Category Archives: Curiosities

by | June 2, 2014 · 1:00 am

Voices from the past

 

While he was stuck in traffic in early 2000, the physicist Carl Haber heard the drummer and world music enthusiast Mickey Hart on the radio talking about the dire need for preserving early recordings of indigenous peoples.

Haber had been working with SmartScope, a machine that analyzes visual information, and his work had been going so well that he had started brainstorming for further uses of this machine. It occurred to him that SmartScope might be able to read these old recordings without touching them, thereby removing the likelihood of irrevocably damaging them by playing them.

The idea worked, and Haber went on to facilitate the preservation of recordings in repositories such as the Library of Congress, and to participate in the repatriation of historical recordings to Native Americans and other ethnic groups, allowing them to hear the voices of their ancestors.

This according to “A voice from the past: How a physicist resurrected the earliest recordings” by Alec Wilkinson (The New Yorker XC/13 [19 May 2014], pp. 50–57). Below, Dr. Haber and his technological innovations.

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by | May 26, 2014 · 1:00 am

The astrology of pop

Aquarius-Woodstock

Popular  music underwent a profound transformation during the period between 1954 and 1969; this change can be understood through the prism of the extraordinary planetary position of February 1962, which some call the Age of Aquarius.

The seven inner planets formed a stellium (multiple conjunction of planets) in Aquarius at the time of a total solar eclipse. Opposite the stellium was Uranus, approaching its half-cycle with Jupiter on 14 March 1962 (above left; click to enlarge).

A chart for the Woodstock Festival (above right) has the Jupiter–Uranus connection writ large, with airy ideals in Libra. Its Sun–Neptune square is both idealistic and druggy.

This according to “The astrology of pop” by Neil Spencel (The mountain astrologer XXVII/3 [April–May 2014] pp. 25–33. Below, The 5th Dimension elaborates.

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by | May 19, 2014 · 1:00 am

Patuas’ paintings repurposed

bengali scroll painting

In West Bengali tradition, a person known as a patua travels around the countryside to entertain with sung narratives illustrated with painted scrolls. The patua’s audiences are usually poor and illiterate, lacking access to televisions and films as well as to written entertainments.

Increasingly, however, patuas are finding that their scrolls are viewed as valuable folk art, and that their storytelling skills are in demand among the urban intellectual elite as a means of selling these illustrations, which thereby take on a new, passive function.

This according to “From oral tradition to folk art: Reevaluating Bengali scroll paintings” by Beatrix Hauser (Asian ethnology LXI/1 [2002] pp. 105–122). Below, a patua demonstrates her art.

BONUS: A more modern example of the patua’s skills used to raise ecological awareness, with English subtitles.

Related article: Bhāgavata purāṇa as performance

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by | May 5, 2014 · 1:00 am

Music Monday

music monday

Music Monday is an annual event sponsored by Canada’s Coalition for Music Education; each year it unites hundreds of thousands of young people through their schools and communities from coast to coast through a simultaneous musical event on the first Monday of May.

Singing and playing the official Music Monday song brings attention to the importance of music as part of a well-rounded education. I.S.S. (Is somebody singing), the official song for Music Monday 2013, was commissioned by the Coalition and CBC Music and written by the astronaut  Col. Chris Hadfield—the first Canadian commander of the International Space Station—and singer/songwriter Ed Robertson of the Barenaked Ladies.

On Monday 6 May 2013 Hadfield performed the song from the International Space Station while Robertson, the Barenaked Ladies, and the Wexford Gleeks (the choir of the Wexford Collegiate School for the Arts), performed from Earth.

This according to “Building a voice that cannot be ignored!” by Holly Nimmons (Canadian music educator/Musicien éducateur au Canada LIV/3 [spring 2013] pp. 20–23).

Today is Music Monday’s 10th anniversary! Below, Hadfield, the Ladies, and the Gleeks perform I.S.S. for Music Monday 2013.

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by | March 18, 2014 · 1:00 am

Goth belly dance

Snake_edited-1

Goth belly dance or raqs gothique—a term coined from the Arabic raqs sharqi (dance of the East)—fuses the already Westernized interpretative dance style of the Middle East with Goth subculture.

This new experimental dance involves different musics (from goth rock to world music), altered costuming, and new performance settings. Although rooted in belly dance and its ties to colonialism, Goth belly dance transforms Orientalism and embodies decolonization as process and product.

This according to “Raqs gothique: Decolonizing belly dance” by Tina Frühauf (TDR: The drama review LIII/3 [fall 2009] pp. 117-138). Above, Maiiah with her snake, Maharet (photo by Pryor Dodge; click to enlarge); below, the late JeniViva Mia performs.

Related article: Subversive belly dancing

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by | March 13, 2014 · 1:00 am

The Jenkins Orphanage Band

Jenkins Orphanage Band

The Jenkins Orphanage Band was an important institution in early 20th-century Charleston, South Carolina.

Founded in the 1890s by Rev. Daniel Jenkins, the orphanage’s vocational training included printing, bread making, shoe repairs, and music—bands, choirs, and singers.

Programs from 1914, the year that the boys’ brass band performed at the Anglo-American exhibition in London, indicate that the group worked long hours performing popular works by Irving Berlin and John Philip Sousa, as well as classical works by Verdi and Offenbach.

This according to “The Jenkins Orphanage Bands”, an unsigned article in Black Europe (Hambergen: Bear Family Productions, 2013). Above and below, the boys’ brass band in 1928.

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by | February 6, 2014 · 1:00 am

Brahms and the “cremation cantata”

Wesendonck

Mathilde Wesendonck (above) is known to music historians for her romantic entanglement with and artistic influence on Wagner in the 1850s. What is less commonly known is that once her relationship with Wagner had cooled she became an admirer and personal acquaintance of Brahms, and began a correspondence with him that was to last for several years.

A little-known oddity is the poetic text she composed and sent to Brahms in 1874 in the hope that he would set it to music as a work for chorus and soloists. The remarkable subject matter of her poetry: cremation.

The practice of modern cremation, demonstrated at the Vienna Exposition of 1873, had begun to attract much attention among the medical community and press in Europe and U.S., but it was new, controversial, and generally unavailable. In appealing to Brahms to write a work on the subject, Wesendonck’s intention was to encourage the movement’s growth.

Upon receiving her ode to cremation, Brahms, much amused, immediately forwarded it to his friend Theodor Billroth, who likewise derived from it much unintended humor. Word of the would-be “cremation cantata” spread to other friends, including Wilhelm Lübke and Julius Stockhausen.

This according to “Brahms, Mathilde Wesendonck, and the would-be ‘cremation cantata’” by Jacquelyn E.C. Sholes (The American Brahms Society newsletter XXX/2 (fall 2012) pp. 1–5). Below, Brahms’s Begräbnisgesang, op. 13, which explicitly evokes a conventional burial.

More posts about Brahms are here.

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by | January 30, 2014 · 1:00 am

J.B. Schalkenbach’s electric music

Schalkenbach

In the 1860s Johann Baptist Schalkenbach developed a music hall act in which he performed on an amalgamation of instruments, built around a reed harmonium, which he called the Piano-Orchestre Électro-Moteur.

While playing, Schalkenbach would simultaneously create musical, noise, and optical effects via the electromagnetic triggering of circuits connected to objects placed around the hall.  Over the decades, the apparatus gradually became more and more spectacular as new features were added.

An early review states that Schalkenbach’s act received much applause, but “we fancy it would have gained still greater favour but for [his] singular resemblance to the Great German Chancellor Prince Bismarck, which did not quite please some of the audience.”

This according to “‘Electric music’ on the Victorian stage: The forgotten work of J.B. Schalkenbach” by Daniel Wilson (Leonardo music journal XXIII [2013] pp. 79–85). We are indebted to the author’s blog post for information and images.

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by | January 27, 2014 · 1:00 am

Anatomy of an earworm

earworms

The experience of earworms, a type of involuntary musical imagery, may reflect a systematic failure in mental control.

A recent study focused on how individual differences in each of two factors—schizotypy, or openness to experience, and thought suppression—might relate to the appearance of the involuntary musical image (earworm). Each was found to contribute independently to the overall experience of involuntary musical imagery.

Schizotypy was correlated with the length and disruptiveness of earworms, the difficulty with which they were dismissed, and the worry they caused, but was not correlated with the frequency of such intrusive imagery.

In turn, schizotypy was predicted by suppression and intrusion associated with the length, disruptiveness, difficulty dismissing, and interference, but not with the worry caused or the frequency of earworms. The assumption of ownership of earworms was also found to affect the extent to which the earworms were considered worrying.

This according to “Individual differences in mental control predict involuntary musical imagery” by C. Philip Beaman and Tim I. Williams (Musicæ scientiæ: The journal of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music XVII/4 [December 2013] pp. 398–409).

Above, an alternative way to assume ownership of earworms. Below, DJ Earworm’s annual mashup of the top 25 pop hits.

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by | January 13, 2014 · 1:00 am

The Thai Elephant Orchestra

thai elephant orchestra

Thailand’s National Elephant Institute  is the first government-sponsored organization dedicated to the long-term future of the domesticated elephant; but it also requires funds from tourism for its upkeep.

To establish an orchestra that could raise financial support from tourists, instruments were designed that could be operable with elephants’ trunks, and that were large and strong enough to stand up to very powerful animals and monsoons. The Thai Elephant Orchestra was soon a reality.

To teach them, a mahout demonstrates an instrument and the elephant begins to play almost immediately. The animals learn through experimentation how to make their instruments sound the best.

Once the group is assembled, the mahouts cue the elephants to begin and stop playing. They now perform daily concerts, and often refuse to stop when they are told to do so.

This according to “Eine kleine naughtmusik: How nefarious nonartists cleverly imitate music” by David Soldier (Leonardo music journal XII [2002] pp. 53–58). Above and below, the orchestra in action.

Related article: Pachyderm proclamations

 

 

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