When Leon Theremin debuted his strange electronic device on the world stage, it seemed to many people more like a curious toy than a serious musical instrument. The theremin soon became associated with B‑grade sci-fi movies and novelty soundtracks, an association that made Clara Rockmore furious. Determined to achieve respectability for the theremin, she championed it as “a legitimate classical instrument that deserves a place in the pit,” writes Atlas Obscura, “right next to the violins and piano.” Rockmore’s ambitions may have been outsized, but her talent was undeniable. “As serious as anyone has ever been about the theremin… she left behind a number of valuable lessons,” including a book, freely available, in which she dispenses some very practical advice.
But much has changed since her day, including popular methods of instruction and some of the technical design of theremins. Now, aspiring players will likely go looking for video lessons before consulting Rockmore’s guide, which requires that students read music in order to transition from exercises to “easy pieces” by Camille Saint-Saëns and J.S. Bach.
One series of video lessons offered by “thereminist” Thomas Grillo, an earnest instructor in a white shirt and tie, begins with the very basics and works up to more advanced techniques, including possible mods to the device (Grillo plays a Moog-made theremin himself).
Grillo opens with a disclaimer that his short course is “no substitute for professionally done how-to videos on how to play the theremin,” thereby humbly acknowledging the low production values of his series. Nonetheless, I imagine his classes are as good a place to start as any for newcomers to theremin-ing, not a skill one can pick up as readily online as playing the guitar or piano. He clearly knows his stuff. With the look and demeaner of a high school algebra teacher, Grillo patiently explains and demonstrates many techniques and principles, beginning with lesson one above, then continuing in lessons two, three, four, five, six, and seven.
Once you’ve reached an intermediate stage, or if you already find yourself there, you may benefit from the instruction of Carolina Eyck, who has carried on the serious classical work of Clara Rockmore. See her just above perform a stirring rendition of Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise,” accompanied on piano by Christopher Tarnow, and check out her YouTube channel for more performances and short lessons.
William S. Burroughs was a cultural prism. Through him, the mid-century demi-monde of illicit drug use and marginalized sexualities—of occult beliefs, alternative religions, and bizarre conspiracy theories—was refracted on the page in experimental writing that inspired everyone from his fellow Beats to the punks of later decades to name-your-countercultural-touchstone of the past fifty years or so. There are many such people in history: those who go to the places that most fear to tread and send back reports written in language that alters reality. To quote L. Ron Hubbard, another writer who purported to do just that, “the world needs their William Burroughses.”
And Burroughs, so it appears, needed L. Ron Hubbard, at least for most of the sixties, when the writer became a devout follower of the Church of Scientology. The sci-fi-inspired “new religious movement” that needs no further introduction proved irresistible in 1959 when Burroughs met John and Mary Cooke, two founding members of the church who had been trying to recruit Burroughs’ friend and frequent artistic partner Brion Gysin. “Ultimately,” writes Lee Konstantinou at io9, “it was Burroughs, not Gysin, who explored the Church that L. Ron Hubbard built. Burroughs took Scientology so seriously that he became a ‘Clear’ and almost became an ‘Operating Thetan.’ ”
Burroughs immersed himself without reservation in the practices and principles of Scientology, writing letters to Allen Ginsberg that same year in which he recommends his friend “contact [a] local chapter and find an auditor. They do the job without hypnosis or drugs, simply run the tape back and forth until the trauma is wiped off. It works. I have used the method—partially responsible for recent changes.” No doubt Burroughs had his share of personal trauma to overcome, but he also found Scientology especially conducive to his greater creative project of countering “the Reactive Mind… an ancient instrument of control designed to stultify and limit the potential for action in a constructive or destructive direction.”
The method of “auditing” gave Burroughs a good deal of material to work with in his fiction and filmmaking experiments. He and Gysin included Scientology’s language in a short 1961 film called “Towers Open Fire,” which was, writes Konstantinou, “designed to show the process of control systems breaking down.” Scientology appeared in 1962’s The Ticket That Exploded and again in 1964’s Nova Express. Each novel references the concept of “engrams,” which Burroughs succinctly defines as “traumatic material.” During this hugely productive period, the radically anti-authoritarian Burroughs “associated the group with a range of mind-expanding and mind-freeing practices.”
It’s easy to say Burroughs uncritically partook of a certain sugary beverage. But he clearly made his own idiosyncratic uses of Scientology, incorporating it within the syncretic constellation of references, practices, and cut-up techniques “designed to jam up what he called ‘the Reality Studio,’ aka the everyday, conditioned, mind-controlled reality.” An inevitable turning point came, however, in 1968, as Burroughs journeyed deeper into Scientology’s secret order at the world headquarters in Saint Hill Manor in the UK. There, he reported, he “had to work hard to suppress or rationalize his persistently negative feelings toward L. Ron Hubbard during auditing sessions.”
Burroughs’ dislike of the church’s founder and extreme aversion to “what he considered its Orwellian security protocols” eventuated his break with Scientology, which he undertook gradually and publicly in a series of “bulletins” published during the late sixties in the London magazine Mayfair. Before his “clearing course” with Hubbard, in a 1967 article excerpted and republished as a pamphlet by the church itself, Burroughs praises Scientology and its founder, and claims that “there is nothing secret about Scientology, no talk of initiates, secret doctrines, or hidden knowledge.”
By 1970, he had made an about-face, in a fiercely polemical essay titled “I, William Burroughs, Challenge You, L. Ron Hubbard,” published in the Los Angeles Free Press. While he continues to value some of the benefits of auditing, Burroughs declares the church’s founder “grandiose” and “fascist” and lays out his objections to its initiations, secret doctrines, and hidden knowledge, among other things:
…One does not simply pay the tuitions, obtain the materials and study. Oh no. One must JOIN. One must ‘sign up for the duration of the universe’ (Sea Org members are required to sign a billion-year contract)…. Furthermore whole categories of people are automatically excluded from training and processing and may never see Mr Hubbard’s confidential materials.
Burroughs challenges Hubbard to “show his confidential materials to the astronauts of inner space,” including Gysin, Ginsberg, and Timothy Leary; to the “students of language like Marshall MacLuhan and Noam Chompsky” [sic]; and to “those who have fought for freedom in the streets: Eldridge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, Abe Hoffman, Dick Gregory…. If he has what he says he has, the results should be cataclysmic.”
The debate continued in the pages of Mayfair when Hubbard published a lengthy and blandly genial reply to Burroughs’ challenge, in an article that also contained, in an inset, a brief rebuttal from Burroughs. The debate will surely be of interest to students of the strange history of Scientology, and it should most certainly be followed by lovers of Burroughs’ work. In the process of embracing, then rejecting, the controlling movement, he compellingly articulates a need for “unimaginable extensions of awareness” to deal with the trauma of living on what he calls the “sinking ship” of planet Earth.
Is there a design geek lurking among your fine feathered friends?
Some chickadee or finch who values clean lines over the fripperies of the gilded cage?
Or perhaps you’re a bird lover who’s loathe to junk up your mid-century modernist view by hanging a folksy miniature saltbox from a branch outside the kitchen window.…
California-based cabinetmaker Douglas Barnhard’s Bauhaus birdhouses offer a minimalist solution.
No word on the interiors, but the exteriors are gorgeous, with additional inspiration coming from the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright and Joseph Eichler.
Barnhard, who studied architecture briefly, repurposes walnut, bamboo, teak, and mahogany in his designs, which extend to dog beds, breadboxes, and planters.
His birdhouses feature living walls and green roofs planted with succulents.
Is it wishful thinking to believe it’s only a matter of time ’til tiny wetsuits and empty Fosters and Pacificos start festooning the rails?
Browse Barnhard’s birdhouses here and follow him on Instagram to get a peek at custom orders, many for customers residing in the sorts of homes he recreates for the birds.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her solo show Nurse!, in which one of Shakespeare’s best loved female characters hits the lecture circuit to set the record straight premieres in June at The Tank in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
If you’ve lived in or visited New York City, you must know the laughable futility of trying to “do the Met” in a day, or even a weekend. Not only is the museum enormous, but its permanent collections demand to be studied in detail, an activity one cannot rush through with any satisfaction. If you’re headed there for a special exhibit, be especially disciplined—make a beeline and do not stop to linger over elaborate Edo-period samurai armor or austere Shaker-made furniture.
I thought I’d learned my lesson after many years of residence in the city. When I returned last summer for a visit, family in tow, I vowed to head straight for the Rei Kawakubo exhibit, listing all other priorities beneath it. More fool me.
Immediate overwhelm overtook as we entered, on a weekend, in a crush of tourist noise. After hours spent admiring sarcophagi, neoclassical paintings, etc., etc., we had to nix the exhibit and push our way into Central Park for fresh air and recuperative ice cream.
Does an exhibition checklist, with photographs and descriptions of every piece on display, make up for missing the Kawakubo in person? Not exactly, but at least I can linger over it, virtually, in solitude and at my leisure. If you value this experience, cannot make it to the Met, or want to see several hundred past exhibitions from the comfort of your home, you can do so easily thanks to the wealth of catalogs the Met has uploaded to its Digital Collections.
These catalogs document special exhibits not only at the New York landmark, but also at galleries around the world from the past 100 years or so. In a recent blog post, the Met points to one such scanned catalog—out of almost a hundred from the Hungarian Gallery Nemzeti Szalon—from a 1957 exhibition of sculptor Miklós Borsos. The text is in Hungarian, but the artwork (further up), in detailed black and white photographs, speaks a universal visual language.
These catalogs join the thousands of books—50,000 titles in all—at the Met’s Digital Collections. There, you’ll find collections such as Rare Books Published in Imperial and Early Soviet Russia, with unusual treasures like the book Churches of Uglich, a survey of one Russian town’s churches, with photos, from the 1880s. “Interested in Dada?” asks the Met, and who isn’t? The museum has just added a 1917 issue of journal The Blind Man, edited by Marcel Duchamp and containing Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of Duchamp’s found art prank Fountain.
If you’re headed to the Met to see one of these special exhibits, take my advice and don’t get distracted once you’re inside. But if you want to access a range of the museum’s cultural treasures from afar, you can’t do any better than browsing its Digital Collections, where you’re also likely to get lost for hours, maybe days.
Everybody knows a fact or two about the United States of America, even those who’ve never set foot there. At the very least, they know the US is a big country, but it’s one thing to know that and another to truly understand the scale involved. Today we offer you an artifact from cartographic history that illustrates it vividly: a 19th-century traveler’s map of the Mississippi River that, in order to display the length of that mighty 2,320-mile waterway, extends to a full eleven feet. (Or, for those especially unfamiliar with how things are in America, displays the river’s full 3,734-kilometer length at a full 3.35 meters.)
With a width of only three inches (or 7.62 centimeters), the Ribbon Map of the Father of Waterscame on a spool the reader could use to unroll it to the relevant section of the river anywhere between the Gulf of Mexico and northern Minnesota. First published in 1866, just a year after the end of the Civil War, the map “was marketed toward tourists, who were flocking to the Mississippi to see the sights and ride the steamboats.” So writes Atlas Obscura’s Cara Giamo, who quotes art historian Nenette Luarca-Shoaf as describing the river as “a source of great awe. That kind of length, that kind of spaciousness was incomprehensible to a lot of folks who were coming from the East Coast.”
Luarca-Shoaf describes the map, an invention of St. Louis entrepreneurs Myron Coloney and Sidney B. Fairchild, in more detail in an article of her own at Common-Place. “The completely unfurled map extends beyond the limits of the user’s reach, wondrously embodying the scope of the river in the time it took to unroll it and in the eleven feet of space it now occupies,” she writes. “At the same time, the care required to wind the strip back into Coloney and Fairchild’s patented spool apparatus reiterates the precariousness of human control — either representational or environmental — over the mercurial Mississippi.” We still today talk about “scrolling” maps, though we now mean it as nothing more than a digital metaphor.
Unwieldy though it may seem, the Ribbon Map of the Father of Waters must have struck its travel-minded buyers in the 1860s — some 150 years before technology put touchscreens in all of our hands — as the height of cartographic convenience. Despite having sold out their Mississippi River map quickly enough to necessitate a second edition, though, Coloney and Fairchild did little more with their patented concept. You can see a surviving example of the Ribbon Map in greater detail at the Library of Congress and the David Rumsey Map Collection. The current generation of river tourists yearning for an understanding of the surprising breadth of America’s land and depth of its history may even constitute sufficient market for a replica. But what happens when it gets wet?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
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On June 10th, at the Sheffield Doc/Fest in England, director Arwen Curry will premiere Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin, the first feature film about the groundbreaking science fiction writer. The film’s website notes that “Curry filmed with Le Guin for 10 years to produce the film, which unfolds an intimate journey of self-discovery as Le Guin comes into her own as a major feminist author, opening new doors for the imagination and inspiring generations of women and other marginalized writers along the way.” Starring Le Guin herself, who sadly passed away earlier this year, Worlds of Ursula K Le Guinfeatures appearances by Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Neil Gaiman, Samuel R. Delany, and Michael Chabon. You can watch the brand new trailer for the film above.
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!
In my childhood, I heard stories about Henrietta Lacks’ miraculous cells. I heard these stories because she happened to have been my grandmother’s cousin. But this was just oral lore, I thought at first, legendary and implausible. Cells don’t just keep growing indefinitely. Nothing is immortal. That’s a safe assumption in most every other case, but millions of people now know what only a relatively self-contained community of researchers, doctors, biology students, and, eventually, the Lacks family once did: Henrietta’s cervical cancer cells continued to grow and multiply after her death in 1951. They may, indeed, do so forever.
The once anonymous cell line, called HeLa, has provided researchers worldwide with invaluable medical data. Henrietta herself went unrecognized and unremembered until fairly recently. That all changed after Rebecca Skloot’s book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, based on an earlier series of articles, appeared in 2010 to great acclaim. Since the publication of Skloot’s bestseller, the story of Henrietta and the Lacks family has further achieved renown in a 2017 film version starring Oprah Winfrey.
Suffice it say, seeing Henrietta arrive on the pop cultural stage has been a strange experience. (One made even weirder by other media moments, like indie band Yeasayer and former Dead Kennedys singer Jello Biafra releasing songs about her and her cells.) The injustices of Henrietta’s story are now well-known. She was poor and received substandard medical treatment. Her cells were harvested without her knowledge, and after her death, no one notified the family about the worldwide use of her cells for biomedical research. That is, until doctors did research on her children in the 70s, publishing family medical records without consent and gathering more data because the HeLa cells had contaminated other cell lines.
She has “become one of the most powerful symbols for informed consent in the history of science,” Nela Ulaby writes at NPR. She is also a symbol, says Bill Pretzer, senior curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), “that history can be remade, re-remembered.” To that end, Henrietta has been immortalized as a whole human being, not just the source of extraordinarily immortal cells. Her portrait, by African-American artist Kadir Nelson, now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, a representation of both the historical figure and her world-historical biological legacy.
Drawing on the photograph that adorns the cover of Skloot’s book, the portrait shows her “just like they said she was in life,” says her granddaughter Jeri Lacks-Whye, “happy, outgoing, giving,” and stylishly dressed. The two missing buttons on her dress represent the cells taken from her body, and the pattern behind her, which “almost looks like wallpaper,” says National Portrait Gallery curator Dorothy Moss, is “actually representative of her cells.” Other tributes, notes Ulaby, include a “high school for students interested in medicine” and “a minor planet whirling in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.” The cells have also generated billions of dollars in profit.
In life, she could never have imagined this strange kind of fame and fortune. The HeLa cells were instrumental in the development of the polio vaccine and research in cloning, gene mapping, and in vitro fertilization. They have traveled into space and around the world hundreds of times. The story of the person they came from, says Skloot in a 2010 interview, reminds us that “there are human beings behind every biological sample used in the laboratory… but they’re usually left out of the equation.” Making those lives an essential part of the conversation in medical research can help keep that research ethically honest, equitable, and, one hopes, based in serving human needs over corporate greed.
Everyone knows “My Favorite Things.” Most know it because of the 1965 movie version of the Broadway musical for which Richard Rodgers originally composed the song. But many jazz enthusiasts credit the one true “My Favorite Things” to a different musical genius entirely: John Coltrane. The free jazz-pioneering saxophonist’s version of Rodgers’ show tune (a filmed performance of which we featured here on Open Culture a few years ago) first came out as the title track of an album he put out in 1961, two years after The Sound of Music’s original Broadway debut. Clocking in at nearly fourteen minutes, it gave listeners a tour de force demonstration of dramatic musical transformation.
“In 1960, Coltrane left Miles [Davis] and formed his own quartet to further explore modal playing, freer directions, and a growing Indian influence,” says the documentary The World According to John Coltrane. “They transformed ‘My Favorite Things,’ the cheerful populist song from ‘The Sound of Music,’ into a hypnotic eastern dervish dance. The recording was a hit and became Coltrane’s most requested tune—and a bridge to broad public acceptance.”
If Coltrane’s interpretation of the song brought it toward the East, what would an Eastern interpretation of his interpretation sound like? Now, thanks to Pakistan’s Sachal Jazz Ensemble, you can hear, and see, Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things” itself transformed dramatically again.
You may remember the Sachal Jazz Ensemble from when we featured their performance of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.” In the video up top, led by no less an American jazz luminary than Winton Marsalis, they and their traditional instruments (bansuri, tabla, sitar, dholak, and more), played with a modern sensibility, give a similar treatment to “My Favorite Things.” Their interpretation, though it runs only a comparatively brisk eight minutes or so, will sound quite unlike any jazz standard you’ve ever heard — or any show tune or piece of traditional Pakistani music, for that matter. It also hints at the vast musical possibilities still untapped by the hybridization of musical traditions, even when used to play a song many of us thought we’d been sick of for the past fifty years.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
Jamerson is the Schoenberg of getting from the I chord to the IV chord. He’s algorithmically generating a new pattern every phrase…[He] belongs with Bach, Debussy and Mozart.
- Jack Stratton
Sideman James Jamerson, Paul McCartney’s musical hero and a co-author of the Motown sound, is a great illustration of the bass’ importance in pop and R&B history.
Jack Stratton, leader of the modern American funk band, Vulfpeck, named Jamerson to his Holy Trinity of Bass, along with Chic’s Bernard Edwards and Sly and the Family Stone’s Larry Graham.
(Joe Dart, Vulfpeck’s bassist, is a pretty hot ticket too.)
Stratton’s reverence extended to a side project in which he visually plots some of Jamerson’s savoriest baselines.
No wonder it’s the most listened to isolated bass track on No Treble, the online magazine for bass players.
All together now:
Stratton’s visualizations of the Jameson lines for Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her” and “For Once In My Life” are pretty mesmerizing too.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her solo show Nurse!, in which one of Shakespeare’s best loved female characters hits the lecture circuit to set the record straight premieres in June at The Tank in New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
What makes a good ambient record? I’m not sure I can even begin to answer that question, and I count myself a longtime fan of the genre, such as it is. Though conceived, ostensibly, by Brian Eno as modernist mood music—“as ignorable as it is interesting,” he wrote in the liner notes to 1978’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports—the term has come to encompass “tracks you can dance to all the way to harsh noise.” This description from composer and musician Keith Fullerton Whitman at Pitchfork may not get us any closer to a clear definition in prose, though “cloud of sound” is a lovely turn of phrase.
Unlike other forms of music, there is no set of standards—both in the jazz sense of a canon and the formal sense of a set of rules. Reverberating keyboards, squelching, burping synthesizers, droning guitar feedback, field recordings, found sounds, laptops, strings… whatever it takes to get you there—“there” being a state of suspended emotion, “drifting” rather than “driving,” the sounds “soothing, sad, haunting, or ominous.” (Cheerful, upbeat ambient music may be a contradiction in terms.)
Given the looseness of these criteria, it only stands to reason that “good” ambient must be judged on far more subjective terms than most any other kind of music. Next to “atmospheric,” a primary operative word in an ambient critical lexicon is “evocative,” and what the music evokes will differ vastly from listener to listener. “No one agrees on the language surrounding this music,” Whitman admits, “not the musicians who make it, not the audience.”
Ambient’s close association with trends in avant-garde minimalism, from Erik Satie to Steve Reich, La Monte Young, and Charlemagne Palestine, may prepare us for its many crossover strains in electronic music, but not, perhaps, for the seeming synergy between ambient and certain developments in heavy metal (though Lou Reed seems to have presaged this evolution). “There are many roads one can take into this particular sector,” writes Whitman, “virtually every extant sub- and micro-genre has an ambient shadow.”
Such ecumenicalism is a feature: it means that a list like Pitchfork’s “50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time” (stream most of those albums on the Spotify playlist above) can pull from an impressively wide array of musical domains, from the early experimental electronic music of Laurie Spiegel to the spiritual jazz of Alice Coltrane; the chill-out electronica of The Orb and The KLF to the ethereal indie post-folk dreampop of Grouper, a very rare entry with vocals.
If the genre has stars, Tim Hecker and William Basinski might be considered two of them; if it has august forebears, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and of course Eno are three. (Music for Airports comes in at number one, though another very well-chosen inclusion here is Eno and Harold Budd’s utterly gorgeous The Pearl.) Other entries I’m very pleased to see on this list include albums by Gas, composer Max Richter, and vocal experimentalist Juliana Barwick, artists who might never share a stage, but sit quite comfortably next to each other here.
What’s missing? Maybe the glacially slow, guitar and bass drones of Sunn O))) or the deeply unnerving noise of Prurient or the lush electro-acoustic compositions of Ashley Bellouin, I don’t know. These aren’t complaints but suggestions on the order of if you like Pitchfork’s “50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time,” check out…. I could go on, but I’d rather leave it to you, reader. What’s on your list that didn’t make the cut?
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