Prince Plays a Mind-Blowing Guitar Solo On “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

in Music | April 21st, 2016

Amidst all its other unsettling excesses, 2016 has become a year of collective mourning as musical icon after musical icon passes away. The names begin to sound like a list of battlefield casualties. Our latest loss was much more than a leader among men: he was royalty.

Prince’s death strikes me as a tragedy for so many reasons: he was too young, only 57. He was—as for nearly everyone of my generation—a fixture of my childhood, a figure of impossible cool; his loss feels deeply personal. Lastly, Prince seemed so above it all—above all of the ugly, petty crap the rest of us slog through every day, including death.

All pop stars seem like that to their fans.

But when it comes to Prince, it wasn’t just his forever young sexuality that made me think he’d never die, but the fact that he could do anything, and I mean anything at all as a musician. He seemed to have no limitations. Unlike many of this year’s lost stars, I was lucky enough to see him play. That show became the high watermark by which I’ve unfairly measured every other performer.

He played for three hours, then held an afterparty and played for two more. He tore through his catalog, then played everyone else. Members of his band left the stage one by one, and Prince continued, picking up instrument after instrument. The hugeness of the sound didn’t seem diminished one bit when he remained on stage alone with his guitar at three o’clock in the morning.

And that guitar, man.… Whether his trademark butterscotch Telecaster or series of unique, signature instruments—he played like no one else: he made the guitar cry, sing, howl, wail, and launch into outer space hysterics. His power and control were unmatched. Eric Clapton, when asked what it felt like to be the world’s greatest guitarist, supposedly said, “ask Prince.” Apocryphal or not, it’s believable. No guitarist can be anything but blown away by Prince’s prowess. Witness his solo at the end of the 2004 all-star Rock and Roll Hall of Fame George Harrison tribute performance of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (top), widely cited as one one of the best guitar moments caught on tape, and as evidence for why Prince belongs in the top ten of world’s greatest players. He’s accompanied on the stage by Tom Petty (RIP), Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and Dhani Harrison.

I don’t think there’s any hyperbole in saying that Prince may have been the greatest stage performer of the past forty years, as a total package: showman, songwriter, and musician. And though he dominated center stage, he wasn’t too proud to play the sideman. Check him out above, for example, backing Lenny Kravitz on “American Woman.” But when it came time for Prince to take a solo (see him tear it up at around 4:50), it was like everyone else had left the stage.

Rest In Peace, Prince. As a guitarist, singer, and general explosion of purple amazingness, he was in a class all his own.

David Bowie (RIP) Sings “Changes” in His Last Live Performance, 2006

The Memorial Service & Celebration of “Lemmy” Kilmister, Motörhead Frontman, is Now Streaming Live

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Call Me Burroughs: Hear William S. Burroughs Read from Naked Lunch & The Soft Machine in His First Spoken Word Album (1965)

in Literature | April 21st, 2016

Image by Christiaan Tonnis, via Wikimedia Commons

Where did you first hear the voice of William S. Burroughs? Weary yet vigorous, flat yet powerful, wry yet haunting, it has, to a good-sized segment of several generations now, defined a cadence for the counterculture. Many of those enthusiasts (most of whom would have come to know the grand old man of the Beat Generation’s postmodernist wing through his writing, like the novels Naked Lunch and Junky) had their first genuine Burroughs listening experience through the record album Call Me Burroughs, first released in 1965, and more recently re-issued by Superior Viaduct.

In these sessions, recorded in the basement of The English Bookshop in Paris, Burroughs reads from Naked Lunch as well as Nova Express, the third book in the “Nova Trilogy” that the author considered a “mathematical continuation” of his best-known work. Both emerged as the fruits of the “cut-up” technique of literary composition Burroughs developed with artist Brion Gysin, creating new texts out of decontextualized and reassembled pieces of existing text found in the mass media.

“Burroughs believed that language and image were viral and that the mass-dissemination of information was part of an arch-conspiracy that restricted the full potential of the human mind,” writes Glenn O’Brian at Electronic Beats. “With cut-up, Burroughs found a means of escape; an antidote to the sickness of ‘control’ messages that mutated their original content. If mass media already functioned as an enormous barrage of cut-up material, the cut-up method was a way for the artist to fight back using its same tactics.”

Call Me Burroughs, which at one point became a deep-out-of-print collector’s item, has now come available free on Spotify. (You can download its free software here.) You can also stream it on Youtube. Counterculture chronicler Barry Miles notes that the Beatles all had copies (and Paul McCartney, particularly impressed with it, went on to hire its producer himself), and “art dealer Robert Fraser bought ten copies to give to friends such as Brian Jones and Mick Jagger. Marianne Faithful and Keith Richards’ dealer had copies, as did numerous painters and writers.” So whatever inspiration you draw from this “talisman of cool in Greenwich Village in the mid-1960s,” as Greil Marcus once called it, you’ll certainly join a long line of distinguished listeners.

Call Me Burroughs will be added to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

via Electronic Beats

How William S. Burroughs Used the Cut-Up Technique to Shut Down London’s First Espresso Bar (1972)

William S. Burroughs Teaches a Free Course on Creative Reading and Writing (1979)

William S. Burroughs Reads Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”

How David Bowie, Kurt Cobain & Thom Yorke Write Songs With William Burroughs’ Cut-Up Technique

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Becoming Bilingual Can Give Your Brain a Boost: What Recent Research Has to Say

in Education, Language Lessons, Neuroscience | April 21st, 2016

From the time my daughter was born, my wife and I took her out to restaurants—not to annoy the other diners, mind you, she was usually very well behaved—but to expose her palate to as much variety as possible and socialize her early to new and unfamiliar environments. At one establishment, during her second year, another toddler her age approached us, her mother trailing behind. “Can we say hi?” the mother asked. We said, “of course.” “What languages does your child speak?” the woman politely inquired.

We looked at each other, a little chagrined. Parents of young children often play subtle games of one-upsmanship, whether they mean to or not, and most parents fret over whether they’re offering their kids the richest learning experiences they can.

At that moment we felt slightly inadequate. “She just knows the one language,” we mumbled, turning back to our menus after a few more pleasantries. I may have studied Latin for several years, learned to read a little French and Italian and speak enough Spanish for some halting small talk, but for all intents and purposes, we’re a monolingual household.

And according to current research on infant brain development, this may put our poor preschooler at a disadvantage to children who can greet her in two or more tongues. That’s not only because those children will grow up able to easily conduct business across countries and continents, but also because, Big Think reports, “a new study shows that babies raised in bilingual environments develop more cognitive skills like decision-making and problem-solving—before they can even speak.” The brains of bilingual (and trilingual, etc.) people “look and act differently,” the TED-Ed video at the top of the post claims, than those of the monolingual. (The New York Times puts things more bluntly: “Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter.”)

Is this really so? Princeton University neuroscientist Sam Wang explains why it may be in the short Big Think video further up. Wang and other researchers have acquired their findings by conducting research on some of the most adorable scientific subjects ever. One study, conducted at the University of Washington, tested 16 babies—half from only English-speaking families and half from English- and Spanish-speaking households. As you can see in the video clip above, the tots were monitored via a magnetoencephalographic helmet designed specially for babies, as they listened to sounds specific to one or both languages.

Lead author of the study Naja Ferjan Ramirez writes, “results suggest that before they even start talking, babies raised in bilingual households are getting practice at tasks related to executive function.” Her co-author Patricia Kuhl elaborates:

Babies raised listening to two languages seem to stay ‘open’ to the sounds of novel languages longer than their monolingual peers, which is a good and highly adaptive thing for their brains to do.

The University of Washington researchers are but one team among several dozen who have drawn these kinds of conclusions about the benefits of growing up bilingual. Both The New York Times and The New Yorker survey and link to much of this research. The New Yorker also profiles a skeptical study by psychologist Angela de Bruin that undercuts some of the enthusiasm and possible overstatement of the benefits of bilingualism; and yet her research doesn’t deny that they exist. Whatever their degree, the question might arise for anxious parents like myself: Is there anything we can do to help our monolingual children catch up?

Never fear, they can still profit from exposure to other languages, though you may not speak them fluently at home. Big Think offers a couple pointers for raising a bilingual child, even if you’re not bilingual yourself.

Lots of foreign words make their way into English. You can point out foreign foods every time you have them, or watch a bilingual show with your child. As long as you expose them to the foreign words in a consistent way with the same context, they’ll reap the benefits.

Try using a Language Exchange community, where you and your child can speak another language with native speakers together. You’ll both reap the benefits with constant practice.

Every little bit of exposure helps, and no amount of language training will ever do any harm. “Basically,” writes Big Think, “there is no downside to being bilingual.” The earlier we start, the better, but there’s no reason not to engage with other languages at any age. We can help you do that here with our expansive collection of lessons in 48 languages. And to learn even more about bilingualism and its prevalence amidst rapidly changing demographics in the U.S. and around the world, see the University of Illinois Spanish linguistics professor Kim Potowski’s TEDx talk below, “No Child Left Monolingual.”

via Big Think

Learn Latin, Old English, Sanskrit, Classical Greek & Other Ancient Languages in 10 Lessons

200 Free Kids Educational Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Websites & More

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

What Miles Davis Taught Herbie Hancock: In Music, as in Life, There Are No Mistakes, Just Chances to Improvise

in Life, Music | April 21st, 2016

One of my favorite Brian Eno quotes, or rather one that became an Oblique Strategy, is “Honor Your Mistake as a Hidden Intention.” (Or to be pedantic, the original version was “Honor Thy Error…”).

As a teenager growing up and trying to make art (at that time music and comics) there was no advice more freeing. It was the opposite of what I thought I knew: mistakes were shameful, the sign of an amateur or of the lack of practice. But the more art I made, the more I referenced Eno’s idea, and the more I read and listened, the more I realized it wasn’t just Eno. The Beatles left in an alarm clock meant for the musicians on “A Day in the Life” and the sound of empty booze bottles vibrating on a speaker was left in at the end of “Long Long Long” (along with tons more). The Beastie Boys left in a jumping needle intended for a smooth scratch on “The Sounds of Science.” Radiohead left in Jonny Greenwood’s warm-up chord that became essential to “Creep.” (There’s a whole Reddit thread devoted to these mistakes if you choose to go down the rabbit hole.)

But those examples relate to the recording process of rock music. What about jazz? Surely there’s “wrong” notes when it comes to playing, especially if you’re not the soloist.

In this very short video based around an interview with pianist Herbie Hancock, the master improvisor Miles Davis honored Hancock’s mistake as a hidden intention by playing along with it. It’s both a surprising look into the arcane world of jazz improvisation and a revealing anecdote of Davis, usually known as a difficult collaborator.

“It taught me a very big lesson not only about music,” says Hancock, “but about life.”

h/t Jason W‑R

Watch Animated Sheet Music for Miles Davis’ “So What,” Charlie Parker’s “Confirmation” & Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”

Herbie Hancock Presents the Prestigious Norton Lectures at Harvard University: Watch Online

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based 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 Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Download 67,000 Historic Maps (in High Resolution) from the Wonderful David Rumsey Map Collection

in Archives, Art, History | April 20th, 2016

Stanford University’s been in the news lately, what with expanding its tuition waiver last year and now facing renewed scrutiny over its ultra-low admissions rate. These stories have perhaps overshadowed other Stanford news of a more academic nature: the arrival of the David Rumsey Map Center, which celebrated its grand opening yesterday and continues the festivities today and tomorrow. While these kinds of university improvements are rarely of much interest to the general public, this one highlights a collection worth giving full attention. Well, for those of us, that is, who love maps.

You do not need to be a Stanford student or faculty or staff member to access the vast treasures of the Rumsey Map collection, nor do you need to visit the university or its new Center. Since 1996, the Rumsey collection’s online database has been open to all, currently offering anyone with an internet connection access to 67,000 maps from all over the globe, spanning five centuries of cartography.

Rumsey’s holdings constitute, writes Wired, “the dopest map collection on Earth,” and though its physical housing at Stanford is a huge boon to academic researchers, its online archive is yours for the browsing, searching, and downloading, whoever and wherever you are.

Pages like the 1867 map “Twelve Perspectives on the Earth in Orbit and Rotation,” further up, contain detailed publication information, the ability to zoom in and examine the tiniest details, and an “export” function allowing users to download a variety of resolutions up to 12288 pixels. (The same holds true for all other maps.) There’s also a new feature for many maps called “Georeferencing” (see a short introductory video above), which matches the map’s contours with other historic maps or with more accurate, modern satellite images.

In the case of “Twelve Perspectives on the Earth in Orbit and Rotation,” the georeferencing function returns an error message stating “this is not a map.” But in terrestrial images, like the topographical map of the Yosemite Valley above, we can choose specific portions to georeference, use the “visualize” function to see how they match up to contemporary views, and conduct an accuracy analysis. (Georeferencing requires sign-in with a free account, or you can use your Google, Facebook, or Twitter log-ins.) Georeferencing is not available for all maps, yet. You can help the Rumsey collection expand the feature by visiting this page and clicking the “Random Map” link.

The Rumsey Collection contains a seemingly inexhaustible supply of cartographic images, such as the colorful aerial view of New York City from 1900, above, and the 1949 composite map of the Soviet Union, at the top of the post. In addition to the maps themselves—most works of art in their own right—the database is full of other beautiful images related to geography, such as the fabulous, full-color title page below for the 1730 Atlas Novus sive Tabulae Geographicae by Matthaeus Seutter.

David Rumsey—currently President of the digital publishing company Cartography Associates—began collecting maps and “related cartographic materials” in 1980. Since then, his physical collection has grown to include over 150,000 maps, to be housed at the Stanford Center that bears his name, and he has received several awards for making his collection available online. The cartography enthusiasts among us, and the hardcore scholars, can likely look forward to many more maps appearing in the web archive. For now, there’s no shortage of fascinating material.

On the site’s homepage, they highlight these areas worth exploring:

The historical map collection has over 67,000 maps and images online. The collection includes rare 16th through 21st century maps of America, North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, Pacific and the World.

Popular collection categories are celestial, antique atlas,globe, school geography, maritime chart, state, county, city, pocket, wall & case, children’s, and manuscript maps. Search examples: Pictorial maps, United States maps, Geology maps , California map, Afghanistan map,America map, New York City map, Chicago map, andU.S. Civil War maps. Browse map categories: What, Where, Who, When. The collection is used to study history, art, genealogy, explorations, and family history.

Get to browsing… and georeferencing….

The History of Cartography, the “Most Ambitious Overview of Map Making Ever,” Now Free Online

A Planetary Perspective: Trillions of Pictures of the Earth Available Through Google Earth Engine

19th Century Maps Visualize Measles in America Before the Miracle of Vaccines

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 12 ) |

Hear the Vintage Sherlock Holmes Radio Drama, Starring John Gielgud, Orson Welles & Ralph Richardson

in Literature, Radio | April 20th, 2016

Can there ever be such a thing as too much Sherlock Holmes? Since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation of the character in 1887, he’s never gone out of style; there are often several adaptations of Sherlock Holmes—in film, television, and otherwise—running simultaneously, and I never hear anyone complain about Holmes overload. In fact, Holmes holds the Guinness World Record for the most-portrayed literary character ever, with over 70 actors (but alas, no actresses, yet) playing the brilliant detective in 254 screen adaptations. And that’s not even to mention the thousands of detectives and detective-like characters inspired by Holmes, or his many cameo appearances in other fictional universes.

Comments sections may quibble and snipe, but it seems to me that we’ll never run out of opportunities to make more Sherlock Holmes films, television shows, video games, fully immersive holographic virtual reality simulations…. But there’s one medium that seems to have slowed when it comes to adapting Holmes—and everything else literary: Radio. (Though several podcasts have picked up the slack.) And as much as we love to see the arch looks on Holmes actors’ faces as they astonish and perplex their various Watsons—radio is a medium well suited to the dialogue-driven drama of Conan Doyle’s stories. One classic demonstration of this is a series of Holmes radio plays that ran from 1939 to 1947 and starred for a time perhaps the quintessential screen interpreters of Holmes and Watson, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce.

The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, as it was called, took a lighthearted approach to the characters and, as one reviewer puts it, could feel “quite rushed,” with the actors given little time to rehearse. Although the original series has many merits, in the ‘50s, NBC decided to improve upon it, taking the radio transcriptions of the Conan Doyle stories and re-recording them with new actors. Which actors? In many episodes, two of the finest British stage actors of their generation: Sir John Gielgud as Holmes and Ralph Richardson as Watson. And in one episode, an adaptation of “The Final Problem,” the producers found to play their Professor Moriarty an actor whose voice dominated some of the most popular radio broadcasts of the age: Orson Welles.

You can listen to “The Final Problem” with Gielgud, Richardson, and Welles at the top of the post; hear all of the 1950’s New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes episodes (125 in all) just above, and download them at the Internet Archive. And, further up, hear thirty-two broadcasts of the original New Adventures starring Rathbone and Bruce. Like all commercial media then and now, each episode features its share of… well, commercials. But they also feature some very fine voice acting and excellent music and sound design. Most importantly, they feature the genius of Sherlock Holmes, who will live forever, it seems, in our imaginative media, whatever form it happens to take.

These fine recordings will be added to our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

Download the Complete Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Masterpiece

Arthur Conan Doyle Discusses Sherlock Holmes and Psychics in a Rare Filmed Interview (1927)

Sherlock Holmes Is Now in the Public Domain, Declares US Judge

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hear Rufus Wainwright Sing Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Album Featuring Florence Welch, Carrie Fisher, William Shatner & More

in Literature, Music | April 20th, 2016

How to classify the singing-songwriting of Rufus Wainwright? Pop? Folk? Surely we’ll have to throw a “neo-” or two in there. And we can’t ignore the importance of all things operatic to the work of this musician who grows more sui generis with every album he puts out — and indeed, with every stage production he puts on. His interest in opera dates back to his youth, and as early as his self-titled 2001 debut we can hear its direct influence in a song like “Barcelona,” whose lyrics borrow from Verdi’s Macbeth. Verdi, of course, was also working with some pretty rich inspirational material himself, and Wainwright has found an occasion to pay more direct tribute to William Shakespeare this April 22nd, on almost the 400th anniversary of that most influential English playwright’s death.

On that date, he’ll release Take All My Loves: 9 Shakespeare Sonnets, an album that finds him, in the words of NPR’s Stephen Thompson, “tackling the Bard’s work in a grandly sweeping collection of recordings” featuring the talents of “an assortment of singers and actors to perform these 16 tracks, many of which pair rich orchestral pieces with dramatic readings by the likes of Helena Bonham Carter, Carrie Fisher, and even William Shatner.” Yes, Wainwright has somehow managed to bring Star Wars and Star Trek together — and in the least likely of all possible contexts, one in which we also hear Austrian soprano Anna Prohaska, Florence of Florence + the Machine, Wainwright’s sister Martha, and a fair bit of German.

Fans of both the ambitious and nearly uncategorizable singer, fans of the (if you believe Harold Bloom) humanity-inventing dramatist, and many in-between will find in Take All My Loves many more feats of musical craftsmanship, literary creativity, and sheer cleverness. And they don’t have to wait until the actual anniversary (or in any case the day before) to do it. You can hear “A Woman’s Face Reprise” (based on Sonnet 20, for those playing the Shakespeare-scholarship home game) at the top of the post; “When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes” (Sonnet 29) below that; and for a limited time, the entire album available to stream free from NPR, which gives everyone a chance to hear what one of our age’s most interesting bards has done in partnership with the Bard himself.

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour Sings Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18

The Late, Great Alan Rickman Reads Shakespeare, Proust & Thomas Hardy

A Survey of Shakespeare’s Plays (Free Course)

What Shakespeare Sounded Like to Shakespeare: Reconstructing the Bard’s Original Pronunciation

Such Sweet Thunder: Duke Ellington & Billy Strayhorn’s Musical Tribute to Shakespeare (1957)

Lou Reeds Sings “Blue Christmas” with Laurie Anderson, Rufus Wainwright & Friends

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

A Short Animated History of Zero (0): How It Started in India, Then Made Its Journey to the West

in Math | April 20th, 2016

Zilch. Nada. Bupkis. Yes, I’m taking about Zero (0), a number that seems so essential to our system of numbers, and yet it hasn’t always enjoyed such a privileged place. Far from it.

In this short animation, Britain’s venerable Royal Institution traces the history of zero, a number that emerged in seventh century India, before making its way to China and Islamic countries, and finally penetrating Western cultures in the 13th century. Only later did it become the cornerstone of calculus and the language of computing.

India, we owe you thanks.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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:

Free Online Math Courses

Free Math Textbooks

The Shortest-Known Paper Published in a Serious Math Journal: Two Succinct Sentences

The Math in Good Will Hunting is Easy: How Do You Like Them Apples?

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Behold the First Electric Guitar: The 1931 “Frying Pan”

in History, Music | April 19th, 2016

The names Leo Fender and Les Paul will be forever associated with the explosion of the electric guitar into popular culture. And rightly so. Without engineer Fender and musician and studio wiz Paul’s timeless designs, it’s hard to imagine what the most iconic instruments of decades of popular music would look like.

They just might look like frying pans.

Though Fender and Paul (and the Gibson company) get all the glory, it’s two men named George who should rightly get much of the credit for inventing the electric guitar. The first, naval officer George Breed, has a status vis-à-vis the electric guitar similar to Leonardo da Vinci’s to the helicopter.

In 1890, Breed submitted a patent for a one-of-a-kind design, utilizing the two basic elements that would eventually make their way into Stratocasters and Les Pauls—a magnetic pickup and wire strings. Unfortunately for Breed, his design also included some very impractical circuitry and required battery operation, “resulting in a small but extremely heavy guitar with an unconventional playing technique,” writes the International Repertory of Music Literature, “that produced an exceptionally unusual and unguitarlike, continuously sustained sound.”

Like a Renaissance flying machine, the design went nowhere. That is, until George Beauchamp, a “musician and tinkerer” from Texas, came up with a design for an electric guitar pickup that worked beautifully. The first “Frying Pan Hawaiian” lap steel guitar, whose schematic you can see at the top of the post, “now sits in a case in a museum,” writes Andre Millard in his history of the electric guitar, “looking every inch the historic artifact but not much like a guitar.” Gizmodo quotes guitar historian Richard Smith, who discusses the need in the 20s and 30s for an electric guitar to be heard over the rhythm instruments in jazz and in Beauchamp’s preferred style, Hawaiian music, “where… the guitar was the melody instrument. So the real push to make the guitar electric came from the Hawaiian musicians.”

Beauchamp developed the guitar after he was fired as general manager of the National Instrument Manufacture Company. Needing a new project, he and another National employee, Paul Barth, began experimenting with Breed’s ideas. After building a working pickup, they called on another National employee, writes Rickenbacker.com, “to make a wooden neck and body for it. In several hours, carving with small hand tools, a rasp, and a file, the first fully electric guitar took form.” (An earlier electro-acoustic guitar—the Stromberg Electro—contributed to amplifier technology but its awkward pickup design didn’t catch on.)

Needing capital, manufacturing, and distribution, Beauchamp contracted with toolmaker Adolph Rickenbacker, who mass produced the Frying Pan as “The Rickenbacher A‑22″ under the company name “Electro String.” (The company became Rickenbacker Guitars after its owner sold it in the 50s.) Although the novelty of the instrument and its cost during the Great Depression inhibited sales, Beauchamp and Rickenbacker still produced several versions of the Frying Pan, with cast aluminum bodies rather than wood. (See an early model here.) Soon, the Frying Pan became integrated into live jazz bands (see it at the 3:34 mark above in a 1936 Adoph Zukor short film) and recordings.

How does the Frying Pan sound? Astonishingly good, as you can hear for yourself in the demonstration videos above. Although Rickenbacker and other guitar makers moved on to installing pickups in so-called “Spanish” guitars—hollow-bodied jazz boxes with their familiar f‑holes—the Frying Pan lap steel continues to have a particular mystique in guitar history, and was manufactured and sold into the early 1950s.

The next leap forward in electric guitar design? After the Frying Pan came Les Paul’s first fully solidbody electric: The Log.

Learn More about the invention of the electric guitar in the short Smithsonian video just above.

Related Content:

The World’s First Bass Guitar (1936)

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

Brian May’s Homemade Guitar, Made From Old Tables, Bike and Motorcycle Parts & More

Oxford Scientist Explains the Physics of Playing Electric Guitar Solos

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

A Huge Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music (1920–2007) Featuring John Cage, Sun Ra, Captain Beefheart & More

in Music | April 19th, 2016

Image by Emily, via Wikimedia Commons

If you’ve taken any introductory course or even read any introductory books on music, you’ll almost certainly have heard it described as “organized sound.” Fair enough, but then what do you call disorganized sound? Why, noise of course. And all this makes perfect sense until your first encounter with the seemingly paradoxical but robust and ever-expanding tradition of noise music.

“Modern ‘noise music’ finds its roots in early electronic and industrial musics,” says Static Signals, which used to review a lot of the stuff. “Where composers began expanding their vocabulary of sound and instrumentation is where the concept of ‘noise’ begins: what sounds can produce music and which are purely static or noise? For some, music’s outer boundary is defined by western European classical instruments designed hundreds of years ago and the sounds, pitches, rhythms they can (classically) produce. For others, no sound, rhythm, tone, or pitch is off limits; music can be made by anything that can vibrate air.”

The development of electronic musical instruments — and indeed, any kind of sound-manipulating electronic device — came as a great boon to this exploration of the borderlands between organized and disorganized sound. You can hear the effects of that sort of technology and much else besides in An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music, a seven-part anthology released by formidable Belgian experimental music label Sub Rosa, all of it available on Spotify (whose software you can download here if you need it). The first two volumes are embedded above; all seven volumes can be streamed via the links below. If you dig the collection, we’d encourage you to purchase your own copy and support Sub Rosa’s project.

An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music #1 (Spotify playlist) features John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, DJ Spooky, and Sonic Youth (Buy on Amazon)
An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music #2 (Spotify playlist) features Captain Beefheart, Percy Grainger, Sun Ra, and (Eraserhead’s sound genius) Alan R. Splet (Buy on Amazon)
An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music #3 (Spotify playlist) features Faust, Merzbow, and Carsten Nicolai with Alva Noto (Buy on Amazon)
An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music #4 (Spotify playlist) features Gyorgy Ligeti, Steve Reich, and the Loop Orchestra (Buy on Amazon)
An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music #5 (Spotify playlist) features Pere Ubu, Dub Taylor, and Li Chin Sung aka Dickson Dee (Buy on Amazon)
An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music #6 (Spotify playlist) features Sachiko M, Pain Jerk, Henry Cowell, and Ultraphonist (Buy on Amazon)
An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music #7 (Spotify playlist) features Tziga Vertov, Cabaret Voltaire, Novi_sad — and, to end the anthology, a piece both anonymous and untitled (Buy on Amazon)

To the noise music-uninitiated — and probably even to a few of the initiated — some of the tracks here will sound like music, and some certainly won’t. But most of them fall fascinatingly in-between the two states, ideally expanding the listener’s conception of the sonic territory music can explore. Some musical experiments, just like scientific experiments, point in more fruitful directions than others, but each one sheds a little new light on the musical enterprise itself. And “the noise,” to take the words straight from Sub Rosa themselves, “goes on…”

via Ubuweb

The Avant-Garde Project: An Archive of Music by 200 Cutting-Edge Composers, Including Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Cage & More

The Music of Avant-Garde Composer John Cage Now Available in a Free Online Archive

Hear the Experimental Music of the Dada Movement: Avant-Garde Sounds from a Century Ago

Hear Albums from Brian Eno’s 1970s Label, Obscure Records

The History of Electronic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Mr. Rogers Introduces Kids to Experimental Electronic Music by Bruce Haack & Esther Nelson (1968)

Hear Seven Hours of Women Making Electronic Music (1938- 2014)

How the Moog Synthesizer Changed the Sound of Music

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Watch the Titanic Sink in Real Time in a New 2‑Hour, 40 Minute Animation

in Animation, History | April 19th, 2016

From the makers of Titanic: Honor and Glory–a PC video game that lets you sail aboard a fully detailed re-creation of the RMS Titanic–comes an animation that lets you watch the sinking of the Titanic in real time. According to the web site Titanic Facts, the ship sank in two hours and 40 minutes in 1912. And that’s precisely how long things take to unfold in the video above. The animation narrates the events in a fairly straightforward way–nothing like the dramatic scenes painted in James Cameron’s 1997 fictionalized film. But it’s still worth the watch.

In the Relateds below, you can check out two related clips — a vintage clip showing footage of the actual Titanic in 1911, and another animated reenactment of the Titanic sinking, this one created by Cameron himself.

via coudal.com

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here. Or follow our posts on Threads, Facebook, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

How the Titanic Sank: James Cameron’s New CGI Animation

Titanic: The Nazis Create a Mega-Budget Propaganda Film About the Ill-Fated Ship … and Then Banned It (1943)

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Prince Plays a Mind-Blowing Guitar Solo On “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

Call Me Burroughs: Hear William S. Burroughs Read from Naked Lunch & The Soft Machine in His First Spoken Word Album (1965)

Becoming Bilingual Can Give Your Brain a Boost: What Recent Research Has to Say

What Miles Davis Taught Herbie Hancock: In Music, as in Life, There Are No Mistakes, Just Chances to Improvise

Download 67,000 Historic Maps (in High Resolution) from the Wonderful David Rumsey Map Collection

Hear the Vintage Sherlock Holmes Radio Drama, Starring John Gielgud, Orson Welles & Ralph Richardson

Hear Rufus Wainwright Sing Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Album Featuring Florence Welch, Carrie Fisher, William Shatner & More

A Short Animated History of Zero (0): How It Started in India, Then Made Its Journey to the West

Behold the First Electric Guitar: The 1931 “Frying Pan”

A Huge Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music (1920–2007) Featuring John Cage, Sun Ra, Captain Beefheart & More

Watch the Titanic Sink in Real Time in a New 2‑Hour, 40 Minute Animation

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

newsletter

Receive our Daily Email

FREE UPDATES!

GET OUR DAILY EMAIL

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

Receive our newsletter!

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search