by | February 25, 2012 · 1:00 am

Insects in rock and roll cover art

Insects in rock ’n’ roll cover art is an article by Joseph R. Coelho, who teaches in the Biology Program at Quincy University.

The article, which can be read online here, was published in American entomologist (L/3 [fall 2004] pp. 142–151). It  is part of a larger project called Insects in rock ’n’ roll music, which also includes lists of insect-related songs, albums, and artist names.

Above, a classic Iron Butterfly album cover. Below, ants dancing to Ant man bee from the legendary Trout mask replica by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band.

Many thanks to the Improbable Research blog for alerting us about Professor Coelho’s work!

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by | February 22, 2012 · 1:00 am

George Washington, dancer

Although there is no record of Washington studying with a dance teacher, and rumors suggest that he was self-taught, the first U.S. President was widely known as a superb dancer.

One anecdote has Washington performing a minuet before French officers who admitted that his dancing could not be improved by any Parisian instructor. Washington’s dancing of a minuet in 1779 with Henry Knox’s wife Lucy inspired the following tribute from The Pennsylvania packet:

“The ball was opened by his Excellency the General. When this man unbends from his station, and its weighty functions, he is even then like a philosopher, who mixes with the amusements of the world, that he may teach it what is right, or turn trifles into instruction.”

This according to George Washington: A biography in social dance by Kate Van Winkle Keller (Sandy Hook: Hendrickson Group, 1998).

Today is Washington’s 280th birthday! Below, a minuet of the type that he would have danced.

Related article: Woodrow Wilson, lyric tenor

 

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by | February 19, 2012 · 1:00 am

John Philip Sousa, violinist

While the composer of iconic marches is famous for directing the U.S. Marine Band and his own world-famous ensembles, John Philip Sousa’s early life as a violin prodigy is relatively unknown.

A sickly child, Sousa was home-schooled, and from the age of six his studies included lessons with an Italian violin teacher. He showed tremendous promise, and his father, a trombonist in the Marine Band, enlisted him as a Marine apprentice when he was 13; there he studied academics and several instruments.

Sousa went on to play the violin in orchestras and chamber groups, where he developed a taste for cutting-edge art music that he never lost; for example, his band performed excerpts from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger ten years before the opera’s first U.S. production.

This according to “John Philip Sousa’s violin: An American original” by Erin Shrader (Strings XXV/4:187 [November 2010] pp. 53–56). Above, Sousa’s childhood violin before (background) and after it was restored by John Montgomery. Below, Sousa’s Band performs Carl Friedemann’s Slavonic rhapsody.

Related article: Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project

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by | February 17, 2012 · 1:00 am

Musica antiqua

Musica antiqua: Quarterly early music magazine (ISSN 2049-1514) was launched in January 2012 with this statement from its editor, Claire Bracher:

“Our vision for Musica antiqua is very clear: with both of the founders being active professional early musicians, we feel we have a direct line to those performers and musicologists who are currently at the forefront of early music. Our aim is to provide articles written by the performers and musiciologists themselves.

“We intend also to bring a unique and creative design and layout to the articles in the magazine. Musica antiqua will concentrate on music from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, and on bringing you all the latest news and developments from around the world.”

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by | February 14, 2012 · 1:00 am

Love in the top 100

 

On this Valentine’s Day, let’s look at an article that analyzes the 100 most popular songs between 1958 and 1998 for performer demographics and expressions of love.

In the 1990s women and black artists recorded more hits than in earlier periods; over time, references to love in lyrics performed by women artists decreased. References to sex in lyrics peaked between 1976 and 1984, when women used sexual references five times more than men; however, between 1991 and 1998, men used more sexual references.

Later songs and songs performed by white female artists expressed greater selfishness; the quality of love expressed in the lyrics remained the same.

This according to “Expressions of love, sex, and hurt in popular songs: A content analysis of all-time greatest hits” by Richard L. Dukes, et al. (Social science journal XL/4 [2003] pp. 643–650). Below, the Beatles—with a little help from their friends—provide further analysis.

Related article: Sexual attraction by genre

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by | February 12, 2012 · 1:00 am

Astérix and instruments

Astérix le Gaulois, a series of comics written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Albert Uderzo between 1960 and 1999, received much acclaim for the attention to detail in Uderzo’s drawings of ancient civilizations.

Particularly interesting to an organologist are the illustrations of instruments—including carnyx, buccina, lur, bagpipe, harp, lyre, pipes, and drums—used by ancient Romans, Greeks, Egyptians, and Gauls.

In the free online resource Musical instruments of antiquity as illustrated in “The adventures of Asterix the Gaul” Daniel A Russell compares Uderzo’s illustrations to photographs of period instruments and comments on their acoustic qualities, performance techniques, and the roles they played in their respective societies, both in real history and as experienced by Astérix and his friends.

Above, Uderzo’s depiction of a banquet accompanied by a kithara, a double tibia, and a frame drum.

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by | February 9, 2012 · 1:00 am

Source: Music of the avant-garde

The journal Source: Music of the avant-garde was and remains a seminal source for materials on the heyday of experimental music and arts. Conceived in 1966 and published until 1973, it included some of the most important composers and artists of the time: John Cage, Harry Partch, David Tudor, Morton Feldman, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Steve Reich, and many others.

A pathbreaking publication, Source documented crucial changes in performance practice and live electronics, computer music, notation and event scores, theater and installations, intermedia and technology, politics and the social roles of composers and performers, and innovations in the sound of music. Special features included custom typography, multiple paper stocks, multicolored scores, 10 inch LPs, 35mm slides, fur, and shotgun holes.

Source: Music of the avant-garde 1966–1973, a 396-page collection of reprints from the journal, was issued by the University of California Press in 2011. Below, a performance of Feldman’s revolutionary percussion work The king of Denmark.

Related article: John Cage unbound

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by | February 4, 2012 · 1:00 am

Silvio Rodríguez and disappearance

 

 

On 31 March 31 1990, in the early days of the newly restored democracy in Chile, the Cuban cantautor Silvio Rodríguez staged a concert in Santiago de Chile’s Estadio Nacional for an audience of 80,000 people. Accompanying him were the fourteen-piece band Irakere, led by the Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdés, and the formerly exiled Chilean singer Isabel Parra and her group.

While it is entirely possible to see the concert as an event whose event-ness is created post facto, it is also useful to posit the concert as part of a construction of a larger process, that of opposition to the event of authoritarianism.

Two songs performed there, Víctor Jara’s Te recuerdo Amanda and Rodríguez’s Unicornio, involve evocations of death and disappearance. Death, as evoked in the Jara song, at least bears the comfort of a tangible end image; disappearance, as Unicornio bears witness, denies closure.

The afterlife of these recorded concert performances and the subjects of cover versions and tributes all contribute to the counter-event suggested by the Rodríguez concert.

This according to “Reconstructing the event: Spectres of terror in Chilean performance” by Richard Elliott (British postgraduate musicology VIII [June 2006]). Below, Rodríguez’s performance of Unicornio at the historic concert; click here for Jara’s performance of Te recuerdo Amanda.

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by | February 1, 2012 · 1:00 am

The Mr. Isaac mystery

The celebrated late–17th- and early–18th-century English dancing master known in historical sources only as Mr. Isaac may have been Edward Isaac, who was baptized in 1643 and whose particulars fit in circumstantial ways with what little is known about the choreographer.

By the mid-1670s Mr. Isaac was well-connected in the court and theaters, and recognition of his work continually grew, lasting into the reign of George I. His extant dances, notated by John Weaver and others in the Beauchamp–Feuillet system, show a typically English love of formal complexity and occasional departures from fashionable French models, yet they share qualities that mark them as definitively his own.

This according to “Mr. Isaac, dancing-master” by Jennifer Thorp (Dance research XXIV/2 [Winter 2006] pp. 117–137).

Related article: Mr. Isaac and The Union

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by | January 26, 2012 · 1:00 am

Patti Smith and Rimbaud

Patti Smith’s direct assimilation of Arthur Rimbaud’s work into hers presents a case of cultural cross-fertilization in which the poetry of a foreign high-cultural figure enters into and influences a popular and countercultural discourse, illustrating how a nonacademic reading of a canonical text can help to produce a musical style that disseminates a message of social deviance.

Smith has foregrounded her debt to Rimbaud in several ways, explicitly referring to him as her major poetic influence and participating in a hermeneutic activity as she transformed his texts into her own. The poet has served as Smith’s most credible archetype of subversive behavior, and his work has provided the richest source for the development of her innovative aesthetic practices.

This according to “Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as social deviance” by Carrie Jaurès Noland (Critical inquiry XXI/3 [Spring 1995] pp. 581–610). Below, Smith performs Rock n roll nigger, one of the songs analyzed by Noland, in 2011; listen for Rimbaud’s name around 3:20.

More posts about punk rock are here.

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