and he lis­tened to these tem­po­rary tracks and agreed that they worked fine and would serve as a guide to the musi­cal objec­tives of each sequence he, nev­er­the­less, wrote and record­ed a score which could not have been more alien to the music we had lis­tened to, and much more seri­ous than that, a score which, in my opin­ion, was com­plete­ly inad­e­quate for the film.

North did­n’t find out about Kubrick­’s choice until 2001’s New York City pre­miere. Not an envi­able sit­u­a­tion, cer­tain­ly, but not the worst thing that ever hap­pened to a col­lab­o­ra­tor who failed to rise to the direc­tor’s expec­ta­tions.

For more Kubrick and clas­si­cal music, see our recent post: The Clas­si­cal Music in Stan­ley Kubrick’s Films: Lis­ten to a Free, 4 Hour Playlist

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in Decem­ber 2014.

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:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Watch a New­ly-Cre­at­ed “Epi­logue” For Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

1966 Film Explores the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Our High-Tech Future)

James Cameron Revis­its the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Rare 1960s Audio: Stan­ley Kubrick’s Big Inter­view with The New York­er

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

What Guitars Were Like 400 Years Ago: An Introduction to the 9 String Baroque Guitar

in History, Music | October 30th, 2019

Maybe it’s just me, but it some­times feels like gui­tar music is on the wane. Sure, there are plen­ty of gui­tar bands out there, gui­tar sales seem to hold steady, but the syn­the­siz­er, midi con­troller, and dig­i­tal audio work­sta­tion have become the dom­i­nant instru­ments of pop­u­lar music. Then again, it’s short-sight­ed to count the gui­tar out just yet, giv­en the 500-year longevi­ty of its design.

In the 17th cen­tu­ry, the Lute Soci­ety of Dart­mouth notes, the gui­tar was “cul­ti­vat­ed by play­ers and com­posers with­in the courts of princes and kings.” The Baroque gui­tar was very much like the mod­ern six string (or, as often these days, sev­en and eight string) that we know today, “aside from a dif­fer­ence of tun­ing,” writes luthi­er Clive Tit­muss. Where “the mod­ern gui­tar is a baritone/tenor… the baroque is an alto instru­ment, about the size of a vio­la.”

The dif­fer­ences in size and pitch change the sus­tain and artic­u­la­tion. The Baroque gui­tar’s tonal char­ac­ter­is­tics are much more del­i­cate, per­cus­sive, and lute-like. “The great­est music for baroque gui­tar is dif­fi­cult to ren­der ade­quate­ly on the mod­ern gui­tar because the tra­di­tions of the two instru­ments have diverged so wide­ly: They speak basi­cal­ly the same lan­guage, but with a dif­fer­ent vocab­u­lary and accent.” Ear­ly Renais­sance gui­tars had what is called a “four course” string arrange­ment, with eight dou­bled strings. The baroque gui­tar added one more for a “five course” instru­ment with nine strings.

Like its Renais­sance fore­bear, lutes, and mod­ern twelve-string gui­tars today, four of those “cours­es” were dou­bled, with pairs of strings tuned to the same note. This essen­tial­ly made it a five string gui­tar with the ring­ing sonor­i­ty of a man­dolin. In the video at the top, Bran­don Ack­er explains what this means in the­o­ry and prac­tice. The tun­ing was fair­ly close to a mod­ern six-string, but one octave up and miss­ing the low E. The lone high E string was called the chanterelle or “singing string.”

Pop­u­lar main­ly in south­ern Europe, the Baroque gui­tar “may well have been used as it fre­quent­ly is today,” the Lute Soci­ety points out: “to pro­vide a sim­ple strummed accom­pa­ni­ment for a singer or small group.” It was first held in con­tempt by ear­ly Span­ish com­posers who pre­ferred the sim­i­lar vihuela. But the gui­tar would dis­place that instru­ment, as well as the lute, in musi­cal com­po­si­tions across Spain, Italy, France and else­where in Europe.

In the videos above, you can see and hear some fine demon­stra­tions from Ack­er, who plays peri­od pieces like Suite in D Minor by Robert de Visée, court com­pos­er and musi­cian for Louis XIV and Louis XV. Below, see gui­tarist Ste­fano Maio­rana play a gor­geous Span­ish piece.

Giv­en the 400 years that sep­a­rate the mod­ern gui­tar from its Baroque ances­tor, the resem­blances are remark­able, prov­ing that the instrument’s 17th cen­tu­ry refin­ers hit on a design that per­fect­ly com­ple­ments the human voice, sounds great solo and in groups, and can han­dle both rhythm and lead. Even if most gui­tars in the future dou­ble as midi-con­trol­ling synth instru­ments, it’s prob­a­bly safe to say mod­ern music won’t give up this bril­liant, time-test­ed design any time soon.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of the Gui­tar: The Com­plete Three-Part Doc­u­men­tary

The His­to­ry of the Gui­tar & Gui­tar Leg­ends: From 1929 to 1979

The Ency­clo­pe­dia Of Alter­nate Gui­tar Tun­ings

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |


« Newer Entries | Older Entries »

  • Great Lectures

  • Sign up for Newsletter

  • About Us

    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.


    Advertise With Us

  • Great Recordings

  • Book Lists By

  • Syllabi

  • Favorite Movies

  • Archives

  • Search

    • Quantcast