by | February 23, 2014 · 1:00 am

Johnny Winter’s roots

 

In 2010 Johnny Winter decided to make recordings of some of the classic blues songs that had inspired him to become a musician. The result was his 2011 album Roots.

“The whole thing was a lot of fun,” Winter said in an interview. “They were songs I loved and grew up with, that I was influenced by.”

Recalling imbibing Delta blues from the source, as a sideman for Muddy Waters, he said “Playing with Muddy meant so much to me as an artist. It was a big pleasure, a big thrill. I loved every second I spent with him.”

This according to “Living blues talks to Johnny Winter and Paul Nelson” by Steve Sharp (Living blues XLII/5:215  [October 2011] p. 41).

Today is Johnny Winter’s 70th birthday! Below, Winter and his band plays Dust my broom, a song first recorded by Robert Johnson and later covered by Muddy Waters; the video is from Winter’s tour supporting Roots.

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by | February 20, 2014 · 1:00 am

Peter Brook and Carmen

Carmen

The 1981 premiere of Peter Brook’s and Jean-Claude Carrière’s La tragédie de Carmen at the Opéra in Paris sparked considerable controversy over its focus on the bleaker, darker aspects of the story.

In their revision of Bizet’s Carmen, Brook and Carrière attempted to be truer to Prosper Mérimée’s 1845 novella, emphasizing the basic components of its tragedy: sorcery, sexuality, obsessive love, and death. They removed the comic elements from Bizet’s work, reasoning that the composer had been constrained by a theatrical medium that demanded the inclusion of comedy.

This according to The tragedy of Carmen: Georges Bizet and Peter Brook by William Manning D. Mouat, a dissertation accpted by the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1996.

Above and below, Zehava Gal in the title role.

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by | February 17, 2014 · 1:00 am

“Exile on Main St.” redux

 

Recorded during the blazing summer of 1971 at Nellcôte, Keith Richards’s seaside mansion in southern France, Exile on Main St. has been hailed as one of the Rolling Stones’ best albums, and one of the greatest rock records of all time. Yet its improbable creation was difficult, torturous, and at times nothing short of dangerous.

In self-imposed exile, the Stones—along with wives, girlfriends, and a crew of hangers-on unrivaled in the history of rock—spent their days smoking, snorting, and drinking whatever they could get their hands on. At night, the band descended like miners into the villa’s dank basement to lay down tracks.

All the while, a variety of celebrities including John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Gram Parsons stumbled through the villa’s never-ending party, as did the local drug dealers, known to one and all as les cowboys.  Nellcôte became the crucible in which creative strife, outsize egos, and all the usual byproducts of the Stones’ legendary hedonistic excess fused into something potent, volatile, and enduring.

This according to Exile on Main St.: A season in hell with the Rolling Stones by Robert Greenfield (Cambridge: Da capo. 2006). Below, the complete album for your contemplation.

Related article: The Beatles’ white album

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by | February 15, 2014 · 1:00 am

Bach’s temperament

harpsichord tuning

It is unanimously accepted that the term wohltemperiert in the title of Bach’s Das wohltemperierte Klavier refers to a tuning that makes it possible to compose and perform music without restriction in all twelve major and minor keys; however, there are still divergent opinions about the tuning that Bach preferred for his composition.

One view is that so-called equal temperament was assumed, in which the octave is divded into twelve equal half-tones (the tuning which came to be generally accepted over the course of the 19th century). Other scholars dispute this, but do not agree among themselves about how the nuances of the inequality in tuning are to be divided among the individual major and minor keys.

This according to Valuable nuances of tuning for part I of J.S. Bach’s “Das wohl temperirte Clavier” by Mark Lindley (Berlin: Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 2011), which is an open-access multimedia resource for students and performers of Bach’s work.

Below, Kenneth Gilbert’s interpretation.

More posts about J.S. Bach are here.

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by | February 10, 2014 · 1:00 am

Swinging at the Savoy

Savoy Ballroom 1

The development of the Lindy hop must be understood within the context of Depression-era black culture and the Savoy Ballroom in New York City.

For some young black dancers the Savoy became a way of life, and for serious Lindy hoppers the crucial part of the evening was showtime, when the best dancers took the floor and tried to eliminate each other. The improvisational section—known as the breakaway, when couples broke into solos—spawned many new steps and maneuvers that were subsequently incorporated into the dance.

This according to “Swinging at the Savoy” by Barbara Engelbrecht (Dance research journal XV/2 [spring 1983] pp. 3–10). Above, a moment at the Savoy Ballroom in the 1930s; below, a tribute to the great Frankie Manning includes vintage footage from the Savoy.

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by | February 8, 2014 · 1:00 am

German-Jewish organ music

German-Jewish organ music

German-Jewish organ music: An anthology of works from the 1820s to the 1960s, edited by Tina Frühauf (Madison: A-R Editions, 2013), traces the main phases of the history and stylistic development of organ music in the Reform Jewish communities in Central Europe, as well as in the German-influenced communities of Königsberg (Kaliningrad) and Odessa, and works by German-Jewish composers who emigrated to the U.S. and Israel after World War II.

The small but respectable body of compositions for the organ in the synagogue is represented by fourteen exemplary works; the pieces span the period beginning with the Reform movement in the early 19th century to post-Holocaust works in the mid-20th century.

Initially oriented predominantly toward Christian models, a specifically Jewish style of organ music emerged in the late 19th century, made up from elements of both Jewish and Western musical cultures. The selected repertoire featured in the anthology, although all emanating from the same cultural milieu, is based on a wide variety of musical thematic material, including biblical cantillation, 19th-century synagogue song, Yiddish folk song, and the musical traditions of various Jewish cultural groups (Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Yemenite).

Some of the selected repertoire corresponds to detailed analyses published in the editor’s monograph The organ and its music in German-Jewish culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Below, music by Louis Lewandowski, with an assortment of relevant images; he is represented in German-Jewish organ music by his Fünf Fest-Präludien (1871),

Related article: American cantorate

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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 | February 3, 2014 · 1:00 am

Johannes Tinctoris: Complete theoretical works

tinctoris

Johannes Tinctoris: Complete theoretical works presents a complete new edition of Tinctoris’s treatises, along with full English translations and multiple layers of commentary material, covering a wide range of technical, historical, and critical issues arising from both the texts themselves and the wider context of Tinctoris’s life and the musical environment of early Renaissance Europe.

Combining the highest levels of historical, textual, and critical scholarship with innovative technological presentation, this open-access edition explores new methods of relating text-based materials to the numerous, often complex, music examples that punctuate the treatises.

The project, which is based at Birmingham Conservatoire, is an outgrowth of the ongoing research of Ronald Woodley into the life and works of Tinctoris.

Above, a depiction of Tinctoris at his desk; below, the Kyrie from his Missa L’homme armé.

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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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